Huddersfield striker Jordan Rhodes looks set to join Blackburn Rovers after the clubs agreed a deal that could be worth up to £8 million, according to the BBC.
The Scot is due for a medical at Ewood Park today, having already agreed a four-year deal with the Championship new boys. The move is expected to be completed within the next 24 hours.
Steve Kean has been chasing the 22-year-old all summer, and will be delighted to have finally made a breakthrough with the deal for a striker who scored 40 goals for Huddersfield last season.
It is understood the fee will be paid across the duration of the contract, with add-ons expected should Rhodes help Blackburn to promotion.
Kean is desperate to add to his squad before the transfer window slams shut on Friday, having lost new signing Leon Best to a long-term injury.
Rhodes has already bagged three goals for club and country this season, including a first international goal during Scotland’s 3-1 friendly victory over Australia.
Huddersfield have released a statement explaining they are expect to lose Rhodes for a club record fee, with their previous highest being £2.5 million from Ipswich for Marcus Stewart in 2000.
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Rhodes will be hoping to be available for Blackburn as soon as this weekend. Steve Kean’s side have made a decent start to life in the Championship and are unbeaten after their first three games.
Juventus chief executive Giuseppe Marotta has revealed that he has some regrets about not bringing former Arsenal striker Robin van Persie to Turin in the summer, the Daily Mail report.
Despite missing out on the Dutchman, Marotta believes his club have done well in the summer transfer window and claims that Manchester
United overpaid for van Persie who was in the final year of his contract at Arsenal.
“I have regrets about Van Persie, but it would have been a bad choice for the club if we had paid €30million for a player who would have seen his contract expire next year,’ Marotta told Tuttosport.
“We are happy with the business we were able to carry out.”
“We hit our targets with the acquisition of good, young players with reasonable salaries – (Kwadwo) Asamoah, (Mauricio) Isla and (Sebastian) Giovinco.”
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Juventus did however sign one Arsenal player in the transfer window as Nicklas Bendtner joined them on a season long loan from the Gunners with a view to a permanent deal if the loan is a success.
Steven Fletcher has stated his willingness to return to international duty next month.
The Scotland international has been absent since a public falling out with manager Craig Levein following a late international withdrawal from the Sunderland striker.
Scotland face Wales and Belgium in World Cup qualifying next month, with the £14 million man ideal to lead the line for the Tartan Army should he solve his differences with Levein.
When asked on Twitter whether he would return to the international stage, the 25 year old simply replied, “yes”.
However The Daily Mail report that bridges have been burned as SFA insiders claim it is too late for Fletcher to reconcile with the ex-Dundee United boss, having already turned down opportunities to represent Scotland since his falling out with the manager.
The Former Wolves and Burnley man has settled instantly on Wearside netting all three shots he’s taken in red and white, following his transfer from the Black Country. While Fletcher is relishing life up-front for Sunderland, it remains a problem area for Scotland, who so far have kept faith in Kenny Miller, despite the 32 year old showing signs of decline last year at Cardiff and now playing in Vancouver.
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Stoke boss Tony Pulis believes his side deserve more points than they have earned from their opening Premier League fixtures.
The Potters are still searching for their first win after last Saturday’s narrow 1-0 defeat at Chelsea followed draws against Reading, Arsenal, Wigan and Manchester City. But Pulis is refusing to panic by their failure to earn a victory and remains optimistic that his team’s fortunes will change in the near future. The Welshman felt they were on the receiving end of some dubious decisions at Stamford Bridge, but hopes luck will be on their side when they host Swansea on Saturday. He told Sky Sports:
“We are just hoping and praying that we get a bit of luck. Our performances this year have probably deserved more points than we have got, but that is the way it goes at times. You want to win every game and get as many points as you possibly can as quickly as you can. If we keep playing the way we are playing, and we get a little bit of good fortune, that will come.”
Daniel Agger says a tattoo of Liverpool’s motto on his right hand shows he is “proud” of playing at Anfield, after agreeing to extend his contract with the club till 2016.
Agger got the letters of ‘YNWA’, standing for ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ tattooed onto his knuckles during the summer, and despite Barcelona and Manchester City being interested in him, he insists he has never wanted to change clubs.
“I’m proud to be here and I think my knuckles show that. As I said, I feel a part of this club and I feel a part of this city. I’ve been here so long now, so it was an easy decision,” Agger said.
The deal is a relief for Liverpool, after it started to look like Agger wanted to move. It was reported in his home country of Denmark that Barcelona would be the one club he would leave Anfield for, and he was thought to have a difficult relationship with boss Brendan Rodgers, something which intensified when he was not included in the team picked to play in a Europa League qualifier. Manchester city manager Roberto Mancini was also keen to sign the centre-half.
However, Agger says that he enjoys being under Rodgers’ management.
“I’m enjoying life under the new manager. I really like it and I’m happy every day going into training. I feel we have a good team, a good mentality and a style of good football that I want to play,” he added.
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Attacked Sheffield Wednesday goalkeeper Chris Kirkland has revealed his fury at not just his attacker but also that fact that his family had to see him in that light, according to reports.
Kirkland was attacked by a moron who leaped onto the field after Leeds United scored an equaliser against Sheffield Wednesday on Friday night and it seems the initial blow was not the sole concern for the former Liverpool ‘keeper.
“I am OK now, but I was really shocked at the time,”
“I was gutted at losing the goal – I had kicked the ball away and was deflated. Out of the corner of my eye I saw this Leeds fan coming towards me.
“I thought he was going to give me some abuse. Then he laid right into me. It felt like I had been hit by a baseball bat. He caught me a cracker.
“Then I am on the floor and thinking, ‘Has that really just happened?’
“The game went on and at the final whistle the adrenaline drained away and the emotions came out.
“I had my wife at the game, my daughter has seen it too. But this is not about me. I hope coming out and speaking means that something will be done by the authorities before something really serious happens either to a player or to fans.
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“It is a sad time for football. There are people out to cause trouble. That guy has only gone to the game for that reason. It’s not about football any more, it’s terrible.
“You want families to go to games but I’m not sure you can do that anymore. There is too much going on, too much abuse.”
With a permanent boss finally appointed, Chesterfield are looking to climb the League 2 table on the back of a new style of play and an improved training culture. But is fitness really the answer? asks Will Strauss
For the third time this season, Chesterfield FC has a new manager. Having dispensed with the services of John Sheridan and subsequently given his assistant, Tommy Wright, a go, the club has now appointed former Accrington Stanley manager Paul Cook on a two and a half year deal.
Cook seems like a decent enough appointment: he is enthusiastic, forthright and had a decent playing career with the likes of Wolves and Coventry. His managerial record, so far, isn’t up to much though (unless you happen to hold the League of Ireland in particularly high esteem). But the former Southport and Sligo Rovers boss does have a reputation for getting his teams to play exciting attacking football and that will go down well with most people in this particular corner of North Derbyshire.
Cook is said to have got the job partly because of the progressive style of football that his Accrington team played against the Spireites in a 4-3 reverse earlier this season and partly because of his enthusiasm and attitude towards training. A theory confirmed by owner Dave Allen last week.
“Footballers are paid as full-time footballers but I don’t see many of them training too much and that is the culture [Paul] is going to bring to the club,” he said. “We’re going to have a different culture down at Chesterfield. They’ve got to embrace the Di Canio method. [Swindon] train six days a week. They’re superfit. If you’ve got talent and you’ve got superfit you’ll start to win games. If you’ve not got so much talent but you’ve got superfit you’ll be better than you were if you weren’t superfit won’t you?”
A Bit Of Previous
Sound point though this may be, it doesn’t really say much for the previous regime or for other clubs around the country.
On that very point Allen said: “[Currently the players] go in two hours on a Monday, two or three hours on a Tuesday if they’re not playing, have Wednesday off, train Thursday, train a little bit on Friday, play Saturday and have Sunday off. It’s not enough.”
Results in the last 18 months would suggest he could be right. In being relegated from League 1 last season Chesterfield lost more than 25 points from winning positions – most notably shipping late goals against relegation rivals Scunthorpe and Wycombe when well placed to pick up more points than they eventually ended up with.
It could be suggested that this was down to an inability to ‘go the distance’ fitness wise. It could also be argued that it was down to a number of other factors such as confidence, decision-making and communication.
Equally, in our most recent league game, a horrific single goal defeat at home to bottom-of-the-table Barnet, I would say (from my less-than-lofty position in the West Stand) that some of the players were looking a bit ‘leggy’. There was no drive, no thrust and an inability to ‘go again.’ Our best players were two youngsters, Tendayi Darikwa and loanee Chris Atkinson, and the evergreen Terrell Forbes. The rest were simply not at the races. The consequence? Having created enough chances to win two games of football, we conceded another late goal and lost 1-0.
Survival Of The Fittest
The upshot of all this is that the team, under Cook, is now doing extra training each week and even the odd bit of pilates.
Anyway, all of this got me thinking. Do the fittest teams always do well over a season? On the one hand, Swindon (the team praised by Allen) are certainly doing OK in League One. While on the other, Oxford United (one of Swindon’s local rivals), with their newly appointed strength and conditioning coach and their pre-season ambition to be the “the fittest, the fastest and the strongest in League Two” are just one place and one point above the Spireites, a team now considered to be quite the opposite.
Let’s look at another example. Older readers will appreciate this.
When Liverpool were winning things under the great Bill Shankly, Roger Hunt, the England centre forward, said that the secret of their success was that they “were the fittest team in the country”. Those players won the league in 1964, 1966 and 1973 (albeit in an era when smoking, drinking and eating steak before a game was almost universally encouraged).
What does science say about it? Well, apparently very few people have successfully studied the connection between fitness and winning. But there is some evidence.
Thomas Karapatsos, the editor and founder of Soccer Mastermind, reports* on a study involving 320 male players from three different English leagues. He says the research concluded that: “team performance and success was not directly related to the level of fitness. Other factors such as player’s technique, tactics, formations, psychology, mindset and injuries need to be evaluated.”
Go back to 1999 and there is further evidence. In their report ‘Physical Fitness, Injuries, and Team Performance in Soccer’**, six Scandinavian sports scientists set out to investigate the relationship between physical fitness and team success.
Weak Relationship
Testing 306 players from 17 teams in the two highest divisions in Iceland they found that: “the relationship between team average performance on the various [fitness] tests and team success expressed as final league standing was generally weak.”
Instead, they concluded that incurring fewer injuries during a season equates to a higher league position (really? hold the front page!) and, more interestingly, that the higher a team can jump (yes, jump) the better they’ll do (which goes some way to explaining how well Stevenage and Sheffield Wednesday did last season).
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‘This does not mean,” they add, ‘that a team with superior fitness would not have a definite advantage when playing an opponent with less physically fit players. [But] the ability to transform this fitness advantage to a real performance advantage would depend on a number of other factors, such as motivation, and technical and tactical skills.”
I’m not entirely sure what any of this proves. I personally think that Cook and Allen are right: the first team squad does look like it needs to train more. But hopefully this is not just about fitness or about how far and how fast they can run but also with a view to avoiding injury, rehearsing set-plays and working better as a unit.
Well I certainly hope it is. As science seems to think that improved oxygen intake levels alone are not going to be enough to get Spireites up the table.
As well as writing about his first love, Chesterfield FC, Will is currently generating articles for Dencroft, the concrete garages company.
Former Arsenal defender Nigel Winterburn believes that Arsenal will be plunged into crisis should they fail to beat their North London rivals this weekend.
Winterburn has insisted that only a victory in their Premier League clash at The Emirates will be a satisfactory result for Arsene Wenger’s side, and three points will go some way to re-establishing some momentum to their season.
The Gunners have only secured two victories in their last seven outings and are languishing 11 points behind the current Premier League leaders Manchester United.
Both sides are sitting in seventh and eighth places respectively and will be looking to secure a positive result to push up the table towards the coveted top four places.
“I thought this season that Arsenal would be stronger than last season, even though they lost Robin Van Persie. I like the togetherness of the squad,” Winterburn told Alan Brazil’s breakfast show on TalkSPORT.
“My one slight worry was where they would replace all those goals. They would need [Olivier] Giroud to start scoring straight away and would also need the midfield players around him to possibly to get into double figures. And it just hasn’t happened like that.
“From a positive start, it’s now turning into a bit of a crisis already. They really need a positive result [against Tottenham] and a positive result means a win”
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Arsenal face Tottenham this Saturday lunchtime and will be hoping to replicate their 5-2 win they achieved over their rivals at The Emirates last season, where they produced a sensational comeback, after conceding 2 early goals.
Champions Manchester City and stubborn Stoke City are the only two teams in the Premier League that on average, concede less than one goal per game. While the defensive backline of clubs up and down country has come under fire recently, I would argue that the man between the posts should take his share of the blame. It’s certainly worth asking why so few clubs possess a prominent goalkeeper in the prime of their career?
Take Manchester United for example, a side undergoing their routine, awkward transition between two reliable goalkeepers. At 22 years of age, David De Gea boasts undeniable potential but is raw to core, whereas his colleague Anders Lindegaard is six years his senior but has limited experience at the summit of European football. Sir Alex Ferguson has chopped and changed repeatedly this season, with both men apparently allergic to the number one jersey.
In the wake of their chaotic 4-3 victory over Reading last week, the United boss described it as “agony” and the “worst defending of this season”. A goalkeeper can only be as good as the defence in front of him and the tinkering in both departments has surely hampered rather than helped their title bid.
The defensive frailty is a real concern for those in the red half of Manchester, having already shipped 21 goals this season, three more than struggling Sunderland. Just one side in Premier League history has gone on to win the championship after conceding as many after fifteen games. Unsurprisingly, it was the Red Devils in 1996/1997, but the average for the league’s eventual winners is a mere 11, the current total of fierce rivals Manchester City.
Speaking of Roberto Mancini’s side, even the seemingly faultless Joe Hart has found himself thrust under the intense glow of the media spotlight. Journalists have been queuing up to lambast England’s ‘saviour’ for nurturing an inflated ego, which has allowed errors to creep into his game. However, I would argue he is simply a victim of his own and indeed the nation’s painfully high standards.
Outside the top two, is there a sole candidate that has been consistent, assured and won more points for his team than he has lost? Perhaps such a thing can’t exist within the rigours of modern football. By my calculations, there are only six definitive first choice keepers that find themselves in the optimum 27-32 age bracket. Cech, Reina, Al-Habsi, Foster, Federici and Vorm should by definition, present the perfect blend of experience and physical maturity.
And yet the standout names on that list – Chelsea’s Petr Cech and Liverpool’s Pepe Reina – have both suffered a severe dip in form this season. Neither shot-stopper installs the same degree of confidence or air of authority as years gone by, with only 11 clean sheets between them all season. Perhaps I am being over critical but at 30 years of age they should be at the peak of their career, not sitting at the top of a very slippery slope, encouraging the whispers that they’ve entered a state of decline.
At present, West Brom’s Ben Foster is arguably the leading light in the division with Swansea’s Michel Vorm hot on his heels, although he has been confined to the treatment table in recent weeks. Wigan’s Al-Habsi and Reading’s Adam Ferderici on the other hand are strange characters, one minute sublime and the next surreal, as infuriating as they are dependable for their managers.
The majority of shot-stoppers are either too juvenile – De Gea, Szczesny and even Krul – or a matter of weeks away from being ushered into a retirement home – Friedel, Jaaskelainen and Schwarzer. There is a growing sense that while the Premier League can showcase some of the best attacking talent in the world, it can’t do the same at the other end of the pitch.
There is another angle to this subject which points to the lack of English options in the Premier League, with only John Ruddy providing any real competition to Joe Hart. Ben Foster’s retirement and Rob Green’s resignation to the bench at Loftus Road means Roy Hodgson has had to dip into the lower leagues. However, England U’21 goalkeeping coach Martin Thomas insists he is working with the best batch of ‘safe hands’ for nearly a decade.
Alongside the already renowned Jack Butland, Hull City’s Ben Amos, Middlesbrough’s Jason Steele and Norwich City’s Declan Rudd have thrived on the international scene.
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“It’s not only those four, there’s also other lads like Alex Smithies of Huddersfield and Wes Foderingham who’s at Swindon,” explained Thomas.
“The best part of around 65 goalkeepers, a majority who are English and under the age of 26, are playing in the Football League every week. All you hope is they can do well enough to take the next step and eventually work up to the Premier League.” (FA)
Perhaps then this is simply a transitional period, similar to when teams enjoy phases of success before enduring a rebuilding process. The return of the formidable goalkeeper could be just around the corner, and then we’ll be forced to complain that we don’t see enough goals.
West Bromwich Albion defender Jonas Olsson publicly criticised players who dive, after replays showed Arsenal’s Santi Cazorla simulating in the box against the Baggies last weekend.
However, the defender was rather philosophical in his criticism, noting that due to the omission of in-game replays, referees have “a difficult job.”
He continued by stating, “If it’s a dive the focus should be on the person diving as well [as the defending tackle],” and by doing so it would create an impartial atmosphere for the foul – or dive – to be reviewed.
Olsson’s comment refocuses the debate by highlighting a ref’s intrinsically obstructed responsibility – devoid of video evidence – and then pointing the blame at the simulating players in question.
“I don’t like people diving. I’m not very objective either being a defender. Most of the time I like this league because of the fair play it contains,” he said before expressing his admiration for officials in light of a job without “the privilege of watching replays.”
Earlier in the year Arsene Wenger went further to suggest that a deterrent for diving should be legislated for by the FA. “If an obvious dive is punished by a three-match ban, the players would not do it anymore. I would support it. It has to be obvious diving.”
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Cazorla’s dive came in the first half and stands as an obvious example of a player gaining the upper hand in an underhanded way.