The English Football Thread

[Tomo 21,736]

3 hours ago, NikkiCFC said:

If season continues it is not good for us because Pogba, Rashford, Son, Kane will be back and that was our huge advantage. I know we also had a lot of injuries but still we look better without Kante and we have a lot of players on similar level. These 4 are 50% of their clubs.

We faced 3 of those 4 upto January and we never got below either despite spending December in relegation form.

United look on the up and a challenge regardless but Spurs are broken, Kane and Son or no.

[Jase 43,479]

 

[Vesper 29,202]

Friday April 10 2020 Football Nerd

Will teams blooding youngsters have a post-coronavirus advantage? By Daniel Zeqiri Arsenal are one of the clubs giving minutes to young players CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES Through football's coronavirus hiatus, we are committed to providing a weekly newsletter of facts, analysis and retrospectives. If there is a topic you want us to cover please email [email protected]. Above all, stay safe.     The coronavirus crisis risks draining all liquidity from football's transfer market, meaning those teams with their eye on an expansive rebuild might need to come up with contingencies. If the market is stagnant whenever the next window opens, promoting academy products to fill squad roles could be a necessity and the teams who have already started this process may have an advantage. Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal impressed this season by giving minutes to players aged 21 or younger, behind only Norwich City whose collection of talent is likely to attract admirers.     While there are always high hopes for academy players establishing themselves in the first-team, those players can also be a valuable financial resource when the market picks up again. Chelsea have been trading a vast number of players for many years, enabling them to balance the books in an era of financial fair play and fund more high-profile purchases. Liverpool also sold young talent at a hefty premium, with the sales of Jordan Ibe and Dominic Solanke to Bournemouth putting £44 million in the coffers. Norwich run the tightest ship in the Premier League, with a wage bill of just £54 million, but the loss of matchday revenue during football's suspension — and likely relegation — could mean selling the likes of Ben Godfrey, Max Aarons, Jamal Lewis or Todd Cantwell. The presence of former players Frank Lampard, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Mikel Arteta in managerial roles and the patience afford them by supporters is one factor in the proliferation of youngsters at their clubs. The dominance of Jurgen Klopp's Liverpool and Pep Guardiola's Manchester City also means there is little prospect of winning the title in the near future, so rearming for the future makes more sense. Reece James, Callum Hudson-Odoi, Billy Gilmour, Brandon Williams, Mason Greenwood, Matteo Guendouzi, Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli all have the potential to be fixtures at Chelsea, United and Arsenal for seasons to come. One intriguing aspect of the coronavirus shutdown is how an extended period without matches or collective training will affect youngsters. These are supposed to be the formative months and years of their career, when they learn the requirements of top-level football and absorb information like sponges. Just how much potential will be lost? Unlike when a young player is out injured though, rival players at their own club and elsewhere are also out of action so they are not losing ground on the competition.

[NikkiCFC 8,081]

'He blamed me for getting the sack... he said I was a white witch': Unai Emery claimed his EX-GIRLFRIEND was at fault when he lost the Arsenal job as he thought she was BAD LUCK

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-8211881/Unai-Emery-claimed-EX-GIRLFRIEND-fault-lost-Arsenal-job.html

LOOOOOL

[OneMoSalah 8,810]

3 hours ago, NikkiCFC said:

'He blamed me for getting the sack... he said I was a white witch': Unai Emery claimed his EX-GIRLFRIEND was at fault when he lost the Arsenal job as he thought she was BAD LUCK

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-8211881/Unai-Emery-claimed-EX-GIRLFRIEND-fault-lost-Arsenal-job.html

LOOOOOL

Lol someone desperate for media attention. Superb. Good to see that despite the corona virus there are still these attention seeking morons who will say anything for there 10 minutes in the spot light and even worse, get it from these newspapers. Honestly 35 years old, running off to the sun newspaper for a payout to say Unai Emery called her a white witch and blamed his sacking/poor run of results on her, holy fuck 😂

Is it really that easy to be a journalist/reporter/newspaper writer but? Just wait for a footballer or managers ex gf to come to you with a bullshit story, write it up and add in a few photos of them in a bikini, post it online, sorted. Or is there more to it? Swear thats about 75% of the news these days in the UK.

[Vesper 29,202]

‘13 years down the drain. Just like that’ — The Premier League’s forgotten kids

https://theathletic.com/1721538/2020/04/12/premier-league-manchester-united-city-academy-released/

(Main photo: the United U18 squad in July 2014. Back row (L-R): Scott McTominay, James Dunne, Cameron Borthwick-Jackson, Devonte Redmond, Charlie Scott. Middle row (L-R): Marcus Rashford, Ruairi Croskery, George Dorrington, Dean Henderson, Oliver Byrne, Jordan Thompson, Tyler Reid. Front row (L-R): Travis Johnson, Oliver Rathbone, Demitri Mitchell, Axel Tuanzebe, Joe Riley, Tosin Kehinde. Photo: John Peters/Manchester United via Getty Images)

 

Devonte Redmond will never forget the day he found out he was no longer a Manchester United player.

He was on holiday. It was the summer of 2018, Jose Mourinho’s final year at the club, and Redmond had headed to the beach on the Greek island of Kos.

“I looked at my phone,” he tells The Athletic. “All of a sudden I’d got loads of notifications on Twitter. ‘All the best’ — lots of messages like that. It was really strange. But then I saw the reason why all these messages were being sent. There was a list of all the lads that United had let go. It had been posted on Twitter and it was the official ‘retained and released’ list. And that was how I found out.”

How do you even begin to understand the shattering effects that had on a young footballer who had known virtually nothing but the United system?

Redmond was eight when he joined United’s junior ranks. He stayed with the club until the age of 21 and, though he has had nearly two years to come to terms with the rejection, there are still times when it is unmistakable sadness in his voice. Even now, with a sense of order returning to his life, it is a difficult subject. All those dreams, all those aspirations. “Thirteen years,” he says at one point, “all down the drain, just like that.”

It certainly hasn’t been easy to adjust since that day in the Mediterranean sunshine when Redmond found out United had submitted their released list to the Premier League.

“I tried not to panic at first,” he says. “I rang my dad and it was the first he had heard about it, too. ‘It’s obviously not been done in the right way,’ he said. ‘Try to keep your head.’ He’s quite a calming person, so I listened to him. I don’t think it sunk in straight away. It was later, probably after a couple of weeks, that I started to panic.”

It helped that his father, Paul Edwards, was an ex-pro who knew and understood the sport. Edwards made nearly 350 career appearances, including spells at Wrexham, Blackpool, Oldham Athletic and Port Vale, and could pass on his knowledge from nearly 20 years in the game.

But it still did not prepare Redmond for what it was like, mentally, to cope with the rejection and the long months when life felt empty and directionless.

Redmond was in the same youth team as Marcus Rashford and regarded as one of the more talented players from a crop that included Scott McTominay, Timothy Fosu-Mensah and Axel Tuanzebe. Only one, however, had found out via Twitter that he was being cut free and Redmond was so wounded by the experience that, to begin with, it was an ordeal even to watch United games on TV.

The United team before a UEFA Youth League match against Wolfsburg in 2015. Back row L-R: Ro-Shaun Williams, Devonte Redmond, Matthew Willock, Marcus Rashford, George Dorrington, Ethan Hamilton, Timothy Fosu-Mensah. Front row L-R: Tyrell Warren, Callum Gribbin, Tosin Kehinde, Axel Tuanzebe (Photo: John Peters/Manchester United via Getty Images)

 

He can remember feeling lost without the daily routine of training, the camaraderie of the dressing room and the emotions of a match-day.

Then there was the sudden realisation that he had no real life experience other than being inside “the bubble” of a Premier League club.

“I’d come from a background where football was everything,” he says. “It was everything to me when I was growing up. I was always the most enthusiastic player. I loved it. And then I was no longer part of it.

“It would always hit me when United were on television. I found it hard to watch, especially because a few of the lads from my age group were starting to break through. There was a period at the start when I used to think that could have been me, or maybe that should have been me. I was hurt.”

On some days, even the people who were closest to him found it difficult to find the right words. “Every day I was trying to stay fit, doing runs and playing football with friends. Then I’d go home. Everyone always asked how training was, but you could feel they were a bit edgy around me. They didn’t really know what to say to make it any better.”

He, in turn, did not want to show his family how much it had affected him. So he told them he was OK and that he was sure everything would work out. He did not always know if that was true, but he said it anyway. But the longer it went, the harder it became. The weeks turned into months. Christmas came and went.

“I remember going out in my car one day,” he says. “I said to my mum I was going for a drive. ‘I don’t know where,’ I said. I just wanted to drive. I set off and, all of a sudden, I found myself crying.

“It was one of the first times I’d had an outpouring of emotion like that for years. I’d been bottling everything up for so long. I’d been trying to put a brave face on everything because I’d never been in a situation like that before. I’d always been looked upon as being one of the better players in my age group. So it was hard.

James Weir, Devonte Redmond and their United team-mates, including Dean Henderson, back row centre, celebrate with the Under-21 Premier League trophy before the Premier League home match against Bournemouth in 2016 (Photo: Alex Livesey/Getty Images)

 

“Then there comes a point when you haven’t had a team for a few months and you have to think, ‘Right, what do I do now? What’s my purpose in life now?’ And that’s when you start thinking negative things. ‘I’ve got no purpose now. Are my family still proud of me?’

“When it gets to Saturday, it hits you again. You say, ‘Good luck for the match’ to your friends. But then it hits you: ‘I’m not playing, I’m not doing anything.’ My mum would always tell me that something would happen. But the phone wasn’t ringing. There was nothing going on. I had thought the transition would be easy. My dad kept telling me, ‘Don’t think it will be easy.’ But in my head, I thought it would be easy. Then after a while I started to realise, ‘Wow, this is hard.’”

What he realises now is that it hit him harder than he ever let on.

Redmond spent his first post-United pre-season at third-tier Shrewsbury Town. He trained with Dijon of Ligue 1. He knows what it is like to go on trial and be seen as ‘The lad from United who didn’t make it.’ He came to realise how, in terms of perception, that wasn’t always a good thing.

He would also find out that the skills he developed on United’s training pitches did not necessarily suit lower-league football. “If you have come through the academies at United, Man City or Liverpool, you are trained a certain way. It isn’t about long balls, or being a battering-ram up front, or running the channels. I’m not saying you can’t adapt. But a lot of managers lower down don’t have time for academy players.”

This was around the time in autumn 2018 when McTominay was establishing himself in United’s midfield. Redmond had played alongside McTominay for years and was once considered the better prospect. Now, though, they were heading in completely opposite directions.

As McTominay became a Mourinho favourite, Redmond was straying dangerously close to becoming another of football’s statistics — chewed up and spat out, with nowhere left to go.

“I had to start thinking if there was anything else I could do,” he says. “I knew that if it got past January I might be struggling because if you go a year out of the game, how do you get back in?

“I’d done business studies at college. Maybe I could have been a personal trainer or something to do with sport. I didn’t really know what I was going to do.”

---

It is a hard industry sometimes.

When Manchester United sent their list including Redmond to the Premier League, showing the eight players who had been released from Old Trafford, it also included Charlie Scott, one of their young midfielders.

Scott had established himself as a regular in United’s under-23s and, according to his profile on the club’s website, was “commanding but composed in possession” with the “attributes to become a valuable asset”.

Redmond was the year above and thought his younger colleague had a long career ahead of him. Scott, he says, was a “really good player technically”. Yet there is a misconception sometimes that when a player is dropped by an elite club there will always be another one, not too far down, who will break their fall.

Scott is 22 now and has moved home to Staffordshire. He plays for Newcastle Town, who were fourth-bottom of the Northern Premier League’s south-east division when their season was aborted after the coronavirus pandemic forced football to hit the pause button. Otherwise, he has been working on building sites in and around Stoke-on-Trent.

“He does a bit of coaching, too, and we’re very happy to have him,” Ray Tatton, Newcastle’s club secretary, tells The Athletic. “We’re his local club. He lives so close he can walk to games.”

Michael Carrick was also on that United released list from June 2018, at the end of his 19-year playing career. The others, however, were aged 19 to 21 and they have all found it a long way down.

Theo Richardson is now at eighth-tier Cleethorpes Town. Ilias Moutha-Sebtaoui plays in Luxembourg. Max Johnstone is third-choice goalkeeper for St Johnstone. Joe Riley, who was given a first-team debut by Louis van Gaal, has had two difficult years at Bradford City. Jake Kenyon, once a promising left-back, drifted out of the game. Redmond might have gone the same way if he had not been put in touch with Paul Mitten and, together, formed an action plan to reignite his career.

Mitten is another one-time United starlet and if his surname rings a bell it is because his grandfather, Charlie, played for the club in their 1948 FA Cup final win and made over 150 other appearances. His father, Charlie Jr, was on United’s books too. Football follows in the family and Paul, now 44, is a fitness coach and mentor for modern-day players who have been left, in the parlance of the sport, on the scrapheap.

His first impression of Redmond was that he was “completely lost, his world has come to an end. No direction, no focus, expecting the phone to ring but it doesn’t. It’s a horrible, horrible, lonely place. I know because that was me 20-odd years ago.”

Mitten speaks from experience after finding out, the hard way, what Alex Ferguson meant about United being a bus that waits for nobody. Mitten was 18 when he was released from Old Trafford and, by his own admission, he was not prepared for the mental devastation.

“The gaffer called me into the office,” he says. “There were two queues. One was the queue where you got a contract, the other was for the lads who didn’t. It was five minutes with the boss. He just said, ‘We don’t think you’re good enough.’ There’s no answer to that, is there? So you accept it, you pick up your boots and off you go. And you don’t get another phone call. That was the last time I heard from the club.”

As harsh as it is, Mitten can understand why football clubs are programmed this way. “I don’t blame them,” he says. “Football is brutal — one out of the door, the next one in. But they are leaving a trail of destruction behind them: broken young men, dreams shattered, weaker characters turning to gambling, booze, drugs. Then that becomes some mess.”

In his case, Mitten was a striker, or a No 10, in the team a year behind the famed Class of ’92. But he suffered a grievous setback in the form of ruptured knee ligaments — and the standard at Old Trafford was frighteningly high.

“I’d cry myself to sleep,” he says. “I felt like I’d let my parents down after they had spent years of their lives taking me everywhere. I was embarrassed. I knew old school associates would be laughing at me, I was an outcast, I didn’t belong. I was a mess.”

Mitten eventually found a way back, signing an 18-month contract at Coventry City, but his knee gave way again, six games in. It was during the long hard slog of rehabilitation that the club signed Darren Huckerby and Noel Whelan, both of whom played the same position as him.

He was placed on a month-to-month contract and two incidents in particular linger in his mind.

“They put a list of all the pros on the wall,” he says. “It was pinned up on a piece of A4 paper, numbers one to 40. It went all the way down, player by player, to 27. Then it stopped. There was a gap. And then it was me, number 40. Take that, at 20 years old.”

Later that day, the players were asked to try on their club suits. “I went in and the message was, ‘Sorry, we’ve not got one for you.’ I was still a kid. I’d never grown up because — forget the real world — all I’ve done is go from football club to football club. Those two little things probably ruined me, mentally, more than anything else.

“You’re out of football. You get a black bag, get your boots. I went to my digs, picked up my little portable television. I drove up the M6, crying my eyes out. I turned up at home and my mum and dad didn’t know why I was there. ‘I’ve been released’ — and then I’m bawling, at 20 years of age, on their sofa.”

A fortnight later, Mitten signed up with an employment agency and landed his first job out of football. “It was cutting grass at the hospital. I had a lawnmower, going up and down, and there was someone bollocking me because I hadn’t done the hedges. That was two weeks after being a professional footballer at a Premiership club.”

How long does it take to get over that kind of ordeal?

“Honestly,” he says. “I don’t think I ever did.”

---

What is it like, as a teenager, to train alongside Sergio Aguero, Kevin De Bruyne and Raheem Sterling?

Sam Tattum joined Manchester City as a 10-year-old in the year before Abu Dhabi took ownership of the club. He signed as a first-year professional eight years later — the season that would eventually lead to Pep Guardiola replacing Manuel Pellegrini as manager — and harboured his own dreams of starring in the Premier League.

“People ask me sometimes if I wish I had started from the bottom and worked my way up,” he says. “But I can’t say yes because some people will never experience what I did, being on that training ground, training with those players, in the transition of City going from being a big local club to a massive club worldwide. I’m proud of what I achieved to get a professional contract at a club that size.”

Unfortunately for Tattum, he also knows what it is like to be told, after nearly a decade in the system, that City were letting him go.

“It hits you in the stomach,” he says.

The difference, perhaps, is that City handled a difficult situation with care. Tattum has always been grateful to Simon Davies, their then academy coach, and Mark Allen, who headed the department at the time, for cushioning the blow.

“When you hear it, you still think, ‘Oh shit. Fucking hell,’ but they were just being honest. They were straight-talking and I have a lot of respect for them,” Tattum, who had won caps for Wales’ under-17 and under-19 teams, says.

“People ask me sometimes, ‘Did it break you?’ But I had to be positive. I had to think, ‘OK, it’s time to press on and maybe it’s my time to shine somewhere else.’ I wanted to prove them wrong. I expected I would find a league club and I was thinking it would be a decent level.”

A trial was arranged at Leeds United but, short of match fitness, Tattum accepted an offer to play for non-League Stalybridge Celtic at Droylsden. A bad tackle came in. His leg was broken, the ankle dislocated. “Then I was in the back of an ambulance on my way to hospital and, in the space of three months, I’d gone from Manchester City, where they had the best facilities and the best care possible, to lying in a hospital bed, still in my kit, without a club. It’s then you realise you’re on your own.”

Tattum plays now for Brattvag, in the third tier of Norwegian football, but there have been other spells at FC United of Manchester, Marine and Altrincham. And for the best part of 18 months, trying to get back to fitness, his career in football was a whirl of uncertainty.

There were trials at Macclesfield and Gateshead when, by his own admission, he came up short. “I’d never played men’s football before,” he says. “I was coming back from 12 months on a sofa and trying to play men’s football for the first time. Physically, I was nowhere near.”

As Guardiola set about turning City into record-breaking Premier League champions, Tattum had to reassess his life. He started looking for other bits of work. He did some football coaching for kids of primary school age and, for a while, he thought about getting an office job. But it was a scary thought. “I knew as soon as I did that, nine to five, Monday to Friday, that would have been it for me and football. And I wasn’t ready to give football up.”

Instead, he teamed up with Mitten to build his fitness. Then he left his home in Salford and, at the age of 23, relocated to Scandinavia in the hope that he can still make a career in the sport that has shaped his life.

Mentally, he has had to be strong.

First, he spent 10 days at Ostersunds in Sweden. After that, it was Hodd in Norway. But now he is in Brattvag, a seaside village of 2,400 people in the Alesund municipality, 350 miles north-west of Oslo. Their league season was supposed to begin on Monday but it has been put back because of the coronavirus crisis.

And, though the air is fresh and the mountain views spectacular, it is not where Tattum saw himself when he was measuring up against Aguero, De Bruyne and the rest of City’s A-listers.

---

“It’s quite sad because there is no real support network,” Devonte Redmond says. “A lot of lads can go astray.”

Older, wiser, Redmond has learned a lot about himself, and the football industry as a whole, in the last two years.

Salford City, then of the National League, offered him the first route back, seven months after his release from Old Trafford. He started 11 league games last season and played the full 90 minutes as they beat Fylde at Wembley to win promotion to the Football League. “It has made me realise there are other pathways,” he says. “It wasn’t meant to be at United. I gave my all. Then I worked to get out of that hole and I got back in.”

Redmond signed for Wrexham, again in the National League, in the summer and, to be absolutely clear, he holds no grudge against United. His social-media feeds are filled with positive messages about the club where he spent 13 years. They are still his club, as a United fan, and he knows they would not usually release a player without breaking the news personally.

“At the time, they were going through a transition,” Redmond says. “It’s better now. They have a better loan system, they have a loan manager who can help the lads. There is more communication. It just felt, at that time, like there was no communication. It was always: who do you go to? There was no one person who made a decision. It was a bit all over the place.

“Until then, it was really enjoyable. It was like a family club. But it changed when Jose Mourinho came in. It went from being a family club to something else. Suddenly it was the first team, the reserve players and the academy. All separate. It wasn’t as integrated. It was structured more in a way that the first team were always by themselves.”

Redmond has also had to be mentally tough.

“He never once missed a session with me,” Paul Mitten says of their fitness regime. “He never kept anything back. Eyeballs out when I asked him to dig in and see what it’s like in that dark place. What a kid. We put a plan together: get fit to do yourself justice, get mentally ready, get an opportunity, grasp it.”

But what about all the other young footballers who have gone all the way through academies only to have their dreams snatched away?

Mitten’s organisation, Revive Player Care, is supported by Karl Brown, who was part of the Class of ’92 but torpedoed from the team of David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt, Gary Neville and brother Phil because of a series of major injuries that led to him being released and sinking into depression. He, too, can remember what it was like to feel “lost and isolated” and so damaged psychologically that for a long time he could not even watch football.

“I was in a team with some of the most successful players of the last 30 years,” Brown says. “Leaving was the hardest thing I have ever done. The club was my home. I was left with no job, no real life skills and no sporting career. I also lost most of my friends. They were off, soaring to success and I felt left behind. My life, as I had known it through all of my teenage years, had ended.”

Brown returned to football after 18 years out of the game to go into coaching. He was taken on by United in 2014 and has worked in their academy ever since. “I felt I could offer players first-hand advice and support, along with developing them as footballers,” he says. “I never wanted another player to feel the way I had felt.”

Mitten has helped Callum Gribbin, once one of United’s more highly-rated youngsters, to refocus after being released last year. Gribbin is now at Sheffield United and, at the age of 21, still has time to turn his career around.

Further down the football pyramid, another example comes in the form of Max McGreal, formerly of Rochdale’s academy.

McGreal is one of hundreds of youngsters, thousands even, who are let go every year. He, like many, felt he was treated badly. He started to drift and go out drinking when ordinarily he would be preparing for games. Now, though, he has knuckled down under Mitten’s guidance. McGreal has started playing for 10th tier Stockport Town and says he is enjoying football again.

But it is still a drop in the ocean when, as Brown says, there are footballers being “discarded daily”.

For many, the added problem is they have been so fixated on the idea of becoming footballers they have not taken their education as seriously as they should.

Mentally, it is harder than ever to cope when many have been attached to clubs from the ages of six or seven — not 14 to 16, as it used to be — and it is all they really know. And, though nobody wants to be too alarmist, there are qualified people who genuinely fear that football needs to wake up to this problem, belatedly, and remember the tragedy of Josh Lyons at Tottenham Hotspur.

Lyons was released from Tottenham’s youth system, aged 16, and spiralled into depression before committing suicide ten years later. At the 2013 inquest, the coroner, Dr Karen Henderson, criticised the sport for not doing more to support young footballers. “It is very difficult to build up the hopes of a young man only then to have them dashed at a young age,” she said. “It is very cruel. I find there was an absence and lack of support in football.”

Many in the sport still do not think the authorities — the Premier League, the EFL, the Professional Footballers’ Association — do enough on this front.

One suggestion is that clubs should provide parachute payments to any academy graduate who is released or that, as part of their contracts, a top-up fund should go into a pool that can be used, if necessary, as player-care packages for education and fitness programmes.

But then again, there still appears to be an attitude among some clubs that, once that player is gone, it is somebody else’s problem.

“Too many amazing players are ignored and just disappear,” Mitten says.

He, after all, knows what it is like to be sold the dream then churned out with no aftercare or direction.

“It took years to pick myself back up after so many people had forgotten me,” he says. “Did I get any support? Zero. And guess what? Twenty years later nothing has changed.”

[Vesper 29,202]

Only pen he ever missed (49 career attempts)

a bit late with the post, lolol

 

[Vesper 29,202]

LATEST UPDATES 

Sports news LIVE: Newcastle United takeover DONE, no full football stadiums for 18 months, SPFL announce end to Scottish Championship, League One and League Two season

https://talksport.com/football/680697/sports-news-football-newcastle-takeover-football-stadiums-spfl/

Headlines:

Newcastle United’s £300m takeover ‘very close’ and just waiting on Premier League approval, says talkSPORT’s Jim White
Premier League stadiums may not be back to full capacity for another 18 months, medical expert claims
Jurgen Klopp and Jordan Henderson deliver tributes to 96 Liverpool fans who tragically died at Hillsborough on 31st anniversary
Dana White says UFC APEX could host fights by May
Jimmy Greaves: Tottenham and England legend returns home after a week in hospital with ill health
Bournemouth become latest Premier League club to reverse decision to furlough staff after ‘listening to supporters’
Graeme Souness tells Paul Pogba to ‘put his medals on the table’ after Manchester United ace said he ‘didn’t even know who he was

 

[Fulham Broadway 16,977]

Barcodes could become the next Man City with a Saudi led consortium as owners, and doubtless a big spending spree coming.....

[MoroccanBlue 5,320]

Looking at restarting the league mid June or early July. Matches to be played behind closed doors. 
 

Going to be so weird. 

[NikkiCFC 8,081]

‘End Premier League season by July 1 or it will be chaos’

Majority of clubs ready to halt Premier League

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/sport/half-of-premier-league-clubs-are-pushing-for-july-1-finish-to-season-0smzk7v9d?wgu=270525_54264_15870524165066_0f457fc5cb&wgexpiry=1594828416&utm_source=planit&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_content=22278

Will clubs vote? FA cannot make any decision without government and clubs. 

I can see why majority of clubs would be happy with null and void scenario.

All mid table teams will outvote Liverpool and teams in relegation battle...

[Fernando 6,502]

Exactly,. because of the contracts is best to finish the season before July 1st. 

If you can't do it is best to finish the season and let contracts run like normal. 

[Fulham Broadway 16,977]

Norman Hunter and Frannie Lee having a disagreement

 

[Laylabelle 9,406]

Premier League clubs remain committed to playing the 92 remaining fixtures of the current season but did not discuss a deadline by which play must resume at a meeting on Friday.

Clubs were expected to debate a 30 June deadline to end the season but instead discussed "possible scheduling models".

The Premier League said it "remains our objective" to complete matches but currently "all dates are tentative".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/52326617

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Friday April 17 2020 Football Nerd

Were Leicester really the best Premier League team in 2015-16? By Daniel Zeqiri Leicester pulled off one of the great shocks in sporting history CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES Through football's coronavirus hiatus, we are committed to providing a weekly newsletter of facts, analysis and retrospectives. If there is a topic you want us to cover please email [email protected]. Above all, stay safe.     The league table never lies. It is one of football's oldest adages that we have all parroted when listening to another fan's hard luck story about their team's season. Except, it is not really true. We know this instinctively at the end of August, when a three-game sample size and the vagaries of the fixture list render it meaningless. Yet even across a 38-game sample, relatively small compared with the historical span of the game and our football watching lives, there is room for variance and unpredictable outcomes. Leicester's Premier League title win at 5,000-1 was certainly one of those, and a look back at the numbers from the 2015-16 season hammer home what an against-all-odds achievement it was (with apologies to the Phil Collins averse among you). Claudio Ranieri's team had the second-best attack in the Premier League with an Expected Goals tally of 69.31, only slightly more than the 68 they actually scored through Riyad Mahrez and Jamie Vardy shredding teams on the counter-attack. However, according to xG their defence was only the eighth best in the league - allowing 46.10 xG against but only conceding 36 - giving them an xG difference of +23.21. Expected Goal difference is just one imperfect measure of a team's abilities, but does offer a strong impression of which teams are striking a balance between defence and attack: creating a healthy volume of chances and not exposing themselves at the other end. According to this measure, Leicester were the fourth-best team in the league in 2015-16 as the below graphic demonstrates. Premier League table 2015-15 based on xG difference:     The disparity between the metrics and Leicester's 81-point championship-winning season is due to their defensive overperformance, conceding 10 fewer goals than the data 'expected' them to. A confluence of factors can explain this: good fortune; poor opposition finishing; some outstanding goalkeeping by Kaspar Schmeichel. It may also have been a consequence of their deep-lying defensive strategy. Teams who cede possession and look to soak up pressure tend to concede more shots than those seeking to dominate territory higher up the pitch. The cumulative effect of conceding a higher volume of shots can sometimes inflate a team's xG against figure. The number of bodies barricading a striker's path to goal are not always considered in xG models. When defenders of Wes Morgan and Robert Huth's frame are throwing themselves in front of shots and making last-ditch blocks, good chances can become average ones. What cannot be disputed is that Arsenal and Arsene Wenger have reason to sorely regret the 2015-16 campaign. According to xG, they had both the best attack and the best defence in the division albeit in a year when Chelsea, Manchester United and Manchester City all fell below expectations. How different things may have been had Arsenal signed an outfield player in the summer transfer window, Santi Cazorla not torn his knee ligaments in the autumn or striker Olivier Giroud not gone on a 15-game scoring drought after January. Arsenal underperformed their xG in attack by a shade more than five goals that season. Elsewhere, the value of using data to make predictions about future performance is clearly demonstrated. Although Manchester United finished fifth and won the FA Cup, their miserable xG difference of +4.53 shows they were right to part ways with Louis van Gaal. West Ham challenged for the Champions League places with Dimitri Payet producing several goal of the season contenders, but were ninth on xG difference and over-performed in attack by a full 10 goals. Their numbers were more akin to a mid-table team, and despite hubristic talk of challenging for Europe at the London Stadium the following season, they finished 11th. Sunderland produced another great escape, but according to xG had the most porous defence in the league and xG difference placed them 19th. Their luck would finally run out the following season when they were relegated. Chelsea and Liverpool both sacked managers during the 2015-16 season, but the data suggested they were not as bad as their league finishes of 10th and 8th suggested. Based on xG difference, Liverpool were a comfortable fifth with +14.49 and Chelsea clawed their way back from a disastrous start under Jose Mourinho to be sixth. Jurgen Klopp would use this season as the foundation for reaching the Champions League places the following season, when Chelsea won the title under Antonio Conte.

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Like a bunch of drunks dancing on a stag do – the Premier League’s ‘pub team’

https://theathletic.com/1751277/2020/04/17/leicester-premier-league-pub-team-memories/

The 50,000 plus Manchester United fans inside Old Trafford must have looked on in bewilderment as Leicester City warmed up.

In front of them was what looked like a rag-tag team conducting their own spontaneous warm-up without any coaching staff in sight and looking like a bunch of drunks dancing on a stag do. This would surely be easy meat for their star-studded side, who were being put through their own coordinated and professional-looking preparations.

And as David Beckham, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and the rest of the Class of ’92 looked over at the shenanigans of their opposition, they too must have thought they would make light work of Martin O’Neill’s side.

“Honestly, it was the most shambolic warm-up you have ever seen in your life,” recalls striker Tony Cottee of that Premier League game in January 1998. “There were balls going everywhere.

“We made a little circle where everyone was allowed to do a little warm-up dance. Matt Elliott did this dance like Baloo the Bear from Jungle Book, Muzzy [Izzet]was doing The Worm. Honestly, if you had seen us you would have said we were a non-League ‘pub team’, turning up to get walloped at Old Trafford. But we had so much fun in the warm-up that by the time we had Martin’s motivational speech, we were ready to go out and perform.”

“It was instigated by [midfielder] Garry Parker,” former Leicester captain Elliott explains. “We would get in the circle and then we would all do a stupid dance. Muzzy would do the caterpillar, ‘Parkes’ would do the Moonwalk. I would do this stupid dance where you lean forward and kick your legs up at the back, a bit like Baloo.

“Parkes used to call me that [Baloo]. If we had a practise match at training and I would go and get the ball off the keeper and start sauntering out from the back with it, because I had some space, he would be shouting, ‘Here comes Baloo Bear,’ because I had a big arse and legs.

“The Manchester United players and fans would have been looking at us thinking, ‘What are these idiots doing?’ The next minute one of their balls came near us as we were doing the warm-up and it was Gary Pallister, who knew Parkes a bit. He shouted, ‘Garry, kick the ball back, will you?’ Parkes told him to fuck off and get it himself. We all went, ‘Wahey! Go on, Parkesy!’”

“We would do this Turkish or Russian dance, where you squat down and kick your legs out,” adds midfielder Izzet. “I remember it started at Old Trafford. It relaxed us and the spirit was there. We would do spontaneous things and Martin liked it. Steve [Walford, the assistant manager] as well. That was why they were such a great partnership.”

Leicester went out and beat then-champions Manchester United 1-0 – which remains their only win at Old Trafford since 1973 – with Cottee scoring the goal, and the strange pre-match routine, which may had fed some complacency within the United ranks, became a regular occurrence, adding to the mystique of O’Neill’s uncouth and unfashionable battlers.

They were dubbed “The best pub team in the country”, a reputation that was fostered by O’Neill himself and relished by his players as they finished in the top 10 of the Premiership in four consecutive seasons from 1997-2000.

“We revelled in that,” Cottee says. “That tag of us being a pub team may have even come from Martin O’Neill himself. He may have said that. We deserved to win that game and we played on that tag. It wasn’t an issue for us. We knew on our day we had good players and could potentially beat anyone. There were some great teams in that era with Arsenal and Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and Spurs. It was hard to get results in the Premier League so for us to finish four years on the trot in the top 10 was a great achievement.

“It was, in its own way, as good an achievement as winning the cup and getting to cup finals.”

It wasn’t just the warm-ups that earned Leicester the “pub team” tag, it was also the fact that O’Neill had built a side with players signed from the lower leagues, like Elliott from Oxford United, Gerry Taggart from Barnsley, Neil Lennon and Robbie Savage, both from Crewe Alexandra, plus raw youth including the home-grown Emile Heskey and Izzet, who couldn’t break through at Chelsea, mixed with players who were considered washed up, like Cottee, who was 32 when he joined and had been playing in Malaysia.

A more eclectic mix of players you could not find in the Premier League, but it was all part of O’Neill’s plan and formed the identity of a side that remains embedded in Leicester City folklore.

“First and foremost, we had an outstanding manager, a man who motivated the players,” Cottee adds. “He had a great eye to attract players to the club other teams didn’t want. I was an example. I was stuck out in Malaysia and no one wanted me. Martin took a chance.

“These players were really good players but they just needed a manager who believed in them and gave them a license to perform. The manager was inspirational in most of what went on.

“Having said that, we had a good bunch of players and if you look back now it was, pretty much, a team of internationals. If you look at the players who weren’t internationals, like Steve Walsh for example, he was club captain and a fantastic player. Ian Marshall was another underrated player. Steve Claridge scored hundreds of goals in lower-league football and was now getting his chance in the Premier League. The management recruited really well.”

Goalkeeper Kasey Keller became one of the first Americans to play in the Premier League when he was recruited from Millwall. He believes the secret to O’Neill’s success with Leicester was the simplicity of his recruitment philosophy.

“He was brilliant at finding a way to play that suited the players in his side,” Keller tells The Athletic. “Then he would buy someone who would fit into that system and play the way they play in that position, which fits the overall tactics of the side.

“I have heard managers say to someone they want them to play with their back to goal, when the player is 30 years old and never played that way in his life. Wouldn’t it be easier just to bring in someone who naturally plays that way? That’s what Martin did. That is where he was truly at his best — finding a player who could fit perfectly into that side, playing the way he liked to play.”

The game plan was simplistic too. O’Neill would give his teams clear instructions on how he wanted them to play and while it may not have been the most attractive style, with Arsenal counterpart Arsene Wenger amongst their biggest detractors, it was effective.

Famously, O’Neill would tell the other players not to pass to Savage, as his role was to be combative and feed the ball to playmaker Izzet, and Keller remembers being given strict instructions not to play out from the back as well, as is the modern trend.

“We were away at Tottenham in the first season I was there [1996-97],” Keller recalls. “Neil Lewis came in at left-back because of injuries and Martin told me specifically in front of the whole team, ‘I don’t care if he is 30 yards open, you don’t throw him the ball.’ He was adamant.

“We were 1-0 up and in time added time before the break I had the ball in my hands. Neil was open by about 50 yards. Walshy looks at me and says, ‘Roll him the ball.’

“I was like, ‘No.’

“‘Roll it out.’

“‘No.’

“Walshy is like, ‘Come on!’, so I rolled Neil the ball.

“He dribbled about 20 yards and tries to nutmeg the Spurs player closing him down. He lost the ball and they nearly scored. I knew what was coming, and so did Walshy, who was apologising to me as we walked off.

“Martin starts going off on one at half-time. He says, ‘I know he was 30 or 40 yards open but I don’t care if he is 60 yards open. You do not pass him the ball.’ I think Neil hardly played for the club again but I am sure he was told many times what to do. ‘You shouldn’t be dribbling in these areas and trying to do these things.’ It is the reason why he didn’t play again. If you know what your strengths and weaknesses are and everyone on your team plays to those, you have a very good opportunity of doing what we did. That was some of the real reasons for our success.”

Izzet stood out as the most naturally gifted player in O’Neill’s side, a player who would have been a huge hit in the modern era where the focus is on the technical side of the game. He laments the lack of diversity in the playing styles of Premier League sides.

“I look at football now and everyone is playing the same,” Izzet says. “It is crying out for a team like Leicester, Wimbledon or Stoke City. It would cause modern teams all sorts of problems.

“No one seems to be playing those styles. Everyone seems to have to play the Pep Guardiola way or whatever. It was interesting when Wimbledon played Manchester United or we played Liverpool because we weren’t as good technically, so you had to think about another way to beat them.

“Everyone now is jumping on the technical bandwagon. Managers like Martin, Sam Allardyce or Tony Pulis won’t get a job now because they are not seen to play a certain way. It is a shame. They are even looking at Jose Mourinho now and saying he is old-school. Blimey, if he is old-school, what chance have we got? It is crazy how it has gone.”

While the technical abilities of O’Neill’s Leicester were far greater than they were given credit for, the “best pub team in the country” possessed a commodity even the technically gifted sides of the modern era cannot be successful without. It was their true strength and the source of their relative success.

“We had was a fantastic team spirit,” says Cottee. “There is a lot to be said for what goes on in the modern game but the one thing that doesn’t change is if you don’t have a good team spirit and get on, if you don’t have a joke and a laugh with your team-mates, then you are not going win anything as a team.

“All the best teams have a great team spirit and we certainly did.”

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Who should be the Premier League’s Young Player of the Year?

https://theathletic.com/1745237/2020/04/18/premier-league-young-player-of-the-year/

We asked five of our writers to nominate five different players as the Premier League’s Young Player of the Year. We will reveal our shortlist next week but here is some inspiration in the meantime of possible candidates. Players have to be below 24 years of age at the start of the season.

Plenty of them wanted to write about Trent Alexander-Arnold, but where would the fun be in that?

Here are their picks…

Wilfred Ndidi (Leicester City)

It takes a special type of holding midfielder to play behind an attack-minded duo like James Maddison and Youri Tielemans, but Ndidi has performed that role excellently throughout a fine 2019-20 campaign.

On first viewing, he feels like a simple, disciplined defensive midfielder capable of protecting his centre-backs with solid positioning and energetic ball-winning. And that does remain Ndidi’s primary task.

The more you watch him though, the more you realise Ndidi has more to his game. There was his sudden dribble forward in the memorable 2-1 late win against Everton, which led to Jamie Vardy’s equaliser. There was also a fine headed equaliser from a corner away at Chelsea.

Ndidi is more than a pure holding midfielder: he’s comfortable in possession and happy to push forward and join attacks, while his ball-winning isn’t limited to deep midfield positions — he can go searching for the ball high up, helping Leicester press in advanced positions. He’s an intelligent player who reads the game well — perhaps not surprising for a footballer who spends his spare time studying for a degree in Business and Management at De Montfort University.

His performances in a 2-0 home victory over Arsenal, and in 5-0 and 3-0 wins over Newcastle stand out as particularly impressive. A knee injury means Ndidi hasn’t played regularly since the turn of the year, but his performances in the first half of the campaign means the 23-year-old deserves to be recognised as among the best players in his position.

Michael Cox

Jack Grealish (Aston Villa)

There are probably a dozen stats that underline how important Grealish has been to Villa this season. He has scored more goals, had more touches, created more chances, completed more dribbles, won more fouls and made more successful passes than any of his team-mates.

He is streets ahead in pretty much every one of those categories, too, to the extent that the rest of the squad couldn’t really have any complaints if Villa’s badge was simply replaced with a stylised cartoon of his face. This is the house that Jack built; the rest of them are just living in it.

But really, the raw numbers are not necessary — perhaps not even that useful — when it comes to appreciating Grealish’s sui generis excellence. He is a player who elicits feelings, properly tugs at the heartstrings. Not because he’s some brave hero archetype, but because he’s just so bloody cool.

Grealish wears his socks around his ankles, daring you to hurt him. His shinpads aren’t worthy of the name, and he sometimes wears boots that are literally falling apart. His haircut is objectively stupid, but his commitment to it is admirable, even charming. I would happily follow his disembodied calves into a war zone without a second’s thought. We saw hints of all this in his previous stints in the top flight, but Grealish is now fully realised as a concept, irreversibly himself. The Premier League is a much better place for his presence.

Above all, Grealish is simply a study in frictionless grace, a thousand No 10 fantasies made flesh. He floats around, reorganising the game on the fly. He runs at people. He is raffish, happy to try things others won’t. He strikes the ball with outlaw glee. He is two-footed, patient and very, very clever. He is brilliant fun to watch and has been all season long, even when playing out of position in a team with all the menace of a candy-floss cutlass.

Villa don’t deserve him, but maybe none of us do.

Jack Lang

Trent Alexander-Arnold (Liverpool)

As it says on the mural at the corner of Sybil Road, a block away from Anfield, Trent Alexander-Arnold is “just a normal lad from Liverpool whose dream has just come true.”

Those were the words he uttered, breathlessly, after Liverpool won the Champions League final last June. He was a Champions League winner at the age of 20. Where could he go from there?

Well, to Alexander-Arnold’s best season yet. His crossing ability has been clear from the moment he first broke into Liverpool’s first team, but his influence has grown to an extraordinary degree. It is not just his delivery from the right-hand side. It is the way that, as he explained to The Athletic earlier this season, he has learned to dictate matches from right-back.

His contribution is most commonly measured by his number of direct assists for goals. There were 12 of them in the Premier League last season — other than team-mate Andy Robertson, the next-highest total from a defender was six — and he had already equalled that total when 2019-20 was suspended with nine games still to play. Next highest by defenders? Robertson’s seven, then Everton’s Lucas Digne with five.

A debate persists over whether, in time, he might revert to the midfield role he occupied when he was coming up through the academy ranks. But, as Jurgen Klopp’s assistant manager Pep Lijnders suggests, “he plays as a playmaker on the right. He plays like a central midfielder there, how he puts passes.”

For all Liverpool’s dominance in this season’s Premier League, there have been many matches when they have found themselves needing to find another gear, another angle, another dimension to their play. Whether it is a pinpoint set-piece delivery, a menacing cross on the counter-attack or one of those probing crossfield passes, Alexander-Arnold has consistently come up with answers.

On top of all that, he has remained humble. He speaks with a maturity that has led many to propose him as a future captain of club and country. He’s still just a normal lad from Liverpool whose dreams keep coming true.

Oliver Kay

Adama Traore (Wolverhampton Wanderers)

Traore only just sneaks into this category, mindful that he turned 24 in January. If it was a race, he’d have been first through the door by a distance. The boy they nicknamed ‘Usain Bolt’ at Barcelona’s La Masia academy, where he signed as an eight-year-old and went on to make four first-team appearances, has come of age this season in the old gold of Wolves.

The physical attributes — blistering pace and extraordinary power — were always there. But now there are numbers too — and numbers that matter. Seven assists (only Kevin De Bruyne, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Riyad Mahrez have more in this season’s Premier League) and four goals from 28 top-flight appearances, 22 of them starts — an impressive return for a winger who has been turned into a wing-back.

Traore’s progress over the nine months before football pressed pause had been startling. That rawness — there were times last season when you sensed he knew as much as you about what he was going to do next when he set off on another burst down the right — has been refined. There are brains to go with the brawn and, in football parlance, end product. Traore has attempted more than 200 dribbles and seven out of every 10 (69.6 per cent) are completed. The defensive side of his game has improved markedly too, all of which is testament to Nuno Espirito Santo’s coaching.

The sense of trepidation among opponents is almost tangible when Traore comes into view. By the middle of December, an incredible 24 players had been booked for fouling him. It is almost the only way that people can stop a player who would walk/run into any Premier League squad in the country right now.

“Unplayable” was the word that Jurgen Klopp used to describe Traore after Liverpool’s game at Molineux in January. “What a player — it’s not only him [at Wolves] but he’s so good.”

Stuart James

Daniel James (Manchester United)

On numbers alone, Daniel James does not have a compelling case to be the best player in the Premier League aged 24 or below this season. Yet I often feel this award should be recalibrated to champion breakthrough talents or chart rapid individual development in players, rather than provide further cause for celebration in those players capable of winning the grander individual prize. James’ growth has been clear, particularly when we consider that he was nearly sent out on loan to Yeovil — then of League Two — by Swansea City only a year before joining Manchester United in the summer of 2019. His playing style and personality also offer a signpost for what Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s United could and should resemble in happier times ahead.

James’ progression is particularly evocative when set against the heartache of his father’s passing shortly before he signed for Manchester United in the summer of 2019. Yet James made a blistering start to life at Old Trafford and his emotions were encapsulated by the celebration that marked his first goal for the club in the 4-0 debut victory over Chelsea. James scored three goals in August alone and remained a significant threat in the autumn, even if the goals dried up.

Indeed, his fourth goal of the season came in United’s final match before lockdown against LASK and there were certainly stages of the campaign where it appeared Solskjaer had over-burdened James, who at times looked fatigued both mentally and physically. This, I would argue, was not the fault of the player himself but of United’s haphazard recruitment policy, which left young players such as James and Marcus Rashford carrying United’s efforts on four fronts until reinforcements arrived in January.

James has room for improvement, particularly in his final ball against lesser opposition, but his raw pace and devil on the counter was central to United’s two outstanding home performances of the Premier League campaign against Liverpool and Manchester City, while his diligence and ball-carrying quality carried United to two away victories at Chelsea (one in the Premier League and one in the Carabao Cup) and particularly the league win at City’s own ground. Should United qualify for the Champions League, his speed and direct play will terrify Europe’s finest defences.

James’ season has not been perfect but his hunger, desire and appreciation for life at United has been sharply at odds with several of the expensive disappointments of recent years and his style will be essential to the development of this United team in the coming years; high-octane, playing with a smile, he gets you off your seat and he is capable of dazzling quality. James offers a reassuring reminder of how Manchester United are supposed to approach the game.

Adam Crafton

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Daniel James on there is a joke, and Grealish turns 25 in September, so it is a stretch to call him a 'young' player IMHO.

I would have had Marcus Rashford (21/22 this season) and either James Maddison (22/23) or Richarlison (22, turns 23 in May)

 

Honourable mention (no order)

Tammy
Reece
Rodri
Declan Rice
Youri Tielemans
Gabriel Jesus
Rúben Neves    
Caglar Söyüncü    
Ismaïla Sarr
Diogo Jota