All posts by h79snht.top

The summer is coming along quite nicely at Rangers so far. After putting a grossly inadequate season behind them, everyone at the club is pulling together and moving forward with the business ahead.

Their first competitive match of the season is not far away, due to play Progres Niederkorn next Thursday in Europa League Qualifying and it’ll be supporters’ first chance to see whether Pedro Caixinha is going to start putting things right at the club over the next 12 months.

There are key objectives next season. In the Scottish Premiership it will be all about overhauling Aberdeen at least and taking Celtic as far as they can in the title race, although even the most optimistic Gers fans would admit their chances of a title are slim. In the domestic cups then a final placing isn’t too much to ask for and that’ll give them a great chance of picking up some silverware. In Europe it’s all about getting acclimatised to continental football again and given the standard of opponents they can face in the 3rd Qualifying Round and the Play-Offs, a group stage place is more of a hope than an ambition.

The signs so far is that Rangers could in fact achieve most of the objectives ahead next season and that’s reason enough for fans to be excitement but there are THREE more key reasons why that excitement is fully justified…

Pedro Caixinha is backing up his words

Pedro Caixinha isn’t messing about. He promised to change things at Ibrox and everything points to him doing exactly that.

Having gotten of Joe Garner, Clint Hill and Philippe Senderos, you’d expect them to be the first of many to leave club. The signings coming in have been numerous too with six players already added to the first time squad, five permanently. With the likes of Eduardo Herrera and Carlos Pena also joining training and the European squad list but waiting for work permits before being officially unveiled, that makes eight so far.

That’s not unsubstantial business and it’s clear that Rangers chiefs are fully backing the man they picked to bring the club forward in the transfer market.

Caixinha has utilised his contacts in Portugal and Mexico well to bring in former players and footballing legends like Bruno Alves, who has won more in the game than almost anyone in Scotland.

Nobody really knew what a Caixinha team would look like when he came in and talked about tactics and evaluating the squad in his unique press conferences but it certainly appears he is not just a man of words but a man of action. Now fans are eager to see if that translates onto the pitch.

The fans have a new avenue of investment

Most football fans take the opportunity to buy football strips in support of their team for granted but at Rangers over the last couple of years that’s been a very complicated thing.

Mike Ashley and Sports Direct owned the rights to Rangers’ merchandise and so any money spent on strips and the like was not going to the club, meaning they could not tap into the Light Blues’ massive support for a key revenue stream.

That all changed this week when Dave King announced a new deal that would allow Rangers to receive a far bigger cut of replica strips sold to supporters and with many having boycotted the buying of said kits, they’ve been out in their droves investing back into the club with sales.

It’s unlikely to be the kind of money that puts them back on a par with Celtic but it could be the difference between signing a player or two of quality and not and is a massive positive.

For fans, it’s also a sign that the club are moving in the right direction off the pitch after years of worry.

Pedro Caixinha was right about Aberdeen

Pedro Caixinha drew a lot of criticism towards the end of last season when he said Aberdeen were coming to the end of their ‘cycle’, suggesting that they may have reached their peak.

As time has passed since those comments, it seems that he was fully justified in that stance considering Rangers have signed their captain Ryan Jack on a free transfer, Celtic signed their best player in Jonny Hayes, consistent defenders like Ash Taylor have left the club and key talent like Niall McGinn also said goodbye to Pittodrie.

Derek McInnes may have rejected the chance to join Sunderland but it’s clear he has a summer of rebuilding on his hands up North and the squad that enjoyed consistent second places behind Celtic is now very different indeed.

That gives Pedro Caixinha and Rangers a massive opportunity to overhaul them next season and that’ll be the first step towards bringing themselves closer to Celtic.

Former Liverpool midfielder Danny Murphy believes that Arsenal should stop trying to negotiate Alexis Sanchez down and give him what he wants.

The saga over the Chile international’s future has been rumbling for months now, and there are conflicting reports regarding the current status of the situation.

Last week, The Guardian reported that Manchester City are confident of landing Sanchez’s signature in a deal that could cost £50m.

However, El Filtrador reporter Juan Luis tweeted that the forward player will stay at Arsenal, but he did not mention whether or not the 28-year-old will sign a new deal.

It seems as though a major part of Sanchez’s reluctance to extend his stay at the Gunners is over money, with talkSPORT reporting that the former Barcelona star is after a staggering £400,000 a week.

That figure would comfortably make him the highest earner in the Premier League, and Murphy believes that it makes sense to fall to the player’s demands.

He told talkSPORT:

“What Sanchez is demanding, that’s the going rate because he can get that elsewhere. The simple equation is this: £400,000-a-week is £20m a year, over four years that’s £80m. To sign a player to take his place, it’s going to cost you at least £60m or £70m, and that’s if you can find one. But Arsenal can’t replace Sanchez with someone of his quality, because someone that good won’t go there.”

WATCH THE LATEST AFTV VIDEO BELOW…

“The game’s gone,” many a drunken old man has declared to the rest of the pub, protesting that the beautiful game was a much purer sport before the increasingly sanitised corporate era, back when pre-pass-back-rule-football played on farcical pitches was so boring rival fans turned to amusing themselves by beating the Christian Fuchs out of each other across the country on any given Saturday.

Many a drunken old man have been waved off by younger predecessors who will inevitably make the same claims several years and countless boozy nights down the line, when they suffer the same aged curse of mistaking a failure to keep pace with the modern world as the modern world soullessly leaving them behind.

Old men always think the world has become a worse place; that the next generation are softer and stupider than his yet somehow given an easier ride through life.

Yet, amid a summer in which the Premier League will almost certainly spend in excess of £1.5billion on players and in which one club has spent £126million on full-backs alone – Manchester City – you have to wonder whether those many old men had a point, whether football can continue in this way and whether, eventually, the bubble that is the relentless rise of the Premier League will burst. Maybe the game has gone already; maybe we’re now in the post-game era filled with post-truths and fake news.

Of course, there are justifiable reasons for City to spend £126million on full-backs this summer. Over the last few years, it has become one of the most important positions on the pitch, providing the dynamism once expected of central midfielders and the delivery once expected of wingers, but City finished last season with easily the worst full-back options in the top seven, all three beyond their 30th birthdays and their title-contending expiration.

There’s no way Pep Guardiola could have gone into next season depending on Pablo Zabaleta, Bacary Sagna and Gael Clichy, who were all released at the end of 2016/17, and full-backs these days cost almost as much as attacking midfielders. In fact, no position has seen a greater inflation in average price amongst the Premier League’s top six clubs since summer 2013.

Yet, whether the three full-backs in question are actually worth that almighty sum remains a subject open to debate – particularly in regards to £50million signing Kyle Walker, who hasn’t even held down the No.2 berth in the England team since making his debut in 2011. Tottenham were more than glad to see the back of the 27-year-old and there’s an incredible irony in them effectively replacing him with Kieran Trippier, a right-back who began his career at Manchester City but was deemed surplus to requirements in 2012 and accordingly sold to Burnley back in their mid-table Championship days.

Along with Clyne, Trippier will be Walker’s biggest competitor for England’s right-back slot next season and one of his biggest competitors for a spot in the PFA Team of the Year. While he cost Spurs a mere £3.5million, however, City have just spent £50million on a player their one-time academy product forced out of the starting XI at the end of last season, that Tottenham seemingly think is a better option on the right side of defence anyway. In fact, he’d probably be a better fit for City as well, possessing superior technical quality to his former team-mate.

Of course, Trippier probably wouldn’t have developed into the footballer he is today if he’d stayed at City, especially during a time in which the Sheik owners were spending the club’s way to its first ever Premier League title. Playing over 270 games before his 27th birthday and featuring in two promotion-winning sides under Sean Dyche has clearly aided his development.

But in many ways, that’s precisely the point; when the demand for success has become so short-term clubs are paying £50million to address a problem that could have been solved by simply keeping faith in an academy player for a few more years, there is clearly a vast intrinsic flaw within the English game.

Trippier isn’t the only recent example of a club wasting a small fortune through a failure to develop young players either; last summer, Manchester United paid a world-record transfer fee to re-sign Paul Pogba, a youth player who’d left Old Trafford for free four years earlier due to a lack of game-time.

Earlier this summer, Chelsea were prepared to pay £75million before the Red Devils beat them to Romelu Lukaku – more than double the sum they let Everton acquire his services for only three years ago. Likewise, although he ended up at Everton, former academy product Michael Keane could have easily been United’s centre-back signing this summer instead of Victor Lindelof after another impressive season at Burnley.

That’s not to say no Premier League club re-purchased former youngsters who’d proved themselves elsewhere until a few years ago, Martin Keown returning to Arsenal after successful spells with Aston Villa and Everton particularly coming to mind. But what makes the modern day examples so staggering is the sheer level of money involved. The Gunners bought back Keown for £2million; re-signing Pogba last summer cost 45 times as much.

Perhaps there’s quite simply so much money in the Premier League now that clubs can afford to let talented youngsters leave, knowing that they have the finance to buy them back if they come good. But that mentality falls somewhere between laziness and almost arrogant decadence, precisely defying what academies were created to do; produce future first team stars. Trippier, Pogba, Lukaku and Keane tell us the academies are holding up their end of the bargain still – the clubs and managers are simply ignoring the potential of the young players at their disposal, or at the very least lacking the patience to wait for it to blossom.

The Premier League may be the most lucrative and commercially successful top flight in world football, but every empire eventually crumbles, usually when it becomes parody of itself. That’s exactly what’s happening to the Premier League; no manager has the freedom to look beyond the next season and every club tries to solve every problem by simply throwing more money at it to the point where they’re paying for what they already once had.

The Premier League will eventually be destroyed by its own short-termist thinking and lust for spending. If the game isn’t gone already, it’s definitely going – then again, maybe I’m just getting old.

Chelsea striker Diego Costa does not have many fans at the moment due to his behaviour this summer.

The Spain international has so far refused to turn up to training, and has spent the past month or so in his homeland of Brazil.

In a recent interview with the Daily Mail the 28-year-old accused Chelsea of treating him like a criminal and hit out at manager Antonio Conte for allegedly telling the forward that he was no longer wanted by the club via text message.

Costa has not stopped there; in a statement released on Thursday, the attacking player refused to return to Chelsea, demanding that he be sold to his former club Atletico Madrid, who cannot register players until January 2018 due to a transfer ban.

According to Sky Sports, Costa has already been fined two weeks’ wages, but the drama looks as though it will drag on as he is still refusing to honour his contract, which has two years left to run.

Football pundit and former Chelsea striker Tony Cascarino has some stern words for the striker.

He told talkSPORT:

“This guy just totally thinks he can do what he wants and he is going to bulldoze his way through to a move away from Stamford Bridge. Well, hopefully Chelsea will dig their heels in over Diego Costa.

“To say ‘I’m only going to go and play for Atletico Madrid’, that’s fine if his contract is up, but he has two years to run. He has a duty to stay and fight for his place at the football club.

“It’s an embarrassment to footballers. Diego gives food to all those people who criticise footballers. He’s doing everything in his power to embarrass every footballer.”

Gary Cahill is not a name that has been banded about in the transfer gossip pages this summer, but it appears that the Chelsea captain may be wanted by another club.

According to The Sun, Italian giants Juventus have made initial contact with the Blues regarding a possible deal for the defender.

Cahill was made captain of Chelsea just last month following John Terry’s decision to call time on his illustrious career at Stamford Bridge.

There are slight doubts over the defender’s potential playing time this season, though, due to the arrival of Antonio Rudiger.

It has been a bad start to the campaign for Cahill, as he was sent off early into the Blues’ 3-2 defeat to Burnley on the opening day of the Premier League season.

It is unclear whether the England international would be open to becoming Leonardo Bonucci’s replacement, but the fans have given a mixed response to the reports.

Make no mistake about it, we’ve just come to the end of the most ridiculous transfer window in Premier League history, where none of the deals made sense and the price-tags meant absolutely nothing.

That’s a rather cynical view of an obvious upward trajectory in spending but even by usual standards, the transfer market seemed to escalate dramatically over the course of the summer – the English top flight incurring a 23% rise on its overall outlay from twelve months prior.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean it was all bad business from the Premier League. Some handsome fees were paid for some handsome talents, Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah and Manchester United’s Romelu Lukaku particularly coming to mind, and a few clubs managed to pull off a few shrewd deals as well, such as Tottenham’s Deadline Day swoop for Fernando Llorente.

So, Arsenal fans, now the dust has settled on the transfer window, who is your signing of the summer? Let us know by voting below…

According to The Daily Mail, Roy Hodgson will look to sign Jack Wilshere for Crystal Palace in January, offering a new start for the injury ravaged England international.

What’s the Story?

Rouy Hodgson is keen to make Jack Wilshere has first signing as Crystal Palace manager in January. The former England boss was a keen supporter of the Arsenal man during his time in charge of the country and would frequently select the 25-year-old for international duty.

Now the incoming Palace manager is keen to hand Wilshere, who is valued at £16.2million by Transfermarkt, a lifeline to improve his injury ravaged career

How good was Wilshere last season?

In short, not very.

Many were shocked to see the England international head to Dorset last summer in a bid to pay some first team football. And many also felt that he would be the standout player in a Bournemouth team that is mostly made up of players who have spent a large part of their careers in lower league football.

However, Wilshere was wholly underwhelming for much of the season and once injuries started to creep back into his game, it put to bed yet another season for one of the unluckiest men in football.

Would Wilshere be a good signing for Crystal Palace?

This is a difficult question to answer, due to the fact that we arguably haven’t seen Jack Wilshere at his best for a number of years now. It will all be down to the 25-year-old’s body. If Hodgson can keep Wilshere fit and playing every week, it could well be one of the signings of the season.

However, if the Arsenal man succumbs to injuries once again, a repeat of his disappointing loan at Bournemouth could be on the cards.

Tottenham Hotspur will again be without the services of key midfielder Victor Wanyama for this weekend’s Premier League clash against Huddersfield Town.

The 26-year-old has only made two league appearances for Spurs this season due to a knee problem, and while results have been strong for the club in recent weeks, there is no question that the midfielder’s presence has been missed.

On Thursday, Spurs boss Mauricio Pochettino revealed that Wanyama would miss the clash with newly-promoted side Huddersfield, but was hopeful of having the former Southampton midfielder available for selection immediately after the international break.

Wanyama, who is valued at £25m by transfermarkt.co.uk, then posted an image of Twitter signalling that he was closing on a return to first-team action.

As expected, the image brought a strong response from the Tottenham fans, who want Wanyama available for the club’s key Champions League clash against European champions Real Madrid next month.

A selection of the best Twitter reaction can be found below:

Tottenham Hotspur manager Mauricio Pochettino is not the biggest fan of his Manchester City counterpart Pep Guardiola at the moment.

The former Barcelona boss has come under fire from Pochettino for describing Spurs’ side as “the Harry Kane team”.

There is no doubt that the England international has been hugely influential in this early stage of the season.

[ad_pod id=’leo-vegas’]

Following a dry August, Kane hit 11 goals in all competitions for the North London outfit, and seven of those have been scored in his last three outings for the club.

It is not only the striker that has been contributing, though, as Dele Alli, Christian Eriksen and even Ben Davies have been getting on the scoresheet.

When asked about Guardiola’s claims during his pre-match press conference, Pochettino insisted that he did not take any offence personally, but believes that the remarks were “disrespectful” to the other members of the team.

“That comment does not affect me but in reality, it was very disrespectful for many people. I think that many people took those words as very disrespectful for the club and many players that are here at the club. In my case, personally, I did not take it in a bad way. Wasn’t disrespectful for myself but for a lot of people it was unnecessary to say that.”

Tottenham currently reside third in the Premier League table, five points adrift of City, who are at the top of the standings.

Social media is a hub for fan engagement and in the heat of the moment, it is very easy to launch a scathing verbal attack on a player that has not performed well on the pitch.

Ayoze Perez has been targeted numerous times by Newcastle United supporters on Twitter, and his display against Crystal Palace was scrutinised in particular.

The 24-year-old has been handed the number 10 role this season, to play just behind striker Joselu, who signed for the Magpies from Stoke City in the summer.

Last season, Perez contributed with six assists and scored nine goals in 36 appearances in the Championship, 25 of which were starts.

Nine games into the Premier League campaign and the Spaniard has found the back of the net once and created a single assist.

Last weekend, Newcastle sealed a 1-0 victory over Palace at St James’ Park, and Perez managed just 66 minutes before he was substituted.

Benitez has spoken about the attack-minded player, and in particular the abuse that the former Tenerife player has received on social media.

The Chronicle quotes the manager as saying:

“I can read the comments and some people say this or that. He’s doing well. He’s a clever player. He has good movement. He didn’t play well the other day. He knows. We know. He had two or three situations where he could do better, and he was wrong. Still, he’s doing a great job, and the understanding between him and Joselu and the midfielders and the rest of the team is quite good.”