Rice off the menu for Big Six
ENGLAND midfielder Declan Rice has accepted he will be staying at West Ham this season after their £90 million transfer valuation blocked a move to a Champions League club.
Rice, still only 22, believes an extra 12 months under David Moyes at the London Stadium will not be detrimental to his career given he will gain his first experience of European club football.
He will also continue to skipper the team whenever club captain Mark Noble is not involved.
Rice was a long-term target for Chelsea when Frank Lampard was manager but the Blues, Manchester United and Manchester City have prioritised other positions this summer and were unable to meet West Ham’s demands given the financial impact of the pandemic. United have spent more than £100m on Jadon Sancho and Raphael Varane, City have broken t he British transfer record on Jack Grealish and may do so again with Harry Kane while Champions League winners Chelsea needed a centre forward and are in advanced talks with Romelu Lukaku.
Those moves have thwarted Rice’s chances to move to a Big Six team in this window but he is set to spark a midfield transfer scramble in 12 months’ time.
At that point, City could lose Fernandinho and United will look to strengthen with Nemanja Matic already in his 30s. N’Golo Kante, 30, will also be entering the last 12 months of his contract at Chelsea in the summer of 2022.
Rice has never hidden his ambitions, saying: ‘When you start out in football you always want to play at the top. You want to play in the Champions League.
‘If you were in football and you didn’t want to do that, there would be no point playing.’
However, he’s decided an extra season working in east London and playing every week there will help continue to develop his game.
He is also an integral part of Gareth Southgate’s England team that reached the final of Euro 2020 and will now seek to qualify for the next World Cup in Qatar.
SEAN DYCHE will not gamble with Burnley’s survival style despite the club’s rebrand off the pitch under American owner Alan Pace.
Dyche, 50, who is in talks about extending his contract at Turf Moor, has kept the Lancashire club in the top flight for five years on a limited budget.
Though he expects the purse strings to be slightly loosened with the new regime, he considers it folly to change the approach that has made the team successful.
‘It’s a strange thing, when I grew up in football and later thought about coaching, pragmatism in management was looked at as a positive,’ said Dyche.
‘I always look at the reality of what you’ve got, stimulate the players and make them play well, and you stay in the Premier League season after season. That bit has always appealed to me. If I had different players, of course you would look at their skillsets but you’d still have to win. In the modern game, there is a peculiar view that playing the right way i s more i mportant than winning. Trust me, it’s not when you go out the Premier League.
‘ My players like the Premier League and they like to be in it.
‘I just design a way me and my staff t hink will maximise our chances to make that happen.
‘There are days when you catch us right, like the 4-0 win against Wolves last season, when nobody could say it was boring.’
Burnley’s only summer signing so far has been £12m Stoke defender Nathan Collins, seen as a long-term replacement for James Tarkowski who has a year left on his deal.