Vesper

I do have to say, Pepe has looked much better lately

Xhaka blasted McBurnie right in the jacobs eeeek

Blades so on the front foot need to score

horrid back 4 for Arse

Arse v Sheffield United United HD Streams http://www.sportnews.to/sports/2020/premier-league-arsenal-vs-sheffield-united-s1/ https://www.totalsportek.com/arsenal-streams/

the main thing that would make me worry (opponents wise) is if Manure sack the clueless OGS and install a top class manager Allegri or Poch especially especially IF they actually do good business this window (which is shaky) I also am hoping for a Leicester overall collapse (which is less likely)

I think we cave and give him the 2 year extension, simply due to the fact we do not want to buy two wingers in one window.

One small thing. I am FAR FAR more worried about the loss of revenue that comes from missing out again on CL footy than I am its impact on recruitment. Our business model demands pretty much constant or near constant CL or we start to run into FFP issues.

Delusional. Some of those top Manure teams would cut 2020 Victimpool to ribbons. The Manure MF alone would DESTROY the scousers, especially with no Fabinho atm. This is Fergie's Honours as a manager It fucking dwarfs Klopp Most major trophies in football history St Mirren Scottish First Division: 1976–77 Aberdeen Scottish Premier Division: 1979–80, 1983–84, 1984–85 Scottish Cup: 1981–82, 1982–83, 1983–84, 1985–86 Scottish League Cup: 1985–86 Drybrough Cup: 1980 European Cup Winners' Cup: 1982–83 European Super Cup: 1983 Manchester United Premier League: 1992–93, 1993–94, 1995–96, 1996–97, 1998–99, 1999–2000, 2000–01, 2002–03, 2006–07, 2007–08, 2008–09, 2010–11, 2012–13 FA Cup: 1989–90, 1993–94, 1995–96, 1998–99, 2003–04 Football League Cup: 1991–92, 2005–06, 2008–09, 2009–10 FA Charity/Community Shield: 1990 (shared), 1993, 1994, 1996, 1997, 2003, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011 UEFA Champions League: 1998–99, 2007–08 European Cup Winners' Cup 1990-91 European Super Cup: 1991 Intercontinental Cup: 1999 FIFA Club World Cup: 2008 Individual LMA Manager of the Decade: 1990s LMA Manager of the Year: 1998–99, 2007–08, 2010–11, 2012–13 LMA Special Merit Award: 2009, 2011 Premier League Manager of the Season: 1993–94, 1995–96, 1996–97, 1998–99, 1999–2000, 2002–03, 2006–07, 2007–08, 2008–09, 2010–11, 2012–13 Premier League Manager of the Month: August 1993, October 1994, February 1996, March 1996, February 1997, October 1997, January 1999, April 1999, August 1999, March 2000, April 2000, February 2001, April 2003, December 2003, February 2005, March 2006, August 2006, October 2006, February 2007, January 2008, March 2008, January 2009, April 2009, September 2009, January 2011, August 2011, October 2012 UEFA Manager of the Year: 1998–99 UEFA Team of the Year: 2007, 2008 Onze d'Or Coach of the Year: 1999, 2007, 2008 European Coach of the Year—Alf Ramsey Award: 2008 IFFHS World's Best Club Coach: 1999, 2008 IFFHS World's Best Coach of the 21st Century: 2012 Laureus World Sports Award for Team of the Year: 2000 BBC Sports Personality of the Year Coach Award: 1999 BBC Sports Personality Team of the Year Award: 1999 BBC Sports Personality of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award: 2001 BBC Sports Personality Diamond Award: 2013 English Football Hall of Fame (Manager) : 2002 Scottish Football Hall of Fame: 2004 European Hall of Fame (Manager): 2008 FIFA Presidential Award: 2011 Premier League 10 Seasons Awards (1992–93 – 2001–02) Manager of the Decade Most Coaching Appearances (392 games) Premier League 20 Seasons Awards (1992–93 – 2011–12) Best Manager FWA Tribute Award: 1996 PFA Merit Award: 2007 Premier League Merit Award: 2012–13 Mussabini Medal: 1999 Orders and special awards Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE): 1985 Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE): 1995 Knight Bachelor (Kt.): 1999 Freedom of the City of Aberdeen: 1999 Freedom of the City of Glasgow: 1999 Freedom of the City of Manchester: 2000 Freedom of the Borough of Trafford: 2013

Frank Lampard provides Christian Pulisic fitness update ahead of Newcastle https://www.101greatgoals.com/news/frank-lampard-provides-christian-pulisic-fitness-update-ahead-of-newcastle/

The Ballad of Danny Drinkwater The fall of a Premier League champion shows just how precarious a soccer career can be, and the damage that can be inflicted by one bad choice. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/sports/danny-drinkwater-lionel-messi.html Enjoying this newsletter every week? Forward it to a friend and tell them to sign up at nytimes.com/rory. A few hours after Danny Drinkwater joined Aston Villa in the first week of January, a friend asked if he wanted to go watch his new club in action. Aston Villa was playing at Leicester City in the semifinals of the Carabao Cup, English soccer’s midweek afterthought, the night after Drinkwater’s move was confirmed. There was a space for him in an executive box at the King Power Stadium: Drinkwater could come along, pretty much incognito, and cast an eye over the Villa players who were, now, his teammates. Politely, he declined the invitation. It is not especially hard to discern why. Leicester was, of course, where Drinkwater spent the happiest, most productive years of his career: a central cog in the team that first won promotion to the Premier League in 2014 and then, as is still occasionally pointed out whenever Leicester is mentioned, won the English title two years later. It was at Leicester where Drinkwater grew into one of the most highly regarded midfielders in England. He won the Premier League. He made it to the quarterfinals of the Champions League. He played for England. He was good enough that Chelsea, the team that had succeeded Leicester as champion, paid $45 million to acquire him in 2017. A few days after that deal went through, Chelsea, in one of those quirks that soccer throws up so frequently that you wonder if the whole thing is scripted, visited Leicester. Ngolo Kanté, a player who had left Leicester for Chelsea a year earlier, was given a rousing reception by his former fans. Drinkwater, named as a substitute, a little less so. The BBC described his welcome as “mixed.” It is a fairly transparent euphemism. Perhaps that memory gave Drinkwater pause as he contemplated the idea of walking into the King Power, a few months short of three years on, to watch a game. Or, perhaps, it is something a little deeper. Perhaps he sensed that returning to Leicester, where his career topped out, would simply serve to remind him that he had fallen. snip

LAMPARD DELIVERS POSITIVE INJURY UPDATE ON LOFTUS-CHEEK, DISMISSES TWO TRANSFER RUMOURS AND PRAISES CHELSEA'S ADOPTION OF IHRA ANTISEMITISM DEFINITION https://www.chelseafc.com/en/news/2020/01/17/frank-lampard-press-conference-pre-newcastle-away?cardIndex=0-0

Matteo Politano's swap deal with Leonardo Spinazzola COLLAPSES at the last minute despite Roma posting images of winger having medical... and this is the second time in two years the Inter Milan star has seen his transfer fall through Matteo Politano was set to move to Roma with Leonardo Spinazzola joining Inter But the deal has collapsed despite the Inter star having a medical with Roma Antonio Conte's side demanded left-back Spinazzola did extra fitness work Politano's transfer to Napoli from Sassuolo collapsed in 2018 due to paperwork https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-7899841/Matteo-Politanos-swap-deal-Leonardo-Spinazzola-COLLAPSES-minute.html Matteo Politano's swap deal with Leonardo Spinazzola has fallen through at the last minute after talks break down between Inter Milan and Roma. The transfer looked as though it was completed as Paulo Fonseca's side posted images on Instagram of Inter ace Poltinao having his medical. But a late U-turn according to reports in Italy has resulted in the agents abandoning the deal completely. snip Alonso back in the crosshairs get it DONE make a hard move for Gosens as well with Emerson as bait Gosens and either Telles or splurge a bit more on Grimaldo we can have two really class LB's for 25m to 35m total net spend (or far less if we go for Telles) if we play this right screw rolling dice that we pull Chilwell for 80m in the summer

Because... board.

Lets put this Drinkwater maths shite to bed once and for all Transfer fee £35m Salary £110K per week (there was some confusion as some sites said £120K per week but I am going with 110K now per the extremely reputable Athletic https://theathletic.com/1516614/2020/01/07/danny-drinkwater-aston-villa-wages/ so 5 years at 110K per week is £28.6m in wages meaning we are on the hook for a total of £63.6m for the 5 years we paid all his wages in 2017-18 we paid ALL his wages 2018-19 we paid ALL his wages 2019-20 Burnley paid £1m for a 5 month loan (they picked up 50K of the 110K in wages for 20 weeks, again per multiple links including the Athletic one above) we demanded they pay it all for the rest of the year, they said piss off Aston Villa the same (we wanted them to pay the full 110K they said no), so we cut a deal (probably similar to Burnleys, BUT I will even give us the benefit of the doubt, an say they are paying 50% more than Burnley, so 1.5m quid for the 5 months) Lets say we somehow get a team to pay his FULL wages on a 2 year loan (2020-22) to close it out (there is almost no chance of get a transfer fee for him with these wages and his age) again I am giving us full benefit of the doubt here so that knocks off (assuming they pay the full 24 remaining months of his wages) £11.44m (and that is also generous as a team can wait a couple of months to start the 2 year loan, so they would only pay 22 months worth or so) lets do the maths £63.6m minus 1m minus 1.5m minus 11.44m equals a straight cumulative net spend of £49.66m (call it £50m, especially if we only get 23 or 22 months for the final 2 year loan) (as he walks on a free in June 2022) that £50m also assumes we can do what we have failed to do so far, that being getting a team to pay his FULL salary for 2 years (which is really looking shaky atm) so that £50m could easily go up to around £53m to 55m in total net cost no team is going to buy him for even £10m in transfer fees and then pick up those insane wages on top. At just a £10m transfer fee, that would mean they are paying around £21.5m for a 30 to 32 year old MFer (who was been a disaster for the past 3 years) for just two years of play, and a player who then walks on a free (or they keep him and pay him far lower). Why would a team shit away 10m (at a minimum) when they can just loan him and probably NOT even have to pay his full wages (no one except us has paid his full wages yet) If anyone thinks that that is 'good business' by the board, and that I am an idiot who doesn't know finance (laughable) then I truly do not know what to say, other than good luck in life. So sick of these dodgy as hell appeal to authority logical fallacies being rammed down our throats by a few bad apples. Remember, this is the same board who just shit away £26m plus on the sacking of just one manager. I do not (nor have I EVER claimed to) have access to the club's books, but their public disclosures back me up 100%. You can take what I say with a grain of salt (I urge any and all to always fact check me, and I always try to provide links), but I will be fucked if I am gaslit into believing we are conducting an overall good business model when it comes to contractual management, piss poor buys, cocked-up non buys and stalled out (to the point the window closes) tie ups on multiple occasion (Italy, I am looking at you), non-timely sales (knowing a player will not renew), renewals of contracts for dodgy players and overall salary cock-ups in general. NO ONE on here needs an advanced degree in any sort of actuarial or fiduciary science to see it has been one disaster after another. But by all means, put those baby blue blinders on and all hail the magnificence that is the Chels board! #sodone

What really happens when transfer deals collapse https://theathletic.com/1515552/2020/01/17/transfer-deal-collapse-signings-van-dijk-suarez-sanchez/ It was past 10pm on transfer deadline day and Daniel James was starting to get restless. It had been a long day for the young Swansea City winger, spending the afternoon at Leeds United’s training ground and the evening in their offices at Elland Road. Personal terms agreed? Check. Rigorous medical examination? Check. Publicity photographs with newly-printed No 21 shirt? Check. Paperwork signed? Check. It felt like the perfect next step for his career, joining a club who were top of the Championship under Marcelo Bielsa. But still negotiations dragged on as the 11pm deadline drew closer and closer. This one was going to go down to the wire. The plan last January was for Leeds to pay £1.5 million to sign James on loan until the end of the season. If he helped them win promotion, that would become a £10 million permanent transfer in the summer. But a problem arose in the final hour of trading. The Swansea hierarchy moved the goalposts, demanding a bigger up-front payment, and the deal collapsed The scene is captured in Take Us Home, Amazon Prime’s fly-on-the-wall documentary about Leeds’ dramatic first season under Bielsa’s management. At one point James is heard making a phone call, telling someone, “I’ve been here all day. Everything is done, man. They just won’t sign.” As the deal breaks down, Victor Orta, the Leeds director, appears to be in tears. “I don’t know what’s happening in the future now — with him, with us,” he says. “After this situation, nobody wins. Swansea, I think, have a player which, after this episode, is really difficult. This player can’t get his dream. And Leeds can’t get this player. “Respect your player — because you give permission to make the medical. We’re talking about people. This is with people that have feelings. Today is one of the most tough moments that I’ve watched, a player of 21 years old, with his father … It’s never happened in my career.” James says goodbye to Orta and the other Leeds officials and prepares for the long journey back to Wales under darkness. He looks tired and emotional. Leeds hope to revive the conversation in the summer, but for now the transfer window is closed. It is a blow to their promotion hopes and it is a blow to James’s career aspirations. They do not know what the future holds. In his mind, Alexis Sanchez had already moved on from Arsenal. It was transfer deadline day in August 2017 and, 7,000 miles away in Chile, he was preparing for a crucial World Cup qualifier that evening. That was his over-riding priority. Only afterwards would he allow himself to think about the challenge that awaited him at Manchester City. He had assured his Chile team-mates of that the previous day. Delighted, he gathered them at the Pinto Duran training centre, on the outskirts of Santiago, and told them he would be joining City, pending a few last-minute formalities. The other players congratulated him — not least Claudio Bravo, who was going to be his team-mate in Manchester — and then he promised them that, for now, his focus was purely on La Roja and the game against Paraguay. Deadline day didn’t go to plan, though. Arsenal had already accepted City’s offer of £55 million, with £5 million in potential add-ons, but, with Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain moving to Liverpool, they now indicated they wouldn’t let Sanchez go unless they managed to bring a player in to fill the void. Sanchez’s agent, Fernando Felicevich, called Ivan Gazidis, then Arsenal chief executive, and his City counterpart Ferran Soriano in a state of increasing anxiety. “This needs to happen. Make it happen.” Word came back that Arsenal had made a huge bid for Monaco’s Thomas Lemar. Monaco had accepted it. Everything would be fine. Lemar had a match that night too, playing for France against Holland, so everyone shared the same sense of urgency. It would be done — sooner rather than later. For Lemar, though, these were not the final stages of a saga that had dragged on all summer. The proposal had come about too quickly. It was an awful lot for a 21-year-old to deal with as he prepared to make the biggest match of his short international career to date. He was being pushed for a decision. He wanted to stay and was more tempted by the faint prospect of joining Liverpool. Lemar pulled out of negotiations and, with that, the Sanchez deal collapsed. City were furious with Arsenal. Felicevich was furious with everyone. And Sanchez was aghast, horrified, incredulous. Whereas Lemar went out at the Stade de France that night and performed brilliantly, scoring twice in a 4-0 win, Sanchez sleepwalked through Chile’s damaging 3-0 home defeat by Paraguay. “That,” said Jose Sulantay, who had coached Sanchez at the Under-17 World Cup a decade earlier, “was not Alexis.” Worrying reports came out of Chile: that Sanchez might go on strike in protest at Arsenal’s refusal to sell him. That proved wide of the mark, but it was still a serious concern. Sanchez had just 10 months left on his contract, with no prospect of a renewal, and was now severely disillusioned with the club. Relations with a number of team-mates had deteriorated over the final months of the previous season. Several of them had been eager to see the back of him. He had been desperate to go. Arsene Wenger said there wouldn’t be a problem. He was wrong. What happens when a player’s dream move falls through? And what happens in those cases where a player has kicked up a stink, polluting the atmosphere at one club in order to try to force a transfer to another, and then has to return, tail between his legs, to a dressing room he thought he had left for the last time? The most notorious example in the Premier League era concerns Pierre van Hooijdonk, the former Holland centre-forward who, in an attempt to get a move away from Nottingham Forest, refused to return to pre-season training in July 1998, citing broken promises about investment in what he called a sub-standard squad. “I think we all felt similar to Pierre that summer,” Alan Rogers, the former Forest full-back, tells The Athletic. “We all thought we needed one or two signings and instead the club sold Kevin Campbell (to Trabzonspor) and they were about to sell Colin Cooper to Middlesbrough, too. We all felt frustrated. But you don’t expect one of your team-mates to go on strike like Pierre did. He just went about it completely the wrong way.” As Forest began the season without their star player, the indignation from his team-mates was overwhelming. Steve Stone warned that if Van Hooijdonk returned, he would “have to get changed somewhere else because there’s no way the lads will accept him back in the dressing room after everything he’s said.” Two months into the impasse, when Van Hooijdonk (below) made noises about returning to Forest, their manager Dave Bassett said, “If he thinks we’re going to offer him an olive branch, he knows where he can stick it.” What was it like in the dressing room when the rebel returned? “I remember Pierre walking in and I thought Geoff Thomas was going to hit him,” Rogers says. “He didn’t, but he had a right go. Geoff really went to town on him. A couple of the other senior players did, too. “It was a bad situation. He would walk into the dressing room and people would blank him. He scored a goal against Derby and I think Thierry Bonalair was the only one who celebrated with him. The first couple of weeks back, he was a disgrace in training. In one session, Dave Bassett was trying to work on team shape and Pierre just walked off with a bag of balls. “We all thought he was taking the piss. It got to the point where Mark Crossley, Steve Chettle and Geoff pulled him to one side again and said, ‘Enough is enough. We’ve all got our frustrations, but you can’t let the team suffer.'” Even if relations thawed slightly on a superficial level, the ill-feeling festered all season before Van Hooijdonk got a move home to Holland with Vitesse Arnhem. Dressing-room lore was different in those days. You were either in or you were out. Over time, that has changed. “It’s almost accepted now,” Rogers says. “I’m not saying it’s like we had with Pierre at Forest, but it seems to be pretty much accepted now that players will play up to try to get a move. The players have so much power these days. You look at certain players where they’ve made clear they don’t want to be at a club and they seem to be taking the piss, but in a lot of cases now their team-mates just seem to put up with it. “We had some strong characters at Forest. We had some even stronger ones when I was at Leicester — Matty Elliott, Gerry Taggart, people like that. Can you imagine Gerry Taggart letting someone pussyfoot around and say they don’t feel like training today? I don’t think anyone would dare.” Player power has become an accepted norm and, while rarely abused on the scale of Van Hooijdonk’s one-man act of mutiny, barely a transfer window goes by without a high-profile footballer picking up a mysterious injury that excuses him from duty while any transfer negotiations are at a delicate stage. Whether fairly or not, several recent winners of the PFA Player of the Year award has been accused of that: Gareth Bale, when his move from Tottenham Hotspur to Real Madrid was dragged out over the course of the summer of 2013; Luis Suarez, when Liverpool refused to sell him to Arsenal that same summer; Riyad Mahrez, when Leicester City rejected a bid from Manchester City in January 2018; Virgil van Dijk trying and failing to engineer a transfer from Southampton to Liverpool the year before. The three who were held against their wishes — Suarez, Mahrez, Van Dijk — were all reintegrated in the short term before getting their move a little further down the line. Mahrez missed four Leicester games midway through the 2017-18 season, apparently not in the frame of mind after being denied his move, but was welcomed back unquestioningly by his team-mates and manager Claude Puel shortly after the transfer window closed. Having blown hot and cold over the remainder of the season, he got his move to Manchester City in the July. Van Dijk was a different case. Having been very public about his wish to join Liverpool, he missed Southampton’s pre-season training camp and all their warm-up games, training alone at their Staplewood base, and did not feature in their first seven games of the campaign. An ankle injury had restricted his involvement at the start of pre-season, but Mauricio Pellegrino, the coach, was unequivocal about the defender’s absence, saying, “The boy is not available to play because he wants to leave.” Van Dijk had been named team captain eight months earlier, but, after that summer of discontent, the armband went to Steven Davis, the club captain. Van Dijk’s performances in his final months at Southampton were not those of the £75 million footballer he was about to become. According to one source, there was no discernible difference in attitude or application — and, as with Mahrez, not even a hint of ill feeling from his team-mates — but there was certainly a drop in performance. According to Opta’s statistics tracking his four-and-a-half years in the Premier League, that final half-season on the south coast saw his highest rate of unsuccessful touches (one every 331 minutes, as opposed to the staggering one every 1,800 minutes this term at Liverpool) and his number of successful tackles per 90 minutes dropped from 1.9 the previous season to 0.9. Then there is Suarez, whose relationship with Brendan Rodgers and Liverpool broke down after the 2012-13 season and briefly looked irretrievable. He publicly accused the club of breaking promises by denying him a move to a club offering Champions League football. His customary zeal on the training ground was replaced by melancholy and apparent disinterest, leading Rodgers to send him to train on his own. It was Steven Gerrard who pulled his team-mate to one side and told him to forget about leaving. “Do you seriously want to go to Arsenal?” the Liverpool captain asked him. “If you sort your head out and give everything for Liverpool this season, you’ll get a move to Barcelona and Real Madrid — and I think that’s what you really want.” Once he had finished serving an FA ban for biting Chelsea’s Branislav Ivanovic, Suarez went on to perform to an extraordinary level that season, spearheading an improbable title challenge, before — just as Gerrard predicted — getting his move to Barcelona the next summer. His behaviour during three-and-a-half turbulent years at Anfield was inexcusable in certain instances, but in terms of knuckling down and getting back to business once the transfer window closed, he set perhaps the ultimate example. For James, going back to Swansea after deadline day last winter was something he was just not prepared for. Like Sanchez, he thought he had moved on to bigger and better things. He had nothing to apologise for, but his head was in a spin, even though his team-mates did what they could to help him get over the disappointment of seeing the Leeds move break down. Graham Potter, then in charge of Swansea, said he had “no concerns whatsoever” about James’s attitude. His confidence proved well-founded. If anything, he seemed inspired by what had happened on deadline day, fuelled by a desperation not to miss out on the bigger stage that had been presented to him and then taken away. He was in the shop window and, sure enough, he got his move at the end of the season — to Manchester United, not Leeds. He has barely looked back since. James Milner remembers turning up to Aston Villa’s training ground on transfer deadline day in August 2006, looking forward to joining permanently after a spell on loan from Newcastle United the previous season. He was greeted by an anxious-looking Martin O’Neill, telling him Newcastle had changed their mind and pulled the plug on the deal with just hours left before the window closed. O’Neill was apoplectic. Milner, in his own words, was raging. He had been told that morning he was free to go, but now Newcastle were saying the move was off because they had been unable to agree a deal with Middlesbrough for Mark Viduka. At Villa’s suggestion, he still underwent the medical and signed the paperwork in case the deal could be revived before the end of the evening. He then drove up from Birmingham to his parents’ house in Leeds and turned on Sky Sports in the hope of witnessing some kind of breakthrough in negotiations. “You know that feeling when you’re watching deadline day and your heart is telling you there’s still a chance a certain deal will go through but your head is telling you it’s pretty much over?” he said in his book Ask A Footballer. “Well that was me on deadline day that year.” Milner felt he was in a state of limbo when he went away with the England Under-21 team. On his return to Newcastle the following week, manager Glenn Roeder expressed pleasure at the way things had unfolded and told him he was in his plans. “That was exactly what I wanted to hear,” Milner said. “But then Saturday came and we were playing at home to Fulham and I wasn’t even on the bench. It was the angriest I’ve ever been with a manager. I went into his office and said a few things I shouldn’t have done. “I was fuming. It’s the only time I’ve been like that in my career and it was simply because it was ridiculous for them to pull the plug on the deal and then for me not even to be on the bench. “After that, I got my head down and grafted and managed to force my way back into the team. I had a good season actually and scored a few goals, but it left a sour taste and (…) it opened my eyes to certain things about the football industry. It can be ruthless and, although people talk about the players calling the shots, the reality is often the exact opposite.” Suarez, Sanchez and Diego Costa. Three South American centre-forwards with very different skillsets and personalities but bound by a certain characteristic in terms of their on-pitch attitude. Spanish speakers might call it cojones. The three of them reacted very differently when trying to engineer their exits from a leading Premier League club, though. Suarez, as stated above, knuckled down and produced the form of his life. Costa responded to Antonio Conte’s infamous text message, telling him he was no longer in Chelsea’s plans, by refusing to return to train with the reserves. Instead he exiled himself in his hometown in Brazil while waiting for Chelsea to agree a deal with Atletico Madrid, whom he joined when the transfer window re-opened a few months later. Sanchez? He struggled. He always was something of a loner at Arsenal. After the move to City fell through, he became even more distant and detached from the rest of the squad. His arm-waving histrionics on the pitch and outbursts in the dressing-room had been tolerated in previous seasons when he was playing well, but not when, in the eyes of some team-mates, his efforts left much to be desired. There were still a few goals and assists, but his performance level was erratic. His number of unsuccessful touches per 90 minutes went up from 2.6 the previous season to 3.8. Tensions came to the boil after a game at Burnley in November 2017. Sanchez scored a dramatic stoppage-time winner from the penalty spot, but several team-mates told him afterwards that his performance had been unacceptable. When he scored the first of two goals at Crystal Palace a few weeks later, some of them joined his celebrations but he appeared irked that others did not. “There is division in the team,” former Arsenal forward Thierry Henry said in the Sky Sports studio. “He’s asking them to come. Why are they not coming? Don’t they want to celebrate?” Sanchez finally departed for Manchester United — not their cross-town rivals — a few weeks later. The previous summer, as mentioned above, Arsenal had accepted a City offer of £55 million, with £5 million of potential add-ons. Now, in the final months of his contract, they were grateful just to be able to take Henrikh Mkhitaryan from United in a straight swap. From so many different perspectives, holding onto Sanchez had backfired. For all his undoubted talent, there was a collective sigh of relief from the Arsenal dressing room when he left. In his place, Arsenal welcomed Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, a player who was so determined to join them that, according to Peter Stoger, his coach at Borussia Dortmund, he had missed team meetings and “refused to run” during training sessions in his unhappy final week at the club. The Dortmund hierarchy thought about holding him against his wishes, but ended up concluding it would do more harm than good. They were probably right.

If people on here think that all of Drinkwater's wages are and were and will be paid in full by other clubs and that the board is actually handling his situ well and he wasn't an absolutely DISASTROUS buy that will end up costing us a £45-50m or so (maybe more) net loss at the end of the day, then I have some prime tropical beachfront property to sell you in a little place called the Australian Outback. The maths are not complicated, regardless of what gaslighters want you believe.

He is waiting until after Euro 2020 to decide what he will do.

Babbo, in Mayfair https://babborestaurant.co.uk/mayfair/about-2/

He is 31yo in the summer and is shit as a backup option. We are not Bournemouth or Burnley or some Championship side, which is his level now or very soon will be. If this is now the level of our ambition the bloody club needs to be sold ASAP. #losingmymind

FRANK LAMPARD ‘KEEPING AN EYE’ ON RYAN BERTRAND https://readsouthampton.com/2020/01/17/frank-lampard-keeping-an-eye-on-ryan-bertrand/ Hell no! I draw the line at this. Pretty sure this is 100% bollocks.

Frank Lampard demands Chelsea pull out all the stops to keep Willian https://www.standard.co.uk/sport/football/frank-lampard-chelsea-willian-transfer-news-a4337036.html sigh his wage demands are bonkers too we will dump another £20m or so in for two years and he will be worthless at the end of his extension (when he is turning 34)

Let's hope so. I prefer Werner (and obviously Lautaro, but he will cost £100m or so thus is out of our budget) but not at all sure we can grab Timo.