New QPR signing Nedum Onuoha has admitted that he is glad to be reunited with manager Mark Hughes, and the ambition of the newly promoted club was a deciding factor in his move from Manchester City.
The versatile defender has signed a four-and-a-half year deal with the Loftus Road club for an undisclosed fee, joining Taye Taiwo as a new face at the London club.
Onouha has spoken of his admiration for Hughes, who he worked with at City, and is eager to get started with his new employers.
“This was the right time for me to join a club like QPR,” he told the club’s official website.
“The manager obviously played a massive factor in my decision to come here. I’ve worked with him before and he always wants players around him who are open and honest.
“He wouldn’t have come here if he didn’t believe that there was a squad of players here that can achieve the goals he has.
“The ambition of the owners was really appealing.
“This is my club now and I’ll give everything to help us succeed,” he stated.
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Onouha will be charged with shoring up Rangers’ vulnerable rearguard, and is in line to make his debut against Chelsea in the FA Cup on Saturday.
There are reports in the Metro that West Brom striker Peter Odemwingie has become a summer transfer target for Tottenham. This is partly due to his performance against Spurs at the weekend in which Odemwingie scored his 13th Premier League goal of the season.
Odemwingie arrived at West Brom in the summer from Lokomotiv Moscow for a fee of just £2.5m. The Nigerian international has suggested his future remains in England, but the dream of playing in the Champions League is one possible lure.
Odemwingie told Fifa.com “You never know what’s round the corner in football but all I can say right now is that I’m very happy here at West Brom.” But the desire to play in Europe is clear and Odemwingie went on to state “My hope is that, if we stay up, we can start raising our objectives and look at reaching the top half and qualifying for Europe.”
West Brom manager Roy Hodgson has guided the club to the 40 point mark and nearly secured their place in the Premier League for another season. The player’s desire to play at a bigger club could pave the way for a move to North London.
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Like a bottle of Sir Alex Ferguson’s finest red, midfield veteran Paul Scholes seems to get better with age.
Described as ‘a master of his trade’ by his manager following Scholes’ man of the match display in United’s 3-0 opening victory against Newcastle last Monday, the ginger magician rolled back the years to deliver a midfield master class in touch, timing and technique at Old Trafford.
Little wonder his evergreen team-mate Ryan Giggs has lauded the United craftsmen as the best player he has ever worked with at Old Trafford, putting him ahead of talents such as Roy Keane, Eric Cantona and Cristiano Ronaldo. Giggs enthused:
‘‘I have played with some great players during my time at United but I would have to put Paul Scholes down as the best.”
Yet it is the assessment of French legend Zinedine Zidane, considered by many as the outstanding player of his generation, which is perhaps the most telling evaluation of Scholes’ supreme talents. Zidane revealed he regrets never having played with Scholes during his career and branded him ‘in a class of his own’ despite his growing years.
“There is no doubt for me that Paul Scholes is still in a class of his own,” revealed Zidane.
“He’s almost untouchable in what he does. I never tire of watching him play. You rarely come across the complete footballer, but Scholes is as close to it as you can get.
“One of my regrets is that the opportunity to play alongside him never presented itself during my career.”
Scholes, with nine league titles and two Champions League medals, is certainly one of the best-ever players to grace the Premier League. His pin-point passing and movement is unmatched, while his technical skill and ability to control a game elevates him alongside the best player’s of his generation. And the one man who certainly appreciates such talents, and qualified to make these judgements, is the outrageously gifted Zidane.
The season may be just two games old but the diminutive former England international shows no sign of slowing down just yet, despite his contract running out at the end of the season. Sir Alex may yet persuade Scholes to stay on for another season if he continues to deliver such exquisite performances in the heart of the United midfield this term. The 35-year-old was up to the same old tricks at Craven Cottage on Sunday, firing The Red Devils into the lead with a rasping 25-yard rasping shot which nestled into the corner of David Stockdale’s net, marking his 150th goal for the club.
Despite no longer possessing the pace he once had when he first broke into the United first-team an astonishing 17 seasons ago, his quick footballing brain keeps him one step ahead of his often beleaguered opponents. The midfield veteran was the division’s most accurate passer last term with a remarkable 89.58% of his passes reaching their intended target. Scholes also was the Premier League’s top passer over the opening round of Premier League matches with 104, streets ahead of nearest competitors Yaya Toure and Michael Essien.
United and Ferguson’s next task will be attempting to replace the seemingly timeless Scholes when he finally decides to call it a day and hang up his boots. Yet with Scholes continuing to deliver at the highest level, I wouldn’t bet on this being his last season at Old Trafford.
Do you agree with Zidane’s assessment? Leave your comments below
VIDEO: Pass-master Scholes
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Wolves manager Mick McCarthy has stated that despite the fact that his side came back from a goal deficit twice against Norwich to draw 2-2, the home side should have won the game.
Andrew Surman and Simeon Jackson scored a goal in each half to give The Canaries the advantage, but Slyvain Ebanks-Blake and Ronald Zubar levelled things up for the Molineux outfit.
Despite Zubar’s goal coming eight minutes from the end, McCarthy feels his side had enough of the play to get three points instead of one.
“It was exciting, captivating and excruciating at times,” he told Sky Sports.
“They got off to a good start, we got back into it and were on top at the end of the first half.
“I think we dominated the second half and conceded against the run of play.
“If we get those chances, irrespective of the goals we’ve conceded, we have got to win the game.
“My players always give every ounce of effort. I love my players for that. It shows what they’re about, coming back from behind twice,” he concluded.
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Following Chelsea’s 1-0 defeat to Manchester United at Stamford Bridge in the first leg of the quarter finals of the Champions League last night, the knives are out once again for Fernando Torres. The Spanish striker who cost Chelsea £50 million from Liverpool in January is still yet to score for the Blues and doesn’t look like doing so any time soon. So that begs the question, is Fernando Torres the biggest waste of money ever?
This is an accolade for which there is plenty of competition, including previous Chelsea signings for starters. This comes in the form of the likes of £30m man Andriy Shevchenko, while Man United can boast Juan Sebastian Veron at £28.1m and Man City spent £32.5m on Robinho. Liverpool fans will want to forget £17m they spent on Alberto Aquilani, while could the £35m spent on Andy Carroll be considered a waste in the future? As like Torres, the former Newcastle striker is still yet to score for his new club. A special mention also has to go to Winston Bogarde who was more than happy to take the £40,000 given to him by Chelsea.
The decision as to which player is the biggest waste of money ever was too difficult a one for a single man to make, so we’re opening it up to you. Who do you think has been the biggest waste of money ever? Vote now!
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The relative tranquillity of this summer’s transfer market has disguised the fact that Premier League revenues are up. This rise in revenue is attributable to the value of overseas television rights which have doubled to exceed £1 billion over three years. The twenty Premier League clubs have asked its chief executive, Richard Scudamore not the reveal how much the new deal is worth. Another rise in income may seem positive news but this will have far-reaching implications for the future of television rights and the ownership and financial management of clubs. In the spirit of openness should fans be made aware of their club’s share of the pot? Knowledge of the figures would allow fans to better hold their respective clubs to account and scrutinise their decisions.
In the midst of a global economic downturn Premier League clubs are reluctant to have details of their wealth made public. The desire of top flight clubs not to reveal the details of this new agreement is also motivated by a wish not to give any rival clubs or agents an advantage in the transfer market. All valid reasons but fans may wish to know more about the financial health of their clubs. The distribution of overseas television money is more equitably distributed than in Spain and Italy where the elite sides negotiate their own deals. The appeal to make this information confidential may not be due to the discrepancies which occur between Premier League clubs but because of the financial mismanagement it would reveal.
The figures that Premier League clubs do not want fans to see have huge implications for the future of the league. Overseas fans are the main driving force behind these increased revenues. This has maintained the Premier League’s financial advantage over Serie A, the Bundesliga and La Liga. This goes some way to explain the cosmopolitan profile of Premier League owners. The Chinese financier Kenny Huang is vying to become the latest foreign Premier League owner, recognising the unlimited potential of overseas markets. What does this mean for the average fan who attends games and watches their club on television? The ability of the domestic fan to bolster their club’s profits has long been in decline.
In an effort to attract overseas fans we have already faced the rescheduling of league games and the widely criticised proposal of the 39th game. The prospect of each side playing an extra game abroad was received sceptically by managers but less so by club chairmen. The argument that overseas markets have altered the focus of Premier League clubs is hard to dismiss. Arsenal has recently signed a deal with MP & Silva, an international sports media company. Anticipating a move towards the internet becoming the dominant medium for football the club are intent on revamping its media output so it can eventually interact with fans across the globe, for a fee, via the touch of a button.
Such decisions may make business sense but for the humble, domestic fan are the investments of clubs misplaced. A paradigm shift in how clubs raise revenue and how we watch football may be occurring. These changes may mean greater revenues still for top flight clubs and yet financial mismanagement still afflicts the league. Manchester United and Liverpool fans protest about the scale of debt at their clubs and Portsmouth became the first Premier League side to enter administration this year. With so much money sloshing around the system questions need to be raised about clubs’ investment in youth and coaching, paying down debts and reducing the cost of attending matches. Greater freedom of information would allow fans to question their club’s actions and guard against financial short-termism.
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With the PL season nearly upon us, let’s see the WAGS that will be keeping the players on their toes. Click on image to VIEW gallery
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So the inevitable happened – Wayne Rooney has had his England ban reduced to two games, the third game ban suspended for four years.
As a Manchester City fan who considers Rooney to have fewer good points to his character than the love child of Piers Morgan and Kelvin Mackenzie (if such a thing were possible), as a football fan who has fallen out of love with the England team and its surrounding circus over the past few years, you wouldn’t expect me to be happy with the decision, or be supportive towards the decision.
After all, no one could argue the red card wasn’t deserved. Rooney kicked out needlessly at another player, it was violent conduct, and that’s a three-match ban the world over – or so I thought.
And he’s got form. A player whose red mist has let down club and country before, a player whose suspect temperament always hinted at a disciplinary nightmare round the corner.
So three matches is surely fair? Well maybe not. UEFA disciplinary procedures are different to the FA’s, so you can’t really compare the two. A whole host of journalists are claiming now the FA have set a terrible precedent by appealing Rooney’s ban and that they will now be open to appeals every time a player is given a 3-match ban. But they miss the fact that the two organisations run different disciplinary procedures, due to the different nature of domestic and international football. There is no set three-match ban for this sort of offence with UEFA – they have disciplinary panels that assess bans, and can reduce them – as they did with Rooney, and as they have done before with other players.
Already managers are moaning too, Kenny Dalglish being the first to also predict clubs contesting domestic three games bans. The FA will quite rightly point out that their bans run under a different organisation, under a different process, and thus there is no comparison to be made. The constant flow of club football demands a different process, a different rule-book.
I don’t know what argument the FA took in the appeal, as they have no intention of revealing such information, though they will have definitely cited the example of Andrei Arshavin, who had his ban reduced to two games in similar circumstances prior to Euro 2008. Either way, despite everything, I agree with the FA’s stance, and I agree with the length of ban, if not the way it was eventually decided.
My main argument is straight-forward, if not necessarily a very popular one. It is that having similar punishments for domestic and international games is not fair. A three match domestic ban has far less impact than a three match international ban. Domestically, a player might be out of action for a fortnight. An international ban can leave a player in the wilderness for a large chunk of a year, and as we saw with Rooney, could wipe out participation in a whole tournament. This doesn’t seem fair to me, and punishments should be more proportional. Yes, getting a ban just prior to the finals of a tournament could be seen as bad luck (or timing), just as getting banned for an FA Cup final would be, but getting banned for three matches during a qualification campaign would still see you off international duties for up to half a year (for games of consequence at least). The FA have invited criticism by appealing Rooney’s ban, as they seem to condone violent conduct, going against everything they preach about “fair play” on the pitch. But if they hadn’t appealed, they would have been slammed in the press anyway. Any FA would have appealed, as it was in their interest, and the fans’ interest to do so. After all, even the player Rooney kicked thought the ban was too harsh.
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Rooney was stupid to kick out at the opposition player, as he has been stupid many times before. He cannot bemoan the red card he got, and he cannot bemoan a suspension – but three matches was too harsh in my opinion – the route to getting it reduced may have been flawed, a route involving a campaign by our Football Association until they got their way, but the end result was fair. The length of a sporting ban, be it for violent conduct, accumulation of cards, taking a banned substance or pushing a referee to the ground, is not a set amount laid out in some magical rule book deep in the vaults of FIFA HQ. A ban should enforce the sufficient punishment for the crime committed. Rooney deserves no sympathy for his various misdemeanours, but missing what could be two-thirds of England’s Finals campaign is to me a punishment that fits the crime.
A London club has never won the Champions League but, when the English capital became the first European city to boast three sides in the group stage of the competition this season, the likelihood of its long wait to win the competition ending at last looked to be greater than ever. When Arsenal, Chelsea, and Spurs all succeeded in reaching the knockout stages, the odds on the final at Wembley witnessing a win for a London team shortened again – at least until Arsenal and Spurs drew Barcelona and Milan, respectively, in the last sixteen.
In the end, Spurs excelled themselves against the Serie A leaders but Arsenal were narrowly defeated 4-3 on aggregate by their Spanish spiritual cousins, though they were comprehensively outplayed in the away leg. Chelsea, for their part, eased past FC Copenhagen. With the draw for the last eight and the semi-finals of the Champions League to take place on Friday, the two remaining London sides from the west and north of the city are both still in the running to do what the other English club joining them in the quarter-finals – Manchester United, who knocked out Marseille – achieved in 1968: lift the trophy on home soil.
The last time a team won the Champions League in its own country was in 1997 when Germany’s Borussia Dortmund defeated Juventus 3-1 in Munich. That result came only a year after the Italian club had beaten Ajax on penalties in the final in Rome. The other clubs to have benefited from home advantage all won the tournament when it was still trading as the European Cup: Liverpool (1978 – against FC Brugge at Wembley), Ajax (1972 – against Inter Milan in Rotterdam), Manchester United (1968 – against Benfica at Wembley), Inter Milan (1965 – also against Benfica, in Milan), and Real Madrid (1957 – against Fiorentina in Madrid). The 1957 final at the Santiago Bernabéu stadium and the 1965 final at the San Siro, then, are also the only two that have been won by sides playing in their actual home stadium.
Roma could have followed suit in 1984 but, with a little help from goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar’s ‘spaghetti legs,’ Liverpool triumphed in the penalty shootout at the Giallorossi’s Stadio Olimpico to win their fourth European Cup. The last time the final featured a side from the host country that then went on to lose on the night was in 1986 when Barcelona lost a dour game against Steaua Bucharest in Seville, again on penalties. Reims, who lost the first ever European Cup final to Real Madrid in Paris in 1956, are the only other side to have lost within their native borders.
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Should either Chelsea or Spurs make it to Wembley on 28th May, then, it will be only the third time a London side has reached the Champions League final. Arsenal lost to Barcelona in Paris in 2006 while, two years later, Chelsea came within the width of a post of beating Manchester United in Moscow. The 2008 final – John Terry’s scuffed penalty and all – summed up the north-west of England’s pre-eminence over the capital in Europe’s top club competition. Not only have Liverpool and Manchester United lifted the cup at Wembley before, the two clubs have triumphed eight times between them in total.
Aside from the 1968 and 1978 finals featuring United and Liverpool that Wembley played host to, the old stadium staged the showpiece fixture of the European season on three other occasions before it was marked for demolition in 2000: in 1963, Milan beat Benfica 2-1 to deprive the Portuguese side a hat-trick of final wins; Ajax won the first of three successive European Cups in 1971 against Panathinaikos; and Barcelona won the trophy for the first time in 1992 thanks to a Ronald Koeman free-kick against Sampdoria. Aside from Liverpool’s win in 1978, then, the old Wembley only ever welcomed first-time winners. Indeed, of the nine different clubs to have been Wembley finalists, Liverpool and Benfica were the only two that had won the competition prior to the year they lined up in London – and Benfica lost on both their visits. If the new stadium is to maintain that quirk of history it could count in Spurs and Chelsea’s favour but, then again, Schalke or Shakhtar Donetsk’s too.
Berlin, Paris, and Rome are three other members of the luckless capital city club, in that none of their sides have won the Champions League either. The German and French cities have never even had a finalist, and it is one of the interesting aspects of the European club game that sides from those two capital cities have been continuously outshone on the football field by their provincial rivals. London will be playing catch-up with the north-west clubs’ European trophy haul for a long time yet, even if Chelsea or Spurs do manage to avoid Barcelona in Friday’s draw and then progress to and win the final. Nonetheless, Wembley success for Harry or Carlo in two months’ time would be a truly historic event.
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Mark Schwarzer’s proposed move to Arsenal has proved that there is no age limit for top quality goalkeepers. At 37 he is not a signing for the future, but as someone who can come in and make an immediate impact on first team affairs this is a shrewd move. In his fifteen years in England he has made over 550 appearances in the Premier League and has made his name as one of the most consistent players in the league.
But of course he is not the first goalkeeper to play successfully at the highest level past 35. The likes of Friedel, Van Der Sar, Hahnemann, James and Jaaskelainen are just some of the goalkeepers aged 35 or over who played in last year’s Premiership and all appear to have a good few years left in them. It’s not just a case of new diets or training regimes that is the reason why goalkeepers are playing until around their 40s. Zoff, Shilton, Ogrizovic and Southall are just a few examples of players having extended careers in the past.
Obviously though, the nature of the goalkeeper is slightly different from any other. As on-field players get older and they lose that yard of pace or those last 10 minutes of fitness they are looking at slipping down the leagues in order to prolong their careers. These attributes are not so important for goalkeepers; all a goalkeeper really needs is agility and judgement. It has been proved that both things of these can be maintained at a high level well into your thirties, and far from declining, they seem to improve with age. It makes you think how good Joe Hart can be in 10 years, or how good Chris Kirkland could have been if he’d not been ravaged by injury.
So when Arsene Wenger felt like he needed a new goalkeeper he didn’t want to take any chances. An experienced goalkeeper will not only benefit Arsenal and their title push, but the move must also be irresistible for Schwarzer who has been playing most of his career in the obscurity of the Premier League mid-table. It is notable also that, should Schwarzer sign, it will be a signing out of trend with most of Wenger’s wheelings and dealings – young players with bags of promise being the usual arrivals seen at the Emirates. So the train of thought that goalkeepers improve with age is a valid one, especially bearing in mind the mistakes Fabianski made in crucial games last year.
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Manchester United striker Wayne Rooney has shaken off a knock to be fit to play against Benfica on Tuesday night, in what is a crucial match for the Premier League champions.
Sir Alex Ferguson’s men are locked on eight points with the Portuguese giants, and a win at Old Trafford would put the English side in pole position to top Champions League Group C.
With Danny Welbeck doubtful and Chris Smalling out, Ferguson has received a boost by Rooney declaring his fitness.
“Wayne Rooney got a few knocks and missed training, but he should be OK for Tuesday,” the Scottish coach told Sky Sports.
“We’ve got one or two knocks from Saturday. Jonny Evans got a little tightness in his hamstring yesterday, but hopefully will be OK.
“Chris Smalling trained but won’t be available, but he should be OK for Saturday,” he stated.
Ferguson was under no illusions to how important the game is for United’s progression hopes, and has targeted three points.
“It’s a big game. It’s a game which we recognise is a real European game in the history of Benfica and ourselves.
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“It’s a really interesting game for both teams. Both will want to win so it should be an open match and hopefully we will get the result we want,” he concluded.