TOP 100 SOCCER SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| Johnson ruled out for a month • England defender has torn knee ligaments• Jamie Carragher likely to swap to full-backThe Liverpool defender Glen Johnson has been ruled out for at least a month with a knee injury. The England right-back sustained a tear of the medial ligament in his right knee during Tuesday's 1-0 victory at Aston Villa."Johnson has a problem, so he'll see a specialist and then we'll talk but we know he'll be out for at least one month," said the Liverpool manager Rafael BenÃtez. "But we are waiting for another opinion and then we'll know how long."Right-back has become a troublesome position for BenÃtez as the Swiss international Philipp Degen has struggled to settle after injury wrecked his first season after signing in the summer of 2008.The 26-year-old did not make his Premier League debut until this September and has been unconvincing in the first team, and was sent off in the 3-1 defeat to Fulham at the end of October.BenÃtez's likely option is to move Jamie Carragher from central defence to fill a role he is not entirely comfortable with. He could also give Stephen Darby an extended run in the side while the 19-year-old Martin Kelly, who made his first start in the Champions League defeat at home to Lyon in October, is currently sidelined with injury.If the Liverpool manager should decide to dip into the transfer market it is unlikely he would be looking for anything other than a short-term loan deal.On the positive front, BenÃtez is hopeful of having Albert Riera back from a hamstring problem within the next few days."Riera will start training tomorrow, so hopefully in the next week he can be available," said BenÃtez. "Kelly and Nabil El Zhar still need maybe one or two weeks."LiverpoolPremier Leagueguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Alarm bells are ringing at Old Trafford Sir Alex Ferguson has always enjoyed the last laugh before but there are signs he lacks the resources to rejuvenate UnitedHis name was Richard and he came from Manchester. He was the first caller to MUTV and what he had to say made the presenters squirm on a channel known in media circles as Pravda TV, where the interviews with Sir Alex Ferguson are traditionally about as demanding as Hello! magazine. The Premier League champions had just been bundled out of the FA Cup by Leeds United, of League One, and feelings were running high. "It's not good enough," Richard announced. "We have to change the manager."There is always that danger of the classic knee-jerk reaction when Manchester United have put together a string of bad results and the team have temporarily lost their wow factor. Ferguson loves nothing more than toasting another title by reminiscing about the frequency with which he has seen headlines declaring the end of the empire. "Bloody hell, you had in me in a bath chair down on Torquay beach!" he announced during one press conference last season, eyes sparkling, while the journalists did what we always do in those moments – stare sheepishly at the floor.There can be no doubt, though, that United's supporters have authentic reasons to contemplate the future with more trepidation than has been the norm since Ferguson started greedily accumulating all those trophies. Fabio Capello, the England coach, has already said that United are not the "war machine" they were and it is not just a question of the artillery being downgraded now Old Trafford is no longer bedazzled by Cristiano Ronaldo. It is an issue of whether this is a team in decline, and whether the money is there to prevent the downward trajectory. The only logical conclusion is that yes it is, and no there is not.When Ferguson was asked to respond to Capello's observation recently he argued that the perception of United regressing was a "media thing". He insisted that his second-placed side's experience and strength in depth make them "better placed than most teams" and that their challengers "all know that and they always have to look at Manchester United – there's no getting away from that".The most successful manager in the business was even more forthright when some of his younger players came under scrutiny. The question was asked whether the likes of Darron Gibson, Danny Welbeck and the Da Silva twins were equipped to take over once the club had lost the services of Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs and Gary Neville. Ferguson called one journalist an "idiot" and said he should be "bloody sacked". He found the debate "unbelievable".His team, he is entitled to point out, are hanging on to Chelsea's coat-tails at the top of the league, only two points behind the leaders, and have qualified for the Champions League's first knockout round, as well as having the first leg of a Carling Cup semi-final against Manchester City tomorrow. Yet this is a question of what lies ahead and to try to pass off everything as hunky dory is to ignore the fact that the failure against Leeds was, in one strange way, not actually as shocking as it first appears.The truth is that Ferguson's men have been struggling for fluency and cohesion for longer than they would care to remember and that, by the halfway point of the league season, they had already lost to Burnley, Liverpool, Chelsea, Aston Villa and Fulham. The defeat by Leeds was the first time they have been eliminated from the FA Cup third round in the Ferguson era while, in the Champions League, facing moderate opposition, they found themselves behind in all of their home ties, against Wolfsburg, CSKA Moscow and Besiktas.What Ferguson needs, above all else, is a show of strength in the transfer market but there are rules in place, financial constraints imposed by the Glazer family at a time when United owe about £700m to banks, financial institutions and hedge funds.At the same time the club have made the long-term decision not to sign any players aged 26 or above for large transfer fees. Dimitar Berbatov, who was 27 when he joined from Tottenham Hotspur for £30.75m, has been described as the "last of his kind" and the age-before-ability policy means United will entertain big-money deals only if the players involved will still retain a significant market value at the end of a five- or six-year contract. At a stroke, the Glazers were essentially telling Ferguson they would not pay large sums for established international players such as David Villa or Franck Ribéry.The effects cannot be overstated at a time when the miracle of perseverance otherwise known as Giggs has to be used more sparingly while, in defence, Rio Ferdinand has joined the club's thirtysomethings and almost instantaneously found his body betraying him. Nemanja Vidic, the club's player of the year, is reputedly agitating for a summer move to Spain, and nobody can be certain of Edwin van der Sar's position when the 39-year-old is out of contract at the end of the season and his wife, Annemarie, is recovering from a brain haemorrhage.It can only alarm Ferguson that so many celebrated players are coming to the end of their professional lives. From time to time, Scholes can turn back the clock, with exquisite results, but this is no longer a guarantee. He and Neville are also out of contract in June and you wonder whether one or both will choose a personally choreographed exit. Neville increasingly looks like a champion boxer who has had one too many fights and, if that does not strike you as an original line, it is because it is not. It was first used three years ago.That leaves Ferguson relying to a certain extent on the players coming through the ranks and waiting for Gibson, for one, to show he is more than just a decent player. At Old Trafford it is not enough to be "decent". Superlatives are required. Anderson has made a striking lack of progress. Welbeck may be an exciting prospect but it was also one of Ferguson's more preposterous statements last summer to say the player, then 18, would make Capello's squad for the World Cup.So who else? Zoran Tosic has made a grand total of two substitute appearances since arriving last January as part of the £16.5m joint deal that was supposed to bring his Partizan Belgrade team-mate Adem Ljajic to Old Trafford a year later. Ljajic was marooned after the Glazers decided it was too expensive a gamble and operated a get-out clause in the deal. Nani? United made it clear what they think of his efforts to take over from Ronaldo when they offered him to Benfica as part of a proposed cash-plus-player exchange for the prodigious Angel Di MarÃa.The lesson of history is clear: we should not doubt Ferguson's ability to reanimate a championship team. The awkward moment on MUTV on Sunday afternoon was edited out from the replays yesterday.Yet there are more concerns for United right now than at any point since the team failed to qualify from the Champions League group stages in 2005 and Roy Keane went on the attack in another moment MUTV did not want us to see.Sir Alex FergusonManchester UnitedFA CupDaniel Taylorguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Liverpool's troubles prompt Jose Mourinho's Inter Milan to move for Steven Gerrard Italian champions will seek to take advantage of Liverpool's current upheaval by launching summer bid for England international. telegraph.co.uk |
Are Manchester City poised to overtake Manchester United? Fans of both Manchester City and Manchester United would have scoffed at the suggestion until recently. But could City's unrivalled wealth and United's debt nudge the pendulum towards Eastlands? telegraph.co.uk |
The end of Leeds United's goldfish years With their striker the star of this year's FA Cup, the Elland Road club have finally shed their traumatic historyLeeds are a club much copied. They built a debt mountain long before Portsmouth, Newcastle or West Ham, pioneering the suicidal wage bill and lunatic transfer budget for others to emulate. After the reckoning has come the rise, as if they exist these days to provide hope for clubs who endure near-death experiences.But there is more to them than that, as they demonstrated by confronting Tottenham's aristocratic pretensions face on and earning a replay through Jermaine Beckford's penalty in added time, his second contribution in a thrilling tie. Their fans are as truculent as ever and the old fighting spirit of the 1970s has returned to erase the gauchness of the Peter Ridsdale years. The League One promotion race is their real battleground, but the FA Cup has quickened the pace of self-recovery. Beckford, who has scored against Manchester United and Spurs in successive rounds, has used the competition as a personal finishing school.The third-round victory over United at Old Trafford was the real attention-grabber, but this is close behind. Those who occasionally look farther down the list of 92 professional clubs than the Premier League's top four already knew Leeds were calling the shots in League One. But the victory over England's champions altered the dynamic in a partly unhelpful way. Until Beckford outran Wes Brown to hustle United out, Leeds could play the Phoenix role, plotting a way back up through the divisions. By the time they reached north London, though, Norwich were on their tails at the top of the table and the nation was tuning in expecting another prime-time upset.That was seldom on the cards here, but how Spurs will dread the rematch at Elland Road. Two of the top six defences in the English game have now failed to cope with Beckford, a former Chelsea trainee who dropped all the way to Wealdstone to restart a stalled career. In modern football no one expects a young striker to be able to fall so far off the chart and still make a name for himself as Beckford has. This is a big torch to carry. It lights the way for hundreds of other youngsters discarded by Premier League academies. If he carries on this way, he can look higher than Newcastle United, his most likely destination in this transfer window before he elected to stick with Leeds for the rest of this campaign.Beckford is the individual billboard star of this year's FA Cup and Leeds are the big romantic tale in a competition that squeals for our attention in a schedule crammed with Premier League and Champions League drama.The Yorkshire revival is back on course. A draw and two defeats since the Old Trafford ram-raid had broken a sequence of 17 games unbeaten. Coincidence? A fair extrapolation is that the third-round win interfered with the team's ascent. Cup runs often work as a distraction for clubs bent on promotion. Mischievously, some of us wondered whether Simon Grayson's men motored to White Hart Lane thinking the best result would be a hiding.If so they hid it well, as an early Tottenham onslaught subsided, and the 4,500 travelling fans proclaimed a first-half counter-surge after a torrid opening chapter. "We're not famous any more," sang the Leeds throng, subverting a chant many opposing crowds have tried to tickle them with since they plunged from a Champions League semi-final in 2001 to a league housing Yeovil and Leyton Orient.Unlike United, Spurs saw the upstarts coming. Forewarned, by the Manchester miracle, Tottenham were in threat-elimination mode. Leeds assumed the Alamo pose. Grace under pressure was impossible. Patrick Kisnorbo's head, bandaged from the start, was emblematic of their defiance.After 25 minutes of north London bullying, though, Leeds decided it was time to explore the other half of the pitch, and Beckford twice forced gymnastic reactions from Heurelho Gomes. No longer in command, Tottenham's millionaires knew they would have to grapple. Premier League players are meant to be softer nowadays, but they all carry memories of when football was always feisty (in their pre-professional years) and Harry Redknapp's team welcomed the chance to play old-school Cup football. Jermaine Jenas might as well have been reading a book when Leeds first equalised, but otherwise Spurs applied themselves valiantly. Even Roman Pavlyuchenko, he of the languid air, recognised the urgency of Tottenham's position, restoring his team's lead. But still to come was Beckford's meatily executed penalty.In an interview with the Yorkshire Post last week, Ken Bates recalled being wheeled out as the new chairman five years ago by Gerald Krasner, who asked: "Do you want to shake hands for the photographers?" Bates replied: "Not now I've seen the books."Leeds were losing £120,000 a week and were practically wearing the taxman like a rash. "The finances were completely out of control," Bates recalled on Friday. Now, the average gate is 25,000 and the club filed a £4.5million profit last season.The assumption that Leeds will glide straight through the Championship next season is flawed, because they have achieved the current rebirth without risking a repeat of the luxury goldfish years. Run prudently, they will encounter one of football's deepest mysteries: how do teams escape a division where a kind of communism applies? Most teams are equal, and most can beat any other on any Saturday.But that's another mission. First Leeds needed to regain their self-respect, their identity. The twinkly team of the David O'Leary years has retreated into a kind of infamy. This one is an older diagram of machismo, with touches of prettiness. You look at Leeds now and no longer see a history of trauma. You see a replay and Beckford writing his name across the sky.FA CupTottenham HotspurLeeds UnitedPaul Haywardguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |