It is now time to switch to a new Money AM football blog as the world cup is now over and we all look to the future.....World cup 2010 is over, Bravo Espana, and Forlan, once again and bring on the new season !.....I never expected the last thread to be such a success...thanks all.... so this new one might go on for years without the need to edit the title...we shall see...

Congratulations to striker Danny Ings and manager Sean Dyche who have both been successful in this year's North West Football Awards.
Danny was up against Jordan Rhodes, Tim Ream and David Perkins for the Championship Player of the Year whilst Dyche faced Brendan Rodgers and Manuel Pellegrini, the managers who finished in the top two places in last season's Premier League.



Congratulations to both on winning these awards.

Sounds like we were beaten by the far better team on the night - well done England!

COME ON ARSENAL! - Despite the millions spent by VAN GOD United are no better off this season than they were under MOYES. I for one hope DANNY WELBECK scores a hat trick today.


By Mark Ogden, Northern Football Correspondent10:34PM GMT 21 Nov 2014 Comments53 Comments
Louis van Gaal has claimed Danny Welbeck was good enough only to be a substitute at Manchester United, and insisted he does not regret sanctioning the England forward’s £16 million exit from Old Trafford.
In a robust defence of his decision to sell Welbeck, Van Gaal has claimed that the 23-year-old was "more a substitute than a line-up player" and that the forward’s ongoing presence at United would block the progress of teenager James Wilson.
Manchester-born Welbeck, who progressed from the schoolboy ranks to become a first-team player at United, faces his former club for the first time this evening since his move on transfer-deadline day to Arsenal in September.

Should be a good match at Goodison today, though both teams have suffered injuries to key players.



Provisional squads
Everton: Howard, Coleman, Distin, Jagielka, Garbutt, Gibson, McGeady, McCarthy, Barkley, Osman, Lukaku, Robles, Browning, Hibbert, Pienaar, Besic, Atsu, Naismith, Eto'o.
West Ham: Adrian, Cresswell, Reid, Collins, Jenkinson, Downing, Noble, Song, Kouyate, Valencia, Sakho, Jaaskelainen, Carroll, Cole, Nolan, Amalfitano, Tomkins, O'Brien.
Match notes
There was a time when a meeting between Everton and West Ham was a switch off for the purists. These days it is in danger of being billed as the reconstruction of a meeting between the 1974 Dutch squad and Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona. Sam Allardyce will surely admit substance is the key to making his side look more stylish, but if the Hammers emerge triumphant from a trip to Goodison – beating Martinez at his own game – his reinvented West Ham will have another notable scalp.
Chris Bascombe prediction: Everton 2 West Ham 1

How did Arsenal lose that match? Simples, superb goalkeeping, SHIT finishing by Arsenal.

United now in 4th place kin joke! Wenger how can you leave Giroud on the bench for so long?

Everton..... Robbie had a dream

to build our football team

we had no money, so we signed the players on loan.

we play from the back,

with Ross in atack.

The school of science is on the way back!


Great result for Burnley. Danny Ings and Ross Barkley Englands future but let's play them in the under 21's. FFS build the England team around them WOY you knob head!


Rant over, over to you Stanley :0)

Oh yes CC we have a rich seem of talent around at the moment.

Sean Dyche: Burnley can stay in Premier League this season

Burnley boss Sean Dyche says his team can achieve the "impossible" and avoid relegation from the Premier League.

Ings puts Burnley 2-0 ahead inside 13 minutes
Walters diving header pulls one back for Stoke
Burnley win for second time in league this season
Stoke dominate possession but cannot force equaliser
Danny Ings scored twice in two minutes as Burnley beat Stoke to claim their first away win of the season and move off the bottom of the Premier League.
Ings put the visitors ahead in the 12th minute when he tapped in after Asmir Begovic parried Ashley Barnes's cross.
The striker grabbed his second soon after, with another close-range finish following Michael Kightly's low pass.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/30163181

Bad day at the office for Liverpool.

Spurs got lucky, never a sending off.

Spurs v EFC next Sunday should be interesting both playing in Europe on Thursday night.

Liverpool look a mere shadow of the team last season and much as I'm a great Gerard fan I think he's gone off the boil, as a player and as a captain. He had some scoring chances today which he normally would have buried.

Hull were robbed, the referee spoiled a good contest.

Yep, it was the linesman who got the Hull player sent off, pathetic!

Chris Carson [Send an email to Chris Carson] [View Chris Carson's profile] - 22 Nov 2014 09:33 - 4078 of 4084
COME ON ARSENAL! - Despite the millions spent by VAN GOD United are no better off this season than they were under MOYES. I for one hope DANNY WELBECK scores a hat trick today.

...
They are much better off, there is more to it than points.

How did Arsenal lose? They played like Arsenal; Manchester United did that v Leicester City and look what happened. Everyone can see it, yet Wenger does nothing game after game.

Offside; is there room for it? :)

Liverpool:

Last season a poor defence with poor cover - 50 goals - had an out of Sterling, Sturridge, and Suarez. This season they have a poor defence with poor cover.

Cheers,
KidA

It seems that Arsenal have no one with the ability or inclination to shoot from more than 6 yards.
2517

KidA - You can't blame the manager for poor finishing. United were shite in the first half and Arsenal should have been 3-0 up. Game over.

I can blame him for Arsenal still being the biggest suckers re the counter. They should've been down to 10, then of course what follows is different. As to them being 3-0 up, when is that game over v Arsenal? In the end they were lucky not to concede 4; incorrect offside with 2 on 1 - the 1's position meant he was all but out of the game - and Di Maria's miss.

Cheers,
KidA

Ok KidA, you know your team better than I ever could :0)

Cheers,
Chris

By Jeremy Wilson
12:48PM GMT 24 Nov 2014
Alisher Usmanov wants Arsene Wenger to continue his work at Arsenal, he has pointedly suggested that the manager is failing to learn from past mistakes

Alisher Usmanov, Arsenal's second largest shareholder, has offered his most critical assessment yet of Arsene Wenger and claimed that the club need to strengthen in every single position to seriously challenge the elite of English and European football.

Although Usmanov says he wants Wenger to continue his work at Arsenal and is desperate to see him succeed, he has pointedly suggested that the manager is failing to learn from past mistakes and being restricted by his footballing principles. Defeat against Manchester United on Saturday continued a losing pattern against the very best opposition in recent seasons.

"My opinion, and I tell it openly, we need to strengthen every position to play on the level of such teams in the UK as Chelsea and Manchester City or in Europe like Real, Barcelona, Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich and other clubs," said Usmanov. "Arsenal is a dream that sometimes becomes a mirage and sometimes a pain as every dream. The potential of the team is there, but there is no critical evaluation of mistakes and their admittance.
"Not a single genius can retain its level when he does not admit his own mistakes. Only when you admit your mistakes are you rid of them. We just repeat the same results year by year. Quite high to secure the place in the Champions League but we regularly lose in the first circles of play-offs. As an investor I am not happy with that."

Asked if Wenger still had his backing amid calls from some fans for him to leave, Usmanov told CNBC that it was "frustrating" to have no say over such a key decision, despite owning 30 per cent of the club.

Usmanov has not been offered a place on the board and has never spoken to majority owner Stan Kroenke since losing a battle for control of the club.

"As to Arsene Wenger - he is one of the greatest coaches not just of European, but of world football," said Usmanov. "But we have a Russia proverb which goes 'even an old lady can have a roof falling on her'. Everybody makes mistakes. He can make mistakes and I know as you age that it is more difficult, more challenging to accept ones mistakes. Maybe it's a problem today.

"He is a great man, a great coach, he had great victories and he has to have an opportunity to secure the place, which he and his team ought to have. I think the men who created winners have to be winners themselves. I wish him this."

Usmanov, though, fears that Wenger's principles have become a restriction on the club. "I like Arsene for his principles," he said. "But principles are sort of a restriction. And restrictions are always lost possibilities. That's why sometimes coaches even without principles became the coaches of great teams. And some coaches with principles lose because some positions in teams are vacant because of ethical, moral or personal views."

Arsenal can play some attractive attacking football, but can't seem to convert the attacks into goals. Players always seem to add another pass and another pass, instead of having a crack at goal.

By Jim White2:26PM GMT 24 Nov 2014 Comments36 Comments
It seems unlikely, but just imagine for a moment James Tomkins as a member of Wimbledon's Crazy Gang. And imagine what Vinnie Jones, John Fashanu or Lawrie Sanchez might have made of their colleague's performance at Goodison Park on Saturday.
Falling to the turf clutching at his face after being lightly brushed in the chest by Kevin Mirallas: back in the dressing room, the mockery would have been unyielding, his suit would have been cut to ribbons, buckets of water emptied over his head.
This was not the sort of behaviour that passed muster in the Wimbledon dressing room back when the Crazies were at their fractious, rollicking peak. It was not so much the feigning that would have been considered anathema by the knuckle draggers of Plough Lane. What would have disturbed them was Tomkins's evident lack of masculinity. He went down, you could almost hear them pointing out, like a girl. At Wimbledon they would simply never have given their opponents any hint that they might be hurt. For them it wasn't manly.
Plenty has changed in the game in the 25 years since the Neanderthal days of the Crazy Gang. Much of it for the better, not least in referees' vigilance against the kind of career-ending assaults on ankles and shins that they referred to as tackles, or the end of tolerance for their relentless mental and physical bullying of colleagues that coaches once mistook for team building.
But of this there can be no doubt: the assumptions of how a player should behave on the pitch have altered, too, beyond recognition. If players were hurt in the past - and they frequently were, especially with Jones and Fashanu on the prowl - they would be reluctant to show it for fear that to do so might be a demonstration of weakness.

A reputation for being hard to knock off your stride was hugely valuable in an intense competitive environment. In the 1970 FA Cup final, for instance, the level of physical assault was more appropriate for a boxing match. As scything tackles rained down, there was no point in the players feigning anything. As the journalist Hugh McIlvanney reported wryly at the time, the only way Eric Jennings, the referee in that particular match, might have reached for his book was on production of a death certificate. So everyone instead tried to stay on their feet, to show that they were the sort who would not easily be knocked off their stride. Or indeed knocked out.
But as football has increasingly become a non-contact sport, such renown is no longer required currency amongst those who play the game. These days it is a rare event when a player does not roll around on the turf as if under small arms fire the moment he comes into the vague proximity of an opponent. Indeed, so institutionalised is the requirement to hit the ground as often as possible when running, that if a player doesn't go down when expected it becomes a point of comment.
As on Saturday when Yaya Toure received plaudits for powering on through various invitations to tumble issued by the opposing defence to score the winning goal for Manchester City against Swansea. The expectation is now that the challenged player will invariably play the victim. And the better they play it, the more shameless their subterfuge, the higher the chances of kidding the referee into reducing the number of opponents.
When faking is now so routine, the inevitable corollary is the sort of behaviour that would have been considered undignified in the past but has now become commonplace. And the odd thing is, the unyielding glare of the television camera has not reduced the practice.
Despite being shown to look ridiculous in repeated slo-mo after the event, players appear more willing than ever to adopt a position of weakness. Since Rivaldo first demonstrated in the 2002 World Cup the effectiveness of going down ostentatiously, for more than a dozen years the growing urge has been to assume the position of the cry baby. Real men, it appears, don't get their opponents sent off.
And despite the widely delivered common prejudice, this is not a habit restricted to players raised overseas. It was not Carlos Kickaball and his dodgy foreign ways on show on Merseyside in November 2014. It was James Tomkins, who was born in Basildon, the kind of foresquare, uncompromising centre back who in the past would rather have undergone root canal surgery without the benefit of anaesthetic than behave like a theatrical toddler. Now, however, he is shameless in the pursuit of nefarious advantage. Off with the end of his socks.

By Telegraph Sport
4:17PM GMT 27 Nov 2014
Brazil legend was admitted to hospital in Sao Paulo on Monday with a urinary infection, according to reports

Brazil football legend Pele is in intensive care as his condition worsens, according to the hospital in which he is staying in São Paulo.

The 74-year-old was taken to hospital on Monday with an urinary infection. It was the second time in two weeks that he has been admitted for treatment.

He entered the Albert Einstein hospital in São Paulo but officials there released only a brief statement with no details about his condition.

He had an operation at the same hospital on Nov 12 to remove kidney stones and was discharged on Nov 15.

Pelé won three World Cups as a player – in 1958, 1962 and 1970 – and has also been named football player of the 20th century by Fifa.

Everton first up on the box tonight then Spurs.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/30252441

If we could get another 3 pts today that would do nicely.