THE FINAL THIRD

More and more controversy when it comes to Barca and Cesc. Remember the good old days when everyone was happy and their was no uncertainty? Arsenal it seems have sent a figurative warning.

Warned: Arsenal have used Cesc Fabregas in the launch of their 2010-11 away kit Photo: ARSENAL.COM
Barcelona have not been shy in their pursuit of the 23-year-old midfielder, but the Catalan club have so far failed to convince the Arsenal board to sell, having already had a £30 million bid rejected.
However, Barcelona’s incoming president Sandro Rosell has said he will work closely with the departing Joan Laporta in a bid to add Fabregas to the club’s list of summer signings, which already includes David Villa.

Fabregas himself has said he will not discuss his future until after completing his international duties with Spain at the World Cup, but Rosell is keen to see what stage discussions have reached between the two clubs.

“When we get together, Laporta will explain at what stage the Cesc situation is at,” Rosell said. “If negotiations are advanced and the coaching staff want the player, we will continue with the negotiations, without doubt.” Laporta will stay in charge until the end of the month, and Rosell believes the pair can put their differences to one side in order to land Fabregas.

“Until July 1 we can’t do anything, but if they need help then we will be the first to give it,” Rosell added.
Although he does not officially take control until the beginning of next month, Rosell will speak to coach Pep Guardiola in the coming days to discuss how the club can strengthen the squad for next season.

“I have spoken to Pep and before he goes away on holiday we will speak again to try to help improve the team in these days before our mandate starts,” he continued.

“If Pep thinks we can lend a hand in terms of making signings, we will. They have the last word. We don’t have any ‘top player’ lined up, but we will make our contacts and knowledge available,” Rosell said.

Adrian Mutu has been ordered to pay former club Chelsea over £14million after losing his final appeal in a legal battle which has lasted over five years, the Swiss Federal Court announced.

The court confirmed that they have upheld the decision made by FIFA and the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Mutu was sacked by the Barclays Premier League club in September 2004 after testing positive for cocaine.

The Romania international received a seven-month ban from football, but Chelsea took a firm stance on the forward and sacked him before then suing him to recover the money they paid to sign him.

One of our readers found this great article over on si.com about Freddy Adu. Have a read, it’s an excellent piece. I must say that I called this over 6 years ago when I saw Freddy play in a US u.18 game against a Clearwater select… he was good, very good… but only when he had the ball. He had no tactical awareness at all, and drifted in and out of the game. I explained to the people who were with me watching the game that he was a ‘playground superstar’, a player who is great in practice, but is surrounded by hype, and will not live up to it. I personally hope that Freddy turns it around, and that he buckles down and starts educating himself on positional sense, he still has the potential to be a world beater, but alas, as I explain to the kids that I coach, potential is useless unless you do something with it.

Stray dogs. Freddy Adu sees them everywhere in Thessaloníki. Scavenging trash in the vacant lot by his practice field. Wandering in packs outside the hotel he called home for two months. Shadowing pedestrians with enough menace to spark visions of giant-needled rabies shots. Greece’s second-largest city is beautiful in many respects: the seaside beaches, the bustling restaurants, the sigh-inducing women. But no matter how hard Adu tries, he can’t avoid the stray dogs.

They are a constant backdrop to Adu’s own fight for survival in the Darwinian world of European soccer. Six years after making his professional debut at age 14 with MLS’s D.C. United, Adu is still trying to find consistent playing time with the Greek club Aris, his fourth European team in three years. He lives a dual existence. To mainstream U.S. sports fans he remains one of this country’s best-known soccer players. Adu has nearly 350,000 Twitter followers (more than any other soccer star in the world except Brazil’s Kaká). He has sat on David Letterman’s couch, been the subject of a 60 Minutes profile and gotten a shout-out in a Jay-Z lyric.

Yet barring a major surprise, Adu, now 20, will not be on the U.S.’s 23-man World Cup roster in South Africa. With unproductive stops in Portugal and France before Greece, he has strayed from the path that he and so many others had envisioned when he signed a $1 million Nike deal in 2003 and became the highest-paid player in MLS before he had ever kicked a ball in the league. As a rookie Adu appeared with Pelé in a national ad campaign for Sierra Mist and had a sponsorship deal with Campbell’s Soup. In ’03 former MLS deputy commissioner Ivan Gazidis (who now runs England’s Arsenal) called Adu “probably the best young player in the world.”

There are so many questions. What happened? Why has Adu shown promise in major competitions at the youth level but failed to establish himself professionally in Europe? Does he have a future with the national team? And how many more opportunities will Adu get overseas? “I believe in him. That’s why we signed him,” says Antonio Calzado, Aris’s international general manager. “But is this the last chance for Freddy to get to the top? Probably it is.”

Yet if this sounds like a sad story, then why does U.S. goalkeeper Tim Howard maintain that Adu “has skills with the ball that not many—if any—American players possess”? And why is Adu so upbeat? “I’m only 20,” he says, flashing his magnetic smile. “People panic sometimes when things don’t go right. I don’t. I’ve still got a long way to go, but I’m on the right track now. I’m finally, finally on the right track.”

Game time in Thessaloníki. It’s a glorious spring night, perfect weather for the crosstown rivalry between Aris and PAOK, and Aris’s Super 3 fan club is leaving nothing to chance. As the players march onto the field, the hard-cores in the east stands ignite a fireworks display that makes it look as though the entire section has been napalmed. Nothing in the U.S.—or in the rest of Europe, for that matter—is quite like it. “It’s crazy here, man,” says Adu. No kidding. Since Adu and fellow American Eddie Johnson joined Aris in January, they’ve been sprayed by shards of glass after opposing fans shattered the roof over their bench, and scurried for cover in the players’ tunnel during a battle royal between bottle-throwing supporters.

Aris, in fifth place in the Greek league, defeats PAOK 2–0, sending the Super 3 into flare-burning, rocket-launching ecstasy. But for the third straight game Adu stays rooted to the bench. After starting four times on the left wing and scoring two goals in February, Adu has played twice in the last eight games through Sunday. The prevailing view among Greek journalists and fans is that Adu has good technical skills, especially with his favored left foot, but he plays “too young,” with an underdeveloped awareness for tactics, defensive duties and knowing when less is more on offense.

The scouting report among coaches is that Adu is capable of a dangerous pass or shot but that he’s not fast and doesn’t have much of an engine for the modern game. The Aris coach, Héctor Cúper, argues that Adu also needs to be tougher mentally. “I think Adu is paying a little bit for the acceleration he had to professional soccer,” says Cúper, who has coached Italy’s Inter Milan and led Spain’s Valencia to two Champions League finals. He notes that in European clubs’ youth programs, “you are allowed to be more free, to prepare more technically,” but at the senior level “you have to win. When someone jumps directly to this level, you must be a phenomenon from your head to your feet. If you aren’t, it’s very difficult. He has to be very strong psychologically.”

Adu showed promise for U.S. youth teams, notably during the Under-20 World Cup in 2007 (where he captained the team and led an upset of Brazil) and the ’08 Olympics (particularly in a 2–2 tie against the Netherlands). So the question persists, Why hasn’t that success carried over to his pro career? “I watch video of me playing well in the Under-20 World Cup or the Olympics, and I’m like, Man, how can I not be playing here?” Adu says. “It’s taken me the last year and a half to figure it out. I was always satisfied with making one or two plays during training and thinking I had a good practice. There’s so much more to it than that. Coaches see the times you cut off passing lanes or got behind the ball. Those are things that tell them they can count on you for 90 minutes.”

Until Adu finds regular playing time at the club level, it’s hard to envision that he’ll get called back to the national team. He was on the U.S. roster for last year’s Confederations Cup but didn’t see the field, and he hasn’t been in a U.S. camp since struggling with the B team at last July’s Gold Cup and barely playing at the club level last fall. “It’s a case of a young player who has aspirations but still hasn’t been able to establish himself,” says U.S. coach Bob Bradley. “When you go to Europe, nothing is ever going to just get handed to you. It’s that ability to establish yourself within the team, with the coaches. He’s in the midst of all that, and when you add on the pressure of the early recognition and the hype, that makes it in some ways harder.”

Now that he’s 20, it’s easier for Adu to interact with his teammates off the field, and Aris players say they enjoy sharing a coffee or going to dinner with him. It was more challenging for Adu as a 14-year-old at D.C. United, where he says he “only felt comfortable with a couple of people. There were some guys who never warmed up to you because of everything you had.” Adu showed only flashes of his potential in MLS, scoring 12 goals in 3½ seasons with D.C. United and Real Salt Lake, and he joined Portugal’s Benfica on a $2 million transfer in 2007. At first he saw occasional action there, scoring two goals in 11 appearances, but Benfica went through three coaches in 2007–08, and the last of them (Fernando Chalana) did not play Adu at all after he returned from the Olympic qualifying tournament.

Things really went downhill when Benfica loaned Adu to Monaco of the French league for 2008–09. Jérôme de Bontin, a French-American member of the U.S. Soccer Federation’s board of trustees, had taken over as president at Monaco, and he wanted to add Americans to the team. “Maybe the highlight of his stay was the first day of practice,” says De Bontin. “Freddy scored three beautiful goals. Everybody in the academy was excited about him, not to mention the fact that he was a riot in the locker room.” But Monaco’s coach, a Brazilian named Ricardo, started Adu only once that season. Says De Bontin, “Everybody had the same analysis. He had incredible talent, yet he was lacking standard tactical knowledge that most players his age had. It was tied to the fact that he became professional at 14 and in some ways stopped learning at 15.”

While Adu was not an automatic starter during his MLS days, the league’s small rosters could never replicate the constant battle for playing time on European teams with no roster limits. As U.S. Under-20 coach Thomas Rongen says, “Our creative players have a tough time sometimes adjusting to the day-to-day of competing in Europe, which is different from our youth national teams or MLS.” Rongen adds that while Adu at his best can change a game in the attacking end, “a lot of coaches say he is still to a certain extent a luxury player.” The modern game values athleticism and requires even the best players to have some defensive responsibilities, and, Rongen says, “that was an area where Freddy really needed to grow and become better.” Nor has Adu proved himself to be such a phenomenon offensively that a team in Europe (or, for that matter, MLS) would choose to build around him.

Last fall Adu went out on loan again from Benfica, this time to Belenenses, a team at the bottom of the Portuguese first division. It was a hastily arranged deal that came together on the last day before the transfer deadline. “I didn’t even have a chance to talk to the coach before I went there,” says Adu, who started just once and soon began seeking a way out. In January he joined Aris on an 18-month loan. Adu now has until the end of the 2010–11 season, when his contract runs out, to prove himself in European soccer. “It’s like they gave you a lifeline,” Adu says. “I started four games in a row, which is the most I have since MLS. I feel like a new person, and I’m happy again.” It wasn’t the only change Adu made; he also dumped his agent, IMG’s Max Eisenbud, and rehired his previous one, Richard Motzkin.

If Adu can’t make an impact as a pro in Europe over the next year, he will most likely return to MLS. The question these days is how to view him: as a sixth-year pro who hasn’t lived up to the hype or as a 20-year-old who still has potential? De Bontin hopes Adu can be another Franck Ribéry, the late-blooming French midfielder who played for several mid-level teams before rising to the top of the soccer world, starting for France in the 2006 World Cup final and starring for German powerhouse Bayern Munich. (“Freddy has enough talent to succeed,” De Bontin says.) Adu certainly thinks such a track is possible. “I want to be one of the best players to play this sport one day,” he says. “I still have the chance to do that, and I want to work hard to get there.”

It is an odd twist, the hope that an athlete who turned pro at 13 could become, in the end, a late bloomer. But if Freddy Adu is going to make it, that’s how it will have to be.

Tonight could be the last time that Real Madrid fans see several of their players at the Bernabau. Spanish Sports paper “AS” has correctly pointed out today in its edition that tonight many current REAL MADRID players will say good-bye, with another hand full possibly finding that their future is elsewhere next season, a number that tallys up to eight players. Here is a list of possible departures:

Guti: Has said publicly that he wishes to leave. Dubai looked like the best option, but latest news places him in Turkey with Club Galatasaray.

Lass Diarra: upset with the Club & Coach. Plus it is doubtful if his injuries are true. Directives are not happy with his attitude. High possibility Real Madrid will sell.

Raúl: The Club has left Raul to decide his future. Still has a year of contract. Speculation has placed him in English Football or US Soccer.

M .Diarra: If the Club receives a good offer, they will sell.

Higuaín: Future in the air. Still has not renewed contract with the Club & has plenty of offers, Chelsea FC the most sounded.

Drenthe: Club desires to find him another place.

Gago: Manchester City is very keen. Madrid will sell if offer is correct.

Metzelder: Has already signed with German Club Shalke 04

Obviously the big ones on this list are Guti and Raul, both of which are legends at Real Madrid. Things must carry on, clubs must move forward, and players get older. I just can’t imagine seeing Guti or Raul in any other jersey than the white of Madrid.

Steve McClaren and FC Twente have won the Eredivisie, something the club from Enschede has never done. Amsterdammers look down at their eastern brethren, there is a feeling of superiority that emanates from the the capital city and the surrounding area. Therefore, it is a very sweet championship for the “Tukkers” who have shown that a stable, well-run, debt-free football club can succeed in Europe. Especially sweet also for Steve McClaren who exiled himself to FC Twente after his failure with the English National team. He has guided Twente to second place last year, and the championship this year. Champion’s League beckons for FC Twente. Both coach and players will be seduced by its riches and also seduced by offers from the Prem, Serie A, the Bundesliga, and La Liga. McClaren should stick around for at least one more season. So should players like Stoch, Bryan Ruiz, and others. Twente is a selling club, players will leave, but good management will find replacements for them.

Hull will have to offload most of their best-known players and could reinstate Phil Brown as manager as a result of the cash-strapped club’s impending relegation from the Premier League, it emerged on Monday.

High-earners Jimmy Bullard, Geovanni, Anthony Gardner, Stephen Hunt, Kamil Zayatte and Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink are all expected to be put up for sale this summer as the club battles to avoid going into administration, a move that would mean starting life in the Championship with a ten-point penalty.

Chairman Adam Pearson admitted last week that administration was a very real possibility for a club that is £35 million in debt.

The club’s owner, Russell Bartlett, struck a more optimistic note but admitted there would have to be brutal cost-cutting to keep the business afloat.

“We face a tough period to trade through the transitional period and readjust the business to life in the Championship, but I am confident we can do that,” Bartlett said.

“We are presently preparing plans to trade through and within that process is to significantly lower the wage bill and potentially to restructure other liabilities.”

Auditors warned earlier this season that relegation would threaten Hull’s future and the club’s two-year stay in the top flight was effectively confirmed on Saturday following a 1-0 defeat by Sunderland.

The cash squeeze is so severe that Brown, who was relieved of his duties last month and replaced by Iain Dowie, could be asked to return from gardening club because that would be the cheapest option.

Hull will be joined in the Championship next season by Burnley, who look set to retain the services of Brian Laws as manager and are confident they can cope with the financial consequences of dropping back to the second tier after only one season in the Premier League.

Burnley have lost 14 of their 17 matches since Laws took over from Owen Coyle in mid-January but club chairman Barry Kilby did not appear to be planning a change.

“We’ll sit down with Brian in the summer. He didn’t have a great hand when he arrived, and we’ll see where we go from there,” Kilby said.

“Obviously, after getting to the Premier League after 33 years, it hurts a little bit that we’ve gone down after just a year.

“We were determined that if we did go down we would go down strong, that’s what we’ve tried to do.

“We will have another crack and try to get back into the Premier League.”

Kilby said sensible planning meant there were no serious financial implications for the club.

“West Brom have been a good model for us,” he said. “You can’t bet the ranch on these things, and if we can get back up we will be stronger for it.

“We intend to be back and we’ll have a good chance. We are free of debt, have a good wage bill and will give it a good crack.”

The 10th Anniversary of the 100th Anniversary.

Back row right is Newcastle United and Torquay United legend Wesley Saunders. Rather less legendary is Dayle Burton back row second left

It was Neal Fenn’s idea – he was one of the relatively small circle of internet users amongst the worldwide brotherhood of Torquay United fans back in the days of the 1999 / 2000 Third Division Campaign. His idea ? Get some of the internet using fans together and hold a competition on the pitch at Plainmoor, have a few beers and a chat and put a face to a Yahoo Messenger ID.

The online community had been nurtured on the cyber terrace, and in the online community of the old torquayunited.com, long before there was premiumtv or football league interactive. Thirty odd serious on-line fans – whose names ended in gull – lyongull, ohiogull, ozgull, tokyogull, burbankgull, mervogull, graygull well you get the picture – doubledel was the exception – would get up at whatever hour the time difference dictated and use yahoo messenger chat to update each other on the score from wherever the gulls were playing.

As Yahoo added an audio feature to Messenger, so it was possible for a listener in Devon to pipe the radio commentary over the web from a microphone poked into the speaker of a transistor radio. Raw but it totally worked, and it was terrific until Yahoo made modifications that meant the mic ‘on’ button had to be re-pressed every 20 seconds or so.

Mike Bateson

Then Torquay Chairman Mike Bateson – unbeknownst to us all at first – was one of the first local Devon supporters to re-broadcast the away commentaries over the web. Mike had a leg condition that gave him discomfort travelling in Coaches so he stayed at home and listened in to BBC Radio Devon. Lucky for all us emigres as it happened, Kevo the dental hygienist, Del the decorator and handyman or Matt his son would take home duty of they weren’t at the game but listening in.

A real cast of characters emerged and connected with each other in this forum – Alan Cole, Richard Hughes, Scott Brehaut but none more so than Derek Hore. Sure it was Neal’s idea but the execution was all Del’s. I was scheduled to fly in to catch a handful of games over New Year Southend at home and Mansfield away, and the ‘Nettists’ (as we came to be known) gathered and planned.

Derek Hore

Between January and the end of March 2000 it was all arranged – to celebrate the 100th Season of Torquay United Football Club there would be The Nettist Match – four teams would have a ‘virtual manager’ who couldn’t make it from wherever in the world they were, and there would be two games with the two winners facing each other in a penalty shoot out against the first team reserve ‘keeper. We’d all throw in twenty quid or so, and the money raised would go to the club to buy new nets, balls, corner flags or shower fittings, whatever was needed.

Now Torquay (as I come over all glassy eyed and nostalgic) is a modest club, and though there’s been ups and downs the team has never threatened anything above the third tier (the third division, league two, call it what you will). Mike Bateson took the club over from the disaster that was Dave Webb in 1990, during the Webb era the club had toyed with survival, sought re-election to the fourth division a number of times (this was before automatic relegation) promised a bit – under Cyril Knowles, made a Wembley final in The Sherpa Van Trophy of 1989 – but really delivered nothing. Knowles had discovered Lee Sharpe but the club was forced to sell him to Manchester United for the then record fee of 180,000 pounds.

Though 45,000 odd travelled to Wembley for the Sherpa Van Final where The Gulls were beaten by Bolton 4-1, Plainmoor’s capacity was under 5,000 and that was plenty – average gates peaked in the low 3000′s – and that’s not a lot to run a club on. Mike Bateson was an old school entrepreneur who never strayed far from the business – he’d worked trawlers, sold cloth, sold double glazing, windows – worked hard, controlled costs and recognized the hard realities of life at the bottom of the football league. He opened up the offices in the morning and his wife Sue got everything in order for the day’s business. His daughter Debbie washed all the first team kit, while her husband Richard – an accomplished lower division journeyman footballer – trained the team while he took his coaching badges, and did double duty as groundsman, cutting the grass, marking the field, checking the nets.

Sue entertained the visiting dignatories in the executive bar after home games, and Mike would glad hand who ever he needed to, making sure that gate receipts were properly accounted for and programme sales were properly reconciled and then came in early on Monday mornings to make sure there was a matchball sponsor for next week’s games.

Mike wasn’t popular with a section of the Torquay faithful of course – those who wanted the club to buy promotion into the third division, or sack the (current) manager, or who just thought they could do a better job, albeit without having to take any of the risks. Periodically they’d barrack him from The Popside, spit at him, call him names or scratch his car or snap the aerial off. There is no doubt in my mind, and the collapse of ITV digital in 2002 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1896732.stm) showed which clubs had cut their cloth appropriately.

And so, April 2000 came around and Del had worked with the Bateson’s to provide everyone with a unique experience as they raised a bit of money for the club. It was confirmed, after the Macclesfield game on Easter Monday April 24, 2000 the four teams (Global Wanderers, Chivas De Marmite, Brazil United and Mervo Magic) would play in old first team strip, get changed in the home and away dressing rooms just vacated by Torquay United and Macclesfield players, play on the Plainmoor turf, and then get a shower and go upstairs to Boots and Laces, the club pub and have a few pints and food. There would be certificates for all participants signed by the first team boss Wesley Saunders, and Mike and a Trophy for the winners. As exciting as the Macclesfield game was, with Torquay coming from 2-1 down at half time to win 3-2, The Nettist match in the mud, in front of the recently demolished away stand was second to none that day.

Del did a terrific job and channeled incredible amounts of nervous energy on the day worrying about how well things would go. The immensely exceeded everyone’s expectations of course, and it was considered a success. So much so, that Del was asked to organize Nettist Match 2 the following Easter. It became an annual event raising money for the club each Easter until 2006. Del managed the lot.

In those six Easters I met, married and divorced my second wife, had my son, and watched him play in Nettist Match 6. Del split from his wife, but met and married his second. Mike Bateson stood down in 2006, but we all met and played against or with each of the clubs managers – Wesley Saunders, Colin Lee, Roy Macfarland, Leroy Rosenior and the amazing Ian Atkins. We stayed up, went up, went down again, and then stayed up and played the first football match to be played after 9/11 when we played Tottenham Hotspur in The League Cup.

Del became the webmaster for Torquay United, a job he did tirelessly without pay. Del’s wife Julie became the club’s commercial manager, but in spite of their amazing success were forced aside by the craziness that was Chris Roberts who took over from Mike Bateson in 2006.

I think of all these people very dearly from time to time and 2000 to 2006 was a good run, really. Painfully hurt by the way they were treated by the club once Robert’s took over, two of Torquay United’s most dedicated servants haven’t found their way up to Plainmoor since Kevin Hill’s testimonial in 2007. So 10 years on I reflect, and not without sadness.

Global Wanderers warm up at Plainmoor

More next week.