SWP gets tough |
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Sunday Times
"We need blue steel at City"
Two
former top-flight footballers were discussing Manchester City over
lunch. They were disparaging. Both are connected to a club that, like
City, has ambitions to challenge the Big Four.
“I wouldn’t have
a single member of their first eleven in our team,” said one. Not Micah
Richards? “Lost his way.” Stephen Ireland? “Great season but needs to
sustain it.” Richard Dunne? “Good player in bad form.” Robinho, surely?
“Nope.
"Our lads have heart - not sure if Robinho performs when
the chips are down.” They had forgotten Shaun Wright-Phillips. “Oh,
he’s the exception,” both agreed. “Definitely take him.”
Wright-Phillips
may be the size of a mascot but he is currently a looming presence at
his club. City’s billing has shrunk rapidly from “New Force in
Football” to “Premier League Strugglers” and Wright-Phillips is one of
the very few on their staff whose reputation has not dwindled.
Robinho
and Mark Hughes, City’s manager, have more than enough talent to grow
again but a 5ft 5in winger seems, for the moment, the biggest positive
at Eastlands. Since rejoining City in August he has married new levels
of enthusiasm and consistency to the dynamism that always marked his
play. If only others shared his focus. “We’re surprised to find
ourselves in trouble with the quality we have,” he said. “And I don’t
think we’ve been playing that badly. Our problem has been we’ve lost
concentration at key moments, at crucial times in games.
“The
players feel we’ve let ourselves down. Against Everton we played well
for 90 minutes then conceded a goal which was a sucker punch. It’s
hurting us just as much as it’s hurting the fans.”
That defeat
last week against Everton, and Sunderland’s win at Hull yesterday, have
pushed the world’s richest club into the Premier League relegation
zone, summing up their mental softness. Everton’s winner came with just
seconds left on the clock, from a routine corner and involved a 10st
12lb midfielder (Tim Cahill) outmuscling a 13st centre-back (Richards)
to head into an area of goal that City had not protected.
Pundits
talk of City using the wealth of their owner, Sheikh Mansour of Abu
Dhabi, to transform themselves in the January transfer window, but
Hughes could sign Kaka, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo and remain
on a losing streak if he cannot get his squad to show mettle. A table
ranking Premier League clubs by “resolve” shows City bottom. They have
thrown away 15 points in games where they have led, lead, more than any
side, the sequence starting when Chelsea were the visitors in September
and accelerating when Liverpool came from 2-0 down to win at Eastlands
on October 5.
At Chelsea, under Jose Mourinho, Wright-Phillips
played for a team that was almost impossible to dislodge once it gained
a lead and it felt appropriate to ask him about the difference between
that side and City who, after all, hope to follow the London club’s
example of revolution through spending. Unprompted, he pinpointed
workrate.
“The basis of everything, no matter how much quality
you’ve got, is hard work,” he said. “Once you get that throughout the
team, even if some players aren’t playing well but working hard, it’s
important because they are still doing the other things - helping out
by getting round the pitch and tackling. That’s the side of things
we’re trying to get right at the moment.”
When Sheikh Mansour
bought City in August he signalled he would make £260m over two years
available for squad improvements, a figure based on what Roman
Abramovich spent on turning Chelsea into champions. Hughes has lavished
far more on attackers (£59.5m for Jo, Robinho and Wright-Phillips) than
defensive players (£17.4m for Vincent Kompany, Pablo Zabaleta and Tal
Ben-Haim) and though Roque Santa Cruz remains a January target, the
manager’s focus may be on stiffening his midfield, defence and
goalkeeping options.
News of the World
"Shaun won't fake it"
SHAUN
WRIGHT-PHILLIPS gets kicked from pillar to post in the Premier League
but you will never see him rolling about in false agony.
In the recent Manchester derby, for example, four United players were booked for hacking at the City winger’s ankles.
But Wright-Phillips said: “I get kicked every game. I grew up with my friends messing around kicking me so I’m used to it.
“If I’d rolled around on the floor they would probably have just laughed at me and carried on playing. So I just got back up.
“Now I find it quite funny when other people do it.
“But everyone that tries to be a creative part of a team is going to get kicked.
“You can say it’s not a fair part of the game but it happens. You have to take it as a compliment.”Santa's at the door? |
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Daily Mail
"Santa Cruz drops Blackburn bombshell after revealing desire to leave for a bigger club"
Roque Santa Cruz has told Blackburn Rovers he wants the chance to move to a bigger club.
The
£20million-rated striker dropped a bombshell on the eve of Sam
Allardyce’s first game in charge by opening the door for a January move.
The Paraguay international said: ‘I don’t want to miss the chance of playing with a big side.
'If a bigger club came in for me then I would like to take that opportunity.’
Santa
Cruz will be a target for Manchester City and Mark Hughes — the manager
who took him to Ewood Park for £3.5m and revived a career that was
flagging at Bayern Munich — and Aston Villa are also certain to renew
the interest they showed in the summer.
Santa Cruz told BBC’s 5 Live: ‘I am happy at Blackburn but also I want to keep improving my football.
'My
contract with Blackburn is clear but I am looking again to play in a
big side that is in Europe and trying to win their league.
'I want to watch out for myself but I have to think of Blackburn too. It is a very hard decision.’
If
Blackburn do decide to grant the wishes of last season's 23-goal top
scorer they will want to do a deal quickly to give Allardyce time to
strengthen his squad for the battle to avoid relegation.
Santa Cruz’s lack of form this season has meant he has scored only three goals in 13 Barclays Premier League games.
The Times
"Stephen Ireland faces up to his past errors"
Had
this interview been arranged 12 months ago, it is doubtful whether
Stephen Ireland would have turned up and even had he done so, the
conversation might well have been peppered with so many untruths as to
make the exercise pointless. This, after all, is the man who invented
the deaths of two grandmothers to secure his release from international
duty with Ireland.
Trust is a difficult thing to re- establish,
but Ireland is trying hard, that much is obvious. He is, by his
admission, a complex character, but the person who sat down to talk
this week has a clear idea of what he wants from life and is almost
unrecognisable from the one who was in such a dark place a year ago
that he resorted to inhabiting a world of make-believe, one who briefly
seemed in danger of turning his back on football for good.
Speak
to anyone at Manchester City and they will tell you that the
transformation Ireland has undergone in the space of a year is even
more pronounced than the one experienced by the club, with City on the
brink of financial meltdown one minute and bankrolled by an Arab
billionaire intent on global domination the next. While 2008 may be
remembered as the year that Sheikh Mansour came to City’s rescue, it
was also the year that Ireland decided to rescue himself from himself.
The
result is an inspiring tale of where a willingness to change can get
you. On the pitch he has been City’s best performer this season; off
it, he finally appears to have got things together. “I suppose I am a
different person in many ways,” Ireland, 22, said. “I don’t know if I
take pride from what I’ve done. I just know what I want from life now.”
Ireland’s life was a mixture of chaos and disorder long before
September last year, when he decided to tell the (grand)mother of all
porkies to Steve Staunton, the Ireland manager, the FA of Ireland (FAI)
and City, rather than offer the simple truth that his girlfriend — now
fiancée — Jessica had suffered a miscarriage and that he would not be
able to play in a European Championship qualifying fixture against the
Czech Republic.
Nothing should excuse Ireland’s behaviour and
he is still deeply embarrassed by the affair, but the midfield player
was neither thinking nor behaving like a rational person at the time,
even if that did not stop the hate mail from stacking up.
“Grannygate”
was the most public example of his troubled and muddled state of mind,
but there were plenty of others that would almost seem comedic did they
not hint at deeper issues. The black 4 x 4 with pink alloys, the
seemingly uncontrollable pet dog that helped to turn an otherwise
impressive family house into “a tip”, according to one friend, the
rumoured hair transplant, the Superman underpants. Then there was that
infamous post on his Bebo social networking website when, under the
name “Daddy Dick”, Ireland professed to “hate” football.
Ireland
denies that he was responsible — “it was a friend who did all that, not
me,” he said, somewhat unconvincingly — but what he does not dispute is
that he had fallen out of love with the game. For a time, he wondered
whether he would ever fall back in love with it, but then City were
beaten 8-1 away to Middlesbrough on the final day of last season and a
switch seemed to go on in his head. It would prove a turning point in
his life.
“In previous years I just wanted to get away from
football and go on holiday \, but after losing that game to
Middlesbrough, I said, ‘No, I’m staying here for the summer and getting
myself in shape,’ ” he said. “A lot had happened that season, but I
don’t know what it was that changed, I just realised I needed to get my
head down. It’s a short career and there is no time to waste.
“I’m
a lot more determined as a person now. I want to do something with my
life. I felt like I didn’t know where I was going and I just seemed to
say, ‘I need to get myself together’. I’m happy again.”
That
has certainly been reflected on the pitch, with eight goals and a
string of man-of-the-match displays to his name. City may have smashed
the British transfer record to sign Robinho for £34.2 million from Real
Madrid, but even the Brazil striker’s form has been overshadowed by
that of Ireland.
Unfortunately, the high standards set by the
midfield player have not always been matched by his team-mates and City
will find themselves in the Barclays Premier League relegation zone by
the time Ireland makes his 99th top-flight appearance away to West
Bromwich Albion tomorrow, should Sunderland overcome Hull City this
afternoon.
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