ARCH RIVALS
EVERTON have spent big but this week announced new five-year deals for homegrown talent Mason Holgate and Dominic Calvert-lewin.
Maybe clubs should look closer to home first for the answers to their recruitment problems. comes to something when visiting an on-site micro-brewery is more of an attraction than watching what’s happening on the pitch.
Mourinho’s arrival has confused everything. His football is like a onetime hot High Street brand that has fallen out of fashion.
Power and strength has been replaced by guile and intricacy. The Portuguese is being asked to re-invent himself, and so far has been incapable.
Perhaps club kingmaker Daniel Levy should have seen the writing on the wall – it was never a good fit. He’s a fan. He should have asked himself how Chelsea’s finest would be received. The answer: ‘Not well’.
The question for Levy is to ask himself honestly if any of the things Spurs have traditionally been associated with – glamour, goals, glitz and gut-wrenching calamity – can, or will, apply under Mourinho. The only constant these days is calamity.
Mourinho is looking increasingly like a man out of his time. And unless the Spurs manager changes his narrative – and quickly – he is surely a man who will run out of time, too.
JOFRA ARCHER and the ECB are on a collision course over the bowler’s fitness.
The ECB don’t want him to aggravate a stress fracture in his elbow by playing in the IPL. His latest MRI scan suggests his condition is improving, and he should begin his rehab with Sussex before leading the attack against the Windies in June.
Trouble is, he could lose an £800,000 contract with the IPL if he doesn’t make it to India at the end of April.
Take a wild guess which way this one will go...
Agreed a contract extension with Crystal Palace. Another year the pressure is taken off the boardroom at Selhurst Park.
WHO’S NOT
No reserve day for England’s women at the T20 World Cup, denying them a shot at glory. Amateur.
Was earning £150,000-a-week at Liverpool. And he’s orchestrating betting on football matches? Why?
President Aleksander Ceferin calling for the League Cup to be axed. In the same week that he announces a summer competition for the continent’s top clubs. Funny that.
LEE GRANT signed a new deal this week to remain as a goalkeeper on Manchester United’s books.
Given he’s never played since joining in
July ‘18, the money he’s on, and will pick up until past his 38th birthday, makes him the bestpaid gym member on earth.
No wonder Grant
(right) had a grin a mile wide when it came out.
Money, meet old rope. Incredible. Yet another bit of poor decision-making.