ROQUE Santa Cruz has hit back at critics who labelled him a trouble-maker during his final season at Blackburn Rovers.

Santa Cruz last week finally completed an £18m move to Manchester City and was unveiled at Eastlands yesterday.

The move ended a 12-month chase, led by former Rovers boss Mark Hughes, and Santa Cruz saw his popularity with Ewood fans plummet during his final season at the club after quotes appeared regularly in the South American press suggesting he wanted to leave.

But Santa Cruz, who had signed a new four-year contract at Rovers last August, has insisted that quotes attributed to him in many of the interviews were false and he never meant to unsettle the club as they fought relegation from the Premier League.

“I never went to anyone in the press in England or Paraguay, there were things I couldn’t control,” Santa Cruz said yesterday.

“There were always things in the press that I never said. It was quite hard to get through that because in Paraguay there were stories all the time about my ambitions and things saying I wanted to leave.

“Blackburn were having a hard time, working hard to get out of the relegation zone so everything came at a bad time.

“But I was quite clear with Sam Allardyce and let him know that I never tried to unsettle the team or the club and I think that he might know that for sure.

“I don’t think we had a bad relationship. In fact, I have always been very open with him.

“Of course it wasn’t nice for him that I was interested in leaving the club to join City before he became manager.

“They could have let me go or stay but I made clear that if I stayed I would keep working hard as I did before, it’s just that if I had the chance I’d like to have taken it.

“I was always professional. When the interest is there in you you want to play even better to really show that you can do a job.

“I think in many ways it made me work harder and do better things for Blackburn.”

Many Rovers fans were upset that Santa Cruz, who had been denied a move to City in January, missed the last two months of the season with a knee injury instead of playing through the pain.

But the former Bayern Munich man said: “There was no point in me waiting any longer for the operation, because as all the physios at Blackburn will corroborate, I would have done long-term damage my knee if I’d carried on playing.”