Posts Tagged ‘World Cup Qualifier’

England women frustrated by injuries ahead of qualifier

• Casey Stoney and Jill Scott join list of absentees
• We should win the game, says England coach

Injuries, illness, work and family commitments have conspired to severely restrict the team selection options of the England coach Hope Powell for tomorrow’s World Cup qualifier against Turkey in Izmir.

Only three of the players who were in the starting line-up for September’s European Championship final are set to start at the New Buca stadium as Powell’s team look for a second successive Group Five victory after demolishing Malta 8-0 last month.

Without Kelly Smith, Eniola Aluko, Katie Chapman, Anita Asante and Rachel Brown before leaving England, since arriving in Turkey Powell has lost the services of Casey Stoney and Jill Scott through illness and Lindsay Johnson due to an injury sustained in training.

Any anxiety that Powell may have about the mass unavailability is assuaged, however, by the fact that Turkey – ranked 49 places below England at 57th in the world and 5-0 losers on home soil to Spain last Saturday – are unlikely to cause great problems.

“It’s very frustrating [having so many players missing],” said Powell, “but it gives other players a chance and with no disrespect to Turkey, this is the ideal game. If it was [the current group leaders] Spain, I’d probably be a bit concerned. Hopefully the players who get an opportunity will thrive on it.

“You have to look to the future – it would be foolish only to look to the short term and not the long term. You have to try and develop players but also give them the experience in real-life situations, games that mean something – and if we play to our capabilities we should win this game.”

The captain and central defender Faye White, the right-back Alex Scott and the midfielder Fara Williams are the only remaining members of the side that lost the Euro 2009 final 6-2 to Germany.

Probable England team (4-2-3-1)

Bardsley; A Scott, White, Bassett, Unitt; Buet, Williams; Clarke, Westwood, S Smith; Handley.

Holland want Van der Sar at World Cup

• Goalkeeper willing to open talks about playing in South Africa
• Manchester United also want 39-year-old to extend club career

Edwin van der Sar has been approached about coming out of international retirement to play for Holland in next year’s World Cup, when he will be only four months short of his 40th birthday.

At the same time the Manchester United goalkeeper is giving serious consideration to extending his club career at Old Trafford, and is open-minded about the possibility of staying on another season if he feels he can maintain his high standards.

Van der Sar has not played for Holland since winning his 130th cap, against Norway in a World Cup qualifier 13 months ago. He was playing on that occasion only after a special request from the manager, Bert van Marwijk, because Maarten Stekelenburg and Henk Timmer were both injured, and the Dutch football federation is now hoping that he can be persuaded to return for a second time if there is the promise of playing in South Africa next June.

He has turned down the first approach but there is a sense that he is open to more talks and willing, at the very least, to discuss the idea. He has told associates that he has said no “so far” and is enjoying the benefits from having a free schedule when Holland now meet, spending the last international break on holiday with his family in Dubai. However, the lure of being involved in the fourth World Cup of his 20-year career is strong and Van Marwijk is keen to bring in the two-time Champions League winner and two-time European goalkeeper of the year.

Replacing him has not been easy for Holland and Sir Alex Ferguson faces the same dilemma at Old Trafford, with neither of the Dutchman’s understudies, Ben Foster and Tomasz Kuszczak, making a substantial case to challenge for his place on a permanent basis.

Ferguson has adopted a policy of resting Van der Sar in United’s more inconsequential games and that means a return for Foster tomorrow, when Besiktas visit Old Trafford in a Champions League tie with little resting on it. However, Ferguson admitted he had “no indication” whether Van der Sar would continue.

“He has not decided,” Ferguson said. “He has come back from his [hand] injury well after missing the start of the season. Usually, around Christmas time he will outline his plans, how long he can go on, and we will wait for that. I don’t know his plans and when you get to that age and have a young family you wonder whether he does have plans to go back to Holland. He is a very intelligent man, he understands his body better than anyone and will make the right judgment.”

Ferguson is an admirer of Igor Akinfeev, the CSKA Moscow goalkeeper, but ideally the United manager wants either Kuszczak, or preferably Foster, to show that Van der Sar has a dependable long-term successor. Foster had an erratic start to the season while Van der Sar was injured but he has remained in Fabio Capello’s England plans and Ferguson is not swayed on his opinion that United have England’s best goalkeeper on their payroll.

“I have said that all along and it does not change; the boy has terrific ability,” he said. “He needs big-game experience because he hasn’t got that, but Edwin is 39 so there will be an opportunity one day. He [Foster] and Tomasz Kuczszak will fight it out, I am sure of that.”

With United qualified for the Champions League’s knockout phase, Ferguson intends to field the sort of team tomorrow that would be used in the earlier rounds of the Carling Cup. That means places for Darron Gibson, Danny Welbeck and, possibly, Gabriel Obertan, while the fit-again Park Ji-sung may also be in line to play.

US star Davies in serious condition after fatal crash

• 22-year-old woman dies in accident
• Striker undergoes several hours of surgery

The United States international striker Charlie Davies is reported to be in a serious condition following a one-vehicle accident in which another person was killed.

Davies, who has 17 caps and four goals for his country, underwent several hours of surgery at Washington Hospital Center Medstar. Hospital spokeswoman So Young Pak said Davies’ condition was serious but offered no further details.

US Soccer Federation spokesman Neil Buethe earlier said that Davies’ injuries were not life-threatening.

“Obviously, as a team we were saddened to learn this news,” coach Bob Bradley said after learning of the accident. “Our thoughts and prayers are with Charlie and his family, as well as the other person in the car and the families of the others involved … We are relying on each other in a moment that has for sure hit us all hard.”

US Park Police Sergeant David Schlosser said the accident took place at about 3:15 am on Tuesday morning, on the George Washington Memorial Parkway in Virginia. Schlosser identified the fatality as Ashley J. Roberta, 22, of Phoenix, Maryland.

Schlosser said there were three people in the car, and that Roberta was not the driver. He did not say who was driving the car, and the cause of the accident remained under investigation.

The team is in Washington for Wednesday’s World Cup qualifier against Costa Rica.

The 23-year-old Davies started in the Americans’ 3-2 victory over Honduras on Saturday that clinched a berth in their sixth straight World Cup. He was a member of last year’s American Olympic team and plays for the French club Sochaux.

Injured Gerrard out of England qualifier against Belarus

• Midfielder unable to complete training and returns to Liverpool
• His club face crucial period in league and in Europe

Steven Gerrard has been ruled out of the World Cup qualifier against Belarus after being unable to finish the training session with England today. He walked off with the physiotherapist, Gary Lewin, midway through the session while the rest of the squad carried on. The midfielder will now sit out the game against Belarus and could also be forced to miss Liverpool’s game at Sunderland at the weekend.

The goalkeeper David James was the only player to miss training completely while Gerrard returned to the dressing room midway through the session. James’s problem is not thought to be serious and the Portsmouth goalkeeper has not been sent back to his club. Gerrard, however, has returned to Liverpool for further treatment. “He didn’t finish training because the pain was the same as yesterday. He’s going back to Liverpool,” the England coach, Fabio Capello, said.

Liverpool will fear that it is a recurrence of the groin problem which saw him have a scan after the defeat in Ukraine. Liverpool play Sunderland on Saturday, Lyon in the Champions League three days later and then Manchester United the following weekend in a crucial period for Rafael Benítez’s side.

The Liverpool manager is also concerned over the fitness of Fernando Torres and Dirk Kuyt as they too have suffered injury scares on international duty. To add to Benítez’s worries, Javier Mascherano, Emiliano Insúa and Lucas are due to return from internationals in South America only on Friday, less than 24 hours before the game at Sunderland.

Torres was substituted 10 minutes into the second half of Spain’s 2-1 win in Armenia on Saturday after apparently suffering an injury to his right foot. Spanish officials say the move was precautionary and that he will not play against Bosnia-Herzegovina tomorrow if he is not “100% fit”. Kuyt, meanwhile, did not reappear for the second half of Holland’s friendly in Australia after an ankle injury had prevented him from training properly.

Meltdown averted as 500,000 tune in

• Companies claim there were ‘no technical issues’ in broadcast
• BBC highlights programme attracts peak of 4.3m viewers

The companies behind the screening of England’s World Cup qualifier in Ukraine as a pay-per-view online broadcast today hailed it as a success after almost half a million people tuned in, despite complaints about the picture quality.

The Swiss agency Kentaro, left holding the rights after Setanta went bust this year, and Perform, the internet broadcaster it employed to show the match after receiving no “satisfactory” offers from TV broadcasters, said almost nine in 10 viewers who responded to a post-match survey found the picture quality “satisfactory or better”.

The experiment had been billed as a glimpse of the future but some viewers calling radio stations today claimed it was more like stepping back in time, complaining there were glitches in the feed and delays in the commentary.

But the doomsday scenario predicted by some observers, who said the internet might grind to a halt, failed to materialise and some pubs and clubs rigged up projectors to show the match despite there being no official provision for viewing in commercial premises. In a statement Kentaro claimed “almost half a million” people had watched online or in 12 Odeon cinemas nationwide. It said there were “no technical issues” and claimed all customer enquiries were responded to within five minutes.

Before the match, Perform had said it would cap the number of streams at one million to preserve the quality of the picture. The actual number of pay-per-view “buys”, from £4.99 to £11.99, can be estimated at 250,000‑300,000, although a proportion of those were through a marketing tie-up with the online bookmaker Bet365, which showed the game free to customers with a funded account.

If Sky had shown the game, it might have expected around two million viewers and had it been broadcast on ITV, the audience would probably have peaked at around seven million. Kentaro refused to release a detailed breakdown, claiming the figures are commercially sensitive, so it is impossible to assess how many viewers arrived via newspaper websites and other media partners signed up to promote the match on a revenue-share basis.

Perform’s chairman Andrew Croker said it was “an extremely successful and ground-breaking project”.

He added: “From a customer-service, production and distribution point of view, we felt it went very smoothly.” According to its own survey, 87% of viewers said the match offered value for money and 89% said they would pay to watch sport on the internet again.

The BBC, which struck an 11th-hour deal for highlights but was not allowed to advertise the fact until after the match as Kentaro tried to maximise subscription revenue, attracted a peak audience of 4.3m. The corporation had bid in excess of £1m for the live rights but Kentaro, which was believed to be seeking around £3m, deemed it too low and opted to pursue an internet-only broadcast instead.

Kentaro’s chief executive Philipp Grothe said the model is likely to be replicated in future. “Not only have we delivered Britain’s largest ever live pay-to-view internet sports audience but commercially the venture has proved itself as a viable model for future games,” he said.The experiment was being closely watched by rights holders globally, keen to see whether it can prove a viable alternative to selling to a TV broadcaster and so help stoke competition in the market.