Arsenal are set to increase their interest in Birmingham defender Scott Dann the Daily Mail understands.
The Gunners are pondering a £10 million move for the 24-year-old centre back and are sending chief scout Steve Rowley to run the rule over him this weekend.
Birmingham start their Championship campaign against Derby County on Saturday and Rowley will be in attendance to judge whether he’s the man to put an end to Arsenal’s defensive frailty.
Manager Arsene Wenger wanted to see Dann in action last weekend in a friendly against Everton but he missed the game due to a sever hamstring tear.
However he has now recovered from that and Rowley will make one final check before reporting his findings back to Wenger.
The Frenchman is desperate to bring a centre half to the Emirates before the transfer window closes with moves for Bolton’s Gary Cahil and Everton’s Phil Jagielka going cold.
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Wenger considers both to be overpriced by their clubs and has grown frustrated at the Toffee’s in particular over their valuation of Jagielka.
Arsenal know they will have to move swiftly if they want to capture one of the most sought defenders in England with interest from Chelsea and Liverpool also strong.
Sir Alex Ferguson has ruled out any more incomings at Manchester United admitting that he missed out on some targets reports the Guardian.
Three players have already been added to the United squad although a replacement for Paul Scholes has so far eluded Ferguson.
Ashley Young, David de Gea and Phil Jones all joined the Red Devils for big money this summer with the United boss fulfilling his goal of adding a youthful core to his side.
However Ferguson still wants a replacement for Scholes, who retired at the end of last season, but admits he’s missed he can’t see that happening.
He told the Guardian: “We lost five players in their 30s this summer. That helped finance the three younger players – Ashley Young, Phil Jones and David de Gea – I have brought to the club.
“At this moment, I can’t see another addition. The type of player we might have been looking for is not available. I am happy with the players I have got at this moment in time.”
A new playmaker is still a priority for Ferguson as he strives to replace Scholes. However finances are tight at Old Trafford and moves for Ferguson’s top targets have been considered too expensive.
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Inter Milan’s Wesley Sneijder has been on the Scot’s wish list for some time but his £35 million asking price and looks likely to stay at the San Siro for at least another season.
Inter president Massimo Moratti has confirmed that the Serie A giants are interested in bringing Manchester City striker Carlos Tevez to Italy.
The Argentina international looks set to leave the Etihad Stadium this January after one too many indiscretions and acts of indiscipline.
AC Milan have been heavily linked with the South American forward, and have already had a loan offer for Tevez refused by Roberto Mancini’s men, who would prefer to sell the attacker.
Moratti however has admitted that Inter want to beat their rivals to Tevez’s signature.
“Our interest in Tevez is real, it’s not a joke,” Moratti told fcinternews.it.
“We think it might be a good operation. We tried to get information (from City) to understand how things were, if there was room or not (for us), then we’ll see if we can take him or not.
“It’s not a matter of being optimistic or pessimistic, but just wait and see what happens.
“There are still 20 days at the end of the transfer market, there is so much time,” he concluded.
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The decision to select a GB football team for the 2012 Olympics has brought a mixed response within the game. Some players have welcomed the decision and suggested they would be keen to play, while managers and the football federations have questioned the fact it will impinge on their members preparations for their league programme. The very fact the Euro Championships will also be taking place some weeks earlier only goes to underline the worries that some football managers are likely to have and why they will be hesitant to release some of their players for the Olympics.
The ruling for the Olympic teams is the players must be 23 years of age or under; although three players over that age can also be included within the squad.
With that in mind I have included my Olympic XI for Team GB
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Click on the image below to see the GB XI
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Manchester City laid down their title credentials smashing five goals past Tottenham at White Hart Lane with Edin Dzeko scoring four to maintain their 100% start to the new campaign.
The Citizens stormed back to the top of the Premier League after another rampant performance and have now scored 17 goals in their first three games.
£27 million striker Dzeko was the stand out performer as he put the Spurs defence to the sword scoring four and proving to be a nuisance throughout. Samir Nasri, making his City debut, was also bang in form whilst David Silva and Sergio Aguero kept up their fine starts to the new campaign.
Despite the scoreline the first 25 minutes was rather close with the home side having several good opportunities to break he deadlock. Rafael Van der Vaart had a free kick saved by Joe Hart before Gareth Bale should have at least hit the target only to blaze a volley over from 10 yards.
Those scares kicked the visitors into gear and Dzeko opened the scoring in the 34th minute tapping in Nasri’s cross from the left before the same two players combined again six minutes later with the Bosnian looping a header across goal and into the bottom corner leaving Brad Friedel motionless.
The second half saw City continue in the same vein scoring two goals in quick succession. Dzeko completed his hat trick in the 54th minute tapping in from Yaya Toure’s ball before Aguero smashed home from inside the box after a mazy run through the Spurs defence.
Younes Kaboul pulled a goal back with 23 minutes to go but Dzeko wasn’t going to let the hosts have the last laugh curling in a sublime effort from the edge of the area two minutes into added on time.
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Let’s commence with a player enjoying a remarkable start to life in England. He may not even be able to speak English but this hasn’t hindered Papiss Demba Cissé’s goal scoring ability. The Senegalese now has seven goals in seven games in the Premier League. The striker netted a double against a lacklustre Liverpool side. It meant Newcastle went 11 points clear of their opponents on Sunday. If Cissé’s recent goal scoring exploits continue in the next eight games, the Magpies can certainly challenge Spurs, Arsenal and Chelsea for a Champions League place.
Goal of the Weekend
It’s been another odd week for Manchester City what with Sergio Aguero’s bizarre injury and Mario Balotelli turning up at an Inter Milan press conference on Wednesday. Saturday brought disappointment with a dogged Sunderland claiming a draw at the Etihad. It did see the man who cannot keep himself out of the headlines net a blinding second for City. Mario Balotelli may have argued over a free-kick in the second half but his curving effort which helped to pull City back into the game was sublime. Having scored a spot-kick in the first half, he unleashed what Sergio Aguero might describe as a blistering effort past Simon Mignolet from just outside the penalty area.
Miss of the Weekend
Firstly Wigan deserve credit for turning in another fantastic display as Roberto Martinez’s side continue in their fight for survival. However, even though it’s been a while since the “Miss of the Weekend” section has been used, Jean Beausejour’s performance gave enough reason for it to be revived once more. The winger signed from Birmingham City should have celebrated two goals on Saturday but instead, he conspired to miss two gilt-edged chances for the Latics.
In the first half, the Chilean managed to let the ball roll up his shin from just over four yards out with the goal gaping whilst in the second period, he arrowed an effort straight at Asmir Begovic from a similar distance under no pressure from a Stoke player. Yet when it came to crossing, Beausejour was on much better form as he provided the assist for Wigan’s first goal. Maybe it’s best then that Beausejour is kept out of the opposition’s penalty area.
Dive of the Weekend
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It just hasn’t worked out for Andy Carroll at Liverpool. Perhaps then at St. James’s Park (or the Sports Direct Arena – for all the pedants out there), we saw a late audition by Carroll for the Team GB Diving team with the Olympics just months away. As much as Kenny Dalglish may protest otherwise, the former £35 million forward dived having taken the ball past Tim Krul early on in Sunday’s encounter.
He could have actually scored had he stayed on his feet but matching the efforts of Tom Daley seemed higher on his list of priorities. Newcastle’s James Perch was eager to challenge Carroll late on, judging by his reaction to Pepe Reina’s headbutt. He dramatically flung himself to the floor after the Liverpool goalkeeper brushed his nose albeit not in the most affectionate manner. For someone of Reina’s experience though, it was silly to lean his head in as he did but had Perch displayed a little more sportsmanship, the Spaniard would have remained on the field.
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Its fair to say that this has been one of the most exciting Premier League seasons in quite some time, and there’s one good reason for this, goals, goals, goals.
So far the various nets around the Premier League have bulged 713 times, 24 more so than at the same stage of the 2009/10 season. Of course with goals come big scorelines, and there have been no shortages in this department, with Manchester United thrashing Arsenal 8-2, Bolton avenging their FA Cup defeat of last season with a 5-0 victory over Stoke and this weekends 5-0 defeat for Newcastle at the hands of Tottenham.
This isn’t just a freak season by any means; there are a few reasons for such high scoring, the first being the form and quality of strikers throughout the league. The standout candidate is Arsenal’s Robin van Persie, who simply cannot stop scoring at the moment with a staggering 22 in 25 league games. Demba Ba at Newcastle is in, arguably, the form of his life while Manchester City’s Sergio Aguero can feed from the wealth of creative talent in the Sky Blue’s midfield. It’s not just strikers from the Premier league’s ‘big boys’ who are firing on all cylinders, Grant Holt and Steve Morison have 17 between them for Norwich, while Steven Fletcher of Wolves is already in double figures.
Many teams are now changing their defensive philosophies too. Full-backs are becoming second wingers, encouraged to get forward at any opportunity. This allows for greater numbers in an attacking sense, but leaves gaping holes at the back for the counter attack. Kyle Walker and Benoit Assou-Ekotto are the epitome of the modern day full-back combination, with bags of pace, plenty of technique and various defensive frailties. As well as Tottenham, Chelsea employ attack minded defenders in the shape of Ashley Cole and Jose Bosingwa and even teams further down the division such as Fulham allow John Arne Riise to get forward at almost any opportunity.
Injuries to various teams across the league have prevented many established sides from creating a settled back line. Manchester United have seen Nemanja Vidic, Rio Ferdinand, Phil Jones and Chris Smalling all sidelined, forcing the likes of Michael Carrick to fill in at centre-back. This of course means goals, and the defending champions have shipped 25 so far including three at home Blackburn. Arsenal have also suffered, with first choice full backs Andre Santos and Bacary Sagna both missing long periods of the campaign.
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As well as injuries and changing philosophies there has also been the death of the ‘Makalele’ in midfield. Many of the top sides are no longer employing an out and out destroyer to sit in front of the back-line and mask his defenders. As a result centre-backs are often exposed and playmakers have the added space to create mayhem, which has clearly benefited the likes of David Silva, Juan Mata.
Alan Hansen may be tearing his hair out on a regular basis at the sight of so many goals, but for the fans it’s been a fun filled campaign. Long live the goal.
Another week, and another example of football being under attack. A few weeks back, social media sites were buzzing with the upcoming revelations on that night’s Dispatches programme. The programme looked at drug use amongst footballers, and all the talk was about it naming a top, top player who had been suspended for drug use and then sold on without the buying club being made aware of his murky past.
It’s all par for the course though, as we’ve been here before. Hard-hitting exposes that hit us with the force of a small sponge dropped onto a blancmange, leaving you to say “is that it?”
Sites such as Twitter promote the feeling of anti-climax – rumours spread, and the truth is never as exciting as the rumour, in the same way that journalists tweet of upcoming breaking news (AND IT’S BIG FOLKS!) and then you read that Inter Milan might, at some point in the future, make a bid for Gareth Bale, and you feel cheated. And they never bid anyway.
TV producers know the obvious, that football is big business, and investigating it and unearthing scandal could be a ratings winner. And like any multi-billion pound, global business, there will be plenty to investigate, as it will never be whiter-than-white. How could it be? But have these programmes really told you anything you didn’t know or at least suspect already?
If you watched the Dispatches programme, did it prompt much discussion? Are you still thinking about it? Can you remember a single footballer named in the programme? Dispatches knew they weren’t dealing with the biggest players, so had to embellish descriptions with “full international” and “tipped to be a premiership star”.
The fact is that of the 2000 or so footballers plying their trade in this country, the law of averages and the forces of human nature (especially when large amounts of money are at hand) will determine that some will misbehave. Some will crash cars, get up to mischief in nightclubs and some will obviously take drugs. I am betting some cricketers have taken cocaine too, and some rugby players. How about a programme exposing cocaine use amongst badminton players? Guess there’s not much of a call for that.
The programme followed familiar lines – lots of stern to-camera pieces from the presenter, lots of arty camera angles and concerned faces. The presenter sat in a converted loft surrounded by computer screens and stomped round various venues looking shocked and appalled. He started by discussing Kolo Toure’s drug ban and the length of his suspension – no new news or revelations here – the programme makers managed to find someone who thought the ban wasn’t severe enough – well I never, hold the front pages.
The programme’s main contention was that clubs and football authorities are complicit in keeping failed tests for recreational drugs out of the public eye, with 21 positive cocaine tests since 2003, most of which had not been disclosed to the public.
A cover up, or an FA policy not to report recreational drug use and that these drugs do not enhance performance and thus the players have some sort of right to privacy? The scandal is that players aren’t being named. This isn’t much of a scandal – it might be wrong, but it isn’t a scandal. Players not being suspended would be a scandal.
The alleged case of Garry O’Connor – described as “one of the brightest talents in Scottish football” – was given plenty of coverage (so bright was his talent that Barnsley subsequently released him). But how big a revelation was this anyway? The Daily Record reported O’Connor’s arrest on suspicion of possession on May 17 this year. He was in court as recently as September 5 over the charges, with the case deferred until the end of the month. So Dispatches’ shocking revelation was to repeat openly available news. If you didn’t already know about O’Connor’s antics, like most if us, it’s probably because you’re not really that bothered.
Another feature of the programme was asking members of the public their opinion – the ultimate in padding (and irrelevant). A TV programme is always in trouble when it has to ask members of the public for opinions – apart from the fact that if you asked enough people you could get someone to agree to anything, (that Paul Merson is a great pundit!), these vox pops add nothing to what the programme is trying to achieve. Leon Knight appeared to make unsubstantiated allegations that cocaine use was rife and that he had seen players at one of his former clubs snorting it. He could be telling the truth of course, but it’s hardly compelling television, as the evidence is not there. As a final act of desperation, we heard the claim by one expert that a player on coke could flip out and hurt somebody in a tackle (a leap of faith having been taken that players were snorting lines of cocaine during the pre-match team talk).
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This was just the latest in a long line of “football scandal” programmes of course. In September 2006 Panorama showed a documentary called “Undercover: Football’s Dirty Secrets”, which alleged payments in English football contrary to the rules of the Football Association, involving then Bolton Wanderers manager Sam Allardyce, and his agent son Craig, for taking “bungs” from agents for signing certain players. Portsmouth manager Harry Redknapp is secretly filmed discussing the possibility of buying the Blackburn Rovers captain Andy Todd with agent Peter Harrison, which is against Football Association rules. And whilst it may be against the rules, it is hardly earth-shattering stuff. Either way, allegations of Redknapp and his transfer dealings were hardly new, or surprising. Rumours have been rife for many a year. And if you wanted full details of such allegations against Redknapp, you could already have read a whole chapter in Tom Bower’s book Broken Dreams. Chelsea director of youth football Frank Arnesen is secretly filmed making an illegal approach or “tapping up” Middlesbrough’s England youth star 15-year-old Nathan Porritt.
Tapping up eh? Wow, I can’t believe that happens, I’m going to have to sit down and regain my composure after that bombshell.
On 29 November 2010, three days before voting for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, Panorama aired an in depth investigation into bribes by senior FIFA officials. But then we knew this already didn’t we? If news that FIFA was a bit bent surprised you, then you’re probably not aware that bears like to defecate in wooded areas or the religious persuasion of the Pope. The timing was predictable for getting the best ratings, but its main effect was probably to damage England’s chances of hosting the World Cup, if any chance existed in the first place.
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Donal MacIntyre, given his own series MacIntyre Undercover on BBC One in 1999, covered his exploits among a gang of football hooligans, the Chelsea Headhunters. To sound like a broken record, it told us little new, though was a superb piece of investigation by MacIntyre.
And in July this year Channel 4 showed a documentary about wealthy businessmen and consortium buying football clubs in England – a Dispatches programme once more. “How To Buy A Football Club” featured an undercover reporter claiming to represent a wealthy group of investors in a journey that took the reporter to the brink of buying a League One football club. It showed Bryan Robson as a front for the groups London Nominees and the Football Fund, two investment groups, and whilst he may not have come across that well, there was no evidence of dishonesty or fraud from him.
The broker of deals was a Bangkok bar owner called Joe Sim, a man who claims connections across the football and had the number, and shared company of a certain Alex Ferguson. But once more, there was little substance behind the news. Ferguson distanced himself from Sim, and there was no proof of any wrongdoing on his part, except choosing the wrong friends. Again, a programme showing foreign businessmen trying to buy clubs and get round competition rules is no small deal, but hardly surprising, and most football fans have known about these strange consortiums in recent years. We’re still trying to work out who owned Notts County, who owns Leeds, and a whole host of other clubs with a rather eclectic board set-up.
The programmes are well-made (sometimes) and show good investigative practices – I don’t want to appear to be completely dismissing them as garbage – they are not, and I understand fully why they were made, and why they were hyped up. They add a little meat to the bones and reveal a few new stories we may be unaware of. The issues they dealt with are not to be dismissed or treated lightly. My point is, they didn’t really shock or surprise most of us. We know most of it already. We football fans might turn a blind eye if a Thai dictator with a winning smile takes over our club, or if a player has a mystery “virus” for 6 months, but we know the score. Football inevitably attracts bad people, and bad things happen on and off the pitch. Some of the worst practices have happened further down the football pyramid, where clubs have been virtually destroyed by bad practices and unscrupulous owners and operators. The producers of Dispatches might be better served investigating the truly great scandals of the game’s recent history – but there might not be as many viewers to be earned by doing that.
Manchester United have responded to claims from Owen Hargreaves that they mismanaged his knee injury during his time at Old Trafford, stating their disappointment at their former player’s comments.
The England midfielder had an injury plagued time at the Premier League champions, and following his free transfer move to Manchester City has blamed United for his time on the sidelines.
Sir Alex Ferguson’s team had initially declined to comment, but have defended themselves against the player’s criticism.
“Manchester Unitedis disappointed with Owen’s remarks after the game on Wednesday. The club gave him the best possible care for three years and is as disappointed as anyone he was not able to play a part in the team’s success at that time,” a statement on the club’s official website read.
“It has shared all the medical records with Manchester City and is comfortable with the actions taken by its medical staff at each step of his many attempts at rehabilitation.
“United does not acknowledge any validity in the comments Owen is alleged to have made. Manchester United has some of the best sports medical staff in world sport, who have made a significant contribution to United’s on-pitch success in recent seasons,” it concluded.
Hargreaves returned to first team football for City in the Carling Cup in midweek, scoring the first goal in a 2-0 victory over Birmingham in a man of the match performance.
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After recently hearing an American football pundit talking about how football would be changed if re-invented in modern times, it got me wondering what new additions to the sport would actually be worth considering. There are the serious suggestions that are under a common consensus with footy fans or more wild ideas that’d be worth pondering over a pint with your mates.
With the history of association football dating back for well over a 100 years, there has been many advancements and changes to the game. The disciplinary procedure of red and yellow cards, the offside rule, substitutions or even the duration of matches, but now in 2011, what should we be considering for the future of the game, for better, not worse.
Taking all these points into account, I’ve created a top ten list, some entries are serious and worth some thought whilst others may be more outside the box suggestions.
Click on the officials below to see the top 10 additions that could improve football
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