Posts Tagged ‘Playmaker’

Capello has given England World Cup chance, says Kaká

• Brazil playmaker says England are sharper under Capello
• Full interview: Kaká talks to Fernando Duarte

The England team to play Brazil in Saturday’s high-profile friendly may be missing several first-choice players through injury, but Kaká says the five-times World Cup winners face a difficult and significant challenge against a side he believes can win next summer’s tournament in South Africa. In an interview with the Guardian, Brazil’s playmaker reveals his admiration for the way in which Fabio Capello has turned a group of talented individuals into a formidable team.

“They have cruised through the European qualifiers in a group that was not easy at all,” he said. “I don’t think anybody expected them to go through so strongly, especially with the two emphatic defeats of Croatia. It’s not to say England weren’t a dangerous team before, but there is something different now. They look much sharper collectively, like Mr Capello’s sides are known to be.

“What seems to have changed is the arrival of a better collective awareness. The players look much more aware with regards to movements and positioning. The attitude is also stronger. They are definitely one of the teams to consider for the trophy in South Africa. As much as the Doha game will award no points, it can work as a massive confidence boost when you beat an opponent also tipped to prevail next year.”

The player he respects most in the England side is one of those who has not flown to Qatar, Steven Gerrard, the Liverpool midfielder having struggled with a groin injury in recent weeks. “England have always had individually strong players and I am a huge fan of Stevie Gerrard, who has the heart of a lion and is the icon of the modern footballer with his ability to attack and defend so well.”

Kaká, who won the World Cup with Brazil in South Korea and Japan in 2002, also offered a warning to another of his favourite players, Wayne Rooney. Capello has worked hard to rein in the Manchester United forward’s temper and Kaká advised that a moment of indiscretion, such as when Rooney was sent off in the 2006 quarter-final for stamping on Portugal’s Ricardo Carvalho, could cost England their chance of glory next year.

“The World Cup is a competition in which everything needs to work for your advantage. Players need to be fit, decisions have to go in your favour and details such as a red card can cost a team dearly. I have no doubts that England can do it.”

Metz magic and Dons’ taming of Munich

From Metz feeding Bernd Schuster ham to Aberdeen lighting up the north, here are some of the great European shocks

1. Barcelona 1-4 Metz (agg: 5-6), 10 October 1984, Cup Winners’ Cup, first round

No one saw this coming – almost literally, because after Metz had lost the home leg 4-2 no French TV or radio station bothered to cover the seemingly pointless return match and the Camp Nou was only a quarter full. The pessimism surrounding Metz was understandable: their previous two away matches in the league had been a 6-0 defeat at Bordeaux and a 7-0 mauling at Monaco, and, after the Catalans had benefited from a series of mistakes to win the first leg 4-2, the Barcelona playmaker Bernd Schuster said he would “give the Metz players some ham when they come to our place to thank them for the presents that they give us tonight”.

“They really looked down on us – and that made us so angry,” Michel Ettore, the Metz goalkeeper, recalled recently. “We wanted to wipe away their insults.” After half an hour at Camp Nou, however, Barça’s belief grew even stronger as Lobo Carrasco fired past Ettore to make it 5-2 on aggregate. With less than an hour to go, Metz needed four goals. In the 38th minute Tony Kurbos hurtled down the right and, with the goalkeeper anticipating a cross, sent the ball, perhaps flukily, straight into the net from an acute angle. Sixty seconds later Metz carved open the Barça defence and Sánchez diverted a Kurbos cross into his own goal to leave Metz requiring “only” two more goals. Ten minutes into the second half the irrepressible Kurbos latched on to a sweet through ball and clipped it over the keeper to make it 5-5 on aggregate, but with Barça still in front on away goals. The home side attempted to rally but Ettore and his defenders produced improbable block after improbable block.

“Every time it seemed they were about to score we’d get a head, a foot or an arse in the way – we felt invincible,” Ettore said. In the 85th minute Metz tore forward again, the Senegal striker Jules Bocandé feinted his way to the byline and pulled back towards the penalty spot, where Kurbos, of course, arrived to lift it into the net and ignite ecstatic French celebrations. “I ran straight up to Schuster and bawled: ‘Where’s your ham now?’” Ettore said. “I don’t think he speaks French but he understood me that night.” Paul Doyle

2. Porto 4-3 Wrexham (agg: 4-4), 1984-85 Cup Winners’ Cup, first round

Wrexham were lucky to be in the Cup Winners’ Cup, having failed to fulfil the competition’s fairly obvious criterion. Shrewsbury had in fact won the Welsh Cup in 1984, but the Shrews could not represent Wales in European competition, the snag being that pesky border which placed Shrewsbury nine miles inside England. The beaten finalists, then, took their place.

But by 1984 Wrexham were a club in disarray. Back-to-back relegations in 1982 and 1983 had sent them spiralling from the Second Division to the Fourth, bringing financial hardship. They were left with only 14 professionals on their books and in their squad were three teenagers – Paul Nicholl, Gary Pugh and Kevin Jones – whose careers in football had begun in the summer courtesy of the government’s Youth Training Scheme because the club could not afford to pay them. They warmed up for the first leg with a 3-1 home defeat against Peterborough in front of 1,704 die-hard fans, a result that left them 82nd of the 92 League clubs.

Porto, then, should have been an impossible task. The visiting side that lined up for the first leg contained seven of the players who had been in the team beaten 2-1 by Juventus in the previous year’s final, plus a young Paulo Futre. A host of them had helped Portugal to a World Cup qualifying victory over Sweden the week before. Predictably they dominated much of the first half, but the Welsh side grew into the game and Jim Steel’s bullet header gave them a remarkable victory. Just 4,935 had been at the Racecourse ground for the first leg; nearly 40,000 packed into Estádio das Antas in Porto for the return game. In what Steel would later describe as “a bloody hurricane” the hosts raced into a 3-0 lead within 38 minutes, but the Robins’ captain, Jake King, pulled two goals back just before half-time. Futre put the Portuguese back in command with a goal in the second half before Barry Horne, signed from Rhyl in the summer, made it 4-3 in the dying minutes, giving the Welshmen an astonishing victory on away goals. Their reward was a trip to Italy to take on the beaten European Cup finalists of 1983-84, Roma. A 3-0 aggregate defeat meant an honourable exit, but the players had already written themselves into Wrexham, and indeed European, folklore. John Ashdown

3. CSKA Sofia 2-0 Ajax (agg: 2-1), 24/10/1973, European Cup second round

Ajax had been shocked before – not least in 1960 when they were beaten 4-3 by the Norwegian amateurs Fredrikstad – but those defeats came before they had evolved into the European powerhouse of the early 1970s. This came when they were close to the height of their powers. In 1971, ‘72 and ‘73 they had won a hat-trick of European Cups under Rinus Michels and then Istvan Kovacs. Johan Cruyff had departed for Barcelona in the summer of 1973, but this was still the team of Johan Neeskens, Arie Haan, Johnny Rep and Piet Keizer. They had not been beaten in Europe since the defeat to Arsenal in the semi-final of the Fairs Cup in 1969-70. They had won six of the previous eight Eredivise titles.

CSKA by comparison, despite their domestic success (four back-to-back titles from 1969), had never made an impact on the European scene. They’d reached the European Cup semis in 1967 but in the previous year’s European Cup they had been destroyed 6-1 over two legs by the same Ajax side. They’d reached the second round in bizarre circumstances after their second leg with Panathinaikos was replayed after the game had gone to penalties. A Jan Mulder goal gave Ajax a 1-0 victory in the first leg, but that was nullified in Sofia when Dimitar Marashliev scored in the 68th minute. Extra-time was needed. In the 116th minute, Stefan Mikhailov struck to give the Bulgarians a famous victory and effectively end Ajax’s golden era. It was to be 14 years before the once-dominant club won another European title. JA

4. Chelsea 1-1 Atvidaberg (Atvidaberg win on away goals), Cup Winners’ Cup, 2nd round, 1971

Six months previously Chelsea had lifted the trophy by beating Real Madrid in the final, and they began their defence of the Cup Winners’ Cup with a narrow 21-0 aggregate victory over Jeunesse Hautcharage of Luxembourg. So nobody expected them to slip up in the next round against the Swedish part-timers. Even after being held 0-0 in the away leg, Peter Osgood and Co were anticipating a slaughter at Stamford Bridge, as indeed were the Swedes, who, in the words of David Lacey in the Guardian, “threw nine men back in their defence with a fatalism worthy of Bergman”.

Atvidaberg survived the first half but within 10 seconds of the resumption they finally fell behind, Alan Hudson finding the net from 20 yards. John Hollins’ penalty miss a few minutes later was not expected to matter but, amazingly, it did, as in the 68th minute the visitors mounted their attack of the game and the striker Roland Sandberg dashed on to a pass from Lars-Goran Andersson and slid the ball past Peter Bonnetti for an equaliser. Chelsea failed to respond and, indeed, failed to accept their defeat with good grace. “One of the Chelsea players spat at me,” said the forward Ralf Edstrom recently, adding: “They were real pigs. Absolutely! Pigs! A lot of people say that the Englishmen were always fair. And maybe they were – when they were playing each other. Against foreign teams they were dirty all the time.” PD

5. Dinamo Tbilisi 3-0 Liverpool (agg: 4-2), 3/10/1979, European Cup first round

Teams from behind the Iron Curtain were always shrouded in mystery – in previews they were habitually referred to as “the crack Soviet outfit” or “the ruthless Red Army” but no one knew for sure how good they would turn out to be. Would Tbilisi be as nifty as Ferencvaros and Red Star Belgrade had proved when upsetting Liverpool earlier in the decade, albeit before Bob Paisley had elevated the club to a higher level with two European Cup triumphs? No. They would turn out to be better than anything the English champions had ever encountered. Already in the first leg at Anfield, where the home side had prevailed 2-1, Dinamo had shown flashes of a technical and tactical sophistication that perplexed the hosts. In Tibilisi came the full onslaught.

Liverpool barely slept the night before the match – some 200 Dinamo fans having staged a torchlight parade around their hotel at 4am – but mostly it was Dinamo’s rapid passing and jagged running that made them so sluggish. Dinamo made it 1-0 on the night after a moment that should feature permanently in the Match of the Day intro footage: David Kipiani dazzled past Alan Hansen with a piece of trickery that left the acclaimed denouncer of diabolical defending floundering like a drunk in the dark. Ray Clemence diverted the ensuing cross, but only as far as Vladimir Gutsaev, who slammed it into the net. The Georgians’ second arrived in the 75th minute when Georgiy Chilaya collected the ball in his own half, slalomed past three opponents and slipped in Ramaz Shengelia, who casually lifted the ball over Clemence to make it 2-0. Three minutes later came the third after Phil Thompson conceded a penalty and Alexandre Chivadze converted with ease. Hansen has since said this was the best Liverpool team he ever played in. Kevin Keegan’s Hamburg would avenge them in the next round, knocking out Dinamo. PD

6. Aberdeen 3-2 Bayern Munich (agg: 3-2), Cup Winners’ Cup quarter-final, 1983

An up-and-coming manager named Alex Ferguson had already made Aberdeen a force in Scotland but not until this dramatic night did Europe realise that here was a side to be reckoned with. Applauded just for reaching this stage of the tournament, Aberdeen were expected to be dispatched by Bayern, who counted Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and Paul Breitner in their team. After a valiant 0-0 draw in Munich, the Dons fans were dreading the concession of an early goal at Pittodrie and their worst fears were realised when Klaus Augenthaler stepped regally forward to drive the ball into the net in the 10th minute. Neil Simpson equalised before half-time, but soon the Scots were put back in their supposed place, when Hans Pflügler smashed a crisp left-footed volley past Jim Leighton.

Needing two goals to progress, Ferguson introduced two substitutes – John McMaster and John Hewitt. In the 76th minute the former combined with Gordon Strachan to outwit the German defence with a free-kick routine that has since become commonplace at Manchester United, leaving Strachan to cross for Alex McLeish to head an equaliser. One minute later, the Bayern keeper Manfred Müller parried an Eric Black header and Hewitt, with his first touch after five months out with injury, stabbed in a sensational winner. Now all of Europe was aware of something special brewing in Scotland, but neither Waterschei in the semi-final, nor Real Madrid in the final, could concoct a remedy, and Aberdeen completed one of the most astonishing campaigns in European history. PD

Benítez going for broke in bid to end long title wait

• ‘New players can help us win more games’ says Spaniard
• Does not agree that championship is a must this season

A manager must build expectations but it is revealing how Rafael Benítez already speaks of “managing” them. The financial sands have shifted under the Spaniard this summer and yet, after five years of gradual and occasionally fraught progress, he knows the anticipation is that his building work is nearing completion at Liverpool. He cannot promise the club’s first league title since 1990 but nor does he deny, to use a favoured word, its possibility.

Title predictions are peculiar this year given the leading contenders are judged not on how they have improved but how much they have weakened. On this score Benítez encourages Anfield’s optimists with the assessment that his Liverpool squad is equal to that which finished second and four points behind Manchester United last season. And this despite the loss of Xabi Alonso to Real Madrid and the influential midfielder’s replacement, Alberto Aquilani, being at least a month away from his Premier League debut due to ankle surgery.

In Aquilani, Benítez believes he has located one of the keys to improvement. The final step has proven the hardest for every Anfield manager since Kenny Dalglish left the club in 1991, and Benítez is confident the £20m Italian can remedy the seven home draws that, along with repeated hamstring injuries to Fernando Torres, cost Liverpool the title last season. More adventurous than Alonso, the former Roma playmaker has been designated a role in support of Steven Gerrard this term, leaving Javier Mascherano as the lone holding midfielder at home, with his goals and swift, incisive passing removing the handbrake from those teams intent on parking the bus. That is the theory at least.

Liverpool will stretch those same rigid defences to a greater degree with Glen Johnson raiding from right-back. Benítez has never been sold on the value of an out-and-out winger but the England international, while needing to improve defensively, can provide the width Liverpool have sorely lacked on occasion. So far, so encouraging for a team that added a swagger to its consistency as last season progressed and fielded Gerrard with Torres only 14 times in the league due to injury.

“If you analyse the two players we have signed, they are players with quality,” Benítez insists. “We needed a little bit more quality at right-back and we got Johnson. Trying to find that extra quality is difficult. [Andriy] Voronin has come back and has done really well in pre-season and did really well at Hertha Berlin last season. Yes, we have lost something with Alonso, but we couldn’t stop him from going. We have tried to manage that loss and have brought someone in, Aquilani, who we feel can help us win the games that we were drawing at home last season. Aquilani, Voronin and Johnson are three players with game intelligence and quality going forward that can all help in that manner.”

Hold on. Voronin? Benítez is looking to Voronin to help Liverpool erase 20 years of desperation in May next May? Here is where concerns over Liverpool’s title credentials surface. This scepticism is not a criticism of Voronin directly. He did, after all, score 11 goals in 23 games on loan with Hertha last season and would have signed permanently had they qualified for the Champions League. But if the answer is Voronin, who scored five league goals for Liverpool before being shipped back to Germany, then the question is what happened to the £20m Benítez was promised on top of the money he raised through player sales this summer?

The Liverpool manager had David Silva of Valencia in mind as the calibre of player who could improve his team’s penetration. Now he is reliant on the reinvention of the 30-year-old Ukrainian or the penny finally dropping with Ryan Babel. Benítez’s budget has been revised and is understood to have had to incorporate the lucrative contracts awarded this summer to Gerrard and Torres, who put pen to paper on a £110,000-a-week, four-year deal with the option of a fifth year yesterday. They are worth every penny, but strength in depth could prove a fundamental weakness at Anfield unless funds are forthcoming in the final weeks of the transfer window.

Benítez has resisted entering into another divisive confrontation with the Liverpool owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett over finance, but it is no surprise he enters the new campaign with characteristic caution. “I don’t feel any extra pressure because we haven’t won anything for three seasons. We have to manage the expectations,” he said ahead of tomorrow’s opener at Tottenham Hotspur.

“We know the situation. If you talk about the title, everybody is saying we have to win it [the title] this season. But I don’t think so. We have to be realistic, we want to be in the top four and to be contenders. I was asked the same questions this time last year and I said we wanted to be in a good position come January. We were, and we stayed in a good position all the way through to the end of the season. We have to have that same approach this season, taking it one game at a time and seeing where we are at the end of each week. People will say I’m always saying the same thing, but it has to be like this.”

Chelsea target Pirlo taken off the market

• ‘Pirlo will end his career in Milan,’ says Silvio Berlusconi
• Chelsea had offered £6.5m plus Claudio Pizarro

Chelsea are set to be disappointed in their pursuit of Andrea Pirlo after Milan said the midfield playmaker would see out his career with the Rossoneri.

The Milan owner, Silvio Berlusconi, arrived at the team’s Milanello training ground today to have lunch with the vice-president, Adriano Galliani, and the coach, Leonardo. After a 90-minute meeting he called the press to announce that Pirlo had been taken off the market.

“Andrea Pirlo is officially off the market – he will stay with us,” said Berlusconi. “We received some important offers for him, especially from Carlo Ancelotti who wanted to take Pirlo to Chelsea with him. But we decided that he will stay. Leonardo told us that Pirlo is too important for our team. So we decided he will end his career here at Milan.”

Pirlo said he was delighted to see out his playing days with Milan. “Today is a very good day,” he told Milan Channel. “I am very happy to be able to finish my career here.

“This is thanks to the president Silvio Berlusconi, to Adriano Galliani and to Leonardo who, by taking me off the market, have given me the possibility to end my career here.

“When they told me the news I was very happy, finally the saga of this summer is over and we can continue the adventure in rossonero.”

Pirlo has been with the Rossoneri since 2001, when he signed from bitter rivals Internazionale and instantly formed a formidable partnership with Gennaro Gattuso.

The World Cup winner admits he did consider leaving Milan. “I had the possibility of changing teams and adventure but at the end in mutual agreement, the club and I, decided to continue and we are all happier. It was a turbulent summer with many doubts but at the end, in my family, we are all happier to remain in Milan.”

Chelsea had previously offered Milan £6.5m plus the striker Claudio Pizarro in exchange for Pirlo, but that offer was considered to be too low.

Berlusconi added that there was money to spend on a new striker, and Milan are expected to renew their efforts to sign Sevilla’s Luis Fabiano. Pizarro and Real Madrid’s Klaas-Jan Huntelaar also remain targets, according to reports.

Blackburn snap up Kalinic and Di Santo

• Croatia striker Kalinic was also a target for Portsmouth
• Carlo Ancelotti keen on signing Andrea Pirlo

Blackburn Rovers last night improved their attacking options following the departure of Roque Santa Cruz with the double signing of the Croatia striker Nikola Kalinic from Hajduk Split and Franco Di Santo on loan from Chelsea until January.

The Croatian club announced that a deal has been agreed to sell 21-year-old Kalinic, who had also been a target for Portsmouth, to the Lancashire club for a fee of up to £12m, while Di Santo was deemed surplus to the immediate requirements of Chelsea’s manager, Carlo Ancelotti.

Di Santo, the 20-year-old Argentina youth international, has struggled to make an impression at Chelsea since his £3m move from the Chilean club Audax Italiano 18 months ago and, although he has appeared 16 times as a substitute, he has yet to score. Di Santo and Kalinic will compete at Ewood Park with Benni McCarthy, El-Hadji Diouf and Jason Roberts.

Ancelotti remains in the market for a marquee signing and is hopeful of closing a deal for the playmaker Andrea Pirlo from his former club Milan, although it is expected he will have to pay in excess of £15m. Chelsea also have an interest in Bayern Munich’s forward Franck Ribéry.

Michael Mancienne, the England Under-21 defender, will be offered a four-year contract but he could be loaned out if Chelsea were to end the summer with sufficient cover at the back. Wolverhampton, for whom Mancienne played last season, would be interested in taking him on another loan. Chelsea said they want to hold on to the midfielder Joe Cole, in the face of interest from Tottenham.