Good Morning. It's Thursday 18th February, and here are the latest headlines from Elland Road Should taking the knee be scrapped Following the brutal manslaughter of George Floyd on the 31st May of last year, nations came together to show support, and condemn the mistreatment of fellow human beings based on the colour of their skin! Nine months on, and the English football authorities still insist on all 92 members taking the knee before every game. What would happen to an individual player who didn't want to ? Perhaps a player, or players would prefer a silent prayer, so silent moment to reflect rather than take a position associated with submission? Watching the International Rugby at the weekend, there were entire nations who did not take the knee, even half the England team stayed on their feet! Is it time to do away with the taking of the knee? Do individuals feel bullied what would happen to team, if they took a stand? Middlesbrough decided to stop taking the knee this season with manager Neil Warnock having his say about the changes. ‘I think that [standing behind an anti-racism banner rather than taking the knee] made the point more than the knee,’ said Boro boss Neil Warnock. ‘We are all of the same opinion about what we are trying to achieve. It’s just that our lads don’t think the knee is relevant, they don’t agree with the political side of that, so Britt [Assombalonga, Boro captain] said.’ QPR's Director of football Les Ferdinand was recently quoted as saying: “The taking of the knee has reached a point of ‘good PR’ but little more than that. The message has been lost.” Footballer Wilfried Zaha described kneeling before games as “degrading”. Speaking to the On The Judy podcast, Zaha said: “The whole kneeling down - why must I kneel down for you to show that we matter? Why must I even wear Black Lives Matter on the back of my top to show you that we matter? This is all degrading stuff.” This week Brentford have become the latest club to stop taking the knee, as 'the squad believe the demonstration is no longer having an impact', and they believe we can use our time and energies to promote racial equality in other ways. please log in to view this image Duo return to training Striker Sam Greenwood and winger Ian Povada have both returned to training following their respective injuries. They follow Rodrigo who posted a picture of himself going through the paces at Thorp Arch on Instagram earlier in the week. There is no news yet on the fitness of Kelvin Phillips, just speculation who should replace the England International if he is still sidelined. Alfie McCalmont, Jack Jenkins and Mateusz Klich have all been mentioned this morning! Good thinking or square pegs in round holes again? Out of the five games Phillips has missed, Leeds have only won once! please log in to view this image Highly rated defender quits Anfield for ER Liverpool teenage sensation Cuba Cline has quit Anfield, and will be joining up with Scott Gardner and the Leeds academy. The 16yo defender has been one of the Reds brightest prospects ever since he joined the Merseyside club at the age of 10, and has represented England at U15 level. Cline took to Instagram to inform both Liverpool and Leeds United supporters that he has decided to leave the Merseyside club, where he has spent the last six years, to join the Leeds academy. . The Under-18's are currently rooted to the bottom of the division, on five points from 12 games. please log in to view this image
Morning all Taking the knee is just taking the pee and if fans were back in grounds they would soon stop it as fans would quite rightly boo every time. It should be an individual thing if a player wants to do it. Brentford have stopped, most Rugby nations have stoped or never started. F1 only a handful of drivers donit.its a joke and makes me laugh at the useless people who run our sports. Carry on with a failing VAR system when it needs scrapping as it gets laughed at. These virtue signalling nobodies are just toxic
On a Phillips stand in I think we have only one route open to us and thats to select an U23 to be coached and brought up to Phillips standard, but to immediately buy a top midfielder who can play a role at DM and AM. It would need to be a Rodrigo De Paul or Pulgar type player. Both these players are top high end players as DM or AM and Bielsa demands players who can play in different positions. Phillips to start and new player to start as AM and drop back to DM when Phillips suspended or injured. The U23 to be given the coaching Phillips got when Bielsa arrived as he turned a box to bix AM into an International DM. That will then give us plenty of cover and we can leave Struijk as a back up CB
Morning all, If Phillips is out then we just put one player in that position without moving 3-4 other players to accommodate this. Klich, if fit or Shack for me. Yes, the taking the knee should stop as its time has run. It is time to find a new message to support anti racism. More importantly though more needs to be done to educate people who think racism is acceptable. Social media platforms also need to step up and stop offering anonymity to the keyboard racists. I would imagine there are a large number of the people abusing the likes of Martial, Zaha and the like would be asking for autographs in real life but everyone is brave behind a keyboard.
A piece in the Athletic may be worth a read about Gelhardt and Greenwood. I got the jist but its behind a paywall so just read the first couple of paragraphs. When Greenwood was invited to Leeds for a chat he was offered a hotel room so that he would be on the doorstep next morning for the meeting, but he turned it down and said he was fixed up. 2 weeks earlier Joe Gelhardt had signed from Wigan and now had a place of his own so rang Greenwood and offered to put him up for the night. They were both England team mates and pretty close so spent the night talking football how their careers crossed all the time. Apparently they are inseparable and its said if you see one the other will be somewhere close. Both now competing to play first team and score the first goal
The whole blm thing has now IMO actually become a racist anti white campaign. Like I've said before blacks are not the only people who are and have been racially abused. The authorities should clamp down on players doing a political salute, it's only inflaming the situation. I think that in today's Britain it is also a very equal place to live in, bar the elite. It may be more of a problem in America, but if those marching under the blm badges think it's bad in America, they should go to places around the world where it's far worse and protest/riot there. The last thing I want to say is stop making this floyd fella a martyr, yes he shouldn't have died the way he did, but he was a low life, robbing, gun using, druggie scumbag and certainly no hero.
Why on earth did Bielsa not buy a utility playing in the January transfer window. Someone who is comfortable playing anywhere in defence, say a 5m with some experience...
When the finishing touches were made to Sam Greenwood’s contract, Leeds United did what they do for every new signing and booked him in at a hotel. He was not so far from his home in Sunderland but logistically, it was easier to stay nearby. Greenwood thanked them for the offer of accommodation but said he was already fixed up. Joe Gelhardt had signed for Leeds from Wigan Athletic two weeks earlier and found himself a house. “You can sleep at mine,” Gelhardt told Greenwood, so Greenwood did. The two of them spent the first evening chatting about how their paths were crossing again. They are not quite inseparable but they say at Thorp Arch that if Greenwood is around, Gelhardt is never a million miles away. They knew little of each other until they met playing for England Under-17s and became good friends almost overnight. They roomed together on international duty and developed a healthy rivalry, desperately hoping to cling onto the No 9 shirt but supportive whenever they lost out. “It gets to us but we try not to show it,” Greenwood joked in a recent interview. They got on too well to bicker. It was useful practice for competing for places at Leeds, where Greenwood and Gelhardt are both knocking on the door. The completion of their transfers in quick succession in August was not entirely coincidental. They were pleased to have arrived at the same club and neither player realised that the other was due to sign last summer, but they were to sort of academy footballers whom Leeds had started to target: youth internationals with levels of ability that were worth investing in at the price Leeds were being asked to pay. The club pinched Gelhardt from Wigan for an initial fee of around £700,000. Greenwood cost £1.5 million from Arsenal. For a Premier League side, these were nominal fees. Eleven days ago, Gelhardt scored twice in a development squad victory over Middlesbrough. They were his sixth and seventh goals of the season for the under-23s and between them, he and Greenwood have claimed a combined tally of 14, finding their feet instantly. Leeds supplement their academy line-up with first-team players regularly and they are running away with the Premier League 2 Division Two title, but no end of the impetus is coming from an attacking pair whose tight connection off the pitch is blossoming on it. The problem with Gelhardt at Wigan was that he never caused a problem. He excelled at every age level and, in the words of Wigan’s former coach Nick Chadwick, “he never failed to affect a game”. There were goals, there were assists and there was nothing in the way of a noticeable dip in his form. Wigan’s staff wondered how best to teach Gelhardt about managing adversity because adversity did not seem to find him. The teenager was a plucky Liverpudlian with a thick-set build and a style of play which was dynamic but relaxed. Chadwick, a one-time Everton striker who works now as assistant manager at Fylde, tried hard not to compare Gelhardt to Wayne Rooney — “it’s too much of a burden to put that on him” — but certain things about them were similar; their body shape not least. “I was at Everton when Wayne was coming through as a scholar and whatever else you said about Wayne’s talent or ability, the first thing you noticed with him was how much he loved playing,” Chadwick tells The Athletic. “Wayne was the sort of lad who would go home and play in the street. He was a street footballer at heart and I thought the same about Joe. The streets of Liverpool were like Joe’s practice ground. That’s where he honed his skills. please log in to view this image Gelhardt, right, made 21 first-team appearances for Wigan before joining Leeds (Photo: Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images) “Managing him was a dream, to the point where you felt like you had to challenge him to learn about adversity. The coaches at Wigan, we’d chat about him and say that surely it can’t be plain sailing like this forever? Surely he’d hit a difficult patch which he needed to come through? If that happened, you wanted him to be prepared but what could you do? Every time he played, he was affecting things positively. The flair he had didn’t mean he did things for show. He just had it.” Chadwick was a youth-team coach at Blackburn Rovers before Wigan employed him in 2016 and he became aware of Gelhardt before leaving Ewood Park. Word got around academies about the best prospects in the game and Gelhardt was rated as one of them. The professional development programme (PDP) staff at Wigan monitored him closely as he climbed up through the squads, aware that he was a pick of the bunch. When Leeds signed Gelhardt last year, even they accepted that the forward was coming much cheaper than he should have done at £700,000. But Wigan were in administration and ripe for raiding. Leicester City had the same idea and made enquiries of their own but according to sources close to Gelhardt, he was “blown away” by the way in which Leeds’ director of football Victor Orta presented the offer from Elland Road to him. As Leeds like to do with senior recruits, they put together video packages comparing and contrasting his performances for Wigan with the way Leeds set up under Marcelo Bielsa. By then, the 18-year-old had made 18 appearances in the Championship, 16 as a substitute. Bielsa is understood to have taken part in one of the Zoom calls to Gelhardt’s agency and Gelhardt has lost significant amounts of weight since moving to Yorkshire, working towards a place in Bielsa’s match-day squad for the first time against Crystal Palace last week. His range of finishing and the incisive quality of his link-up play has given Leeds’ academy alternative ways of using him. Gelhardt can play up front but his devilment is more keenly felt in behind the No 9. “Everyone has to be coached but I felt with Joe that you didn’t want to take the edge off him,” Chadwick says. “If you over-coach someone like him or coach him too strictly, there’s the risk that he loses the freedom in his football or loses a bit of that natural creativity. It all comes pretty easily to him. “The first time I saw him walk out with the Wigan first team was in a pre-season friendly with Tranmere (in 2018). He was only 16 but you could see in his body language that little bit of arrogance you need to be a top player. He was in the right place between overconfidence and believing he deserved to be there — because he definitely did deserve to be there.” “The thing about Sam,” says Paul Bryson, “is that you couldn’t get rid of him.” Greenwood’s old academy coach at Sunderland is complimenting him, not criticising him. The striker was a permanent fixture at Sunderland’s training ground, as if there was nowhere else for him to be. It got to the stage where Bryson worried about Greenwood getting too little rest or struggling to switch off. “If you got there an hour before training, he’d be there before you,” Bryson says. “It was like that for every session. He wasn’t late and he wasn’t nearly-late. He’d arrive first or thereabouts and do bits of practice. He’d show up on his days off and say to me, ‘Bryce, give us a bag of balls’. Then he’d take himself off and spend ages doing free kicks and whatever else he wanted to work on. “It’s not like other lads didn’t work hard because they did but he was unusual. Every now and again, I’d say, ‘Take yourself off, man! Go away and rest up’. He’d just laugh. He loved it. It’s like permanent desire.” Bryson, who coaches for the i2i Academy in York, was a coach at Sunderland for 19 years, five of them full time. Liverpool captain Jordan Henderson was one of the notable names he dealt with but when it came to Greenwood, Bryson says the forward was “as technically gifted as I ever saw”. Greenwood had a reputation for scoring spectacular goals and could bury them with both feet. “He’s ambidextrous,” says Greenwood’s father, Steven. “He’s predominantly right-footed but if you ask him to kick with his left or throw with his left, it’s not a problem.” Sunderland liked to use Greenwood in a position off the main striker, between the lines (Leeds are more inclined to field him as a No 9). “He had that much awareness and you wanted him in a position where he could control things,” Bryson says. “He found it simple with both feet and his set plays were unbelievable. He worked on them all the time and at that age level, they were a big weapon. The corners and the free kicks were a nightmare for the opposition and not many academy kids can hit them like he did.” Greenwood had a strong attachment to Sunderland and he and Steven were long-standing season ticket holders at the Stadium of Light. Sunderland would allocate Greenwood free seats for certain games but he preferred to go with his dad, as they had done for years. But in 2018, Arsenal made him the offer of a scholarship and Greenwood took it. Rumours of offers from elsewhere had been growing for a while. Sunderland earned a fee in compensation but were losing one of their best youngsters. “I was sorry to see him go but he was leaving for a top-drawer club,” Bryson says. “You can’t hold it against him and I just wished him all the best. He’d still be around from time to time, though. When he had days off at Arsenal, he’d come back and watch Sunderland’s under-23s.” please log in to view this image Greenwood and Gelhardt celebrate the former’s goal for England at the 2019 European Under-17 Championships in Dublin (Photo: Sam Barnes/Sportsfile via Getty Images) Steven, who owns a taxi firm, did not miss any of Greenwood’s academy games at Arsenal. He would drive down the night before and stay in a hotel near Arsenal’s training complex at London Colney. Greenwood did well down south and lived with other Arsenal trainees like Jordan McEneff, Harry Clarke and Ryan Alebiosu, but the lights of London were not for him. “He wasn’t one for the city,” Steven says. “In all his time there, I think he went into the centre of London once. It just wasn’t his scene. He’s got northern roots and the chaos of the capital wasn’t what he was used to. But he liked Arsenal. The coaches there seemed to say good things about him.” The dilemma for Greenwood came down to the width of the pathway at Arsenal. He was behind Eddie Nketiah, as one example, in the pecking order, and Nketiah was struggling to make a concerted breakthrough. Greenwood, 19, had the offer of a new contract on the table but Leeds were pushing to sign him and he saw Elland Road as a better bet. It helped that Gelhardt was already there: a friendly face in the under-23s squad. “The pair of them were over the moon to be at the same club,” Steven says. “Leeds were really good and got Sam a hotel when he first signed. That was great. But instead, he went and stopped with Joe in his house. They get on great, those two.” Gelhardt — or “Joffy”, as he was nicknamed by his family, a reference to the 1980s film Coming to America — broke into England’s Under-16s squad in 2018, the year that Elland Road hosted the country’s pre-World Cup friendly at home to Costa Rica. He was a ball boy for that game and there is a photo of him on Twitter outside the East Stand with his England tracksuit on, posted by his mother, Lynne. When he and Greenwood first met, they hit it off immediately. Greenwood spoke about their relationship during an interview with the Deluded Gooner YouTube channel last May, saying: “Me and him are so close. When he’s starting or I’m starting, it gets to both of us but we share the same room, so we try not to show it to each other. “It’s the same with the No 9 shirt when they’re reading the numbers out. It’s been me, it’s been him, and you’re just hoping it’s you. But obviously, we’re happy for each other at the same time.” There has been some of that jostling for position at Leeds already. In the first week of January, Greenwood made his debut as a substitute in an FA Cup defeat at Crawley Town. It was a dismal day and a dismal result but it was Bielsa’s way of saying to Greenwood that he was near the front of the queue of prominent young pros. Gelhardt, who is yet to play for Bielsa’s senior side, beat Greenwood to place in a Premier League match-day squad last week, filling in for the injured Pablo Hernandez against Palace. “He’s been one of the better players in the under-23s,” Bielsa said. Chadwick sent a text message to Gelhardt after his appearance on the bench, a little word of congratulation. “He’s had to be a little more patient at Leeds,” Chadwick says, “so I suppose you could say that for the first time, it isn’t coming quite as easily as it did at Wigan. But he won’t have a problem with that. Being on the bench is a stepping stone for him and it won’t be his last.” As partnerships go, it is one to watch.
I think once Antifa got on the scene, spreading their almost terrorist tendencies, the good work of BLM had been largely erased. To go and deface and destroy statues of our history is unacceptable. The home office certainly had the right idea about Shamima Begum, who joined ISIS - ban her from this Country
Thanks for the article. I'd much prefer us to develop our own kids than go out and spend tens of millions on promises that sometimes don't work or, very often with us, just fill up our sick beds. Let's hope these two lads get in to the team soon and develop the sort of symbiotic relationship that wins stuff.
No he certainly wasn't,and plenty of people don't deserve to die the way they do....like Kriss Donald a 15 year old schoolboy murdered in Glasgow,look him up if you don't already know of him then tell me why nobody protested/rioted over that...go **** yourselves with the kneeling
What happened to Kriss Donald, an innocent schoolboy is absolutely shocking if he had been of a different hue there would been riots up and down the UK and his mother would now be in the house of Lords, telling us how racist whitey and covid is
There was also the 5 yr old shot in a hate shooting in America, as far as I know there weren't any riots, looting of black businesses and soon forgotten by main stream media. Kriss Donald (2 July 1988 – 15 March 2004) was a 15-year-old white Scottish boy who was kidnapped and murdered in Glasgow in 2004 by a gang of men of Pakistani origin, some of whom fled to Pakistan after the crime.[1][2][3][4] Daanish Zahid, Imran Shahid, Zeeshan Shahid and Mohammed Faisal Mustaq were later found guilty of racially motivated murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.[2][3] The case, which featured the first-ever conviction for racially motivated murder in Scotland, is cited in two newspaper articles as an example of the lack of attention the media and society give to white sufferers of racist attacks compared to that given to ethnic minorities.[5][6] It is also suggested the crime demonstrates how society has been forced to redefine racism so as to no longer include white victims.
5yo Cannon Hinnant, shot in the head at point blank range in front of his brother and sister No protests no mass media coverage. I wonder why,
100% correct....it is STILL predominantly a white country but the indigenous people are being alienated...r.i.p. kriss an innocent schoolboy,not a career criminal
Career criminal drug user aggravated robber, robbing a pregnant women at gunpoint in her own home, arrested for passing counterfeit money whilst high on drugs, resists arrest and dies in the process and the whole world goes apeshit. **** BLM **** bending the knee and any ****er who does it.
Fair play to Wilfred Zaha, why should he wear something on his shirt or kneel to say his life matters, all lives matter, it goes without saying Well done sir
Well it looks good at last on the injury front with Llorente and Klich both fully fit and Rodrigo and Poveda almost there and Koch should be back in training in a couple of weeks. Lets hope Bielsa has the right players in the right holes this weekend
