Vesper

nil 3, rout is on

CB: 1. Havertz will never be cheaper until he is in his 30's. It is crazy to wait if we want him. I already showed with a complete accounting how we could buy BOTH Sancho AND Havertz plus others for a net zero spend, so IF you remove Sancho from the buying , we sure as hell have the cash. 2. Here are the only Left-Footed CB's who are remotely up to a level worth considering Lucas Hernández (Bayern will never sell him now) Alessio Romagnoli (the cunt Mino Raiola as his agent makes this shit hard, but he is the perfect buy otherwise) Gabriel Magalhães buy him now, IMHO, if we cannot get Romagnoli Clément Lenglet (Barca will not sell I think) Mohammed Salisu - Real Valladolid, young, tall 1.91m, very pacey, good on the ball, very, very large upside, we should be scouting him, number 3 on my list for left footed CB target,all things considered Pau Torres - Villarreal, 23yo, tall 1.91m, good on the ball, large upside, we should be scouting him Presnel Kimpembe (I doubt PSG will sell him) Alessandro Bastoni (worth looking at,, 21yo, 1.90m, but Inter probably will not sell) Benoît Badiashile (too young atm to come right in I think, just turned 19yo, but is huge (1.94m) and we have scouted him), Monaco is friendly team for us Dan-Axel Zagadou (even bigger at 1.96m, not sure if he is that good on the ball atm, and is not the paciest, 21yo) Samuel Umtiti (has collapse in quality of play ever since he was superb at the WC, no clue what is wrong with him, massive enigma) 3. Just bloody buy Telles and sell Emerson IF we are not going to do a swap (Alex Sandro for Emerson) The money difference between the 2 deals is fairly small, as PSG only offered £17.9m for Telles, £20m would take him, which is what approximately we would get for Emerson from Juve or Inter. Hell, swap Emerson for Alex Sandro, sell Alonso to Inter and buy Telles. All that would cost £5m or so max net. Sandro is a month younger than Alonso, so age-wise it doesn't matter. 4. I think the CF he is talking about would be one of the following Myron Boadu - AZ Alkmaar (Raiola is his agent though) 19 yo, 20 goals, 13 assists in 3/4ers of a season Victor Osimhen not really one who has NOT been linked with us though, he has been a tonne Donyell Malen PSV Eindhoven (that fucker Raiola gain though) 17 goals, 9 assists in half a seasons minutes, 21yo Marcus Thuram Borussia Mönchengladbach 22yo, but, guess who is his agent? MINO RAIOLA, ffs Odsonne Edouard - Celtic he fits the criteria, not many links, young, is an all-rounder, 27 goals, 19 assists Dominic Calvert-Lewin , sigh, I can but dream, he would be PERFECT for us, other than Werner, my number 1 target, but his price will be madness Alfredo Morelos - Rangers, but he is a mental fucker, not sure how he would do in the EPL either, 29 goals, 10 assists Josh Maja Bordeaux 21yo, we were liked once, months gao, deffo not a starting quality striker atm Luca Waldschmidt - SC Freiburg just turned 24, I aw we were scouting him, I am not sold he is top quality Ollie Watkins Brentford, 24yo, massive in the Championship so far (22 goals), but not sure if he is EPL star quality Alexander Isak Real Sociedad 20yo, similar to Tammy, Swedish, came from my team here, AIK,, 14 goals in only 1500 minutes, not sure he is ready for the EPL yet at all Luka Jovic, probably not, but a loan with an option might work Fedor Chalov , we were linked, not sold on him at all, who knows Aleksandar Mitrovic 25yo, 26 in a few months, so not really 'young' 5. I have zero clue what is going to happen with Sancho, my nightmare is he ends up at Manure

nil 2 Poulsen

Werner scored

Upamecano back starting after his suspension

Mainz v RB Leipzig HD Streams http://www.sportnews.to/sports/2020/bundesliga-mainz-05-vs-rb-leipzig-s1-english/ http://www.dubsstreamz.com/tb.php https://www.totalsportek.com/rb-leipzig/

that has Newcastle head choppers buy written all over it

?

‘It could do huge damage’ – fears and bills mount as EFL players’ wages shrink https://theathletic.com/1832595/2020/05/24/efl-wage-cuts-fears-quit-football/ On February 20, 2018, Connor Simpson arrived from the substitutes’ bench in the 89th minute at Villa Park. The Preston North End forward, only 18 years old at the time, was about to face one of England’s most decorated defenders. “The next thing I knew,” he recalls. “I was backing in and trying to hold off John Terry.” For Simpson, now 20, it remains his only glimpse of Championship football. A 6ft 5in striker, Simpson (pictured top playing for Carlisle United) first emerged from the Hartlepool United youth team as a 17-year-old, breaking into the first team and becoming the first player born in the 21st century to score for the club. He impressed sufficiently to move up from the National League to England’s second tier and join Preston. He resisted the advances of West Ham United, where he enjoyed a successful trial, in favour of the promise of playing time. Since signing for Preston, however, it has been tough going. There have been loan spells, with varying success, at Carlisle and Accrington Stanley, as well non-League detours to Hyde United and Lancaster City. In the coming weeks, however, Simpson’s time at Preston is likely to be over. His contract is up in June and, although he is still to be officially informed, he is wise enough to know “the signs are there”. “I don’t think I am in the plans,” says Simpson, residing with his parents at their family home in Hartlepool. “Preston are doing the testing for the virus (in preparation for Championship’s restart) and I am not in that group, so I am guessing I won’t be part of training. So, it looks like they’re not going to give me a new deal.” Simpson will be one of those colliding head-on with a “train coming extremely quickly down the tunnel”, to quote the EFL chairman Rick Parry. During an evidence session to the UK parliament earlier this month, Parry revealed that 1,400 EFL playing contracts are due to expire in June and as the clock ticks down, players grow more fearful. Over the past week, the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) revealed alarming results of a members’ survey. Among the 111 current players who responded, 24 said they are depressed or considering self-harm. Among the 262 members surveyed — including current and ex-players — 69 per cent of respondents said they worried about their livelihood and 72 per cent admitted they are experiencing feelings of “nervousness or anxiety”. In the Premier League, concerns centre on the safety protocols and squabbles over wage deferrals. Yet further down the ladder, livelihoods are at risk. Over the past few days, The Athletic has spoken to several players in the lower echelons of the Football League: within WhatsApp groups, players are already organising mortgage holidays, worrying how they will fund household bills and dreading unemployment. Little wonder, therefore, that the former Liverpool midfielder Graeme Souness this week predicted the following doomsday scenario on Sky Sports. He said: “There are going to be tragic cases. There will be players who are professional footballers today who will not be in six months. There is a correction coming across the country. “For all the different money (the chancellor) has handed out, he now somehow has to come up with taxes in an acceptable way to get that back. Football will fall into that category. Clubs will find themselves in dire financial straits and may end up going out of business. The consequence of that will be players on the dole. “The talk is of the mother of all recessions. This is the time when the big guys in football have to think of everybody involved. There has to be a sharing of the incredible riches of the Premier League. There will be so many casualties and we have to take care of the little guys.” As the summer months approach, it is usual for a high number of players to move freely around clubs in the Football League and the National League. Yet the upcoming transfer window is mired in uncertainty. First, leagues in England are ending in varying circumstances at different times. League Two has been curtailed, but relegation and play-offs are still to be finalised. In League One, discussions continue over how to conclude the campaign, while the Premier League and Championship attempt to play the season to a finish. This creates a distinction between end dates for the current season. In the meantime, every club in English football is awaiting a start date for the new campaign. Until then, nobody knows how or when to offer new contracts. In League One and League Two, where the majority of clubs concluded that the cost of testing and the expense of hosting home games without match-day revenue cannot be justified, there are even question marks as to whether the divisions can return before a vaccine is found for coronavirus. As clubs seek to stay afloat, it is no surprise, therefore, that the many players due to be out of contract are hearing next to nothing about future opportunities. On top of the 1,400 EFL players, there will also be numerous younger players and scholars released from Premier League clubs amid the pandemic, who may ordinarily find solace in the lower tiers. On top of the saturated market, further issues arise. Lost match-day revenue equals less lucrative contract offers for players and the Football League is also extremely close to approving new financial regulations for a salary cap in League One and League Two. It is reported that League One clubs will be restricted to a salary limit of £2.5 million to £3 million while League Two will be between £1.25 million £1.5 million. On top of this, clubs may be forced to have no more than 20 first-team players over the age of 21 on their books. Gary Neville, the co-owner of League Two Salford City, this week spelt out the “major reset” for lower league salaries. He told Sky Sports: “It is going to be the biggest game-changer for lower-league players in the last 30 or 40 years. No matter what club, crowd or income you have, you will be restricted in the money you can spend. “The PFA is sleepwalking at this moment. I don’t think they recognise that coronavirus is an issue for players and a crisis for clubs. There will be deferrals and cuts in the immediate term but there is a major reset coming in terms of player wages at League One and League Two level and, potentially, the Championship if the salary cap extends there, which I believe it may do in the future.” It adds up to one harsh reality for players: lower wages. Neville added: “The salary cap will be severe, well below average salaries being paid at the moment. It is a game-changer for clubs at that level but also players, who will be earning a lot less.” Adam Collin, Carlisle’s 35-year-old first-choice goalkeeper in League Two this season, is one of those players who has already been told he will not receive a renewal. He tells The Athletic: “It is a tricky period. Clubs do not know what they are doing financially. Some do not know which league they will be in, so it is very hard for clubs to go out and offer contracts. “It is a waiting game for teams and players. We have never seen anything on this scale. It will play into the hands of clubs, who will get players at a cheaper rate. More players are being released than normal and the market is going to be flooded.” In the bleakest terms, those who ply their trade in the third and fourth tiers of English football have little idea when they may next play competitive football. If clubs are unable to fund training and matches in socially-distanced circumstances, players might be forced to contemplate an extended period away from football. “This is the uncertainty,” Collin says. “There was a decision to call off League Two, as it was deemed infeasible to do all this testing and not play in front of crowds. There is a lot of work that needs to go on behind the scenes. “It is worrying as we are not sure if we can even play in January or February. Coronavirus is not disappearing. The testing has to be there to play on and I don’t know whether clubs can afford to do it.” Gridlocked by a pandemic, lower-league players are now examining the financial repercussions of football grinding to a halt. One report this week claimed that some players may need to accept terms reduced by over 50 per cent at their next employers. Is that the noise, too, within the game? Collin says: “Most players understand the situation. It is going to be the case all over English football. “It could do huge damage. We do not earn £20,000 per week. We earn decent money but not enough so that we can go for six months without earning or working. We have bills and mortgages to pay. Those who are out of contract have no idea if we will get one or when it will start. It will be very damaging and a lot of players will be very worried.” Adam Osper, who works closely with many footballers in financial planning at Tilney Sports, warns that players should already be discussing mortgage holidays with their advisors and banks. He explains: “Lower down, it is much more problematic. These players have footballer status but they are earning £50,000 to £100,000 a year. It’s a good amount of money but a lot of these guys are married, with a mortgage and have children. They do not have much disposable income. In those cases, you have to speak to them about talking to banks for mortgage deferrals and mortgage payment holidays. We hope, also, that they don’t have too many cars on finance. That can be a problem. “Sometimes, footballers do not have advisors around them. They have agents to do deals but some players will then just step away, not get involved and not be aware of the mortgages, credit cards and loans they have. They are the biggest outgoings for these guys. People also may not realise that footballers tend to get much shorter mortgages with higher repayments than the average person. “Whereas you or I would get a 25-year mortgage, a footballer would get a five-to-10-year mortgage. To pay it off in time, they have larger monthly rates. They have shorter careers, especially lower-league players, and they don’t want to get to 35 with lesser job prospects and a chunky mortgage outstanding. “This is one of the things that gets missed a little bit when people say, ‘Oh, footballers should take wage cuts, they earn lots of money’. Yes, but they have very big mortgages and it is common for them to pay their parents’ mortgages, or their brother’s or sister’s. They may have family members furloughed, so they are supporting them at the moment, too.” At Crawley Town, central defender Jamie Sendles-White is in a more privileged position and expects to remain at his club. As with many League Two clubs, he and his team-mates were furloughed. In their case, Crawley topped up the furlough grant to ensure players received maximum pay during this period. Yet it is unclear how long the government will continue to contribute — as it stands, clubs will be asked to pay part of furloughed staff’s wages from August. Should the Football League’s postponement outlive the grants, players know they may not be immune to the redundancies shattering lives across the world. Sendles-White, 26, knows the challenges. He says: “We were extremely grateful to be topped up. We have heard some stories in our league and the league below where finances are incredibly tight, where it must be so stressful to not be able to get even 80 per cent of their pay. “I have heard people who live near me thinking it is all fun and games and that we are earning fortunes. We are in a more privileged position than most people but I have a mortgage, based on what was affordable to me, according to my basic pay and bonuses. We do not get bonuses at the moment as we are not playing, making it a bit tighter. “I also budget my life for the coaching company that I run but we have hardly earned anything there during the pandemic as we have had to pay people back. It is not what people think football is down at our level. It is not the Premier League or Championship. “The lower down you go, the more incentivised the contracts become. You have your basic pay, then your appearances, goals, win bonuses. They make a massive difference to your end-of-month pay, and you budget to that. When you are then furloughed, it is quite tough. “We get 100 per cent of our basic pay but when you know the bonuses are not coming, it changes your monthly planning. In other ways, you do save money. I usually spend £80 per week on petrol. The first six weeks of lockdown, I filled my tank once. It probably does almost even out. But it is still the stress of the mortgage and bills. In the coming months, there will be players forced to take contracts they would never ordinarily do, just to make sure they are earning.” Has the worst-case scenario — where football does not return until an effective vaccine is developed — crossed his mind? He says: “I have tried to not think too much about the worst-case. But there would be so many footballers at this level in serious financial issues. If football does not come back for months and months, I don’t even want to think about the situation a lot of players will end up in. ” When football supporters ask why the sport cannot simply wait until it is safe to return, these concerns provide an insight into the severe economic pressures. At the PFA, the union oversaw a 100 per cent increase in benevolent grants between March and April this year as players scramble to secure their futures. The 24-7 well-being helpline is available, in addition to WhatsApp and emails for those who require support for both their mental health and practical contractual services. However, many would like greater support to be in place, with clear planning for the worst eventualities. Players are aware that the PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor earns more than £2 million per year while the current chairman Ben Purkiss claimed previously that the union has £50 million of capital in the bank. Should a pandemic hardship fund be put in place? Sendles-White says: “We get a few emails sent out and there’s a free mental health app called Headspace. This is where the PFA will need to look after players more so than ever. The money we hear they have — there should be something in place for players who are not getting new contracts and are finding it hard to get another club. “They need to sit down and have a serious conversation about that. There are going to be so many players who will need massive help in the coming months.” Collin, the PFA representative in Carlisle’s squad, explains: “There’s always some sort of help. The PFA is fantastic for players, they will help as much as possible and especially those without a club or contract will receive support. But it is the uncertainty. The EFL and the leagues are not making decisions quickly. “I am pleased the season has been finished but now we need to get promotions and relegations sorted. It seems to be dragging on. Once decisions are made, people will know what is happening. The big thing is not knowing, which causes anxiety. If we get decisions by the end of this month, and play-offs done in June, then everyone will know where they stand and can sort out deals. If pre-season can start in July, with a view to starting in September, everyone has a date to work towards.” Sendles-White adds: “It is all ifs, buts and maybes. Until we have a date for the season and understand the damage caused, it is so hard to see how deep the trouble could go.” In the meantime, individual players can only train alone. Simpson has trained every day in a field in the north east since the start of lockdown. He has football friends in his age group who are talking about other careers, maybe even walking away from the game altogether. Collin, 15 years older than Simpson, has heard similar: “It is logical. It is going to be so tough for players to get contracts. Teams will run with smaller squads. They will use the loan market as much as they can. A lot of players will be out of work or unhappy with wages on offer, and maybe start looking at other options or avenues for income.” Some in the sport are starting to fear a generation aged between 18 and 21 may be lost. Ordinarily, younger talents from the Premier League would be released and picked up lower down the food chain. “It could not come at a worse time for players coming through from under-23 level,” Sendles-White says. “They are looking to kick on their careers and make their names at first-team level. It will be hard enough for experienced pros in League One and League Two.” The transfer market is stagnant. One agent says his clients who have contracts expiring in the summer “have absolutely no idea what is going on”. Sendles-White has discussed the issue with friends in the game. He says: “I don’t think there’s much going on at all, in terms of clubs looking for players. It is going to be so hard. There will be a date set for next season and then it will be chaos: managers, agents, players phoning everyone. “The players I have spoken to who are out of contract have not heard anything. Until there is a date, I cannot see anything getting sorted. It is so important to get a date. There needs to be a plan from the EFL, the FA and the PFA. The longer it goes on, the harder it becomes for clubs. It could become impossible for some players to get through this.” Young striker Simpson remains committed, filming his lone training sessions and preparing videos to show prospective employers. “I don’t see it in quite the same way,” he says. “The money will not be as high but I view it this way: as a young player wanting experience, it may give me a chance instead of taking on older guys with higher demands. It may work out OK. I have to be optimistic. Every day, I go for a run and then go to the field. “I do a lot of fitness, speed and agility training, and a lot of finishing from different areas. I bought a ball machine that fires balls out to you at different speeds. You press the remote control and it acts as a player on the pitch. It crosses balls for me to head, or it does it on a timer. I can also replicate receiving the ball with my back to goal. I then watch back my videos and analyse what I can do better. I am doing runs, wearing weighted vests to spice it up a bit. I need to be ready for trials. I am a fighter. “I came through at 17 at Hartlepool, they were struggling and needed to look at youth players. I washed my kit, cleaned my boots. There was no money there, so everything was off your own back. I got a lot of kicks early on in men’s football. They wanted to bully me and throw me about. I was only 17 and quite weak at the time. I had to fight for myself. The defenders in that league are quite mad and the refs are not watching as much. “I got the move to Preston and this was mad; my first time on the bench was Villa away in front of 30,000. I had played in front of 4,000 at Hartlepool but it was surreal really against Villa, against John Terry. I want more of that. “The level matters less to me but the main thing is playing games. There won’t be footage of me recently in action, so I want to show clubs I care, that I’m not sat at home doing nothing. I have to give myself a chance.”

Will empty grounds be the perfect stage for players who only do it in training? https://theathletic.com/1818159/2020/05/23/will-empty-grounds-be-the-perfect-stage-for-players-who-only-do-it-in-training/ (Photo: Dahoud is congratulated by Erling Haaland last weekend. Credit: Alexandre Simoes/Borussia Dortmund via Getty Images) As Luis Enrique explained in his own inimitable way this week, taking part in matches behind closed doors will be uninspiring and uncomfortable for the vast majority of footballers. “Playing without fans is sadder than dancing with your sister,” the Spain manager said. As strange as it may sound, not everybody in the game will be feeling that way. The sight of thousands of empty seats and the sound of silence will be liberating for some players and take away one of the biggest barriers to them performing on a matchday: the crowd. One player’s motivation is another’s suffocation when it comes to supporters, often leaving managers exasperated by the way in which matchday performances bear little resemblance to what they see on the training ground. Jamie Carragher and Alan Shearer have called them “Monday-to-Friday players”. They set the world alight all week and then go missing on a Saturday. Not any more. With football stadiums empty, that player will never have a better opportunity to step out of the shadows in the weeks and months to come. It is, as Franz Beckenbauer put it on the eve of the Bundesliga’s restart last weekend, “a chance for the training world champion”, the player who “benefits from empty stands” and can “turn up like in practice”, to take centre stage. Beckenbauer went onto predict “some surprises”, and there was one in the first round of matches when Mo Dahoud, who has never quite managed to deliver when it matters for Borussia Dortmund, emerged as one of the Bundesliga’s standout performers. While it is only one game and Schalke were poor, the truth is that Beckenbauer’s theory has plenty of support in the English game too. Several managers have told The Athletic they are considering giving opportunities to players who would ordinarily have been on the periphery because of doubts about their ability to perform at their best in front of thousands of people. One international has even approached his manager to say that this could be a game-changer for a team that has played within itself on too many occasions this season. Another coach predicts a wave of debuts for youngsters at all levels of the professional game. For some players, especially those who feed off the energy of the supporters, it is hard to relate to the idea that an empty stadium could be viewed as good news. “For me, I feel like I’m a different player with the crowd there — it gives me that extra five per cent, so I think it’s going to be one of the main challenges for me,” a Premier League player tells The Athletic. “I’m actually nervous about playing in front of no fans.” But what about the alternative view, the idea that some players will thrive without supporters? “I’ve not thought about that perspective,” he replies. “But now you’ve said it, one player has popped into my head straight away. This would be him down to a tee. A lot of the time he worries about the fans and it does get to him. “So I do definitely feel that could happen, that players could come out of their shell. It will be like a training session for them, which is where a lot of them show their quality and then it gets to a game and the pressure is a bit too much for them.” Few players would be brave and honest enough to tell their manager that they are struggling to handle the demands of supporters. Managers quickly pick up on little signs, though, especially when there is such a contrast between what happens in training and in a match. “I see the difference in body language and decision-making, and I’m thinking, ‘What’s he doing? That’s not him’,” one Championship manager explains. Those sorts of traits and flaws could be there from the very first minute with some players, and more to do with nerves and the pressure that an individual puts himself under to do well. But with others, the tell-tale signs will surface on the back of supporter frustration, maybe after a misplaced pass in a game where the team, not necessarily one individual, is underperforming. Some will have the fortitude to shut out a collective groan and play through it. Others, the Championship manager explains, will “turn down” the chance to execute that same pass when the opportunity presents itself again and instead play overly safe or negatively. Michael Appleton says he often saw that kind of thing unfold during a playing career that took him from Manchester United to Preston and then West Brom, and he has also witnessed it as a manager and a coach. It is why he gave the ramifications of football behind closed doors serious consideration months ago. “As soon as it was mentioned, I was thinking that the landscape of the game could change very quickly and dramatically,” says Appleton, who is currently the manager of Lincoln in League One. “I was thinking about certain players in our squad who have struggled a bit to have an impact in the first team or to get into the squad because they couldn’t replicate their performances in terms of how they were in training to actually playing in front of a crowd. “We actually discussed this as a group, with my staff, that if we did have to play behind closed doors, then certain players who might not have been involved previously would come into the frame.” Looking back, Appleton says that he generally felt “reasonably confident” on the pitch as a player. When he did something wrong away from home and it was met with an ironic cheer, he’d chuckle to himself. As for the moans from the stands at home, they motivated him to do better and to make sure he got the next pass right. “But with some players — and we’re all individuals and deal with things differently — they would go under,” he says. “If you’re going to go into detail about all of this, and this is just my opinion — I’m not a psychologist — I think the players who really struggle dealing with fans and crowds and being in that type of atmosphere, it’s even worse for them, believe it or not, when they play at home. “It’s like that added pressure at home that when you’re in possession of the ball, the scrutiny is on you to do something and to be positive.” The spotlight can be too much for some players. It was fascinating to hear Paolo Vernazza talk honestly and openly to The Athletic recently not only about how he regrets the way that he would “play it safe” for Arsenal, but also the psychological battle that he went through when performing in front of crowds lower down the leagues. “In training I’d be doing things that I just couldn’t do on a Saturday,” Vernazza admitted. “A lot of my managers at a lower level used to say, ‘Paolo, you train so differently to how you play. What is the hold-up?’ “(Rotherham team-mate) Paul Warne, who manages Rotherham now, used to say to me, ‘Paolo, forget about them little faces behind the goal. Forget about them little faces in the stand’. And that really affected me, because at that level you can see the faces. If you make a bad pass, you can hear the groans. And I couldn’t deal with that.” The science behind it all is fascinating to explore. Gary Bloom is a clinical sports psychotherapist and currently involved in research on the subject of “fan-less stadiums”. He also works for Oxford United and privately with players across the Premier League, Championship and League One. “At the moment I’m working with a player who is a dead-ball specialist and he and I were talking last week about this very thing,” Bloom says. “He said when you’ve had a couple of duff free kicks and the home crowd are going ‘urgh’, and then you come up to take the third one and that noise is there, he said it doesn’t half instil fear in you. And we talked about that disappearing — it’s now completely gone. “So you enter what is known in psychology as going from a threat state, ‘I don’t want to hit another bloody free kick’, into the challenger state, ‘You know what, I’m going to have another go, it doesn’t matter’.” Bloom delves a bit deeper as he weighs up the psychological ramifications of playing behind closed doors. “I know the stuff is being televised on TV, perhaps, but that doesn’t really matter to some degree,” he says. “The part of our brain which is aroused by that fear/threat, which is called the limbic part, I don’t think is going to be as aroused in front of an empty stadium. “The limbic part of our brain is where our emotions live — our fear, our anxiety, our excitement, all that sort of stuff. So you’re not as aroused one way and you’re not as aroused the other way. So if you want to think of a metaphor, you think of a music metronome — you don’t get the big swings, the highs and lows; you just get much more of a consistent swing. Scoring that winning goal with two minutes to go is pretty exciting, but it’s not as exciting as scoring it in front of a big crowd.” That last comment brings to mind an interview with Lee Trundle a few months ago, when the 43-year-old former Swansea and Bristol City striker explained that while he still can’t contemplate giving up playing, he badly misses the noise of a big crowd. “If you’re playing out there in front of 20,000 and you hear everyone go up, that instant roar from nothing, and then running and seeing the joy on thousands of people’s faces… that’s a feeling that you can never replicate in any way,” Trundle told The Athletic. Bloom smiles. “That is a classic what I would call, in sport and psychotherapy terms, the big dopamine hit that all footballers, I think, play for. That is transmitted to the crowd, because that is why you go to watch your team on a Saturday or a Wednesday, to get the dopamine of that ball hitting the back of your net when you’ve beaten your opponent.” According to Dan Abrahams, who is a sport psychologist and works in the medical department at Bournemouth, “more players than you would think are negatively impacted by a crowd”. Few, however, will publicly admit it and especially when they’re still playing. “It’s a challenging one to get any data on,” Abrahams adds. “Nobody is going to say, ‘Hey, I struggle to do this’.” Jamie Vardy touched on the subject on the back of Leicester’s Premier League title win when he said that he sensed the club’s supporters “weren’t having me” during a difficult first season at the club following his £1 million move from Fleetwood in 2012. “As much as you try to shut out the background noise, you can hear the moans and groans when something goes wrong on the pitch in just the same way that you feed off the buzz when they’re singing your name,” Vardy said. As much as Vardy may play to the crowd at times, he has explained how it can affect performance (Photo: Richard Sellers/PA Images via Getty Images) The former England striker also believes that he took too much notice of social media in those days, which is something that Shkodran Mustafi recently claimed had affected his Arsenal performances because “once you’ve read criticism, it’s going to stay there.” That platform, which can be brutal at times, has altered the relationship between fans and players, although Abrahams points to a shift inside stadiums too. “It’s a really interesting juxtaposition because you’ve obviously got that notion of ‘we’re playing at home and that’s an advantage’, but there seems to be a bit of a phenomenon that has built up over the last couple of decades whereby crowds have taken it upon themselves to try to motivate players by getting on their back — ‘It’s not acceptable, we’re paying this money, we’re in the stadium’, and one could assume that’s a fair thing to think. Not every player, but quite a few players will hear it and it will suppress their capacity to perform at their best.” We go on to talk about how that can manifest itself on the pitch. For example, the player who receives the ball, looks up and then, gripped by self-doubt, turns down the switch of play that they would make without a second thought in training or on a good day, largely because of the fear of making another mistake and how that will be viewed. As a result they become inhibited in how they play and, ultimately, everybody suffers. “If we look at the underpinning science behind what you’re saying it’s to do with a stress hormone called cortisol, which is released when players are anxious or worried about their specific situation, and that does a lot of things,” Abrahams explains. “You’ve used the word inhibited; it inhibits your actions, your motions, your movement. In many respects it’s designed to switch off the front part of your brain, that’s what happens under pressure or when you’re stressed. “So if you’re worried about what the crowd think of you, you’re self-conscious, you’ve got some social anxiety there, then you’ve got this cortisol that’s streaming through your body, depressing your capacity to execute your skills. “And then your front brain switches off, and now that’s a problem because it’s the part of the brain that really underpins the intelligence side of the game — your visual-spatial capacity, your capacity to problem solve and find solutions in the moment, to think about the game as you’re playing. “And then your emotional senses can really, really fire, and again that just compounds the doubt, the worry, the anxiety — whatever emotions you’re experiencing at the time. If you feel that you’re being judged by the crowd, then that’s what you’re going to experience.” It is, of course, too simplistic to say that the absence of supporters will definitely enable players to perform in a different way. “Perception is everything here,” Abrahams adds. “So if that player creates a narrative, has a perception of ‘Well, there’s no crowd, nobody is going to get on my case’, and that player feels as a consequence that it gives him an enormous sense of freedom, then it might very well be the case that he then goes out and plays more freely. There’s no guarantees even if he has that narrative, but there’s more chance that he will. “But perceptions are very individual-specific. It might be that the source of that player’s challenge is himself or herself, in as much as he or she might be heavily invested ‘Well, I want to win and I want to perform really well’, so even though there is no crowd there, they might still go out and be inhibited at some stage of the game, so it can be a complex combination of the two. But it certainly wouldn’t surprise me if some players feel a little bit freer and less inhibited now.” It is interesting listening to players talking about their relationship with the crowd. At the highest level, they say they rarely hear their manager above the noise of the supporters and hardly ever pick out individual comments from fans. An exception would be when taking a throw-in or a corner. One Championship player says there are “times when I’ve fed off the crowd and the atmosphere” and to such an extent that it has got him through matches when he has not felt particularly good beforehand. Generally, though, it is less about the noise and “more the thought of people watching you” that enters his mind while he is playing. It would be easy to talk about players who struggle to deal with the crowd and a negative reaction as being mentally weak. Another way of looking at it is that it takes a lot of courage to carry on getting on the ball when supporters are turning against a player or the team. “Anyone who can do that constantly, even if it’s going wrong, I’ve got a lot of admiration for,” the Championship player adds. “Because the natural thing is to hide.” The same player later makes a joke but also a serious point about how he would be perceived if he suddenly started playing out of his skin in the matches that are behind closed doors, and whether that would reflect negatively on his character. “People would say, ‘He can’t play under pressure!’” For Bloom, there is equally as much work to do with players now as there was before football behind closed doors became a reality. “We are thinking about techniques of helping people create the preparation to go into a fan-less stadium. Some people will say, ‘Just get on with it’. I disagree. I think you have to prepare players psychologically,” he says. “I work with players on how to prepare them for playing in front of a crowd, so one of the techniques I will say to a player who says, ‘I get really nervous when we’ve got a big game’, or ‘I had a bad game last time, I’m not sure the crowd are on my side’, is to say, ‘OK, how would you feel about something like just before kick-off running by the goal and applauding your home supporters?’ And they’ll say, ‘Why would I do that?’ And I’ll say, ‘They’ll appreciate it, you’ll feel good about yourself, you’re starting from a positive’. “So I would also work with players about the visualisation about playing in an empty stadium and this is where, in my opinion, the big work is about communication. If you’ve got a quiet team, if you haven’t got a team of shouters and screamers and bawlers, I think that’s not great. Because I think you need to gain energy from the internal relationships in your team because you can’t gain it from the crowd. “I think quiet teams are not going to do well in an empty stadium. If you’ve done something well and you’ve got nobody giving you that positive feedback… you need people saying, ‘Well done. Brilliant, mate. Keep going’. You know what it’s like playing in a game when somebody is saying that to you the whole time, you think, ‘I’ll bloody well do it again’.”

Why so many American players are finding a place in German football https://theathletic.com/1827680/2020/05/24/american-players-germany-pulisic-reyna/ Ahead of the Bundesliga becoming the first major league to return from the COVID-19 shutdown last weekend, The Athletic’s Felipe Cardenas highlighted just how many American players are currently in the German top flight. But why is that the case? The paths of the seven Americans involved in Bundesliga action a week ago are varied. Three — John Brooks, Timothy Chandler and Alfredo Morales — were born and raised in Germany. The other four — Tyler Adams, Weston McKennie, Giovanni Reyna (who missed his first Bundesliga start after suffering an injury in the warm-up but returned off the bench yesterday against Brooks’ Wolfsburg) and Josh Sargent — were primarily brought up in the U.S. and did most of their development in the American youth system. Adams, who moved from the New York Red Bulls to RB Leipzig in January 2019, was the only member of that group who played in MLS; the other three began their professional careers in Germany. Although Christian Pulisic, who began his career with Borussia Dortmund before making his big-money move to Chelsea last summer, is the highest-profile example of an American spending formative time in Germany, the trend goes back decades to the likes of Eric Wynalda, Claudio Reyna and Landon Donovan, just to name a few. “We’ve seen it over the past 20 years,” said former U.S. right-back Steve Cherundolo, who signed with Hannover after leaving the University of Portland in 1999. He played for the German club for 15 years and coached there for several more before shifting into his current role as an ambassador for the Bundesliga. “I think it’s only getting better and bigger, and it really does seem to be a wonderful fit.” The German path is more common these days, particularly for young prospects who are joining academies there. Six members of the U.S.’s 2019 Under-20 World Cup team, including Wolfsburg winger Ulysses Llanez, who now has one senior U.S. cap, were contracted to German clubs during the tournament. Four more German-based players were called up to the first U.S. team of the 2021 under-20 cycle last September. Llanez celebrates scoring on his U.S. debut against Costa Rica (Photo: Michael Janosz/ISI Photos/Getty Images) A confluence of factors both on and off the field have made Germany a popular destination for top young Americans. One of the most important of those happens to be the least sexy: immigration laws. England, given its strong, popular league and shared language with the U.S., would probably be a more natural landing spot for Americans, if not for its strict work-permit requirements. But Germany has more lax immigration restrictions for athletes than many other European nations. In fact, no work permit is required for an athlete to gain residency. They only need to be 16 years old, earn a living wage and be confirmed as a competent athlete by their sport’s German governing body. Even FIFA has tougher restrictions — outside of a few exceptions, the game’s international federation bars youth players from moving out of their own country until they turn 18. (Pulisic and Reyna, who both obtained European passports through a grandparent, were able to take advantage of one of those exceptions, which states that players with European citizenship can move to a club in a different European country at age 16.) “Obviously, it starts with the work-permit issue,” said former U.S. defender/midfielder Cory Gibbs, who began his pro career with Hamburg club St Pauli in 2001 and, in his current role as an agent with Wasserman, helped McKennie and 20-year-old Bayern Munich defender Chris Richards engineer their moves to Germany. “It just makes it so much easier for Americans to get over there and prove themselves.” It also helps massively that German clubs haven’t paid acquisition fees for most of their American players. Pulisic signed with Dortmund for free in January 2015. Four years later, the club sold him for $73 million. Dortmund could turn that trick again with Reyna, who left New York City FC without signing a pro deal and joined for no fee in October 2018. McKennie’s journey from the FC Dallas academy to Schalke was the same, though Dallas did manage to get a $1.25 million transfer fee out of Bayern for Richards, who they signed to a pro deal less than a year before selling him. Part of the reason American teams haven’t received any money for players who leave their academies for Germany or other countries is the fact that MLS and U.S. Soccer have not allowed them to pursue training compensation or solidarity payments. U.S. Soccer claimed it became neutral on the topic in 2015, and MLS changed its stance on that last April, when it announced it would comply with FIFA’s system and allow its teams to go after training compensation and solidarity payments. “That’s been a big problem for MLS teams, but it’s also one of the reasons why American players are so attractive, because basically they are free,” said Philadelphia Union sporting director Ernst Tanner, a German national who brought U.S. forward Bobby Wood to 1860 Munich over a decade ago, and even served as Wood’s legal guardian for a time before he later went on to work at Bundesliga club Hoffenheim. “There is an academy payment in place now, but I don’t know if there have been any cases where the German clubs have had to pay training fees.” The friendly immigration laws and the lack of transfer fees make it easier for Americans to get into Germany, but it’s not what allows them to make a career in the Bundesliga. And while talent is, of course, the most important factor for any player looking to stick in the German first division, Americans are helped by their tendency to have a relatively simple time adapting to life on and off the field in the country. Off the field, players can get by using English without too much issue while they learn to speak German. They also have a somewhat easy time dealing with German coaches, who often share similar sensibilities with their American counterparts. “When it comes to Germany, football is very structured,” said Gibbs. “Very, very structured. Every player knows where they need to be, the coach has a specific game plan and they follow that game plan. They don’t turn away from that. And I think Americans follow that type of mentality as well.” The prevailing style in Germany — a fast-paced, transition-heavy game that suits athletic players — also works well for youngsters. The fact that under-21 players get a higher percentage of overall minutes in the Bundesliga than they do in the Premier League, Italy’s Serie A or Spain’s La Liga is another big factor in creating the symbiotic relationship between top American prospects and German clubs. “I think whenever we’re talking about players and we evaluate them in scouting or just in general conversation, we’ll break it up into four general areas: mentality, physicality, the technical side and the tactical side,” said Cherundolo. “And I think that most American players are very well developed in three of those areas — physical stature, technical ability and the mentality side of the game. “The tactical side, that’s where the Europeans — and I can mostly speak for the Germans — maybe they’re a little further along at 16 years old than Americans are. That would be the only point where I would have a bit of pause, but those other three boxes definitely get checked off. And a lot of German clubs believe they can teach the player the tactical side of the game, which is why they love Americans and why they usually always fit, because most are able to learn the necessary tactical pieces.” The recent emergence of young Americans in the Bundesliga, beginning with Pulisic and continuing with McKennie and Adams, has created a positive feedback loop on both sides of the Atlantic. The old European biases against American players that Cherundolo and Gibbs had to fight against at the start of their careers have largely evaporated. Meanwhile, in the U.S., prospects are seeing more and more young players have an easier time getting high-level opportunities in Germany than in the other big-five leagues. Bring it all together, and it’s easy to imagine a steady stream of future American prospects continuing to head to Germany. “I remember we used to have to beg clubs to take a look at these players. Now it’s a situation where these clubs are reaching out saying, ‘Find us the next Weston, find us the next Pulisic, find us the next Tyler Adams’,” said Gibbs. “It’s not easy, but it’s opened up a lot more for the demand for Americans going over abroad, for sure. The mental block is gone.” “Most of the academy boys are looking much more to the English Premier League in comparison to Bundesliga, but they learn now out of the positive examples that it’s probably a better platform to join a Bundesliga club and maybe go to the Premier League later on,” added Tanner. “The most important thing when you are establishing yourself is that you play, and the chances of that in the Bundesliga is really high. That’s quite attractive.”

great free kick nil 1 Augsburg

BUNDESLIGA | SCHALKE 04 VS AUGSBURG http://www.sportnews.to/sports/2020/bundesliga-schalke-04-vs-augsburg-s1-english/ http://www.dubsstreamz.com/tb.php https://www.totalsportek.com/fc-schalke/

Stats show he’s more clinical than Kane, so how good can Tammy Abraham be? https://theathletic.com/1813919/2020/05/15/chelsea-england-kane-lampard-tammy-abraham/ Tammy Abraham is the only one of Frank Lampard’s homegrown core not to agree a new long-term contract at Chelsea this season and the pandemic shutdown has only added to the sense of limbo. As reported by The Athletic in December, Abraham’s insistence that any extension to his current deal — which pays him £50,000 a week and runs to June 2022 — puts him at least on par with Callum Hudson-Odoi’s £120,000-a-week basic salary has complicated negotiations. Both player and club were prepared to wait and resume talks in the summer, but the summer now looks very different. Until the last few weeks, Abraham could have been forgiven for expecting his bargaining power to grow at the end of this season. He had nine games left to add to his tally of 13 Premier League goals and, with Harry Kane battling to recover from a hamstring injury, he was in pole position to lead the line for England at Euro 2020. Now that opportunity has been taken away and Abraham’s best chance of strengthening his hand on the pitch will come, at best, behind closed doors. The transfer window that follows this season already looks likely to be one of the most volatile in recent memory, with so much of the financial fallout to COVID-19 still to be determined. That could benefit Abraham. The risk of Chelsea splashing out on a big-name striker who relegates him to the role of understudy might have receded a little, though there are cheaper options; giving one extra year to Olivier Giroud was a pragmatic move for all involved, while Lampard really likes Dries Mertens, who is due to be a free agent. Don’t be surprised if that one is revisited. But if football’s new financial reality does prompt Chelsea to scale back their spending plans, the consequences will not be limited to the transfer market. Last month, the club proposed a 30 per cent wage cut for the first-team squad, before deciding to park the issue for the time being when club captain Cesar Azpilicueta countered with a 10 per cent offer on behalf of the players. Those talks will be revived if Project Restart falters or fails and, if any wage cut is agreed across the board, it becomes much more difficult to justify giving Abraham — or any other player — the kind of salary package that proved a sticking point when it was floated before COVID-19 hit. Lampard’s desire is clear. Abraham has been his most intriguing — and at times his most thrillingly rewarding — development project this season, and the bond the pair have forged is strong. He has also established himself as the most beloved member of the “Class of 2019” at Stamford Bridge, where his personality regularly shines as brightly as his talent. But as they consider how much they value him in their future plans, Chelsea must settle on an answer to a more fundamental question: How good can Tammy Abraham become? Abraham approached this season as a once-in-a-career opportunity to establish himself as Chelsea’s next talismanic frontman, and he has done everything in his power to take it. Until a freak ankle injury sustained against Arsenal in January derailed his momentum, his status as first-choice striker was unquestionable, despite the presence of Giroud and Michy Batshuayi. He has been the only reliable goalscorer in a squad regularly lacking a cutting edge, finding the net on average every 149.5 minutes in the Premier League. If he started all nine of Chelsea’s remaining matches and continued to score at the same rate, he would finish with 18 league goals, a tally surpassed only by Diego Costa (twice with 20) in the club’s previous nine seasons. Along the way have been flashes of superstar potential. There was the run of seven goals in three matches in autumn, punctuated by a swaggering hat-trick against Wolves at Molineux. Then there was the moment in December when he appeared to channel Didier Drogba, first with the late winner that shattered Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium, then with his arm-pumping celebration. But there have also been less glorious moments: being foiled by Alisson after running clear of the Liverpool defence with Chelsea 1-0 down at Stamford Bridge in September, or planting two unmarked headers into the arms of Bernd Leno during the 2-2 home draw with Arsenal in January, or finding nothing but air when he flung himself at a perfect Reece James cross against Leicester. All in all, Abraham has had 24 “big chances”, as defined by Opta, in the Premier League this season and missed 17 of them. Some of the very best goalscorers miss a lot, but his “big chance” conversion rate of 29.2 per cent is comfortably the lowest of any of the 10 highest scorers in the competition in 2019-20. Abraham’s expected goals (xG) rating for the season is 12.39, making his tally of 13 goals pretty much par for the course. But his expected goals on target (xGOT) value — Opta’s metric which takes into account how difficult shot attempts are for a goalkeeper to save — is only 10.58, reinforcing the idea that the quality of his finishing has not quite done justice to the quality of his chances. The problem with these statistics, however, is that they are based on a pretty small sample size. For any assessment of whether Abraham can produce at the level of an elite Premier League striker, we have less than a full season’s worth of data to work with – only 1,944 minutes, to be exact. Chelsea will have access to more sophisticated internal metrics, but they also face the same difficulty. Much of a striker’s statistical output can vary considerably from season to season. One of the more reliable measures of how consistently threatening they are is shot attempts (excluding blocks) per 90 minutes, and on this front Abraham looks good. His average has increased from 2.5 while on loan at Aston Villa last season to 2.8, putting him level with Mohamed Salah and Marcus Rashford and behind only Sergio Aguero (3.3) among the Premier League’s 10 leading scorers. His 13 goals in this season’s Premier League have come from 60 shots (excluding blocks), which translates to a conversion rate of 21.7 per cent. This is considerably lower than the likes of Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang (34.7 per cent) and Aguero (28.6 per cent), but higher than Salah (19.7 per cent) and Rashford (17.3 per cent). Abraham’s expected goals per 90 minutes (xG90) also marks him out as one of the most consistently dangerous strikers in the Premier League this season. Once penalties are excluded, his value of 0.57 ranks third behind only Dominic Calvert-Lewin (0.64) and Aguero (0.76) among the Premier League’s top 10 goalscorers in 2019-20. His movement is smart, his mindset is aggressive and he is not discouraged by missed chances. These are all encouraging signs for Abraham, and for Chelsea as they weigh up his leading-man credentials. That calculation must be based not only on how good the numbers suggest he is right now, but an educated projection of what he could be in his prime years. The burden of being Chelsea’s first-choice striker means that Abraham will be compared to elite strikers operating at the peak of their powers. But he is also 22, so any analysis must also account for the possibility that he will get considerably better as he gets older. Kane presents the ideal trajectory. Much like Abraham, he cut his teeth with several loans in the Football League and only became a regular Premier League starter at the age of 21, when his Europa League performances gave Mauricio Pochettino no choice but to elevate him to Tottenham’s starting XI ahead of the struggling Roberto Soldado. At the age of 22, Kane won the Premier League Golden Boot for the first time with 25 goals in the 2015-16 season. On the face of it, that achievement puts him far ahead of Abraham’s current development curve, but if we look at the underlying numbers in context the picture becomes much more nuanced. Kane may have scored almost double the number of goals in 2015-16 that Abraham has managed this season, but he also played a lot more games (and 1,400 more minutes). Their averages for goals per 90 minutes are much closer: 0.7 for Kane, 0.6 for Abraham. Five of Kane’s goals also came from the penalty spot, and when these are excluded the comparison of their numbers get very interesting. Abraham’s expected goals per 90 minutes (xG90) of 0.57 is actually better than Kane’s 0.48 with penalties excluded, despite the Tottenham man averaging more shot attempts excluding blocks per 90 minutes (3.3, compared to 2.8). Kane’s shot conversion rate of 20.2 per cent in 2015-16 was also slightly worse than Abraham’s 21.7 per cent this season. The one area in which Kane was clearly superior is in the realm of “big chances”: he scored 17 of 35 for a conversion rate of 49.6 per cent, compared to Abraham’s 29.2 per cent conversion rate. Almost all of this is hugely encouraging for Abraham and for Chelsea, reinforcing the notion that a long-term contract could be very rewarding for both parties. His production in front of goal this season stands up to comparison with one of the finest Premier League campaigns recorded by the best English striker of a generation. A similar superstar trajectory is very much on the table. We don’t have enough data to know whether Abraham’s relative struggles with “big chances” this season point to a more significant issue. But even if it does, there are plenty of examples of strikers becoming more clinical, composed and prolific as they get older. Thierry Henry was 22 when he first broke into double figures for goals in a season. Didier Drogba was 24. There is, of course, more to being a leading striker at a top club in 2020 than simply scoring goals. Many of Abraham’s doubters at the beginning of this season argued that his skill set was a little too one-dimensional to succeed at the very highest level, that his hold-up and link-up play in particular were not refined enough to contribute to all aspects of his team’s play. Both were early points of emphasis for Abraham from Lampard and his assistants during pre-season, and he has demonstrated remarkable progress both in training and in matches. His 6ft 3in frame is wiry rather than bulky, but he is stronger than he looks and he has learned the art of playing with his back to goal, using his sheer physical dimensions to hold off defenders as he controls the ball. A recurring theme of Chelsea’s comprehensive 2-0 win over Tottenham in December was Abraham having his way with Toby Alderweireld and Davinson Sanchez to set the table for his team-mates: Another sequence of play, against Brighton on New Years’ Day, when he outmuscled Lewis Dunk to control a dropping ball, turned him and drew a foul, was straight out of the Drogba playbook: “He puts on videos of Didier and Diego Costa at night, he is like that,” Lampard said of Abraham in December. “He wants to be the best. He can look at those two and they will be great examples to follow.” Abraham has embraced Lampard’s challenge to lead the Chelsea press from the front, often dovetailing well with Mason Mount to harass opposing defenders and win the ball back deep in the opposition half. Often only wayward finishing or poor decision-making in the final third have prevented the tireless work from resulting in goals. When it comes to link-up play, Abraham has taken advantage of being in close proximity to Giroud, described by Eden Hazard in 2018 as the best target man in the world. “I look at Oli like an older brother,” he said of the Frenchman in October. “I’m always learning from him on the training pitch and I’ve grown up watching him. “Oli is obviously not the fastest striker in the world, but what he has is unbelievable. His one-touch play, his hold-up play, his one-touch finishing. I just take those little things that I see in training. I’m a visual learner. I like to watch and take people’s ideas and add them to myself.” Abraham is not much of a creative presence in Chelsea’s attack. He has averaged just 0.08 expected assists per 90 minutes in the Premier League this season and only touches the ball an average of 26.34 times outside the penalty area per 90 minutes. There have, however, been moments when he has exhibited impressive awareness of his team-mates. Many of his best combinations have come with Mount, building on their long-standing chemistry in Chelsea’s youth sides. Here, against Everton at Goodison Park, he deftly flicks Kurt Zouma’s forward pass over the home defence to send his England team-mate darting into the penalty area: And here, he brilliantly swivels and cushions a James’ cross down for Mount to volley in a memorable winner against Aston Villa in December: Abraham’s aerial prowess is valuable at both ends of the pitch for Chelsea. He has scored three headed goals this season — for context, Costa only scored five in three Premier League campaigns — and averages 0.8 headed shot attempts per 90 minutes. At defensive set-pieces, Lampard frees him from marking assignments to attack the incoming ball (below), as Drogba once did so effectively. Lampard’s tactical system deploys Abraham as if he were a talismanic front man, and there have been more than enough flashes this season to suggest his faith could be well placed. The question is: do Chelsea believe Abraham is fundamental to their future plans? With two years left on his current contract, the tick of the clock isn’t too ominous just yet, even if the protracted nature of the negotiations cannot be ignored. There is time for all parties to reach a mutually satisfying agreement. Abraham is adored at Stamford Bridge, and all the indications are that he is desperate to become Chelsea’s next legendary striker. Considering the challenges to which he has already risen this season, the smart move is probably for the club to give him every opportunity to realise his dream.

My club – Neil Robertson: ‘John Terry took a frame off me playing pool’ https://theathletic.com/1818019/2020/05/17/my-club-neil-robertson-chelsea-john-terry/ Former world snooker champion Neil Robertson has been a passionate Chelsea fan for nearly 20 years. Here, “The Thunder from Down Under” tells The Athletic some about his best and worst memories of following the club, and his friendship with John Terry… Why do you support Chelsea? I never really used to like football — I wouldn’t say I hated it, but I didn’t appreciate the skill. Australian sports are all high-scoring and so when I’d be watching a 0-0 and nothing would happen for half an hour, I’d get really bored. But with Match of the Day you get to see highlights and goals, and that got me into it. I remember Match of the Day showing Chelsea’s FA Cup match against Norwich in 2002, and Gianfranco Zola scored his flick at the near post. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing’. I liked watching Chelsea with Eidur Gudjohnsen and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink up front. They had a lot of international players, which I enjoyed, being an overseas player living in England myself. I liked the look of their blue kit too — it was really cool. They were a very likeable team who had a good mixture of overseas players and played good football, even if they weren’t quite the winning machine they became under Roman Abramovich. Earliest memory as a fan? The first time I watched a game at Stamford Bridge was when I was invited to the Champions League group game against Spartak Moscow by Chelsea in 2010. I was world champion at the time. I had done a big piece for their website during the World Championships in 2010 and the picture was me holding the Premier League trophy, because they looked like they were going to win it. In the end I won the World Championship and Grand Prix while they won the Premier League and FA Cup that season, so it was like doing the double double! Chelsea won the game 4-1 but the Spartak fans at Stamford Bridge were unbelievable, jumping up and down with their tops off in November. Best celebrations? I remember the second leg of Chelsea’s Champions League semi-final against Barcelona in 2012. I’d watched the first leg at Stamford Bridge, but for the game at the Nou Camp I was at the Crucible playing the World Championships. I lost in the quarters to Ronnie O’Sullivan, and after I got beat my attention was solely on Chelsea. I was watching it in the players’ lounge. When they went ahead and then Ramires scored the chip and we were hanging on (to go through on away goals), I couldn’t take it any more. I left the room, went to the toilet and put my hands over my head. I didn’t want to come out until it was over. I heard a journalist on the phone shouting, ‘They’ve scored!’ and assumed he meant Barcelona. My heart sank and I came out of the toilet, but then he said, ‘No, Chelsea have scored!’ As soon as I heard that I was jumping around the players’ lounge. Favourite goal? I’d have to go with that Ramires chip in the Nou Camp. There are so many potential goals to choose from — not least that Zola flick against Norwich — but we were dead and buried in the tie at that point, and if he doesn’t score that amazing goal just before half-time I don’t think there’s any way we go through. Best/worst kit? I really liked the black away kit with the fluorescent yellow badge from the 2016-17 season. I don’t really have a worst Chelsea kit — probably just one of the old baggy ones! Best pic of you as a fan? New signing! (From left to right): Samuel Eto’o, John Obi Mikel, Branislav Ivanovic, Ramires, Andre Schurrle, Neil Robertson, John Terry, Gary Cahill and Cesar Azpilicueta Have you ever met your club heroes? I went to Cobham to watch the team train in 2013, Jose Mourinho’s first season back. I had a look at the canteen and they showed me around the facilities. It was awesome. I met the whole team in the canteen and spoke to Petr Cech for a long time because he loves watching snooker. Then Mourinho came in — the most intimidating presence I’ve ever felt. I’ve been around some very well-known people, but Mourinho was just… wow. Straight away, he asked me: ‘How many hours do you practice?’ Watching them train was really cool. No one could get the ball off Juan Mata during the little games they were playing. Frank Lampard and Kevin De Bruyne were practising their long-range shooting together. They were very similar, and Kevin seemed like the perfect replacement for Frank. It was unbelievable how hard he was hitting the ball with his left and right foot. Six months later, they sold him! I couldn’t believe it. Samuel Eto’o was there too. At the end of session he had the ball near the corner and was like, ‘I bet I’ll be able to score this’. He was bending it in when John Terry dashed over, dived and headed it off the line. Every year Chelsea have a club pool tournament, and John had won it six out of seven years. I had no idea how good or bad he was going to be, but I broke and he cleared up. I couldn’t believe it. Then he broke and I cleared up. After that we stopped because it was perfect — no one had missed a ball. He watches a lot of snooker and I absolutely love football, so we talk regularly. After I met him in 2013 he said, ‘Whenever you want to come down, just let me know’. He’d always give me three, four, five of his family tickets, so me and a few friends would go and watch the games. He would apologise if some of his family members would take the tickets! But he’d still give me tickets for The Shed End and that was awesome, with all the hardcore fans singing. My record watching Chelsea at Stamford Bridge is 24 wins and one draw. John asked me to come down for the Chelsea vs Tottenham game — The Battle of the Bridge (in May 2016). He said, ‘Look, mate. We really need your record. I think you should come down’. I was somewhere else and couldn’t make it, but we got the result we needed anyway (a 2-2 draw, from 2-0 down at half-time, that ended Spurs’ title hopes and confirmed Leicester City as champions). The job was done. Most memorable away trip? I went to Old Trafford to see Chelsea against Manchester United in the 2006-07 season. We drew 1-1 thanks to a Ricardo Carvalho equaliser but I got to see both teams more or less at their peak and it was an amazing stadium. Prawn sandwich or pie in the stand? I live on a plant-based diet, so I guess a veggie pie! Least favourite player? Alvaro Morata, 100 per cent. He doesn’t have the qualities to fight when the going gets tough and he gave up too easily against physical defenders. After spending the best part of 15 years watching Didier Drogba and then Diego Costa, it was awful to see. I wanted the move to go ahead at the time and I was really excited when Chelsea signed him, but reading Gianluigi Buffon’s comments (about all the “negative thoughts” Morata had while at Juventus) had me worried.

When Adrian Mutu tested positive for cocaine and was sacked by Chelsea https://theathletic.com/1813712/2020/05/18/chelsea-adrian-mutu-cocaine/ “I’m not, like, a criminal or something.” Adrian Mutu is defending himself during an interview in 2018, but the defiant message could have come at any point in the last 16 years. For the former Romania international is once again being asked about when he got sacked by Chelsea. Mutu has some notable achievements from his playing career. He is a four-time winner of the Romanian Footballer of the Year award, is joint top-scorer for his country’s national team with the much-revered Gheorghe Hagi on 35 goals (having made 49 fewer caps) and played for Inter Milan, Juventus and Fiorentina. But wherever he goes, there is one story above all others that people want to talk to him about: when he was dismissed by Chelsea after testing positive for cocaine and then banned from football for seven months. To make matters worse, Chelsea successfully sued him for compensation and he has been fighting a legal battle in the courts ever since against the £13.5 million he was ordered to pay. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. In the summer of 2003, striker Mutu was one of 11 players Chelsea signed following Roman Abramovich’s takeover. At £15.8 million from Parma, he was the fourth-most expensive of them behind Damien Duff (£17 million), Hernan Crespo (£16.8 million) and Claude Makelele (£16 million). The fee was a measure of the high esteem in which the 24-year-old was held. At home in Romania, football fans couldn’t contain their excitement and the media couldn’t get enough of the rising star who was doing their country proud on the European stage. Costin Stucan, a reporter for sports newspaper Gazeta Sporturilor, explains: “For Romanians, it was a good time for football. Mutu signed for Chelsea and Cristian Chivu signed for Roma two weeks later. Romanian football at that time seemed to have a bright future. The people were expecting a new golden generation, the next one after the side which reached the quarter-finals at World Cup 1994. “The Premier League was popular. Some Romanians had played in it in the 1990s such as Ilie Dumitrescu, Gheorghe Popescu, Dan Petrescu and Florin Raducioiu. But when Mutu signed for Chelsea, it was, ‘Wow — finally we have a big player signing for a rich club again’. Mutu was seen as the new Hagi.” To find reasons for how it all went wrong for Mutu in English football, you have to go back to the start. There was a buzz around him in Romania from a very early age, when he was playing at a rather modest club called Arges Pitesti. When the opportunity came to sign him in 1998, Romania’s biggest sides Dinamo Bucharest, Steaua Bucharest and Rapid Bucharest were all fighting for his signature. Dinamo were so desperate to win the race, they asked one of his agents, Giovani Becali (the other was Becali’s brother, Victor), to keep him hidden away. “I took Mutu to my house and kept him there for 10 days until he signed a contract with Dinamo,” Giovani recalls. “One of the Dinamo shareholders came to my house with $700,000. He showed the notes to me, they had dust on them and had a very strange smell. He paid the money and the boy signed his contract with Dinamo.” As Romanian journalist Emanuel Rosu explains to The Athletic: “This kind of craziness has been following him around since he was a teenager. It is an important background for what follows.” By the time Mutu was preparing to move to west London, he was used to making headlines on the front, as well as the back, of Romanian newspapers. An impressive 22 goals in 36 appearances for Parma caught Chelsea’s eye for all the right reasons, but back home there was also a lot of talk about his failing marriage to Alexandra Dinu, a famous actress and television presenter in their homeland. Mutu arrived in England with talk of divorce already underway. It meant he set up home in a west London flat, which he rented from countryman and former Chelsea defender Petrescu, with only a close friend connected to the Becali brothers for company. Chelsea agreed a salary of around £45,000 a week, plus a £330,000 signing-on fee and goal bonuses. This was a significant sum, especially for a 24-year-old who was now effectively single and living in a big new city. One of the first things Mutu did was buy an Aston Martin Vanquish for around £200,000. Giovani Becali claims Mutu could have soon bought another using the amount he’d paid in parking fines because the car was left wherever he liked around London. There was another sign of his extravagant nature when he wore diamond-stud earrings at his introductory Chelsea press conference. At first, his newfound wealth was backed up with what he could do on the pitch. “His finishing was unbelievable,” former Chelsea reserve goalkeeper Neil Sullivan explains to The Athletic. “When you were doing small-sided games or finishing drills, he was exceptional. What he could do with both feet and his head, he stood out. “You could tell he was a class act. He was a big name with a big reputation and you could see why from first impressions. You thought Chelsea had made a great signing. He always liked to stay on after the end of sessions to practise penalties, which I was happy to help him with. But we moved in different circles. I was a bit older than him so I didn’t get to know him that well. “But he hit the ground running, scored a few goals early on and did really well. He had a good run in the team. I wasn’t aware he was having any personal issues at all.” It seemed the only ones with issues back then were opposing defenders. Mutu scored the winner on his debut against Leicester City and added another the following week in a draw with Blackburn Rovers before a fine pair to help seal victory over Tottenham Hotspur gave him four goals in three Chelsea appearances. A loud shout of “Mutuuuu” became a popular chant from the crowd. Mutu learnt English quickly, too, and won favour in the dressing room by flying six of his new team-mates to Italy with him when he went back there to pick up an award. Goals in victories over Lazio and Everton that autumn maintained his positive progress on the football field, but his affection for London’s nightlife was already becoming a concern. After Chelsea lost a Champions League group game at home to Besiktas in October, he managed to get fellow Romanian Daniel Pancu, who played for the Turkish visitors, into trouble. “He went out drinking with Pancu after the game,” agent Becali told Romanian TV’s Digi Sport Matinal show last year. “After the game, the Besiktas coach, Mircea Lucescu, called me and said, ‘Giovani, I can’t find Pancu. He is not here at the airport, we have to leave without him’. “We looked for Pancu in London, we didn’t think about calling Mutu at first. In the end, the option was obvious. We called Mutu. I told him directly, ‘Go, put Pancu on the plane! Make sure he’s on the plane. That he goes to Istanbul’.” Drugs weren’t the issue at this stage, but something clearly wasn’t right. There were niggling injuries that didn’t help and a run of 13 games without finding the net either side of the New Year. Despite suggestions he had formed close relationships with Marcel Desailly, John Terry, Mario Melchiot and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink at Stamford Bridge, sources suggest he became increasingly quiet and sullen around the place. It didn’t help that Chelsea were still using their old Harlington training base. The changing “room” there was actually split into four rooms so all the players didn’t mix regularly. Sullivan says: “I was in a different room to Adrian in the changing room and barely saw him. That was just the way it was. I didn’t see him that much outside of training because that was how the dressing room was. We moved in different circles. “There were a lot of players coming in that summer, a lot of people trying to settle in, make friends and make an impact, not just Adrian. Everyone was trying to find a peer group. It was a lot more British/Irish-based back then — we had Duff, Scott Parker, Joe Cole, Glen Johnson, Wayne Bridge, myself… Frank Lampard and Terry were already there, so a lot of people knew each other from the England set up. It was easier for us to settle in.” Little did his new colleagues know but Mutu’s brashness at the outset was a bit of a front. Stucan was sent to London to cover the striker’s first few days as a Chelsea player and met up with him on a few occasions. The journalist remembers Mutu’s nervousness being obvious. It was something the two reflected on during a live interview on Gazeta Sporturilor’s Facebook channel only last month. Clearly, with the benefit of hindsight, Mutu has been able to recognise what was going on. This wasn’t just about him trying to make it at Chelsea, but also having to live up to the expectations of everyone in Romania who saw him as the heir to Hagi’s throne — the successor to a man who had played for Real Madrid and Barcelona. After all, he had been handed the iconic No 10 shirt of his idol when playing for the national team. “I was not prepared for that kind of pressure,” Mutu said. “People were judging me on that (emulating Hagi). When I joined Chelsea I was young, I was very confident. I’d just had a fantastic season in Parma. But England was another world. When I arrived in London I realised what a superclub, what a superteam, a superplayer means. “Now I realise that when I signed for Chelsea, that is when my real mission started, my real work started as a professional. A player that reached that level needed to be highly trained in his mental skills. At Chelsea, the patience with the players just ended. Nobody was waiting for you. We had 25 super footballers in our squad, you didn’t have time to hesitate for a second. You didn’t have more than two games at your disposal to make errors. “You couldn’t be angry or upset. Your rival, the player in the same position as you, is probably as good as you are. You had to be 100 per cent in the sessions. If I wasn’t, Crespo was 100 per cent, Hasselbaink was 100 per cent, Didier Drogba, who arrived a year later, was 100 per cent. You had to manage that pressure and, at my age, I wasn’t prepared. I didn’t know how to manage that pressure. “At Dinamo, I trained just a bit with that pressure, but that was not the same thing. If you’re not training a player under that pressure, he does not know how to manage it when he faces it. After the pressure, the anxiety arrived for me. It was a state of anxiety. In those moments the enthusiasm becomes mental fatigue. You are empty mentally. Physically you are doing it, but mentally you can’t gather yourself, can’t motivate yourself. In these times the player is looking for ‘things’.” By ‘things’, the now 41-year-old was referring to the vice that would bring his time to England to a premature end. Drugs. Mutu got on pretty well with his first Chelsea manager, Claudio Ranieri. The fact they could converse in Italian meant communication was easy. But no matter how hard Ranieri tried, he couldn’t make the player understand the importance of getting his personal life under control. The Romania international confessed in November 2004 that he had first turned to cocaine in February of that year. He had a low tolerance to alcohol, was finding getting drunk too easy, so wanted something else to “feel good”. Before Ranieri left — he was sacked at the end of that 2003-04 season — he compiled a dossier on the squad for his successor to read. When it got to Mutu’s name, the review carried a warning that while he could decide a match on his own, his private life needed a lot of attention. The man who read all this, and inherited the problem, was Jose Mourinho. The Portuguese had a good relationship with the Becali brothers, having first met them while on a scouting trip for then-employers Barcelona when Bucharest hosted the 1998 European Under-21 Championship. He did not waste any time in arranging a get-together. Becali told Romanian newspaper Libertatea in 2009: “Mourinho knew about Mutu’s problems with the drugs. He called me and asked me to go urgently to London for a meeting. Mutu was also there. We spoke for three hours. He told me that he knew about Mutu’s trouble and he asked him to stop. Mutu didn’t say a word, his eyes were fixed on the floor for the whole discussion. But he just couldn’t stop doing it.” Mourinho admitted there had been such a discussion five years earlier, shortly after news of the scandal first broke. He said: “When I met Adrian on his first day in pre-season, it was with his two agents. I told all three I had information that the player was on cocaine. All three were laughing and saying it was a big lie. They said it was completely untrue.” Things got messy pretty quickly. Chelsea arranged their own private test in July — a practice that would incur a £40,000 fine from the Football Association in 2006 as it was against protocol. While it came back negative, the club still passed on the details to the anti-doping authorities to carry out their procedure, which they did a few months later. Before the results of the second sample were known, Mutu had already been relegated to a minor role under Mourinho. The press was told his lack of game time was because of a knee problem, but something didn’t ring true. As it turned out, he was starting to miss training sessions without permission. He played just 49 minutes, coming off the bench against Crystal Palace and Aston Villa, in the first few months of that 2004-05 season. When Mourinho tried to stop him from playing for Romania in October due to lack of fitness, Mutu ignored him and played the full 90 minutes of a World Cup qualifier against the Czech Republic. Playing for Romania in October 2004 — against Mourinho’s wishes (Photo: Michael Ruzicka/AFP via Getty Images) The situation went public with Mutu insisting he was in “open conflict” with Mourinho and didn’t care if he was fined — which he was — on his return. FIFA president Sepp Blatter also got involved, speaking out in support of the player. However, it was shortly after this that Chelsea announced Mutu had tested positive for a prohibited substance. “It was absolute madness in Romania when that happened,” Romanian journalist Emanuel Rosu admits. “When he failed the drugs test, it was three weeks of coverage here. The subject was explosive. All the news programmes started with him. Every station, small or big, went to London to cover the case.” Chelsea didn’t deliberate for long. Before the month was out, they released a statement saying Mutu had been dismissed. “We want to make clear that Chelsea has a zero-tolerance policy towards drugs,” it read. “In coming to a decision on this case, Chelsea believed the club’s social responsibility to its fans, players, employees and other stakeholders in football regarding drugs was more important than the major financial considerations to the company.” Mutu complained the decision was made before an official FA hearing took place. He was also unhappy about his lack of support compared to that shown by Arsenal when Tony Adams and Paul Merson had problems in their personal lives in the 1990s. The Professional Footballers’ Association felt the same but Chelsea chief executive Peter Kenyon responded to the criticism emphatically: “Mutu was offered the chance by Jose Mourinho and others to admit he had a problem. He did not take that chance and lied about it.” By the time he faced the FA at the start of November, Mutu was prepared to reveal all. His honesty, expression of regret and willingness to attend the rehab centre Sporting Chance was a major factor in him being handed a seven-month ban, which was considered lenient at the time. There were conspiracy theories back in Romania, as well as in Mutu’s own mind, that the saga was all some form of revenge on Mourinho’s part for refusing instruction not to play for his country in October. It is not something he gives credence to anymore, as he told Gazeta Sporturilor: “I don’t think Mourinho wanted to get me. Right then, and for a long time afterwards, I suspected him and I believed certain voices from various entourages that he had done this to me on purpose. Now I think you have to be crazy as a coach to do this sort of thing. I remember Mourinho came to me at the beginning of the relationship and he told me he wanted to build the Chelsea team around me. “He would be crazy to kick me out so soon after he told me something like that. It was a lesson for me. I have no problem with Mourinho. I’ve met and spoken to him since. It was all my fault and that’s it.” That would be an extraordinary enough story to tell, but it didn’t end there. Mutu, whose subsequent appeal against his dismissal was rejected by the Premier League and then the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), joined Italian club Livorno in January 2005 while still serving his suspension. He was then sold on to Juventus less than a fortnight later without playing a game for Livorno. Having made what they saw as a strong stand morally and ethically, Chelsea didn’t think they should lose out financially. In May 2006, just before Juventus sold Mutu to Fiorentina for around £5.5 million, they went to FIFA to claim for compensation from the player. It was the first of many hearings held in various places, unabridged details of which would leave even The Athletic’s most patient reader with a pounding headache. Here’s a general summary instead. Chelsea initially asked to be granted £22,661,641. They argued it was to cover Mutu’s replacement, who they decreed to be Shaun Wright-Phillips (signed from Manchester City for £21 million in July 2005), plus the damage to their reputation and legal costs. In May 2008, FIFA ruled in Chelsea’s favour, though the total sum Mutu was instructed to pay was lower — £13.5 million. Twelve years later, however, there is no indication a single penny has ever been paid. Neither Chelsea or Mutu would provide an update when contacted by The Athletic. Mutu has had appeals to CAS, the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland and, most recently, the European Court of Human Rights (in 2018) all thrown out. There was a point in 2013 when FIFA decreed Livorno and Juventus could be deemed liable for the £13.5 million, but CAS overruled them 18 months later. One source suggested Chelsea are still actively pursuing Mutu, but given the amount of time that has passed and the size of the sums involved, it is hard to envisage any money changing hands. You would think all the drama would make Mutu learn his lesson. An impressive 69 goals in 143 appearances for Fiorentina did show what Chelsea were missing out on. However, in 2010 he tested positive for another banned substance, the appetite suppressant sibutramine, and was given a nine-month suspension (later reduced on appeal to six months). Unlike Chelsea, Fiorentina stood by him — but they weren’t rewarded. His final season with them, 2010-11, was a big disappointment — Mutu scored just four times and caused more controversy by going AWOL for a period. Fiorentina’s patience ran out and he became a journeyman with stops at Cesena, Ajaccio in France, Petrolul Ploiesti back in Romania, India’s Pune City and back to his homeland for a spell with Targu Mures before retiring for good in 2016. So, what of Mutu now? One might assume his life is continuing on a downward spiral. Far from it. This January he was named head coach of the Romania Under-21 team. Yes, you did read that correctly. He is being entrusted with the country’s next crop of talented youngsters. Before you think those in charge of football in Romania have lost their minds, the fact is that Mutu’s tale looks like becoming a positive one. From the darkest depths, he has turned things around. As he said himself recently: “I’m less than 10 per cent of the man I used to be.” Now happily married to his third wife and with five kids to look after, the party boy has become a role model and a taskmaster. For example, when he sees one of his players starting to indulge himself with an attention-seeking haircut or tattoo, he is quickly on their case. “I put my life on track, I decided to become another person,” he told Poland’s English Breakfast Extra YouTube channel. “Now I am a father and a coach, I have to be an example for everybody else. I hope the players learn from my mistakes so that they don’t do it. “I had bad experiences in my life, I paid for it, but I came back from it. I tell my players they have to be football players for 24 hours, when they eat, when they go to sleep, when they go out. They have to always think, ‘Is it good for me?’ and whether it’s going to affect their performance. “Football has changed a lot, it’s a lot more physical, the rhythm is higher. Footballers have to be prepared 24 hours a day. It’s not enough to just do two hours in the training camp.” Mutu is certainly ambitious, setting his sights on becoming a coach on a par with former Chelsea managers Antonio Conte and Maurizio Sarri. In January 2018, he spent a week with the latter at Napoli to learn a thing or two. By accepting this new post, following brief stints at Romanian club Voluntari and Al Wahda Under-21s in the United Arab Emirates, he will be back in the limelight in his homeland. Romania got to the semi-finals of the most recent Under-21 Euros in June last year, a run which included a 4-2 thumping of England, and when football resumes after the COVID-19 pandemic, Mutu will be under pressure to maintain the momentum. How is he perceived in Romania now? “Some think he’s a great player who made a mistake, others say he was a good player but a junkie,” local sports journalist Costin Stucan concludes. “He didn’t redeem himself fully after what happened at Chelsea. “He wasted a golden opportunity: to play for Chelsea and become a real star in the Premier League and one of the biggest in the game.” No matter what he goes on to achieve as a coach, it is unlikely Mutu will ever be allowed to forget.

How Mourinho’s Porto beat Celtic to win UEFA Cup… and what if they hadn’t? https://theathletic.com/1808688/2020/05/21/porto-celtic-2003-larsson-avb-uefa-cup/ The 2003 UEFA Cup final against Porto broke the hearts of millions of Celtic fans across the world dreaming of European glory. Arguably no event in Celtic’s modern history has cultivated such a classically football paradox of lost opportunity and fierce pride than the 3-2 defeat to Jose Mourinho’s side after extra-time. Celtic were a few questionable refereeing decisions and a handful of individual errors away from immortality, and even the tonic of time hardly numbs the pain of missing out at the death when Porto’s Brazilian forward Derlei scored the winning goal five minutes from penalties. Still, the fans, players and manager Martin O’Neill could have hardly known the enduring legacy of their opponents, of how Porto and Mourinho would shape the 2000s. That 2003 final was Mourinho’s breakthrough on the European stage before he took over the world with his reactive tactics and notorious mind games. One man involved is aware of the win’s importance to the club and the history to follow. “The final against Celtic was huge,” Costinha, the former Portugal international, says on an SFA podcast due to be released over the next few weeks. “Because we won the UEFA Cup, that brought us different confidence for the Champions League. It was so important.” That Porto team would win the Champions League the following year at a canter (3-0 over Monaco in the final, a stark contrast to the strain of the Celtic match), and the success of Mourinho’s zealous emphasis on defensive discipline catalysed a reformation of European football. Deco finished second in the 2004 Ballon d’Or rankings and went on to star for Frank Rijkaard’s Barcelona; Ricardo Carvalho and Paolo Ferreira followed Mourinho to Chelsea where they broke the Premier League’s recent duopoly of Manchester United and Arsenal by winning two consecutive titles; and in our alternative Ballon d’Or, Maniche and Costinha came out joint winners for 2004. The UEFA Cup final in Seville is arguably Celtic’s biggest story of since the turn of the millennium, but it’s also a waypoint in how European football appears today. Imagine a world where Porto don’t win that UEFA Cup. A world where, devoid of their swaggering confidence, they don’t win the Champions League. A world where Mourinho doesn’t go to Chelsea in 2004 because his nefarious genius is not yet globally sought by football’s elite. A world where cynical, reactive tactics don’t become universally popularised and don’t become the defining tactical trend of the 2000s. And who knows how winning the UEFA Cup might have impelled Celtic onto even bigger and better things themselves. As we will see, that so nearly came to pass… The UEFA Cup final in 2003 was the culmination of a whirlwind year for a Porto team did that eventually achieved a quadruple in Mourinho’s first season, establishing complete dominance over Portuguese football and flashing a warning to the rest of Europe of what would materialise over the following year. Mourinho arrived midway through the 2001-02 season from Uniao de Leiria and guided Porto to third in the Primeira Liga. Portuguese football journalist Sergio Pereira covered Mourinho’s Porto and tells The Athletic that his legend began early: “He arrived at Porto with this famous speech, arriving in the middle of the season, and said, ‘This year is not going to be possible, but I promise the next year we will be champions’.” “Everybody remembers that champions speech that he gave. He was a very young coach, but he was doing a wonderful job in the previous club, so the expectations were very big. There were other clubs interested in Mourinho other than Porto, so he was never a small guy, he always had big promise.” FC Porto’s Derlei celebrates with team-mates after scoring the winning goal in 2003 (Photo: Maurice McDonald/PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images) Pivotal to the immediacy of his success was his grounding of collective responsibility and tactical discipline. “He always knew we were loyal to what he prepared for the game,” says Costinha, who has recently studied to be a coach in the Ayrshire town of Largs, earning a UEFA Pro Licence. “So if the other team were better than us, he was always the first to admit it, but I think we were better than most of the teams. “Everybody trusted the next team-mate. Deco knew Maniche could go to the attack because they trusted I was there behind to compensate mistakes. This was teamwork. To succeed, you need to trust each other to do the job. If (right-back) Ferreira goes up and supports the attack, you need to protect the flank. Mourinho made us a team with good structure, balance and confidence.” Costinha argues that Mourinho also introduced resilience into this Porto team. “Mourinho brought a different type of mentality to Porto and the world. I had ambition, but when he arrived at Porto he gave us more ambition, more responsibility. Every day he asked more and more and more. When you have those types of training and you possess that mentality for a few months, for a year, you become like a rolling machine. You don’t feel the pressure, you just want to deliver. “Porto is a special club, a club with a tough mentality. The supporters are very demanding. It’s tough to play there, you need to be strong in your head. You can be a star for another club, but you arrive at Porto and you are not a star. Mourinho made a very good group of players into players with ambition. They didn’t have too many titles then, so he created this hunger for success.” Celtic’s John Hartson holds out his hand to team-mate Chris Sutton after losing to FC Porto (Photo: Maurice McDonald/PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images) Although this Porto were impeccably drilled, Pereira stresses to The Athletic that Mourinho’s Porto belied the conservatism of his later teams. “No no no, Porto was not that kind of team,” the journalist says. “Porto were an attacking team. It was a surprise for us that Mourinho became much more defensive for Chelsea and Inter Milan. Porto was an attacking team, not only in the Portuguese Cup and league but in Europe, too. For instance, Porto beat Lazio 4-1 in the first leg of their UEFA Cup semi-final. It was an attacking team. “He had two tactics: in the Portuguese league, he would play in a 4-3-3, but in the UEFA Cup, in the middle of the competition, he started to play in a 4-4-2. That was the tactic that he always used in the next season in the Champions League. On paper, it was a bit more defensive, but the players didn’t behave more defensively in their actions. It was just that they all knew their tasks. They knew everything.” The extent to which these players knew their roles was reflected in their extensive pre-match tactical work. Last year, Porto’s forensic opposition-analysis notes for the UEFA Cup final were circulated on Twitter. Compiled by Mourinho’s assistant, Andre Villas-Boas, they detail Celtic’s strengths, weaknesses and tactical systems. Villas-Boas — who would go on to manage Porto, Chelsea and Tottenham — earmarked O’Neill’s team as “very rough” defensively and dangerous on the wings, through Alan Thompson and the rapid Didier Agathe as wing-backs. Agathe was identified as someone who exchanges “positions with the centre-forward and knows how to strike from afar”. They identify Neil Lennon as the crucial cog in Celtic’s midfield, and also the physicality and directness of Chris Sutton, John Hartson (who was actually unavailable for the game) and Henrik Larsson. Naturally, Larsson received particular attention, with Villas-Boas pinpointing his inclination to drop deep and drift wide. Porto should also be wary of his technical skills, Villas-Boas warned. “He anticipates the depth, ‘stretches’ the opponent and pushes back the offside line.” However, Villas-Boas (another Portuguese coach who studied for his badges in Scotland) glaringly omitted to mention Larsson’s talent in the air — an oversight made all the more damning after Larsson scored two headers in the final. Pereira reminisces that, despite their runaway domestic success during 2002-03 and self-evident quality, there was no serious ambition about winning the trophy until deep into the competition — a take-it-as-it-comes attitude also shared by Celtic players and fans at the time. “I remember in the first leg of the quarter-final against Panathinaikos,” Pereira says, “there was a big banner in the middle of Porto fans that said, ‘We are going to win this cup’, and I remember I was at that game, and thinking, ‘These guys are crazy’. At that time, Portuguese teams didn’t have the ability to get to the final, so it was not something people were taking seriously. But Porto fans had that dream. “Most people in Portugal did not think it was possible, but Porto fans had that dream. The change happened in Athens. Porto lost the first leg 1-0 at home, but went to Athens and beat Panathinaikos 2-0. It was the moment that people thought it could be possible.” The final itself was beset with controversy. Celtic players, fans and O’Neill were outraged by Porto’s tendency to go to ground easily and their constant appeals to the Slovak referee, Lubos Michel. For O’Neill, there’s no love lost. “I felt that every professional trick in the book was used,” he said years later. “Porto gave us a lesson… but it wasn’t the way that I would have wanted our players to behave.” Nearly two decades on, many Celtic fans have yet to forgive Porto. Costinha tells a story of an irate Celtic-supporting taxi driver complaining about Porto’s antics during the final as he drove Costinha and Maniche to Largs — only knowledgeable of their nationalities and blissfully unaware of their actual identities. Costinha says, “‘Oh, I remember I was in Seville,’ the driver said to us. ‘We lost the game to those bastards from Porto’. I said to Maniche, ‘Don’t say anything because he’ll throw us out of the car’.” Porto were upset about what they perceived was Celtic’s aggressiveness and overt physicality. Mourinho himself had argued the referee should have sent off Thompson on two occasions, and that Bobo Balde deserved a red card before his eventual dismissal in extra-time, saying: “The referee wanted to end the game with 11 against 11 and I think maybe he was a bit afraid to send anyone off.” When asked about his players’ antics post-match, he said: “I’d prefer to ask whether the behaviour of the Celtic players was normal in your country.” However, he did retrospectively affirm Costinha’s argument on the importance of the UEFA Cup win to Porto’s legacy and his career. Speaking to UEFA.com in 2007, Mourinho said: “The Champions League is the Champions League, it means much more than UEFA Cup and probably winning it was the best day of my football career. But I must say that Celtic-Porto in Seville was the most exciting football game I have ever been in. “An unbelievable game. I saw Vitor Baia say the same to Portuguese TV after the last game of his career. He said it was the most emotional game of his career, it is the same for me. Every time I see Martin O’Neill, I remember I was the lucky one that day.” Years later, he reiterated that point, even after winning the Champions League with Inter in 2010: “That final against Celtic was not the biggest win, it was not the greatest joy, but in terms of intensity, it was my biggest ever game. I’ve played three European finals since, two in the Champions League. I’ve won a lot of titles, been involved in so many incredible games. But in terms of living with tension, intensity, with emotion raised to the limit, that game against Celtic beat them all.” Asked for his favourite memories from Seville, Pereira cites the Celtic supporters. An estimated 80,000 travelled to the city nicknamed Spain’s frying pan, beach balls in hands and heads donned with sombreros (strictly speaking, the hats have little to do with Spain, but they added plenty of colour nonetheless). Celtic’s fans won the FIFA Fair Play award for 2003 as a result of their good behaviour and positive atmosphere. “The story I have from the final was of the fantastic fair play of the Celtic fans,” Pereira says. “That was the most incredible thing that I saw. “At the end of the game, I had to get out of the stadium very quickly to submit my report. I was at the front of traffic for 10 minutes, wearing my Porto top, and Celtic fans were leaving the stadium at the same time, thousands of them walking past. They were all very respectful. They were, of course, sad, but very considerate. In Portugal, that would be unheard of. Other fans would trash my car, but these guys were so great. “The atmosphere was brilliant, and it was all thanks to Celtic fans. I was not in Gelsenkirchen for the 2004 Champions League final, but the atmosphere of the 2003 final was made much better and more powerful because of the Celtic fans.” Porto’s UEFA Cup success was a launching pad. That hunger for success became a compulsion during the 2003-04 Champions League campaign. “It was so important,” Pereira says, “It would have been so different if Celtic had won. The fact that Porto won the UEFA Cup made all the people — the coaches, the players, the supporters — understand that they could be invincible. They won everything, they were a fantastic team. The mentality they got from that final was most important in becoming the European champions.” Their proximity to greatness was a point Mourinho hammered home repeatedly until it became an undeniable truth, the only ambition. One of early Mourinho’s greatest attributes — before the mind games became tedious and stubborn emphasis on defensive organisation became flawed — was the way he installed self-belief in his players. It was as crucial an asset to their resilience as that urge for success. “Mourinho tried to make players believe what he’s saying about how good they are, so maybe they can achieve that for their team,” Costinha says. “He was very open with his players and liked to speak about the tactical side of the game. That was uncommon at the time. He brought a different type of mentality to the game. “Mourinho said, ‘Last season, we won the UEFA Cup, and everybody said so what? If you win this, you can tell them we won both’. He was confident, while we were a bunch of players who were responsible, who were organised, and who had tasted success the previous year. We wanted to succeed with that taste in our mouths. We were stronger mentally. We were much better.” The only team to whom Porto lost in that campaign was Real Madrid. Costinha says: “Before Madrid, Mourinho said, ‘You know what those players have more of than you? Money in their bank accounts. You have two arms and two legs, you are the same’.” Despite that defeat in the group stages, they qualified and defeated Manchester United, Lyon and Deportivo La Coruna on their way to reach the final against Monaco. “Mourinho told us, ‘You are not going to play the final, you are going to win the final. You don’t play finals, you win finals’.” Costinha continues. “Second, he said, ‘You have beaten Lyon, Man United and Deportivo. If you don’t beat Monaco, then you’re just another Champions League team. If you want your names to become history, you need to win’.” And they did, promptly changing European football for the next few years in doing so. Without Rab Douglas’ error five minutes from time to gift Derlei that opportunity, none of that might have transpired — and we could be looking at an entirely different football landscape today.

Finishing this season’s FA Cup matters more than you might think https://theathletic.com/1831147/2020/05/23/fa-cup-project-restart/ Amazon, the environment, female heads of state, flour mills, loo roll manufacturers, the NHS, Zoom… there will come a time, hopefully, when we can ask who or what “had a good lockdown” and, when we do, nostalgia must be high on the list. If it is not families sitting down together to enjoy The Lion King or Only Fools and Horses, it is middle-aged couples watching Normal People and wishing they were 20 again. It has been the same for football fans. Broadcasters, clubs, leagues and governing bodies have mined their back catalogues for the classics, none more so than the BBC, which has played the nostalgia card better than most. So we should perhaps not be surprised that the national broadcaster is turning it up to 11 with its homage to the FA Cup final, which — in case you forgot — should be taking place at Wembley this afternoon. Once upon a time, this was the only game fans could watch on television all season but today the BBC’s “full day of special programmes dedicated to the world’s most famous domestic cup competition” must compete with five Bundesliga games on BT Sport and FC Slutsk v FK Ruh Brest on the Belarussian Football Federation’s YouTube channel. Even in lockdown, the FA Cup final must share the stage these days. The BBC is kicking off at 9am on the Red Button with the 1973 final between Sunderland and Leeds United, and pushing on all the way to Ashley Cole’s greatest hits at 11pm on BBC One, via a themed Football Focus, a two-part 50 Greatest Moments show, an FA Cup Final Rewind programme and the latest instalment of Gary Lineker, Ian Wright and Alan Shearer’s Match of the Day top 10s. But what about this year’s FA Cup? Is it destined to remain stuck in the quarter-finals, which is where we left it in March? The FA’s chief executive Mark Bullingham addressed the matter in a conference call of his own on Thursday, when he told the FA Council’s members that he believed the remaining games could and would be weaved into the Premier League-led Project Restart programme. One source who was on the call said: “The FA is determined to complete the cup — there will be a huge financial impact with domestic and international broadcast rights if they don’t. Bullingham said it was something the Premier League understands and is supportive of, and it would be factored into their plans to start playing again. “My gut feeling is it’s part of a quid pro quo for the FA being supportive of the Premier League’s efforts to finish the season.” Another source who listened to Bullingham on Thursday agreed, saying: “I think it will happen. Look, the FA really needs it to happen and I haven’t heard anything from the Premier League to suggest otherwise. “If everyone continues to be collaborative, reasonable and flexible — and not get too precious about dates — then I don’t think there’s any problem fitting the FA Cup in.” This chimes with the views of the eight Premier League clubs still in the competition: Arsenal, Chelsea, Leicester City, Manchester City, Manchester United, Newcastle United, Norwich City and Sheffield United. Bottom of the table, Norwich are particularly eager to do what one club source described as “something special” in a competition where they have not enjoyed much success, while Newcastle’s manager Steve Bruce is understood to believe he could require cup success to impress his new bosses, assuming he ever gets new bosses. Three of those eight sides — Arsenal, Manchester City and Sheffield United — have 10 Premier League games still to play, not nine, while Chelsea, City and Manchester United have unfinished business in Europe, too, although there must be even bigger question marks about the Champions League and Europa League finishing this summer than a knockout competition that does not involve cross-border travel. As things stand, the Premier League and English Football League are still aiming to cram in 200-plus games, including a full Championship programme and the League One and League Two play-offs, in seven weeks starting on June 12, although many in the game believe that date has already slipped to June 19 and could be heading to June 26. The debate about when, where, why and how these games are going to take place has been probably the best live sport we have had for the past two months, but the FA Cup’s seven remaining fixtures have not been widely discussed. This is understandable when you consider the fact that the Premier League is already facing a £340 million rebate to its broadcast partners and every place in the final table is worth an extra £2.5 million in prize money, compared to the FA Cup winners’ cheque of £1.8 million. That is not to say the FA Cup games have not been mentioned at all, though, particularly within the FA, which has as much riding on these games as any of the Premier League sides do when it comes to potential losses. The FA has already revealed it believes it will lose up to £150 million in revenue as a result of the coronavirus. As well as the disruption to its best club asset, the FA has seen two England men’s home games in March disappear and the cancellation of Euro 2020 this summer. Wembley was meant to host seven of that tournament’s games, including the semi-finals and final, and while it should get to do that in 2021, that does mean it will have to do without its usual season of concerts. With its 90,000-seat stadium shut down and the hotel and conference centre it runs at St George’s Park in Staffordshire also closed for business, the FA has already furloughed some of its 1,200 staff and cut the salaries of anyone earning more than £50,000. Its biggest earners, including England manager Gareth Southgate and Bullingham, have agreed to a 30 per cent cut. Some of you may be reaching for your tiny violins at this point, particularly if you are among the millions of people in the UK and elsewhere contemplating an extended period without work, and nobody at the FA will be thinking they are any more deserving of sympathy than anyone else. But, if you care about football in this country, you should care about the FA’s more general financial concerns. Last month, it published its annual accounts for the 12 months to July 31, 2019. They were, to put it in layman’s terms, brilliant. Revenue was up 25 per cent on a World Cup-boosted 2018 to £467 million, which enabled the FA, a non-profit organisation, to distribute a record £165 million throughout the game, pay off another chunk of its Wembley rebuild costs and still finish with £40 million in the bank. The FA has got plenty wrong in its long history, including a few very expensive mistakes, but in recent years it has become a very well-run commercial operation and the FA Cup has underpinned that transformation. Last season was the first year of a six-year international rights deal worth $1 billion (£820 million). The domestic rights are shared by the BBC and BT this season but last May the FA managed to ink an improved four-year deal with the BBC and ITV starting in the 2021-22 season. These deals, plus the contracts for the England men’s and women’s teams, helped the FA more than double its broadcast income last year to £262 million. Throw in more than £100 million from the 54 events Wembley staged and an impressive roster of sponsorships and you have a very profitable non-profit organisation. Then the virus struck. “In many ways, the FA is a victim of its own success,” a government source explains. “No other governing body generates nearly as much money as the FA or gives as much away, but no other governing body is as vulnerable to the pandemic’s economic impact, either.” The old-fashioned view of the FA is that it is a collection of stuffed blazers whose main purpose in life is to ruin our summers. A more modern perspective, however, would be that the FA is the national game’s biggest single funder of amateur facilities, coaching courses, safeguarding initiatives and grassroots programmes. This season’s competition might have to settle for midweek slots to let the Premier League fulfil its contracted weekend fixtures, or it could end up carving out a long weekend for itself in early August, perhaps with Wembley-based semi-finals and a final. Whatever form it takes, the FA Cup deserves to be part of the Project Restart conversation, not just another slice of lockdown nostalgia. Your local pitch might just depend on it.

Jose Mourinho exclusive: Inter’s treble-winning season 10 years on https://theathletic.com/1828056/2020/05/22/inter-milan-jose-mourinho-interiew-exclusive-treble-10-year-anniversary/ “I could write a book of 1,000 pages about my two years at Inter,” Jose Mourinho tells The Athletic. When encouraged to do so, he pauses and thinks about it for a moment. “Maybe. But first I have to ask permission to the guys, because there are lots of forbidden stories,” he laughs. Mourinho is wandering around the Hotspur Way Training Centre reminiscing about one of the biggest days of his life in football. Today marks 10 years since Inter Milan made history and became the only Italian team ever to do the treble and, as anyone who’s been to a derby at San Siro will know, as an achievement Inter fans lord it over their rivals with almost the same pride as the fact the club has never been relegated to Serie B; an ignominy AC Milan and Juventus have both experienced at some stage. He is speaking to us between training sessions on a glorious summer’s day in London, the weather calling to mind one of the many rituals of that Inter team. Mourinho’s former assistant Jose Morais confided in The Athletic about the barbecues — “ooooh the barbecues” — that the squad’s Argentinian players put on for everyone. Javier Zanetti, Inter’s mythical captain, used to organise them. “Once a week,” Mourinho says. Esteban Cambiasso went and picked up the beef. Walter Samuel, the ‘asador’ or grill-master, turned the steaks over hot charcoal and Diego Milito lent his compatriot a hand with the cooking. “Milito ate and that’s it,” Dejan Stankovic mocked. “The food was amazing,” Mourinho reflects. “But the meaning of these barbecues went further than the amazing Argentinian meat they were getting and grilling for everyone. It was much more than that.” It was a family, and one that has never grown apart. A decade down the line the bond between them is as strong as ever. Marco Materazzi, the World Cup-winning centre-back, an Inter ultra who just happened to play football, set up a team WhatsApp group which inundates Mourinho’s phone with notifications. Julio Cesar, the goalkeeper of that side, has said: “The most active guy on it, the one who is messaging and joking the most, is Jose.” Elite sport is almost always about winning. Without the trophies Mourinho brought to Porto, he could not have presented himself at Chelsea as the “Special One”. Every bit as special to him though are the relationships and memories that are made along the way. “Nobody forgets the birthdays, the dates, a picture of the old times,” Mourinho says. “Nobody forgets to support each other. Everyone has a different life now but, as I used to say, it’s a little bit like family. “Even if you are far (away from each other) you are always close and I feel even in my (current) job, I feel how close they are; the ‘Good luck’ before the game, the nice feedback after the good results, a positive word after a bad result. If now I switch off the phone with you and I sit in my office I for sure will have lots of messages in our WhatsApp group, and that for me is the most important thing. In my career, all the big achievements of my teams, all of them were teams with this kind of bond, this kind of mentality. Everything in a football team starts when you have this kind of empathy, and we had that.” It all began around midnight on March 11, 2008. Liverpool and Fernando Torres had just eliminated Inter in the round of 16 of the Champions League and Roberto Mancini perhaps let his emotions get the better of him. To the consternation of those in the press conference, not to mention the home dressing room at San Siro, Mancini announced he had told Inter’s owner Massimo Moratti of his intention to leave at the end of the season. It took everyone by surprise. Mancini had only recently signed a new contract until 2012. Days later, after a cooling-off period, he admitted he had spoken in the heat of the moment. Mancini changed his mind and declared his intention to stay. But the damage was done. He lost face within a team already diminished by a mounting injury crisis. Inter collapsed, frittering away an 11-point lead, turning, in desperation, to a half-fit Zlatan Ibrahimovic to come off the bench and rescue the title on the final day of the season in Parma. In the meantime, reports of contact with Mourinho grew and grew and Mancini began to fear the worst when Il Corriere della Sera’s Fabio Monti, the best-connected reporter on the Inter beat, wrote within 48 hours of Liverpool knocking them out of the Champions League that Moratti was moving to appoint the Portuguese coach. At the end of May, pictures emerged of a meeting at a restaurant in Paris, La Tour d’Argent, and the secret was out. A matter of days later, Mourinho was unveiled to tremendous fanfare. As was the case the first time round at Chelsea, he immediately delivered an iconic, box-office line. An English journalist enquired if the rumours Mourinho wished to bring Frank Lampard to Inter were true. Mourinho didn’t want to talk about another team’s player. But he didn’t leave it there. His response left the media enraptured. “Io non solo pirla,” Mourinho said, using Milanese dialect. “I’m not an idiot.” Winning over the press and even some sections of San Siro was a gradual process though. In Italy, with its Ivy League coaching school, Coverciano, it doesn’t matter how big your reputation is or what you’ve won before. You have to prove yourself all over again, particularly if you are an outsider. Mancini had won Inter their first league title in 18 years and by the time Mourinho arrived they had dominated for three seasons. The bar was very high. Expectation through the roof. All that remained for Mourinho to achieve was the extraordinary; victory in Europe, the treble. Winning the Scudetto by 10 points in his first season was not enough. He was judged almost entirely on the Champions League and despite Ibrahimovic hitting the crossbar and Stankovic missing a gilt-edged chance, Inter lost to Manchester United and were out at the same stage as the year before. Moratti found it difficult to accept. In all his time at Inter, he conceded, it was “the angriest I ever got — and the time I really let my feelings known”. Mourinho could have departed that summer, just as Ibrahimovic did. Real Madrid wanted him to come and coach in Spain. “Moratti asked me to stay,” Mourinho says, “and I told him, ‘Yes, because the reason why I came here was to give you the dream of your life as a president’.” The dream of which Mourinho spoke was the one Moratti had been pursuing since he brought the club back into the family in 1995. The oil magnate’s mission was to emulate his father Angelo, the man who made Inter great in the 1960s when his own Mourinho-figure il Mago (“The Wizard”), as Helenio Herrera was known, guided them to two European Cup triumphs. Forty-five years had passed since they’d last tasted that success and in order to validate their domestic supremacy and consolidate that team’s place among Italy’s all-time greats, Inter needed to repeat or better it. Inter president Angelo Moratti and coach Herrera, surrounded by some fans of the team, celebrate winning the 1965 European Cup (Photo: Mondadori via Getty Images) For this particular generation of Inter players, it was a Last Dance of sorts. Zanetti and Materazzi were 36, Ivan Cordoba 33, Stankovic 31, Cambiasso and Julio Cesar were 30. Their window of opportunity was closing. “There are different perspectives of players when they are coming to the end of their careers,” Mourinho says. “There are the players that just want to be there for a couple more years on their contract — a few more million before they leave. And there are other guys with a different perspective which is: let me try to reach a high moment in my career, let me try and do something I never did. I think that was the point. The ones that were regular in the team, they were fantastic. But the ones that were not regular (Materazzi, Francesco Toldo, Paolo Orlandoni and Cordoba), the ones that didn’t play as much. They were always there for the team, always there for the younger guys, always there for the coach, always there to help. It was really a fantastic achievement and one of the reasons why I was so happy. I felt that my joy and my emotions were not about me, it was about them. It wasn’t about me winning my second Champions League — it was about them realising their dreams.” The United defeat and Inter’s overall struggles in the Champions League — recall how they had finished runners-up to Panathinaikos in the group on the back of a 3-3 draw with Anorthosis of Cyprus and a 2-1 defeat to Werder Bremen in Germany — provided Mourinho with the indications he needed to correct and upgrade the team over the summer of 2009. In hindsight, the recruitment that off-season must go down as one of the best transfer windows ever, anywhere. For Inter to get it so right was out of character with what had gone before under Moratti and his sporting director, Marco Branca, which is why a lot of the credit for the signings, even after the flops of Ricardo Quaresma and Amantino Mancini, ended up being shared with Mourinho. Inter started by granting Ibrahimovic his wish to play for Barcelona but only as long as they received Samuel Eto’o and €46 million in return, perhaps the greatest swap deal of all time. The Cameroon striker had just done the treble with Barcelona. Little did he know he was about to participate in another one and go back-to-back. Materazzi and Mourinho put on a charm offensive to lure him to San Siro. The defender texted Eto’o, “If you come to Inter, we’ll win everything.” Mourinho followed up with a picture of a blue and black No 9 shirt. “It’s yours,” he wrote. “Waiting for you.” How could Eto’o turn them down? “It’s strange that Samuel, during all his career, never managed to win the Ballon d’Or,” Mourinho observes incredulously. George Weah remains the only African player to have one on his mantlepiece. Inter were all-in that summer, strengthening from front to back. Lucio arrived from Bayern Munich and made the defence quicker and more agile. Branca traded the future for the present, wrapping Leonardo Bonucci up in the deals for Genoa’s midfield organiser Thiago Motta and “the Prince” Milito, a striker who, in Materazzi’s words, “wasted time” at clubs of a smaller stature when his talent for scoring in big games deserved so much more than the low profile he carried. Milito had just turned 30 and made the switch to Inter on the back of finishing behind Ibrahimovic in the scoring charts. Even after the mythical season ahead, which he more than anybody helped decide, recognition was still in short supply as he implausibly didn’t even make the shortlist for the Ballon d’Or. Mourinho kept working the phones late in the window. He messaged Wesley Sneijder, who found himself up for sale and disconsolate at Real Madrid following their world record-breaking splurges on Kaka and Cristiano Ronaldo. “His SMSs convinced me (to come),” the Dutch No 10 said at the time. Sneijder touched down at Milan’s Malpensa airport what felt like a matter of hours before the season’s first Derby della Madonnina on August 29. He didn’t even train with the team but his influence was instant as Inter overcame a difficult first 20 minutes to blow Ronaldinho’s Milan away and make a major statement of intent with an emphatic 4-0 win. Although Sneijder didn’t make it onto the scoresheet, his is the display everyone remembers. “Wes was amazing that season,” Mourinho recalls. “In the same year he wins the treble, he plays the World Cup final.” More than that, he set up six goals on Inter’s run to Champions League glory then finished as joint top scorer with Germany’s Thomas Muller in South Africa. Still, an Inter player didn’t collect the Ballon d’Or. Quizzed for an explanation, Mourinho doesn’t have one. “We got to the Gala in 2010. The boys were not even on the top three list (Lionel Messi, Andres Iniesta and Xavi made the podium). The only thing they managed to do was to be in the top XI, a player per position.” The oversight was really no different from what Inter went through at the start of the season. No one pencilled them in as one of the favourites to win the Champions League. The bookies tipped Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona and the new Real Madrid, with Ronaldo up front, instead. During the group stage, that opinion didn’t really change. Inter still found the Champions League hard work. At the beginning of November (match day four) they were still winless and trailing Dynamo Kiev 1-0 at half-time in Ukraine. Andriy Shevchenko, their old nemesis from his Milan days with his 14 derby goals, had put another one past them and Inter found themselves on a precipice. Mourinho calls it “an extreme situation, a half-time I will never forget”. In his book, Zanetti recalled the team talk during the interval. “As if he were studying (the situation) from Appiano Gentile (Inter’s training ground), Mourinho calmly explained, ‘Lads, right now we’re going out of the Champions League. We’re not interpreting the game well. We have to change. So we’re going to play three at the back: You Pupi (Zanetti), with Lucio and Maicon. (Walter) Samuel, you’re going to play further forward, next to Thiago Motta in midfield. Cambiasso, you’re coming on the bench with me. Sneijder, you push up, stay calm, play high and make some shots. Milito, I want you to shadow Sneijder up front. Balotelli and Eto’o, get out wide. Get it? I want you wide. If you go out there, Dynamo will follow you and their defence will open up. That way we’ll create space in the middle for Wesley and Diego’.” As a plan, it worked. Inter created chance after chance but the breakthrough only came four minutes from the end when Milito trapped a pass from Sneijder in the area and slotted the ball past goalkeeper Stanislav Bogush. The winner, just seconds from the end, arrived when Bogush spilled a shot from one of Mourinho’s subs, Sulley Muntari. The keeper got in the way of the rebound from Milito but the danger wasn’t over and Sneijder slid in to keep Moratti’s dream of winning the Champions League alive. Mourinho reflects on that as “the first step” in his team believing in itself in Europe. “People focus more on the semi-final and final,” he says, “but we had a difficult run. As a start we had Barcelona also in the group phase, which obviously creates a difficult situation to win the group. Then the objective becomes to try and qualify, because Barcelona is of course the team that is going to qualify. We had to fight and we had a good win against Dynamo Kiev in that group, we had a difficult match in the Russian winter (1-1 at Rubin Kazan), it was not easy.” A couple of aspects of Inter’s progress under Mourinho deserve wider appreciation. “Thinking is the secret,” he told the players in his very first team meeting as their coach. “You will be trained to think. You will become better by thinking. You will think about the tactics I give you. You will play football thinking. Do you understand? A player who doesn’t think cannot play football.” Cambiasso has just recently finished his coaching badges, but he was already a coach on the pitch. He always had a question about the formation. Over time, though, the entire team’s reading of the game improved. There was no system, no situation, that Inter were unprepared for. In a memorable game against Siena in January 2010, Mourinho sent Samuel up front with the team 3-2 down. Sneijder cancelled out Massimo Maccarone’s go-ahead goal for the Tuscans, curling in his second free kick of the game, before Inter’s rugged Argentine centre-back metamorphosed from Walter Samuel into Samuel Eto’o and scored a euphoric 92nd-minute winner. As Mourinho’s second campaign gathered apace, the team attained enviable flexibility. Zanetti played full-back and in midfield. But no player embodies Inter’s adaptability that season more than Eto’o, who ended up playing an attritional role out wide — practically as a full-back at times. “In the Italian league we were predominantly playing a 4-4-2 with a diamond in midfield, and Samuel (Eto’o) playing striker with Milito,” Mourinho explains. “But then I knew that, going to the Champions League, there were very good teams attacking with full-backs, teams that were feeling possibly better than us, teams that were not playing defensively, like many teams in Italy did against us. “I felt that to play against the ones like Chelsea and Barcelona, the best teams, we needed to give a different balance to the team. So I thought to play with two midfield players in front of the defensive line and giving more width to the wingers would create a better control of the games. But for that, I needed either to sacrifice some of my strikers or I needed to adapt them to make a different role. In the end, we were playing with three strikers, Milito, (January signing Goran) Pandev and Eto’o. But Milito was playing central, Eto’o was coming from the left and Pandev, a left-footed player, was coming from the right. “They created lots of chances, all three could score a goal, all three gave me what the team needed, which was that defensive balance. We had the two positional players in midfield, then we had Pandev, Sneijder, Milito and Eto’o; four attacking players, but giving to the team in the defensive phase the balance that we needed.” Awaiting, somewhat inevitably, in the round of 16, were Chelsea, Mourinho’s previous club. “Chelsea were really, really, really one of the big candidates (for the Champions League),” he insists. “I knew them very, very, very well because that was my team with a couple of top new players like (Nicolas) Anelka. They added to a team, a good team that was really strong and in the best stage (of its maturity), with great, experienced players. Players in the best age of their careers, around 28; John Terry, (Michael) Essien, Lampard, (Didier) Drogba, Petr Cech. They were a phenomenal team.” Last week, Eto’o told La Gazzetta dello Sport that that night at Stamford Bridge, when Inter won 1-0 thanks to his goal in the 78th minute, sticks in his mind for a couple of reasons. One is Mourinho’s team talk. “No team I coached can beat me,” he apparently said. The other is the manner in which Inter performed. “We went out on the pitch with a different determination; we weren’t just playing for ourselves but our coach.” Looking back now, Mourinho says: “I think that was the feeling, the last feeling the players had to make them believe we could go all the way.” That turned out to be a huge fortnight in Inter’s season. Four days before the first leg against Chelsea, the team’s resolve hardened all the more when Samuel and Cordoba were sent off seven minutes apart in a critical Serie A game against Champions League-chasing Sampdoria. Mourinho made a handcuffs gesture, a sign of defiance, seeking to show nothing could hold Inter down and, despite playing almost an hour with nine men, his team remarkably didn’t concede. They held Antonio Cassano and co to a goalless draw and mentally you just knew they wouldn’t be fazed when outnumbered in the future, most famously of all in an epic semi-final second leg against Barcelona at the Nou Camp. That night is the one this Inter side is remembered and defined by. The brilliance of the come-from-behind win a fortnight earlier when Sneijder, a superb Maicon, and Milito all scored tends to be forgotten or unfairly minimised because Barcelona had to take a coach across Europe to Milan on account of the ash cloud caused by the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland. Attempting to play the same way in the Nou Camp as they did at San Siro would have been crazy after Sergi Busquets’ peek-a-boo histrionics and Motta’s subsequent red card after only half an hour. It was one thing to hold off Sampdoria for 60 minutes, another entirely to stop a team that would go down as one of the greatest of all time. Zanetti remembers shouting words of encouragement to Eto’o, then playing full-back, after he made an incredible recovery run to stop Messi attempting a shot. “I said, ‘Come on, Samu. Not long now’.” The pair of them then looked up at the scoreboard… and saw there were only 37 minutes on the clock. Inter, as Mourinho famously put it, “didn’t want the ball”. They wanted to control the space instead and allowed Barcelona 86.4% possession. For Mourinho, though, seeing out a 3-2 aggregate win against that calibre of opponent on that stage was testament to his players’ character. “What they did in Barcelona, playing with 10 players for more than an hour…” he pauses “…That goes further than tactics, further than the defensive organisation. That goes much more deep than that. It goes further than football. It goes to the human side of it.” As he dashed onto the pitch, pointing to the Inter supporters up in the gods, all of a sudden the sprinklers came on. His assistant Jose Morais describes it as “the best shower of my life.” “I didn’t even feel it,” Mourinho says. “The game finished, everybody reacted in different ways. We had people crying. We had people on their knees. We had people completely exhausted on the floor. We had people running around and I ran to our supporters because I know how much it meant to them. Then, when we were enjoying (ourselves), they (Barcelona) didn’t react in the best way which doesn’t reflect the dimension of the club, a club where I was so happy in the period I worked there, a club that I know is a super-class club. But sometimes when we are disappointed we can have these emotional reactions. It’s no problem at all, though, just a nice memory.” In the meantime, Inter were also through to the Coppa Italia final and back in control at the top of Serie A. They had lost pole position at the beginning of April after Julio Cesar made a mistake that allowed Per Koldrup to equalise in a 2-2 draw away to Fiorentina. Not for the first time that season (Materazzi recalls Mourinho “tearing us to bits” after a defeat to Catania) the players received the hairdryer treatment or, as the Italians call it, a shampoo. Cordoba remembers Mourinho coming into the dressing room at the Artemio Franchi in Florence and laying into his goalkeeper. “The tension was softened for one hilarious moment when Mourinho kicked a bag of ice and fell over in front of us all.” Rather than breed any resentment, the respect for each other was so high that, as in a family, no argument was insurmountable. One knew that the other could take it. Players and manager felt they could be honest with each other. “There are many difficult moments that only a top team could overcome,” Mourinho reflects. Having been 11 points ahead of Roma at the end of January, Inter needed to chase at a time when legs are beginning to tire. But the pressure soon got to Roma, with Philippe Mexes bursting into tears at the Stadio Olimpico following a galling 2-1 defeat to Sampdoria that enabled Inter to reclaim first place just three games from the end. Milito did the rest. “He was phenomenal,” Mourinho says. “When we speak about the treble, we speak especially about that last three matches where everything is decided. He scored the winning goal in the cup final (against Roma), the winning goal to give us the title (against Siena) and both our goals in the Champions League final (against Bayern Munich) in Madrid. Amazing.” As Zanetti hoisted the European Cup aloft and placed it on his head, Inter became unique among Italian clubs and Moratti found the fulfilment he craved. Three years later, with no worlds left to conquer, he sold the team. The most powerful image of that night though was of Mourinho jumping in what was assumed to be a Real Madrid car, only to get out and share a tearful embrace with Materazzi outside the Bernabeu. The veteran had been imploring him to stay on as Inter coach all month. “You do realise in whose hands you’re leaving us?” he claims to have told Mourinho, thinking former Liverpool manager Rafa Benitez was taking over. But Mourinho was not for turning. This was it. “When I had these last words with him (Materazzi), it was like I was hugging every player which is something I tried not to do,” Mourinho says. “I was on the pitch with them in the celebrations, in the medals, in the cup. I was with them but then I didn’t go back to the dressing room because I didn’t want to say goodbye. It was too hard for me and I didn’t want to leave with them to Milan because people were saying I had a contract with Real Madrid. It was not true. I had an agreement, but I did not have a contract signed. “I really wanted to go to Real Madrid at that time. I really wanted to try to win the Spanish league after the English and Italian leagues. But I feared that if I go back to Milan with the team and, with the reaction of the players and the fans, I was afraid of not being able to leave. I can say that I ran away. I ran away from them.” Into the night. Into Inter legend. “A few days later, I signed with Real Madrid,” Mourinho adds, “and then I could go back to Milan and I could meet the president and have dinner with Moratti and his family.” On the table when he got there was the European Cup “and this funny situation with (Moratti’s) little grandson in the cup”. A decade on, the ‘triplete’ WhatsApp group will no doubt be going into overdrive today as memories of Madrid, Siena and Rome come flooding back. Plans for a reunion have been put back, and understandably so because of the restrictions imposed by the pandemic, but as Mourinho concludes: “I am with them every day, and that for me is the most important thing.” The 57-year-old from Setubal has won so many titles down the years but when you talk to him about Inter, truly it’s hard to come away thinking anything other than that treble was the Special One.

Is the Premier League fair if stars like Kante and Deeney are pulling out? https://theathletic.com/1824189/2020/05/22/deeney-kante-premier-league-project-restart-unfair/ It feels like a long time since Troy Deeney pulled back his right boot to score Watford’s third goal in their last Premier League assignment at Vicarage Road. You might remember the occasion: Watford 3 Liverpool 0. Or “Phew”, to quote Arsenal’s Twitter account, as Liverpool blew their hopes of emulating The Invincibles. Deeney’s goal capped the shock result of the season, followed by a victory run to the corner flag, a slightly uncoordinated knee slide and a victory group-hug involving Harry the Hornet, Watford’s mascot. The kind of scenes, to put it another way, that make you realise what it is about this infuriatingly addictive sport that drags us in. That was Deeney’s sixth league goal from December 22 to February 29. To put that into context, only Sergio Aguero at Manchester City and Everton’s Dominic Calvert-Lewin (seven each) managed more in the top flight over the same period. Deeney was on target in a 2-0 pre-Christmas defeat of Manchester United, too. He scored twice a week later in a victory over Aston Villa. He got another in mid-January’s 3-0 victory away to Bournemouth and one more against Villa again — the only game in this sequence that Watford did not win. In short, nobody has done more to haul Watford out of a seemingly irretrievable position in the bottom three, where they were previously bottom of the table and 10 points adrift of 17th place. Nobody in England’s top division was exerting such an influence on the relegation positions, pre-lockdown. All of which leaves a reasonable question for Watford, and the Premier League as a whole, if Deeney sticks to his position that he holds so little trust in Project Restart then good luck, comrades, but it is not for him. First, it was Deeney. Then there was N’Golo Kante at Chelsea. A number of other Watford players have also stayed away from training after one of their colleagues, defender Adrian Mariappa, tested positive for coronavirus (along with two members of club staff) without realising he had it. In the coming days and weeks, it is very possible we will hear about other players at Watford, and elsewhere, who are asking to be excused. And, in each case, it is difficult to imagine there will be any kind of public backlash. Deeney has a baby son who has suffered from breathing difficulties and, explaining his reasons at the start of the week, he also pointed out the statistical analysis that shows there is an increased risk for BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) males. Kante is also unconvinced that it is safe, or wise, if there is even a tiny risk of picking up the disease and passing it on to others. The midfielder’s life, lest it be forgotten, has been touched by tragedy. His elder brother, Niama, died of a heart attack two years ago and he lost his father when he was 11 years old. Who would be so flint-hearted to challenge him if he has decided, no matter how many times he has been assured it will be OK, this is not a time to blur his priorities? It does, however, leave the potential for everything to get very messy should the Premier League return in its new form in mid-June. Some teams will no doubt be at full strength. Others, it seems, could be missing key players. And, at a time when “integrity” appears to be the new buzzword in football, it is certainly not going to feel particularly satisfactory if this threatens to have a direct impact on the final league positions. The bottom three, just for starters. As it stands, Watford’s improvement since Nigel Pearson’s appointment in early December has seen them accumulate more points in that time than third-placed Leicester City and the same number as Chelsea in fourth. Watford won 13 points out of a possible 15 in the midst of that run. Yet it is only goal difference (minus-17 to minus-18) keeping them the right side of the dotted line, above third-bottom Bournemouth. With Deeney, you would back Watford to complete their feat of escapology over the remaining nine matches. Without him, it is far easier to see them slipping back into the quicksand. He is their captain and leading scorer. He is their best hope. Before going any further, it should probably be clarified that neither Deeney nor Kante, or anybody else, has categorically stated they will not be involved if the season resumes to the timescale that the football authorities now expect. Plainly, though, that has to be a possibility when various players — some named, others not — have already been given permission to stay away from what is being called “Stage One” of the clubs’ training programmes, which mostly involves running and other drills where social distancing can be maintained. Kante took part on Tuesday before asking Chelsea’s head coach, Frank Lampard, if he could be excluded. There are still three weeks to go before the big lift-off. Nobody knows what kind of numbers will ultimately be involved, whether it will be high or low, and it is probably only when we reach that stage that a reasonable assessment can be made about the potential impact on the league. Watford, of course, could be one of the clubs to suffer. But is it fair, equally, that Bournemouth had to face an in-form Deeney in January’s loss and other clubs in the relegation frame might now come up against what, in theory, would be a weaker Watford team? Watford still have to play Norwich City, who are bottom, as well as West Ham United (16th), Southampton (14th) and Newcastle United (13th) in their final nine matches. What if six or seven Watford players have concluded that Deeney is the only one making sense and decided en masse they are better staying away? What if the numbers are even higher? It may be one player or it may be 10 — the point is, nothing can be ruled out. And the league, with zero training in pandemics, has nothing in its rules to allow for such a matter. For now, it is a waiting game as, bit by bit, the next phases of training are introduced to allow players to tackle and otherwise come into contact with one another. And if the players are concerned now, those misgivings will inevitably increase once it starts to feel more like football, in a real sense. As Gary Neville, in his Sky Sports television role, says: “I do think there will be more players in training at the moment with nerves who are wary of going in and are considering their health. A large majority will be OK with it and want to play, so it’s a case of, ‘We’re not going to stop this now they’re back in training’. This is a train back on the track, so it isn’t going to stop.” In Watford’s case, there is also bound to be heightened concern after the disclosure this week that the club accounted for half of the six positive coronavirus tests from the first set of results throughout the league. Those figures were widely seen as positive elsewhere and it is very clear that football, as an industry, is determined that the show must go on. Not all the cast may be involved but, at the top of the sport, the widespread feeling is that the present situation should not be classified as being different from any kind of personal issue that may require a footballer to seek time off as compassionate leave. These are, after all, unprecedented times and when the football authorities started putting together their plans for the restart it was always accepted that it would be virtually impossible to satisfy everyone. The decision-makers are also entitled to point out that the vast majority of players have been willing to go back. And, harsh as it may sound, there is so much momentum now that a lot of the relevant people are frustrated that Deeney, as a club captain, appears unwilling to accept what has become the party line. It is safer, as they keeping telling us, for a professional footballer to start playing again than it is for that player to visit a supermarket. It is just that not everyone seems willing to believe them.

5 2

If Chilwell, pre COVID was rated at £80m, Davies is worth £120m or more he has permanently benched the best LB in the world for years (in terms of Alaba playing at LB)

and he is only 19, and has been playing fullback for like 6,7 months, lololol

he is streets ahead of TAA in terms of defence

4 2 Davies what a fucking player