Archive | July, 2012

Will Spurs ever recover from ABV’s jilt complex?

30 Jul

AVB’s ‘et tu brute’ moment?

There are essentially three approaches to dealing with being jilted and since arriving at White Hart Lane, Tottenham’s latest manager has demonstrated all three in record time.

Following the trauma of last season, when he not only witnessed his lover run away with a trusted friend but then had to sit back and watch them happily cavort in public across the playing fields of Europe, AVB has been busily sharing the ABC of recovering from a broken heart. Observers of some of the more popular newspaper agony aunts columns might recognise the key stages.

1. Her loss, my gain. The first public utterances about the split with Chelsea were to remind us that those who quit on a relationship early doors patently lack faith and resolve.

“I told him (Abramovich) that for me it was him quitting on me when he had been so much involved in the beginning in bringing me in and he was the one also who was not putting up to the things he promised.”

2. I made her what she is today. Moving through the gears without a whisker of immodesty, the bearded wonder went on to claim responsibility for Chelsea’s eventual triumph in the Champions League. Remarkably this utterance contained not a shred of irony that this would actually make him the architect of his new club’s downfall, whose exclusion from next season’s Champions League arrived with Chelsea’s success.

“I was honoured I could put that team together and I would say that some of what they achieved was down to me.”

3. I’ve now found a greater love. The word ‘rebound’ is possibly football’s only contribution to the lexicon of love, but perish the thought that AVB’s arrival at Spurs should be construed as anything other than the discovery of  a greater love.

“I think the warmth of the (Tottenham) group is excellent to see, and you know two different groups react differently. The spirit within this group has been fantastic – it’s different from what I had in the last year”.

With heart repaired and a new project to command his affection, all that remains is the trifling matter of assembling a squad to achieve the top four finish that his new employers will doubtless regard as a minimum goal. If along the way he can sow seeds of doubt in a certain Russian’s mind that he really was a special one, this may outshine all of the baubles he intends to add to the Spurs trophy cabinet.

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Fergie flinches at cost of a Brazilian (and other hair raising stories)

25 Jul

Sir Alex bracing himself for a Brazilian

No wonder the beauticians of Salford are struggling to make ends meet. Sir Alex Ferguson the unwitting creator of so many footballers wives is now baulking at the cost of a Brazilian. Whilst the rest of the world waxes lyrical at the thought of one adorning their squad Sir Alex has decided to land his strip elsewhere. £30 million for Lucas Moura would just lead to a nasty rash it seems.

It’s also possible that the Glaswegian’s purse is poised to pounce elsewhere. Van Persie’s availability seems to have set the Mancunian managers on edge. The prospect of the Dutchman joining the Arsenal of the north rather than moving to Old Trafford has the ring of title decider about it, even before a ball has been kicked. Yet in the blue half of the city the arrival of RVP in a red jersey on their doorstep would be about as welcome as a housing benefits inspection.

In some respects the main Premiership managers have swapped roles this year. Whilst Fergie’s slowing down has extended to United’s transfer activity, his long term adversary (who left his shopping rather late last summer) appears to have hit the sales with vigour. With Giroud, Podolski and maybe now Santi Cazorla on board Robin can go fly solo as far as Arsene’s concerned.

DVD goes shopping again

Even at White Hart Lane the scene of Harry’s last chance saloon bar for these past 4 years has been brushed aside for a shiny new bistro. In charge of the kitchens one more time DVD (as the man with a penchant for video replays is known) has been given more money to burn than he even had at Chelsea. Yet so far the same problem he had last season of not enough ink on the dotted lines of new recruits looks set to haunt him.

Those fortunate enough to have a squad that warrants little further adornment might be the real winners this summer. Newcastle spring to mind, especially if they manage to pull off the transfer coup of the decade and buy back for a few tins of Newcastle Brown a player that they recently sold for a Kenny’s ransom.

Will any of this transfer activity make a blind bit of difference to the season ahead? If you think not, proceed straightaway to our 2012/13 Premiership predictions survey. If you think it might, than better hang back like Fergie to avoid getting stung.

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Fantasy Football knocked out by transfer window game.

22 Jul

Has the Fantasy game become a bit pointless?

The 2012/13 Premiership season has yet to kick off but it already has its first casualty. It would appear that the game of Fantasy Football may be hitting the skids, with some of the best known versions of this past-time suddenly announcing that they are now free to play – presumably because fewer people want to pay.

It would be nice to think that Fantasy Football’s misfortune is AMNT’s success.Like a well-judged sliding tackle could we have nicked the public’s interest in football prediction and taken it upfield?

The truth is actually more worrying for the inventors of Fantasy Football. The game they originally designed has recently been rendered rather pointless by the Premiership clubs version of the game. Formerly known as the transfer window this game has now closed the gap between fantasy and reality in football so thoroughly that there’s arguably now more fantasy in the real team game than in the one we imagine.

The best thing about the real game is obviously that there’s only one version of each player.  Anyone can have a Van Persie in their virtual team as Sir Alex Ferguson and Roberto Mancini know only too well. We’ll find out quite shortly which one of these two gents is a proud owner of a Dutch master and which one will have to make do with the Athena print.

As the pre-season becomes momentarily eclipsed by the arrival of Sports Day (as the UK police term the Olympics), the big question remains – will it be a record year for transfers as some pundits seem to think or will it be a summer of more money swilling around the same league with relatively little going overseas?

We’ll have all the answers in a little over a month’s time. In the meantime here’s some food for thought as you contemplate your pre-season predictions:

5 random transfer trends

  1. Last summer top-flight clubs spent £485m on players, up 33 per cent on 2010.
  2. The average cost of a Premier League player jumped to £6.40m, a 16 per cent increase.
  3. 2011 was the second summer in a row when midfielders cost more on average than strikers
  4. The typical man in the middle cost £7.42m compared to £6.78m for forwards.
  5. Spain’s Euro 2012 triumph with no recognised strikers might make them an endangered specie.

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The boys from Brazil aren’t just coming to thrill.

16 Jul

Officially the boys from Brazil are just coming to thrill and lay claim to the winners medal that their country has never won. Yet the Olympic football title is unlikely to be the only prize on the horizon for a few members of their squad later this week. Having once been one of the most hesitant employers of Brazilian football talent, many Premier League clubs now appear to be on the edge of going nuts for Brazil.

Long in the tooth

Longer in the tooth but not long till he comes here?

Whilst it’s still early days, there’s no doubt who is leading the charge, with Manchester United and Chelsea stockpiling their squads with Samba men for the past few years.  To date this has primarily been a rear-guard revolution, with centre backs, wing backs and defensive midfielders among the chief recruits. But now the focus appears to have switched further upfield, hence United’s interest in new wunderkind Lucas Moura and Chelsea’s courting of  Oscar and Hulk.

Old Boys Reunion.

Even some of the old guard are getting in on the act. Kaka will leave Real Madrid this summer, according to the president of his former club Sao Paulo – and moving to the Premier League is high on his possibles list. Whilst  has left Brazilian giants  over unpaid wages, making him a free agent. Perish the thought, but the idea of the toothless one turning out for the Baggies in a month’s time might be the tip of the season.

Not so long ago the idea that Brazilian footballers could transfer their silky skills to the Premiership seemed misty eyed nonsense. With the exception of Juninho, Middlesborough’s least South American looking midfield dynamo, the sporting fields of Britain have been unkind to the boys from Brazil. Players fabled for what they do with their feet have been better known for wearing gloves, as clear a sign of acclimatisation failure as you’re likely to find on a football pitch.

Born to chill, not to thrill.

The mystery in all this is why other South Americans have so thoroughly warmed to the Premier League. From the days of Ricardo Villa and Osvaldo Ardiles to those of Carlos Tevez, Javier Maschereno and now Sergio Aguerro, Argentinians have been positively feted. More of them have played Premiership football than Germans, whilst even the occasional Peruvian, Paraguayan and Colombian has out-distinguised their Samba playing cousins. So why has the nation with the biggest footballer manufacturing industry failed to thrive in the biggest market?

The stock answer is that latino temperament wilts in English temperatures. That’s why more Swedes have played the Premiership than Spaniards and more Norwegians than Italians. Yet in the recent 2011/12 season the greatest number of foreign players were Spanish and seemingly the worse the UK weather system becomes, the more exotic the footballer fauna and flora become.

Make your predictions.

So could the 2012/13 season be the breakthrough year for the term ‘Brazilian’ to mean something exciting going on in the 18-yeard box, than what you might ask for in a beauty parlour? These and others are the questions we need to answer to predict the outcome of the season coming up. To make your yours just fill in our pre-season survey.

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Construction underway as Premier League rebuilds.

9 Jul

Six weeks from kick-off and the Premier League is one of the world’s largest building sites. Like the holiday destination favoured by so many of its employees the forthcoming season currently resembles the Dubai sky line. A frenzy of men in hard hats building sky scraping fantasies from seemingly non existent foundations. And they say Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Currently the loudest drilling noises come from White Hart Lane, where the would-be reinventor of Chelsea appears to have been given a 2nd chance to overhaul a squad. Yet with new managers also in place at Carrow Road, Anfield, Villa Park, Swansea and maybe Wigan to come, this could yet be the busiest ever player transfer market.

A genuinely big investment bubble has been long anticipated, with each of the last few seasons threatening to become one before reality caught up with expectation. This time however the rush to register new players before the transfer window closes could test the stamina of the FA’s fax machine beyond its limits.

Wenger concerned about falling masonry.

Whilst the clubs with new managers (currently 25%) might be expected to generate the biggest clouds of dust, rebuilding activity is widespread. The top 4 clubs are not exempt, with each currently adding essential extensions to their battlements and in one or two cases anxiously watching for falling masonry as prized assets threaten to sheer off.

The dust must settle by midnight on August 31st when the transfer window closes. By then we’ll all have a better idea about which team has successfully reinforced its foundations and which could be courting a wobble by mid season. Before then comes the big challenge of deciding how the new season will play out. The AMNT pre-season survey asks all the key questions, from the identity of the likely top 4, to the 3 teams who will probably go down. Pundits have until August 18th to complete it, when all the answers will go into the AMNT data bank to be analysed by our team of statisticians.

If you’d like to take part, click on this magic link. Your clairvoyancy will be rewarded.

Who was wiser before the event? Our Euro 2012 poll reveals all.

5 Jul

As the cities of Eastern Europe return to their pre-tournament states of isolation and the last truck loads of football paraphernalia head to the town dump it is time to look back on how accurately Euro 2012 was predicted before kick off.

In many respects Euro 2012 was a two-horse race that got cancelled at the last minute. Spain or Germany were more or less everyone’s favourites at the start and despite the last-minute wobble at the thought that the Italians might be riding a horse called Destiny,  the reign prolonging in Spain wasn’t a great shock. That’s why our pre-tournament survey included more difficult prediction topics, like who might win the Golden Boot and which big team would crash and burn. You can see the results of these predictions here.

We also asked people to nominate their candidates for Plonker of the Euros, our special award for disservices to the tournament. Rooney and Balotelli were rather quickly out of the traps here as one might imagine. But rather than condemn either straightaway we thought it would be worth giving everyone a chance to vote for their choice from all those nominated. Here’s the magic form to cast your vote. In case you want inspiration here’s some below from one of our nominees, the TV pundits, who once again proved that going large early doors can lead to regrets later.

EURO 2012 BLOOPERS

Gary Lineker – I can see the Dutch getting out of the group and reaching the semi-finals but no further

Mark Lawrenson – I think France have got a really good manager in Laurent Blanc, they have had some fantastic results and they have got the best team spirit they have had for a long time. They will be my dark horses.

Lee Dixon – France will win our group and so England will play Spain in the quarter-finals and lose

Robbie Savage  I fancy Holland. I like the way they play their football, and they have got a player who is on fire in Robin van Persia (and yes he did spell it that way)

John Motson – I’m going for Germany because they have a bright young team which they have carried through from the World Cup, and the most youthful squad at the tournament

Jonathan Pearce – Spain are many people’s favourites but they are perhaps coming to the end of their cycle. They were suspect defensively at set-pieces in their friendly against England last autumn and I suspect one or two of their players have peaked.

Pat Nevin – Something tells me Portugal are going to have a good tournament but I am going to agree with a lot of people who say that the Netherlands are going to be a real threat.”

Mark bright – If Danny Welbeck does well in the first couple of games, Hodgson will stick with him rather than bringing Wayne Rooney back in after his suspension.

If nothing else these errors of pre-judgement prove what we’ve known all along. That the business of predicting match outcomes shouldn’t be left to the professionals.

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Spain slides into one party state as Europe watches in disbelief.

2 Jul

The prospect of economic diversity rescuing the Spanish economy took a huge backwards step last night. The country’s future now appears to be under the exclusive control of the tiki-taka manufacturers, who have set the nation on a unique course to become the first major economy to be entirely driven by revenue generated by footballers. The knock-on effects for the rest of the world look ominous as the country that refuses to give the ball back sold the football pundits of Europe a dummy, before walloping a luckless bunch of Italians 4-0.

The fact that literally nobody saw this coming could be the sporting phenomenon of 2012. This was a collective egg on face of omelette proportions. Following Italy’s victory over Germany many forecasters had down-rated the prospect of Iberian success against historically dominant Catholic cousins. The form book which so accurately prophesied the demise of the Germans at the hands of their Italian bogey team suggested a similar fate lay in store for Del Bosque’s charges. Spurred to life by the idea that historical inevitability would unseat the most dominant team on the planet, many of the last minute predictions in the AMNT data bank indicated that only another spot kick shoot-out might save the Spanish from paying homage to Cesar.

How wrong we all were. Any football fan that entered a coma at the start of Euro 2012 and came round this morning might feel that they’d only missed the most predictable 3 weeks in sporting history. The most fancied team beating the team that somehow always sneaks into the final, when nobody thinks they might, now looks a nailed on certainty before a ball was ever kicked. Yet as everybody who had a stab at forecasting the scores now knows, this became a tournament brimming with unpredictability. The final twist, with Spain wriggling free from the curse of being boring was as unexpected as any decent Hollywood thriller. They’ll be selling bootleg copies of this one all over the Iberian peninsula for quite some time one suspects, though you’ll be lucky to pick one up in Naples.

To see the final prediction results for the tournament click here. There will be a further update with analysis of all the pre-tournament predictions in the next bulletin, so please stay tuned.

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