Good morning.
I like Danny Kelly. I think the watershed moment that turned my head was THIS. And this morning he demonstrated his unerring ability to do his job well rather than just regurgitate all the usual…
Would you swap Torres for Modders?
The addition of Adebayor I am convinced will ultimately proved to be an inspired move. Is he the world’s greatest striker? Well perhaps not as we speak. But he’s a player that evidently thrives on being given a new lease of life. Imagine a scenario were another household name were to join him.
Torres against the immediate and perhaps somewhat harrowing backdrop of his Liverpool form had a good spell one season and then went right off the boil. His £50M price tag requires not a pinch of salt but the complete suspension of ones disbelief. The figure reflected the buyers ambition, not the market value of the product.
Modric we know and indeed must accept is – barring an act of God – or a treble winning season, not stopping long. And so of all the guff that the transfer rumour mongers generate, this concoction might not have legs, but it’s difficult to deny it has a pretty face.
I know some reading this will be unthinkingly dismissive. Buy I tell you this. If you want to predict the future just think up that which is seemingly crazy today. Garages selling ice cold beers, Adebayor and Gallas in Tottenham shirts…
BIOYC!
Torres had one good season? Correction….Season #2: 14 goals in 24 games, Season #3: 18 goals in 22. Season #4: YES TERRIBLE…
Errr in a word NO! Torres wouldnt get in our team at the moment, Crouch was showing better form.
Modric is worth more by miles and Chelsea know it.
I’d rather take Crouch back than see Torres in a lilywhite shirt.
I’d rather take Rebrov back than see Crouch in a lilywhite shirt.
I’ve got Andy Booth on Line 5.
I’d rather take my ex wife back than have that gormless prick stumble his way around The Lane again.
id rather give tmwnn’s wife back than have him at the lane again
Was going to say that, but I didn’t fancy another falling out-feinights
Tmwnn’s ex-wife says she’s going nowhere.
Modric does need to be careful what he wishes for. Players like him get squashed at Chelsea – the “nice guy” types. Deco….Scott Parker…Wright-Phillips…Modric…. Even Ballack got messed about there.
Well I am looking forward to a gloomy week.
HR seems unfazed at the fact that Gomes wants to leave in the next window, though I personally feel the HR’s tactics have let Gomes down badly.
The there is VDV who is annoyed at HR for having excluded him from the EL squad.
Next we have HR talking about Lucre’s new contract. If that fails to materialise. If that fails to materialise, we will have another outbusrst from Lucre along the lines of “the chairman promised….”
On Thursday we go to Salonika , where we will probably get slaughtered. HR has already announced that he will be resting many of the players that played against Stoke, in order to save them for the Liverpool game, and in fairnesss to HR, he does have an injury crisis. However, it is more than foreseeable that come December, we might not look anything like challengers for 4th place, be out of the Carling Cup, face a tough draw in the 3rd round of the FA cup, and fail to qualify for the last 32 of the EL, so effectively our season might end in Jan. Then we will have to put up with four months of post-mortems while we then whinge our way through another transfer window.
In case I was asleep at the time, can someone remind when we became too big to win Europe’s second most important club competition?
Then on Sunday, it’s the annual visit from the bindippers. Now to me, this might well be the defining match of our season. First of all, we have finished ahead of them for the past two seasons, and the last two CL spots are supposed to be between Arse/Cheats/Scousers and us. A good/poor performance is likely to indicate whether we should be trying to win the EL. With VDV back for this game, we will also see whether he will be used in a 4-4-2 (or variant) or whether we will see more of the 4-5-1 that was hardly a roaring success in terms of goals produced last season though it does work well with two DM’s
As I said, I am expecting a gloomy week. Would be nice to be wrong though.
Blinking flip…you need to cheer up… We are not too big for the Europa league, but it is the group stages. You can afford to get beat, and go through. Getting beat 4-0 or 1-0 doesn’t make much of a difference. As long as we win the games we should – i.e the home games, then we should go through. If indeed we do go out of the cups, and finish 4th-6th, then mission still accomplished – which is to maintain top 5/6 presence until a bigger stadium enables us to compete more financially with the others in the top 6.
And of course you miss the most important part – that competing in the Europa League must not in any way interfere with us finishing top 5. What would you rather do? Finish 6th/7th and win Europa OR finish 4th/5th with no trophy? The latter for me. No big foreign player wants to join 6th/7th unless you are Liverpool/Man U/Arsenal – “bigger teams”. We have to make ourselves “big” by finishing as high as possible. And no, the Europa league does not do that…
I have raised this point before, and I will raise it again, for the best part of 15 years, not being in the EL or it’s equivalent hardly helped us to qualify for the CL. We qualify for the CL once in 20 years, and all of a sudden being in the EL is going to ruin our chances of being perpetual CL candidates. The fact that in financial terms, there are five other teams that can “drink us under the table” financially is something that everybody who uses this argument seems to forget.
At present, we are the highest ranked team in the EL, so on paper we are capable of winning this, There are two definite points in having a good run in this comp. The first is that a good run can bring in £20 mill. That would allow us to broaden the wage structure which seems to be our main stumbling block to bringing in the biggest names. The second is that if we do qualify for the CL again next year, a poor run in the EL will deplete our ranking points meaning that if we get to next year’s group stages, we will probably be third seeds again.
One other point to bear in mind is that we have a unique sponsorship deal with Investec that pays £5 mill a year to sponsor our “cup” shirt. If I was Investec, knowing that we are going to be fielding sub-par teams in cup comps, why would I want to chip in £5mill pa. As I understand it, that is what we are paying Ade.
Bloody hell that was a depressing post!! You didn’t have Coldplay on in the background when you wrote it did you?
My fear is that we will probably play 4-5-1 again this season, though Ade will do a better job as the lone striker that 3MP ever could, but again it will not work.
So it comes down to this, by the time Jan comes around, we could, be out of most cup comps and trailing 4th place by 8 points. Or we can rotate our midfield, play 4-4-2 and possibly be challenging for 3rd and have a decent cup run or two. That is the time to decide to focus on the CL place, not at the start of a season which still has 35 games to run where we haven’t even been able to assess the relative strengths of both us and our opponents.
Do we really want to be closing our options down so early in the season, especially when most of us are highly critical of HR’s tactical nous?
It’s realistic, and the point of the matter is even with a super stadium, packed out to the rafters and increasing our revenue, we still couldn’t complete with City or Chelsea, we’d be better served hiring a hit-man and funding a coup in the middle east, far cheaper and more effective, perhaps the Goons would like to go halves?
At last, someone who understands me.
One other point that needs to be mentioned about us concentrating on the CL, we have something like 4 wins from our last sixteen league games. That is not CL form, that is relegation form, and we have averaged something like a point a game from these games.
Based on this, I fear that if we continue to play the failed 4-5-1, those of us who are saying we need to concentrate on the CL, might well be living in a fools paradise, because we might need to concentrate on the PL to avoid relegation.
Leave it out, old Arsene wouldn’t shell out the cash for the hitman!!
EDIT – Unless he was a young Frenchman of course.
But he wouldn’t have to see it, still, I think it has legs, I’ll get on the phone to Boris, he’ll know
If its got legs then get it signed up, it can play in defense for us, we’re short on numbers you know!!
Absolute joke of a link to be fair.
Torres hasnt played well in two years. He was awful last year for both Liverpool and Chelsea, and has carried on where he left off this season. He had injury troubles which undoubtedly have effected his form – which is looking to be permanent. They paid well over the odds for him and is looking like another Shevchenko.
Swapping an inform and on top of his game creative hub midfielder for a lame striker is ludicrous.
Also this would leave us with no cash to buy Modrics replacement/s.
On top of which Im sure Torres is one a good 180K a week if not more.
Non starter and wouldnt want it to be either.
Torres’ best chance of recapturing his form is to get out of the Prem and back to La Liga to find his feet again and form.
The media have also decided to take Defoes words out of context (as per) saying Modric transfer isnt over, where as he ACTUALLY said that speculation is part and parcel of football and Modric is still there. He said specualation will happen in January not ABOUT Modric but in general.
What amazes most about Torres are those amongst us who said we should have bought him. I assume that they would have been happy to pay £50 mill and £150k per week for a striker that has averaged a goal a month since his transfer, when we had Crouch doing the same for a third of the money.
Of course the idea that we were capable of outspending Chelsea shows the real grip on reality that these people had.
I pleaded with the guy in the showroom, please swap my Seat Inca for the new Range Rover, bastard wouldn’t budge, some people eh?