Arsenal midfielder Tomas Rosicky has told team-mate Nicklas Bendtner to remain at the Premier League club.
The Denmark international is believed to be seeking a move away from the Emirates Stadium after finding his path into the first-team blocked by the early season form of summer signing Marouane Chamakh.
After joining from Bordeaux, Chamakh has enjoyed a lengthy run in Arsene Wenger's starting line up, much to the dismay of Bendtner
With Budesliga giants Bayern Munich thought to be interested in his services, Rosicky has insisted the powerful forward still has a bright future at the north London outfit.
"Of course I believe he has a future at the club. I don't quite understand the question because he has been injured for a while, but obviously he has to be patient as Chamakh's playing well at the moment," he said.
"It's difficult, because there's always competition for places at a club like Arsenal. We have three good strikers in Nicklas Bendtner, Robin van Persie and Chamakh.
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If Steve Bruce had wanted an indication of exactly how strong his Sunderland side have become over the last three months, he could not have asked for a stiffer test than a post-Yuletide trip to Manchester and the home of the league leaders. A win, could, remarkably, put the Wearside club only four points from the league’s summit come Sunday night.
Bruce will point to his side’s shock result against Chelsea as an indication that the Black Cats are capable of springing the required upset, however he may find that without Danny Welbeck, the United starlet ineligible against his parent club, much of the momentum behind Sunderland’s attacking drive is lost.
Sunderland will be able to boast the African Player of the year, Asamoah Gyan, and prolific Premier League marksman, Darren Bent in their line-up, however opportunities will be few and far between against a United side slowly starting to click into gear, as they begin a period where they are traditionally strong.
Shocks aplenty as Sunderland, Newcastle and Blackpool all succumb to lower opposition in the 3rd round of the greatest cup competition. Alan Pardew put the Magpies defeat purely down to fatigue; an excuse that doesn’t hold much weight given the quality and depth of their squad compared to their hosts. Manchester City will be hoping to avoid a potential banana skin this afternoon, when Mancini faces his former boss, Sven Goran-Eriksson.
In the papers this morning there have been a mixed bag of stories that includes Samir Nasri looks set to extend Arsenal contract; Kenny Dalglish calling for unity, while Spurs are keen to take Beckham on a permanent basis.
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Samir Nasri’s father believes midfielder will extend Arsenal contract – IMScouting
Dalglish calls for unity – Sky Sports
Johnson launches attack on ‘clown’ Merson – Guardian
Walcott apologises for diving – Daily Telegraph
German international Rene Adler hopes for Manchester United deal – IMScouting
Manchester City punch-ups show our fighting spirit, says Joe Hart – People
Spurs keen to take Beckham permanently – Daily Telegraph
Liverpool set to press £20m Lukaku move – Mirror
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Warnock brands Diouf a ‘sewer rat’ for abusing stricken Mackie – Daily Mail
Football advisor Kia drives into Toon – People
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Roberto Martinez says Wigan must hit the heights of their 2-2 draw with Arsenal last month if they are to match the Gunners this weekend.
The Latics have a wretched record in the capital in recent years, and they will be travelling south in search of a first-ever win over the Gunners in north London.
However, Wigan have taken four points off Arsene Wenger’s side in their last two home encounters, including a dramatic 3-2 victory at the DW Stadium at the end of last season.
And Martinez wants his team to reproduce that kind of performance if they are to get a result on Saturday.
“When we played them at the DW last year, it was a fascinating game and one of the biggest moments in the club’s history,” Martinez said.
“And the game we played a few weeks ago was also a great game of football – with 10 men, we managed to get a draw which was a great achievement and that gave us a lot of confidence.”
“As a footballer, you want to go to the Emirates and play as good as you can. The challenge that we’ve got is to try to be as competitive as we’ve been at home against such a fantastic side like Arsenal.”
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James McCarthy has an outside chance of a first Wigan start in three months after recovering from ankle ligament damage, while striker Franco di Santo is also back in the frame after his late substitute appearance against Fulham last weekend.
Victor Moses (shoulder) and on-loan midfielder Tom Cleverley (hamstring) are still on the sidelines as Martinez’s injury crisis finally shows signs of clearing.
Manchester City boss Roberto Mancini insisted his side deserved at least a draw following their 1-1 result at Notts County in the FA Cup.
City fell behind on Neal Bishop’s header on the hour, but new signing Edin Dzeko ensured the visitors would host a replay at the Eastlands – provisionally scheduled for February 19 – with his first goal in English football 10 minutes from time.
Mancini admitted he would have preferred to have secured a fifth-round berth at the first time of asking, but said he expected his side to account for their League One opponents in the replay.
“We didn’t deserve to lose but this is the FA Cup,” Mancini said after the game.
“The other team fought – that’s normal. If you don’t play hard in these games you can lose them.”
“We didn’t want a replay before the game but I am happy to have one now.”
“The pitch was very hard but it was important to play football.”
“The replay will be different. We must play well if we want to win but it will be a different game – our pitch is different. We can play our football on it.”
County manager and former Manchester United midfielder Paul Ince said his players had done enough to deserve a replay, though he admitted City’s superiority had nearly won out.
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“I’ve never seen the clock go so slow in my life,” Ince told ITV Sport.
“It was a fantastic team performance. I thought we deserved it. We started slow to be fair. Once we got in to them and played at the right tempo we got into it.”
“You do get tired, we don’t have their ability but we showed character. It was a great opportunity at our own place, and we deserve another crack.”
After Newcastle’s comeback against Arsenal on Saturday, Arsene Wenger said “mathematically (we lost) two points, but psychologically the damage is bigger tonight”. The worry will be that the players might lose confidence and although it is only one draw, it could lead to further bad results. I wonder, will that result will have an effect on the rest of their season?
I feel there is too much distraction in the Arsenal camp at the moment, from Jack Wilshere’s Twitter rant, to Wenger’s ‘pretend to have heard’ comment. It is only a few weeks since Cesc Fabregas accused Ipswich of ‘rugby’, and whenever there is a fracas, players like Bendtner and Walcott feel it is best to come out and give their views on the subject. All this occurs at a time when Manchester United are quietly going about their business. After their calamitous collapse at Newcastle, Arsenal desperately need to just focus on their football.
Talking of their football, the 4-4 draw could affect them psychologically because they play the game under the greatest psychological strain. They are more dedicated to their ‘philosophy of football’ than any other side. Whether they are drawing 0-0 or losing 2-0, they refuse to pump the ball long. They retain possession and pass the ball.
But when they went 4-0 up in 26 minutes at St James’ they changed their philosophy and that is why they became so ineffective.
Ideally they would have carried on playing the same way, and ended up winning 8-0. But that is not natural for a footballer; once the huge lead was assembled it is only natural for people to start thinking more defensively. Arsenal showed they are not comfortable with holding on to the lead. As players abandoned their attacking philosophy they lost the plot completely. They were victims of their own success.
People always talk about Arsenal needing to toughen up and get better defenders. But the 4-4 result will affect them most if it brings a change in the way they set up. If they become more focused on defence, with the knowledge that it is weak, they might sacrifice their biggest assets. Wenger might play another holding midfielder and readdress his defensive issues. But I would say, play to your strengths, go and attack. Arsenal always look best when attacking, not controlling. It is their defensive style they should abandon not their attacking flair. Wenger needs to make sure their season does not mirror their capitulation at Newcastle; doing well playing one brand of football, then do poorly playing another.
The difficulty will be in going back to their usual style and sticking with it. It might only be 45 minutes since they were last brilliant, but a lot has happened in that time. Arsenal came off the pitch on Saturday thinking they were a failed defensive unit, not a successful attacking one. They looked like school boys trying to defend, so I ask, why bother? Even with 10 men, they would have been better taking the game to Newcastle.
On the positive side of things, they are only 4 points off the leaders, it could have been 7. Yes it should be 2, but you cannot change the past. You can only affect your future and Wenger needs to tell his boys this: there is still the small fixture of Arsenal v Manchester United at the Emirates to be played.
Looking at the remaining fixtures, Arsenal have a much easier run in, playing only Liverpool from the top 6. Manchester United on the other hand have Man City, Chelsea twice and Liverpool away.
So, Arsenal need to let go of all the tension in the media and their frustration and concentrate on football. Their own brand of attacking football. There is still a lot to do, but their destiny is very much in their own hands.
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West Ham’s hopes of moving to the Olympic Stadium could be affected by lowly Leyton Orient.
Last week the Hammers were given a major boost when they were named as ‘preferred bidders’ for the Olympic Stadium. It meant they were almost certain to move there after the London Games in 2012 having beaten off the rival claims of Tottenham Hotspur.
But now Leyton Orient – who play in League One, two divisions below West Ham – are challenging the decision. Orient chairman Barry Hearn believes that if West Ham do move from Upton Park, they could attract supporters of his club, whose Brisbane Road ground is close to the Olympic Stadium.
Hearn has written to British prime minister David Cameron, London Mayor Boris Johnson and Olympics Minister Hugh Robertson in a bid to reverse the ruling. One of his options is to launch a judicial review challenge at the High Court.
“It’s a question of due process and whether the Olympic Park Legacy Committee, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and even the Prime Minister have given consideration to Leyton Orient in these discussions,” said Hearn. “The government has a responsibility to take into account all the effects of any ruling they take.”
“We are awaiting what I assume is a rubber-stamp decision from Boris Johnson and the DCMS to award West Ham the stadium.” “But I find it incredible they would even consider making the decision before undergoing due process in regard to the effect on the incumbent football club.”
Among Hearn’s concerns are West Ham’s indication that they would give free or heavily discounted tickets to local residents in a bid to fill the 60,000-capacity stadium. He believes that would badly impact on attendances at Brisbane Road, where the average gate is around 4,000.
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Moments that shaped English football: No. 6 Liverpool 2-1 Blackburn Rovers – May 14th, 1995.
With every year that passes the 1994-95 season becomes the most fascinating of anomalies on the graph that is Premier League performance over the last 19 years. As Manchester United were in the process of winning four of five titles between 1992 and 1997, the emergence of Blackburn Rovers, albeit fleetingly, looks to remain the most unlikely of stories in the history of the Premier League.
The truth is at the time, Blackburn’s victory was not the underdog story that it now appears. Manager Kenny Dalglish was given what was then a vast sum of money by Rovers owner Jack Walker to bring in re-enforcements to a squad that began the Premier League era with promotion from the second tier of English football. The purchases of Chris Sutton and Alan Shearer, created what was briefly the most feared partnership in the division, and a second place finish in 1993-94 hinted at the potential of the men from Ewood Park.
The last day of the following campaign will go down as one of the most dramatic in the history of the division. Blackburn visited Liverpool in the knowledge that only a victory would guarantee a first league title in 81 years. United needed to win to maintain pressure on the Lancashire club, but with a trip to struggling West Ham their final day assignment, that result appeared a formality.
Nevertheless, Blackburn started well – Alan Shearer netting his 34th goal of a prolific season, looking to rule United’s result irrelevant. Dalglish’s men had won only two of their previous five leading into the Anfield clash and the strike of their top marksman settled the nerves of the visiting contingent.
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As news of Shearer’s goal rang round Upton Park, West Ham capitalised on some slack defending and distracted minds to tip the balance of power further towards Blackburn.
If it had appeared the race was run, the second half would prove to be anything but a formality. Brian McClair nodded in an equaliser for the champions, United, and lay siege to the Hammers’ goal in the hope that one more strike could wrest the title from Blackburn’s grasp if Liverpool could themselves find a goal.
Half an hour passed without further notable action in either game, and as the clock ticked towards the final five minutes of the season, it appeared that Blackburn had done enough to weather the threat posed by English football’s two most successful sides. Then, disaster, in the form of a John Barnes equaliser left Dalglish’s men completely at the mercy of the result in London.
When Sir Alex Ferguson looks back at the very small list of regrets during his time at Old Trafford, the inability of his team to muster a winning goal against a committed but limited West Ham side that afternoon, may well be top of his list – a handful of frantic goalmouth scrambles the only reward for constant second half pressure that afternoon.
Further north, a Jamie Redknapp free-kick turned what had been a carnival atmosphere into a funeral procession. However, as the players trudged back for the restart news of United’s failure to score at Upton Park was transmitted to the supporters and the party began – a stray fan kissing a bemused Dalglish as the players accepted the congratulations of the victorious Liverpool side.
For Blackburn, this was the start of a very sharp decline. Dalglish relinquished control at the end of the season, and within four years the club were out of the top-flight, having lost a number of their prized assets in their slip down the league.
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Owner, Jack Walker, who had made it is personal goal to bring the league title to Ewood, died in 2000 – destined never to see his beloved hometown club back in the top-flight.
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There are half a million professional footballers in the world. None of them are gay, at least, not openly so. England wicketkeeper Steven Davies has made headlines in the last couple of days by becoming the first English cricketer to announce his homosexuality during his career but he is by no means the only elite British athlete to do so. Take Gareth Thomas, the most capped male Welsh rugby union international of all time, as an example.
Thomas admitted he was gay just over a year ago and despite having suppressed his sexuality for many years, the 36-year-old admits to feeling ‘liberated’ by coming out and it appears players and officials within the game seem to have gained even more respect for him. So if young Davies feels confident enough to come out and, alongside Thomas, can do it without huge public outcry, then why is homosexuality still a taboo for professional footballers?
If you listen to the FA, they will tell you that those Neanderthal football fans are not ready for something as scandalous as a few players admitting to their homosexuality. According to Ellis Cashmore, Professor of Culture, Media and Sport at Staffordshire University and his research partner, Dr. Jamie Cleland, a Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Sport at the same institution, this stance is no more than a cop-out.
Cashmore suggests: “I think the FA’s approach is quite lazy. The easiest thing they can do to allow them to continually ignore this issue is to blame the fans. It is widely accepted that the fans generally create a hostile, homophobic culture which is highly prohibitive and the players are fearful of their reaction. Our research reveals something entirely different though.”
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Cleland adds: “93% of the three and a half thousand fans we sampled think that there is no place for homophobia within football. This goes against the football authorities’ view of football supporters. It appears that there is a very liberal and permissive culture and our results suggest that it is time that the powers that be look at alternative means to challenge this particular process.”
Cashmore and Cleland surveyed over 3,000 fans online – at www.topfan.co.uk – deciding that this was the best method of achieving accurate results for their research. Cleland says: “If you survey someone on the way to a match when they are with their contemporaries, they might not answer truthfully for fear of losing face in front of their mates. In academic research, you are always searching for the truth and the best way to do that, as obvious as it sounds is to take away the incentive to lie. By conducting the survey anonymously online, we have managed to do that. The conditions we set and the size of the sample we took makes our research stand up to scrutiny and makes the results all the more significant.”
So if academic research suggests that the fans are okay with gay players, then why are players still so reluctant to come out? “I think that there are two main factors inhibiting players from coming out,” says Cashmore. “Firstly, they are assigned to football clubs, conservative institutions wary of the consequences of being the first club to have a gay player or players. They are concerned that it could result in damage to their brand, and obviously clubs are very concerned about that as it would affect their annual turnover.”
“The other determining factor I think is agents. Agents make up to 10% commission off of a player’s overall earnings, across the board. If a player comes out then his agent cannot guarantee that he will make the same earnings form endorsement contracts and such. It takes the element of control away from the agent and they will be immediately aware that it could affect their own earnings so they will advise the player to keep quiet.”
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Justin Fashanu, who of course took his own life in 1998, is the only football player up to ever have come out up until now. There can be no doubt that the circumstances surrounding his life and eventual death has contributed to football being somewhat left in the dark ages when it comes to the accepting gay players.
Cashmore, though, contends: “You have to remember that was back in the 1990’s and football has moved on a lot since then. We have become much more liberal and open-minded in our attitude towards gay men and women people since then and the world of sport as a whole has moved on. Many major sports now have had gay competitors who have come out quite openly and without fear or favour. Nobody has really batted an eyelid.”
“With Gareth Thomas for example, he was expecting a torrid time but with the exception of one incident at Castleford, which he was able to laugh off, he has not had any problems. I think the image of football is different but the culture and the environment is no different to other sports. This representation of the game is perpetuated by figures like Max Clifford, who described the game as recently as a year ago as ‘steeped in homophobia’ and that is not helpful. It leaves the culture of football stuck in the dark ages and that does not do anyone any favours. It just serves to perpetuate this misleading idea that football is still medieval when it isn’t!”
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Cashmore and Cleland both remain critical of the FA and initiatives such as the Kick It Out campaign, claiming that they will not work because they are targeted at eradicating homophobia within the fans, instead of within the game itself. “I don’t think any of the campaigns, and there are a few of them come even vaguely close to tackling the problem,” says Cashmore. “Simply because, they don’t know what they are tackling. They accept the orthodox opinion that there is homophobia within football fans and they are trying to combat that. The truth is that there isn’t. If they really want to tackle the insidious forms of homophobia, they need to go to the managers of the clubs, the directors, the agents who handle the players’ business contracts. In other words, get to the inaccessible areas. It’s very easy to blame fans, but I said before, that is just lazy and does not tackle the issue at all.”
“I don’t think any of these campaigns can work, because they are ill-considered and, in any case, when did football fans ever take notice of what the authorities think? They haven’t got a clue what they are doing. They are looking at the fans, which is woefully off target and, quite frankly, it’s embarrassing. Campaigns such as Kick It Out and Football Against Homophobia just don’t get it. I’d rather they didn’t have any campaigns at all as opposed to continually targeting the fans.”
Strong words from Cashmore, and despite or perhaps due to the FA’s apparent inertia, this is an issue that will continue to crop up until the first gay footballer decides to out himself. The progress made in the last 30 years on the issue of race and ethnicity should hopefully offer some encouragement that football will eventually drag itself into the 21st century.
To hear the full interview with Cleland and Cashmore, go to: The Football FanCast Interview Show podcast.
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Heroes turned to villains in losses for Sporting Kansas City and Vancouver in the MLS on Saturday, while newboys Portland remain pointless.After romping to a 4-2 win over Canadian rivals Toronto FC in their first MLS game last Saturday, new franchise Vancouver were dumped back to earth after slipping to Philadelphia Union 1-0 at PPL Park.
The game changed in the 57th minute when the Whitecaps’ French striker Eric Hassli – scorer of a double on debut against Toronto – received a second yellow card for a late tackle on Philadelphia defender Carlos Valdes.
Veteran striker and former MLS Golden Boot winner Carlos Ruiz then scored the game’s only goal on 77 minutes to send the Whitecaps back to Canada with a loss.
Hassli’s fate mirrored that of Omar Bravo, with the Mexico striker sent off in the 31st minute of Sporting’s 3-2 loss to the Chicago Fire.
Bravo scored a double on his MLS debut in Round 1, but found himself making the wrong sort of headlines when he was forced to scramble back to defend a Sporting corner gone wrong and brought down Gaston Puerari in the penalty area as the last man.
Diego Chaves put away the consequent penalty, with fellow Uruguayan striker Puerari adding a double. Kansas City replied with strikes from Matt Besler and Teal Bunbury.
The Portland Timbers’ quest for their first ever MLS point continues after they were beaten 2-0 at Toronto, with Dutch striker Javier Martina scoring twice and the Canadian side surviving the late dismissal of Belgian midfielder Mikael Yourassowsky.
Elsewhere, missing seven players due to injury and international call-ups and forced to turn to third-choice goalkeeper Alex Horwath, the New York Red Bulls pulled off a credible 0-0 draw at Columbus Crew.
Former New York striker Juan Pablo Angel scored the first goal of his LA Galaxy career but it mattered little as his side lost 4-1 to Real Salt Lake, while New England edged DC United 2-1 at home after scoring two goals in the opening 16 minutes.
American striker Chris Wondolowski struck a double in San Jose’s 2-0 win over Dallas, while a first-half strike from Quincy Amarikwa powered reigning champions Colorado to a 1-0 win over Chivas USA.