MercenaryChef Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 He makes a lot of tackles and interceptions, more than Sagna and seems to be as good in the air. Where he lacks is he fouls... a lot. That May or may not hurt us depending on our set piece defending but he should, at the very least, contribute to a few more goals while not being a complete defensive liability. that will settle down i think with some more experience and having better defenders around him. newcastle was horrible in the backline a lot of the season. too often debuchy would find himself forced into tackles he should not have even faces if others had done their jobs. he runs down the side well and delivers good crosses. he will be missed at newcastle but a good addition to the more ambitious arsenal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Consigliere Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 Stop giving me false hope! Er, so did SAF really pass up on Rodriguez in favour of Bebe? :bang: While I would be fucking ecstatic if Hamish joins United, I think that his more likely destination would be Real Madrid if he leaves Monaco. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark Antony Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 Will Monaco be in CL next season? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Consigliere Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 Will Monaco be in CL next season? Yep. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alex. Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 Er, so did SAF really pass up on Rodriguez in favour of Bebe? :bang: While I would be fucking ecstatic if Hamish joins United, I think that his more likely destination would be Real Madrid if he leaves Monaco. Wouldn't read too much into that. He probably rejected 20 other players at the same time who have faded into obscurity. Just bad luck. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Consigliere Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 Wouldn't read too much into that. He probably rejected 20 other players at the same time who have faded into obscurity. Just bad luck. You're probably right. The article says he passed up on Rodriguez in 2010. Bebe could very well have looked to be a better prospect back then. Only in hinsight does it look like a bad decision. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
polishgenius Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 The signing of Bebe was absolute madness even at the time but I seriously doubt it was an either/or proposition for him and Hamish. It's probably more relevant that in 2010 we still had massive hopes for Ravel Morrison - we'd then only recently passed on Adem Ljajic, another similar type of prospect, so Fergie obviously felt we were sorted for that kind of player. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mexal Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 Debuchy to Arsenal is complete. Now we just need them to finish Sanchez. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
polishgenius Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 Well, when a source as strong as this one speaks up about Liverpool/Suarez, we can't argue... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
baxus Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 The signing of Bebe was absolute madness even at the time but I seriously doubt it was an either/or proposition for him and Hamish. It's probably more relevant that in 2010 we still had massive hopes for Ravel Morrison - we'd then only recently passed on Adem Ljajic, another similar type of prospect, so Fergie obviously felt we were sorted for that kind of player.Adem Ljajic is more trouble then he's worth.He wasn't even 20 by the time he got passed on by Man Utd for not improving between age of 17 and 18 (I mean what the hell?! What player doesn't improve at that age? A lazy one, that's who!), smacked around for insolence by his team manager and suspended from national team for failing to follow the code of conduct requested from players which included players singing the national anthem (he even tried to make it a political issue despite his father saying Adem didn't sing it because he didn't know the words?! He tried to pull the "muslims are not equal citizens" card despite his paternal uncle being a minister on the government for the past decade or so and counting).All in all - he'd need to be talented more than anyone ever to get away with crap like that.If it were one of those things, one could argue that Man Utd's scouting staff made a mistake or that his manager were idiots and it was not his fault but all three definitely suggest he's the main reason for all that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
polishgenius Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 In hindsight, not signing Adem Ljajic was absolutely the right decision, but at the time, it came completely out of the blue - we'd put a lot of effort into getting him, right down to signing a whole other footballer along with him just to make sure (poor Zoran Tosic), and then bam, plug pulled. Most people, including me, seemed to think that we'd already signed him and loaned him back out, but no.Anyway, I agree that he's a colossal prick and his excuses for it were daft as hell, but a code of conduct requiring players to sing the national anthem is pretty disgraceful imo. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KiDisaster Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 Warning: Long, ridiculous, pointless post ahead. Avoid if you don't feel like reading a description of the types of things I get up to at work. I've always loved international football, ever since I watched the 98 world cup final with my dad at 8 years old I was hooked. Much as I enjoy watching the sport though, I've never bothered to watch club football. I've always thought it was too much to follow, too many games and the season lasts almost a whole year. This year though, because the world cup is ending shortly and I need more football in my life, I'm changing that. Gonna start watching premiere league. Started off by watching a few repeats of last season's top games to get myself hyped (that Liverpool-Man City game though). So of course I'm faced with the issue I'm sure every non-Brit who follows the premiere league and has no connection whatsoever to any particular team or location faced at some point. Who the balls do I root for? I spent most of my very slow work day contemplating this. Only place in the UK I've been to that has football teams is London (unless there's a Windsor Castle F.C. or a Stonehenge United that I'm unaware of :P) so I could flip a coin to chose between Chelsea & Arsenal. Nah, too limited. Could pick a name out of a hat. Nah, too random. Could just watch some games and decide who I like after a while. Bollocks to that, too sensible. But then I thought, why not decide this via some long and unnecessarily complicated system of random number generation and dice rolls made to resemble a world cup style tournament?! What a genius idea to kill the last few hours of the work day. So here's what I did... Using random.org I separated this upcoming season's 20 clubs into 5 groups of 4. The group stage operated in the standard fashion with each team playing the other three teams once for a total of six games per group. 3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw, nothing for a loss. The top two teams from each group would proceed to the elimination stage. So how to determine the winners of the matches? DICE ROLLS! I'd roll one die for each team to determine how many goals they scored (with a result of 6 being 0 goals) and whoever scored more won. To keep things from being 100% random here I weighted the results based on each teams performance in the last season compared to the opposing team's performance. For this teams were split into four "skill" groups. 1st-5th place, 6th-10th place, 11th-15th place and 16th-20 place (the three teams who earned promotion this year are considered to have placed 18th, 19th and 20th for this purpose). If two teams in the same skill group were facing each other, it would be pure randomness. No advantage given to either side. If one team was in a higher skill group than their opponent though, they'd receive a bonus to their roll. A difference of one skill group equaled a plus-1 to the roll, for a maximum of plus-3 if a team in the top 5 played a team in the bottom 5. Here's the group stage results: http://i.imgur.com/ZV4JjOz.jpg (Note: Not all results were entered, I got lazy and didn't bother to fill in some goals/wins/points if it was obvious which teams would advance). As you can see, 9 of the top 10 teams from last season advanced. The only team from the bottom 10 to advance is Aston Villa, and only because there was only one top 10 team in that group. If I'd put two top 10s in each group rather than doing it totally randomly I have no doubt only the top 10 teams would have advanced. I guess this makes sense, realistically. But I feel like the weighting might have been too much so I'm considering redoing the whole thing with a different weighting system. Nevertheless I moved on to eliminations, following the same dice roll format to determine victors. Of course draws can't be allowed in an elimination stage, and a couple of games did have to go to penalties. To decide the shootouts I'd flip a coin five times for each team (alternating, of course). Here's the final bracket: http://i.imgur.com/5G5sQU9.png As you can see Man U took the tournament by storm. Despite being something of an underdog (due to them finishing 7th last season all of their opponents except for Aston Villa had a +1 dice roll advantage over them) they managed to stick it out and become champions. You can't help but admire that level of tenacity. To be honest I was kind of rooting against them, since Man U are the biggest bandwagonist team in the world across any sport as far as I know. But my boy Van Persie is on the squad and they won fair and square despite their disadvantages in the eliminations. So at least to begin with I'll be following their matches and cheering them on, then maybe a team I like for non-arbitrary reasons will come along and pull me away :lol: Tl:dr - I have way too much free time on my hands at work some days. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Iskaral Pust Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 Supposedly Liverpool are close to signing Markovic now for 25 million. That's an eye-watering amount for a very raw kid who might be the next Sterling or the next Babel. Sterling isn't even worth that much and he has already passed through a development stage further than Markovic. It's even more unnerving because it would suggest that Sanchez is not expected to sign and this is his alternate. I have to hope that figure is wildly exaggerated. It was bad enough spending 25 million on Joe Allen and Fabio Borini. We would have a lightning fast attack though. It looks like Brendan Rogers and Ian Ayre have decided to humiliate Spurs by repeating the Bale experiment but presumably with the intention of actually succeeding this time just to rub salt in that festering wound. I assume it's an elaborate revenge fantasy for all the times Spurs suddenly got interested in our targets. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lessthanluke Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 Can you not just enjoy the sport without following a specific club? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KiDisaster Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 Can you not just enjoy the sport without following a specific club? Of course but it makes it more interesting to care about the outcome IMO, even if you only slightly care for silly reasons. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mme Erzulie Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 It's a lot harder to get excited if you don't root for a specific team. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark Antony Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 It's even more unnerving because it would suggest that Sanchez is not expected to sign and this is his alternateFrom what I understand we have been looking at Markovic for a while and his deal has nothing to do with Sanchez (or Suarez sale) at all. I Hope we sign him , He looks a real talent, but its not gonna be the last of our offensive spending no doubt Hope we invest the Suarez money on our defense though! Would love to finally swing that Moreno deal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mexal Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 I haven't really seen a source that has suggested Sanchez was in play for Liverpool, at least since the initial hoopla over the offer and how they could package it together. It looks to be just Arsenal v Juventus for his signature at this point. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark Antony Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 Yea Liverpool is out now but they were definitely trying hard to get him. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
White Walker Texas Ranger Posted July 7, 2014 Share Posted July 7, 2014 How would Arsenal play him? As a central striker? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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