It sits at the side of the wide, straight road that runs between the Manchester City and Manchester United training grounds. It serves some of the best bacon rolls for miles around, though it is still a far cry from the five-star luxury surrounding Mario Balotelli at Italy's training base at one of Krakow's more exclusive spa hotels.

Burger Baz's snack bar is the place where, a few years ago, Gary Neville and brother Phil filmed that Vodafone advert, huddled under the canopy, sheltering from the rain, blowing into hot mugs of tea as their old mate, David Beckham, sent them picture messages of his new life in sunny Madrid.

Balotelli discovered its charms last season, parking his white Maserati on the kerb and taking his seat on one of the white plastic chairs where the all-day breakfasts are served. There are not many professional footballers who would stop off at a roadside greasy spoon whose main trade is the lorry drivers turning into Carrington power station. But then again, Balotelli is not exactly the average footballer, and nor will he ever be. The last time he dropped in, he asked the man with the frying pan if he could join him behind the counter to flip the bacon himself. Very soon, he was juggling with the cutlery.

Psychoanalysing Balotelli has never been an easy thing, but there is no libel in saying there are times when he seems to exist in a different universe. His goal against the Republic of Ireland on Monday was a beauty and a reminder why in Italy he is regarded as their best hope of beating England in Kiev . At the same time, Cesare Prandelli's problem is the same one that Roberto Mancini faces for nine months of the year and it is that, as the City defender Pablo Zabaleta puts it, there is simply no point second-guessing what Balotelli might do next. "His brain is gone, absolutely ..."

Zabaleta is laughing, and his affection is clear. Yet it is easy to understand why Prandelli, just like Mancini and many others, can get so exasperated. Italy's training session at Cracovia's Marszalek Pilsudski Stadium on Thursday was a case in point, when the photographers captured the latest moment of classic Mario. Around him, team-mates are lined up on exercise mats, flat out doing press-ups. Balotelli is also horizontal but on his stomach. His arms are crossed, propping up his chin. There is a vacant look on his face, like he is daydreaming, completely oblivious to what is going on around him. He might as well be on the beach, wondering where the next ice cream is coming from.

A less incriminating photo of Balotelli – brooding, challenging eyes, staring straight into the camera – is located just inside the entrance to Italy's media centre. Casa Azzurri, "Home of the Blues", is normally used as a youth hostel and nightclub. It cost a reputed £2m to transform and dwarfs the England operation, both in size and expenditure. Yet Balotelli has not been through these doors and it is unlikely he ever will. Balotelli was persuaded to do a press conference when the squad met in May but he was a reluctant participant and, afterwards, he made it clear that was him done.

The daily Balotelli interrogation is now directed at his colleagues. On Friday it was Gianluigi Buffon's turn. The day before, it was Ignazio Abate and Leonardo Bonucci. Daniele De Rossi, oozing rock-star cool, was put through it on Wednesday. When the squad arrive in Kiev on Saturday , it will be Prandelli. More questions about whether Balotelli can handle the pressure, the danger he might be provoked into something stupid, can he be risked from the start and what was going on after he came off the bench to score against Ireland? Even now, it is not entirely clear whether Balotelli's angry reaction, prompting Bonucci to clamp a hand over his team-mate's mouth, was directed towards Prandelli for dropping him, the Irish fans who were baiting him or the Italian media for criticising his performances against Spain and Italy.

Bonucci was asked why he had muzzled his team-mate. "Unfortunately, he does stupid things … but he's a good lad." Everyone knows the stories by now: the red cards, the car crashes, the parking tickets, the rows, the training-ground fights, the five-pointed woolly hat, his struggles with putting on a practice bib, the "Why Always Me?" T-shirt and the time he thought it would be a good idea to lean out of a training-ground window and throw darts at the youth-team players below. There is enough, already, to fill at least one biography.

"Crazy" is the word one of his former coaches at Internazionale applied when contacted this week. Others prefer to use "misunderstood". Mancini would probably say a bit of both. City's manager took Manchester's football writers – or the Balotelli correspondents, as it can sometimes feel – out for lunch at Christmas and suggested, half-seriously, that if Balotelli carried on getting into trouble maybe he should move in with the Mancini family. Then he was reminded Balotelli's house had been almost burned down a few weeks earlier after fireworks were set off from a bathroom window. Mancini concluded that he "would keep him in the cellar."

The problem, as Prandelli can also testify, is that, maturity-wise, Balotelli is still goofing around at college, never quite sure whose floor he will wake up on. Another photograph from Italy's training shows Balotelli, the big kid, holding the corner post to his groin, as if re-enacting a scene from The Inbetweeners. Three different bodyguards have been assigned to him in Krakow and the joke among the Italian journalists is that the security are there primarily to make sure he doesn't go awol. Mario being Mario, he may just moonwalk into town one night and not be seen for a couple of days.

But it is not always easy to see the funny side. Ask Scott Parker, for instance, about the stamp to his head that persuaded Prandelli to drop Balotelli for the February friendly against the United States. Or the red card against Arsenal that left Mancini threatening to sell him and Prandelli questioning whether it was too much of a risk even to bring him to this tournament.

On the flip side, England's City contingent – Joe Hart, Joleon Lescott and James Milner – have spoken about him with enough affection this week to suggest they realise, for the most part, there is an innocence behind what Balotelli does. A lot of the time it is the juvenile, wide-eyed behaviour of someone who seems permanently intrigued – like a 21-year-old equivalent of the terrible-twos – in exploring life and seeing how far he can take things. His fascination, for example, with the automatic sliding doors at the reception to City's training ground, and the temptation to drive on to the kerb and inch towards them, eager to see how far he can take his car before they open.

Zabaleta talks of a player who can "either score the best goal in the history of football or be sent off after five minutes … when I retire, I will never forget Mario." Micah Richards is laughing, too, when he says "you either love him or hate him, don't you?". Noel Gallagher reckons the only way Balotelli will leave City will be by being fired out of a cannon. "I just love him," Richards says.

There are endearing traits, such as his fondness for the ginger and white cat that lives at the training ground. At City they also tell the story of the day he went to John Lewis because he needed an ironing board – and came back instead with a quad bike, a trampoline and a table-tennis table. Or another true story: the time he went shopping at the Trafford Centre and was so enraptured by a magician he asked him to come back to his house for lessons.

This is the thing that sometimes gets overlooked with Balotelli: despite the scowl, his greatest love is actually having fun. One member of staff at City found him alone one day, laughing almost uncontrollably at a DVD he was watching on his laptop. "Laurel and Hardy," Balotelli explained, announcing it was his favourite television show.

There are times, undoubtedly, when he needs to quit the fooling around and get in control of that flash temper. But the biggest problem, perhaps, is that so few people understand Balotelli because his circumstances are so unique.

Abandoned by his biological parents at the age of two, raised by a foster family as the only black boy in a white neighbourhood, discrimination has provided the backdrop to his life, long before Croatia's fans targeted him for monkey noises and threw a banana on the pitch in this tournament.

It is one of the reasons he likes playing in the Premier League, where he does not feel skin-colour matters. Equally, we know enough about Balotelli by now to know, just like Cristiano Ronaldo in 2006, how much he will like the idea of scoring the goal that would eliminate England – followed, almost inevitably, by a shush gesture for the cameras.

Beneath his shirt, he will be wearing the gold medallion his adoptive mother, the diminutive Silvia, gave him a few years ago. It bears the inscription: "Professionalism, Endeavour, Humility". I've met her and it is very apparent that, behind the scenes, there is a support network in place and Balotelli's life is not always as chaotic as it seems. "He should listen to his mother," she confided.