It's reported in the gossip column today that Chelsea have enquired about Bale,and a defender,but Real are unwilling to sell,wonder if they will offer Hazard as part of a deal
Is Hazard more consistent than Bale though? That seems to be Bale's (only and slight) weakness, he can disappear from matches and games for long spells. While Bale would be a coup it just looks like posturing from Chelsea, "Look! We spend big cahoonies! Buy big name player! From Madrid. We special!"
Bournemouth now on the verge of swapping places with Howe's old club after today's results. To me to you for the seemingly unwanted 5th place in the PL.
I love the way we give our former players a good welcome back when they return to play at the Lane. Gomes will undoubtedly get a great one.
Villa equalize...and come close to getting the winner. Linesman wrongly calls Bentecke offsides. Greilish (sp) has impressed me more in one game than Barkley has in his career. And City get the winner. It's been an entertaining game. Guzan had an absolutely epic giveaway for the first, knocking the ball into his own foot while trying to play a too-ambitious pass. Hart gave away two by going for the ball and missing it--then had the nerve to claim he was fouled for the second. In fact his own man bumped him, then he crawled up the back of a Villa player and fell over. That was a big missed offsides call. It looked to be a pen or a goal, or both.
Marx Brothers 3 Keystone Cops 2. It was exciting, but poor. City didn't care and Villa lack quality apart from Benteke. Definitely in a relegation dogfight despite the distraction of the Cup final.
Leicester's four-game winning streak that's moved them out of the relegation zone is quite strange - because they hadn't won in eight games, played us...and didn't win in nine games. That's not how these things usually work!
Everton have played 4, won 3 and drawn 1 since their exit from the Europa League. Massive improvement in form. No idea why the competition seems to hamper sides as much as it does, but it's hard to see past the apparent influence.
Definitely. It's very genuine too, I think the crowd as a whole always enjoys having a player come back to play against us. It helps that not too many leave to rivals, I guess. One instance that I'll never understand was when we played Peterborough and a young Rose got booed. George Boyd was quite good that day, as I recall.
One suggestion is the geography of it. For example, here's the distance between the cities of each CL quarter finalist PSG to Barcelona: 1034km Atletico and Factitious: 18km Porto to Munich: 2246km Juventus to Monaco: 266km As for the Europa quarter finalists... Seville to St Petersburg: 4465km Bruges to Dnipropetrovsk: 2592km Kyiv to Florence: 2089km Wolfsburg to Naples: 1713km If the distance wasn't enough, the infrastructure is: you can fly to Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Munich or Turin on BA, Air France or Lufthansa (while Porto takes BA and Lufthansa) - but for the Europa teams, that can only be said for Florence, Naples and Seville, which means that travel means a long flight followed by a long coach trip.
I think the 3/4 day gap thing is a factor too, as well as time differences, quality of pitches (injuries?) and a few other issues, too. The finances of it limit the squad depth that most clubs can add and some players seem to think it's beneath them. If we do qualify next season, then we need to do a better job of balancing it out. Pochettino's had his first taste and he didn't seem to enjoy it.
We sent out some weakened teams and still seemed to suffer from the EL in the league even when we didn't travel away. I wonder how well the teams from other competitive leagues who are in the EL from the start and who, like us, still fancy their chances at the top, fare in their domestic competitions?
I don't think any of our managers have enjoyed the Europa League much: Harry was trying to get us out of the tournament as quickly as possible, while AVB and Poch used it mainly to bed in new players without risking league performance.
