Left back - a football blog

The news of Beckham’s exclusion from the Engerland squad (not a shock to many) for a friendly shows Capello is serious about the job; it would have been easy to bow down to the media and the populace. The biggest problem has to be his fitness; his Engerland performances have not been outstanding, but then again he’s not alone in that. SWP has been playing consistently for Chelsea this season and deserves his chance. Lennon is more likely to be picked for the U21s, but is another option.

Capello wants to stamp his authority on the team from the off and this is a bold move, especially for a friendly - good luck to him. Will he do the unthinkable and drop BFF too? His record at Real showed he was not afraid to make big decisions and change his mind when he had to; recalling Beckham after he said he wouldn’t play for them again.

Much as I am more bothered about Burley at Scotland, the Engerland soap opera is compelling.

(I heard Beckham’s situation at LA Galaxy likened to Albert Einstein in a pub team; perhaps a tad harsh, but not a bad analogy!)

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Rafa Benitez thinks that winning the Champions League is harder than winning the Premiership:

How many teams have won the Champions League? That is a massive trophy and it is more difficult to win than any other trophy.

If that’s the case, why the f*** do Liverpool keep losing Premiership games?

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Kevin Keegan is back as manager, there’s still no sign of a number 2 but you get the feeling Keegan would do well to get a serious tactician on board. If there were a 2000s version of Don Howe then that’s exactly what they need.

But then Dennis Wise has come in as an ‘executive director’ with some, as yet unspecified, responsibility for transfers and the development of the youth system, Tony Jimenez as vice-president of player recruitment and Jeff Vetere from Real Madrid as technical co-ordinator.

Then you have Chris Mort as Chairman and Mike Ashley who seems to be a very hands-on owner and it looks like there are too many chiefs and not enough indians at Newcastle. With so many people all having to sing from the same hymn-sheet to be successful it just takes differences between one or two for things to start to unravel.

There’s no question Newcastle need some long-term planning and fixing, perhaps this is it, but I’m not convinced that having the ‘power’ spread so widely is a good thing. Maybe it’s a management structure thing, should one person leave then it won’t have such a massive impact on the club but I’m doubtful. The best clubs in England have always had one man in charge. Too much delegation and interference causes problems.

Can you imagine Arsene Wenger or Alex Ferguson working under such a structure? We saw what happened to Martin Jol at Spurs when faced with the same situation. Jose Mourinho, Chelsea’s most successful manager ever, had his differences with the ‘management team’ and look what happened to him.

I suppose we’ll just wait and see but Keegan is flighty, it won’t take much for him to jack it all in again, and as a guy who, above anything, loves to be loved, it’ll be interesting to see if he’s not feeling it from some of his colleagues.

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‘The magic of the cup’ is as much a football cliché as ’sick as a parrot’ or ‘it’s a game of two halves’, but it holds true in some cases.

Havant and Waterlooville had the day of their lives against Liverpool, taking the lead twice before the Premier League team’s extra class showed through. That they were applauded off the field by the Anfield crowd tells its own story and it’s great that they got a nice reward for beating Swansea rather than a trip to Plymouth, or something.

Sheffield United beat Man City - you wonder with so many Premier League teams going out if the cup has lost something due to the amount of foreign players in the game. In other countries the cup competitions aren’t taken anywhere nearly as seriously as the FA Cup is in England. Could this be a factor?

With just 6 top flight teams left in the 5th round there are going to be some smaller teams making it further than they might have thought. Which is good for the competition. It’s hard to see beyond the big 4 as winners but some other clubs involvement will make it interesting. It’s 1995 since a club outside of Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea or United has won the cup - will this be the season of spectacular giant killing or will it be more of the same?

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You are Carlos Puyol. You are a Catalan boy now captain of that great symbol of Catalunya, FC Barcelona.

You have won league titles, the Champions League, you play with such great players as Thuram, Zambrotta, Ronaldinho, Henry, Eto’o, Deco, Xavi and Messi, plus incredible youngsters like Dos Santos and Bojan. Your team, the one that you captain, plays football that draws praise from all corners of the globe.

Do you then, for one second, consider a move to Spurs? Bearing in mind that they haven’t won a league title in over 40 years, have never played in the Champions League let alone won it, that their only success in recent years (and recent is pushing it) is a League Cup in 1999 and that you’ll swap playing with the greats to line up alongside the likes of Darren Bent, Ricardo Rocha, Michael Dawson, Younes Kaboul, Tom Huddlestone, Teemu Tainio and Paul Robinson.

I think Tottenham can want to sign Puyol all they want but it’s the same as any of us wanting to get busy with Angelina Jolie. It’s just never going to happen.

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The well-publicised “spat” between Nicklas Bendtner and Emmanuel Adebayor has had the media, in particular Sky and the Daily Mail creaming their jeans with airtime and column inches calling for justice.

Looking at the incident, I can’t see a comparison to Le Saux and Batty’s European scrap while at Blackburn or even Lee Bowyer and Kieron Dyer’s brawl at St James’s. At the time, the team was getting thumped, Bendtner had already scored an own goal and was losing any effectiveness he had in the earlier part of the game and Adebayor was determined to retain some respectability. Football is an emotional game, and I would want my team to show a bit of passion and get each other going - maybe Adebayor went a bit far, granted, but at least he showed he cared.

If the FA are to look at the incident and undoubtedly punish Arsenal and their players, maybe they’d like to examine the tape of the entire game with the Spurs fans throwing objects at Fabregas when he went to take corners or singing songs about Arsene Wenger being a…. well, you know. Maybe next time Spurs fans get all uppity about being called the “Y” word they may want to have a closer look at some of their own support.

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And I don’t just mean Titus Bramble’s defending. To celebrate the return of the King (cough) that is Keegan, here’s my top twenty seven (there’s too many to have a top ten) of his collected ramblings. I think this what they mean when they say “He’s got a good football brain”, i.e. it’s made of plastic and full of air.

“I know what is around the corner - I just don’t know where the corner is. But the onus is on us to perform and we must control the bandwagon”
“I don’t think they’re as good as they are”
“I’m not disappointed - just disappointed”
“He’s using his strength and that is his strength, his strength”
“There’ll be no siestas in Madrid tonight.”
“Argentina won’t be at Euro 2000 because they’re from South America.”
“We don’t get any marks for effort like in ice skating.”
“I’m not trying to make excuses but I think the lights may have been a problem.”
“You can’t do better than go away from home and get a draw.”
“Gary always weighed up his options, especially when he had no choice.”
“Chile have three options - they could win or they could lose.”
“England have the best fans in the world, and Scotland’s fans are second-to-none.”
“Hungary is very similar to Bulgaria. I know they’re different countries… ”
“In some ways, cramp is worse than having a broken leg.”
“It’s understandable that people are keeping one eye on the pot and another up the chimney.”
“I’d love to be a mole on the wall in the dressing room.”
“The tide is very much in our court now.”
The ref was vertically 15 yards away.”
“That would have been a goal if it wasn’t saved.”
“The good news for Nigeria is that they’re two-nil down very early in the game.”
“That decision, for me, was almost certainly definitely wrong.”
“It could be far worse for me if it was easy for me.”
“They’re the second best team in the world, and there’s no higher praise than that.”
“You’re not just getting international football, you’re getting world football.”
“Football’s always easier when you’ve got the ball.”
“The Germans only have one player under 22, and he’s 23.”
“We managed to wrong a few rights.”

Never mind all that “I would love it” stuff, this is the real Keggy.

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Speaking about Liverpool’s failure to perform against Villa last night, scrambling a 2-2 draw in the end, the Liverpool captain seemed eager to point the finger of blame at the two American owners, saying:

It’s not just this week, it’s been going on for some time and it’s certainly not helping the players. I’ve got to be careful what I say, but it’s certainly not helping the team.

It’s certainly a point of view that will curry favour with the fans who view the Yanks as meddling devils, but is he just trying to take the easy way out. From 11 home games this season Liverpool have only won 4, drawing 6 and losing 1. Despite some early, early season promise they’ve been steadily slipping out of the title race for some time and while it’s easy to blame the owners doesn’t it deflect from the failings of the manager.

He can certainly not complain he wasn’t given enough money to spend in the summer. A club record £25m on Fernando Torres, £10m on Ryan Babel plus fees for Benayoun and others. Simply put some of the players Benitez has bought aren’t good enough.

Kuyt and Voronin are the kind of players you’d expect to find at teams like Bolton or Middlesboro, not a team that expects to challenge for the Premier League. And that he plays them ahead of Peter Crouch, who scored a lot of goals last season and seems to score enough this season considering how little time he gets on the pitch, smacks of complete mismanagement.

There’s no doubt the off field situation isn’t helping Benitez but I don’t believe the players really care that much about things like that. Their focus should be on the football, not the petty squabbles. So as much as Liverpool fans want to blame Hicks and Gillette, and they’re right to back their manager because of how he’s been treated (which has been shabby), they shouldn’t lose fact that it’s not the Americans picking the team, buying the players and choosing the tactics week in, week out.

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Manchester City’s pleas for Manchester United to mark the 50th anniversary of the Munich air disaster with a minute’s applause instead of a minute’s silence are a sad indictment of the game right now.

It’s typical that the anniversary should throw up a fixture between the two Manchester clubs but if the City fans can’t hate United without resorting to spoiling the minute’s silence then there’s something very wrong with them. A few years back Tottenham fans were fantastic in the way they respected a minute’s silence at Highbury for the recently departed David Rocastle so there’s no reason why City fans can’t do the same.

It’s telling that both the club and supporters groups are urging United to change the silence to applause but the only reason is so any dissenting voices will  be drowned out. And let’s be honest, it would only be a minority of fans but that’s plenty to cause a problem.

What does doing nothing for a minute cost them? Can’t they just keep quiet for 60 seconds then pour whatever vitriol they like at their neighbours?

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Is this thing on? I SAID IS THIS THING ON?

Sorry for the lack of updates, dear reader(s), but fear not. We shall be back with our regular dose of irregular football nonsense starting now.

Kevin Keegan at Newcastle. I think it’s fantastic and I can understand why the fans are so happy. Despite not winning any trophies Newcastle won a lot of friends with their style of football under Keegan. They lost all those friends again under the reigns of Roeder and Allardyce (particularly when he brought scumbags like Barton into the club) but it looks set to be another exciting journey.

Bring out the 2-4-4 formations, the attacking football, the crazy scorelines and the passion of the curly man.

It sure beats Allardyce standing on the sidelines looking like a manatee with a wad of chewing gum in his mouth. So, Newcastle fans, let’s hear you. What do you reckon?

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