Can Arsenal win the title?

Can Arsenal win the title?

No, they have no chance.

Arsenal always bottle it, and there's no reason to think otherwise now. Their recent performance against Southampton was disgraceful, they choked plain and simple. Nacho Monreal (his name sounds like Set Menu No. 2 at my local Mexican restaurant) was particularly poor and is clearly a weak link in the side. All of Arsenal's usual failings were on display, they looked small, slow and physically weak compared to Southampton's bigger, seemingly more athletic players. They missed chances (Giroud and Walcott are particularly bad at that) and they gave the ball away too often.

Another reason why they can't win the title is injuries. Arsenal's injury record has been so bad for so long now that there must be something Wenger is doing wrong, either with the training or match preparation. No team can be that unlucky. Tomas Rosicky has spent more time on the injury list than Gary Glitter has spent on the sex offender's list; Jack Wilshire isn't much better either. But the big ones are Sanchez, Cazorla and Coquilin; with them still injured for much longer Arsenal have no hope.

Yes, they can do

There is plenty of counter-evidence, however, that Arsenal can win the title. For starters they have Mezut Ozil. He may have the looks of someone who's just been punched repeatedly in the face by Brock Lesnar, but boy what a player. His recent performance against Bournemouth was absolutely exceptional and with 16 league assists already this season he is more than on course to be Thierry Henry's all-time Premier League record of 20. Ozil is a joy to watch and has a great chance of winning Player of the Year, especially if Arsenal do go on to win the Premier League title. 

The other reason that Arsenal have a great chance is that their rivals don't look up to much, quite frankly. Chelsea and Manchester United's problems are well documented and Manchester City have an oddly Arsenal-like injury list. City are also far too dependent on Kompany in defence and Aguero to score the goals, Arsenal however have far greater strength-in-depth and this may well count in their favour in the long run.

Can Arsenal do it? I think there are good arguments on both sides. It will be interesting to find out.

On Klopp

We keep getting told by the London media that Jurgen Klopp is a breath of fresh air at Liverpool, that he is certain to be a vast improvement on Brendan Rogers, that has already improved Liverpool immensely and that Liverpool are certain to be challenging for honours very soon. A few weeks ago we were even being breathlessly told that Liverpool could challenge for the league title this season.

But is that all really true? One point in the last three games has certainly stalled Liverpool's progress and they are now ninth - they were tenth when Rogers was sacked. Moreover, Liverpool finished 6th and reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup last season. In order to be a 'vast improvement' on Rodgers, Klopp will have to achieve top four and win a trophy this season. It won't be easy.

Klopp had an excellent record at Dortmund (apart from a Mourinho-style meltdown in his last season which saw Dortmund in the relegation zone in the middle of the season). But the Premier League is far more competitive than the Bundesliga and Rodgers did a much better job than he gets credit for - I'm still not yet convinced that he is all he is hyped up to be. 

Lastly, I have composed some poems.

So Leicester City are at the top

For their next match they're going to the Kop

Will Liverpool put their run to a stop?

Or will Leicester make a fool out of Klopp?

On Monday the Arse beat City

For Pellegrini oh what a pity

Mezut Ozil played well again

Mezut Ozil, ten out of ten

There was once a coach called Ho-Zay

Whose team won the title last May

Now they're awful, the roster

From Cesc Fabregas to Costa 

And Ho-Zay's out on his arse, hooray!

Mourinho - the new dead man walking

Mourinho: a dead-man-walking

Chelsea were very poor against Leicester on Monday night. Mourinho obviously got his tactics totally wrong and there was a lack of desire to press properly in defence. It was all very odd because these are things Mourinho usually does so well.

Firstly the tactics, Diego Costa had a rotten game because Leicester (like every other team in the league) have learned to wind him up and get him frustrated. It's easy to do because he seemingly has the mental fortitude and patience of a ten-year-old. He couldn't hold the ball up and couldn't do anything really, so he needed help. But Mourinho didn't bring on Remy as a second striker until the 66th minute, he should have made the change much, much earlier. Chelsea also consistently failed to get the ball out wide and put crosses into the box for Mr. Sulky. When they did start making overlaps out wide and putting crosses in in the last twenty minutes they looked much more dangerous. But why didn't they do that before?

Even more worryingly for Chelsea is they often didn't put pressure on the ball properly letting Leicester play in front of them instead. The goals they conceded both came from the kind of shoddy, embarrassing defending you would expect from a bottom five team. Ivanovic in particular was awful, he kept dropping off Albrighton coming towards him and then getting caught out by the cross away and over his head. But it's not a big surprise because he's been awful all season. So why hasn't Mourinho just dropped him?

Ivanovic was as embarrassing as a premature ejaculation, but he wasn't the only culprit by far. My view is that some Chelsea players weren't playing for Mourinho. Too many of them were too slow to press the ball allowing Leicester players to pick out a pass, too many dropped off runners driving forward into the box. There's no other explanation for it.

Chelsea were absolutely abysmal, yet the world's most arrogant manager seemed clueless in what to do about it. That doesn't bode well for the future.

Ranieri is achieving redemption; if he can get Leicester City into the top four he will be the special one, but Mourinho is looking increasingly like a dead man walking. 

Villa

Aston Villa look very likely to go down this season. With only six points from fifteen games they are already seven points from safety, not good. Indeed, it could well end up being humiliating as Villa actually have fewer points than Derby County did at the same stage in 05/06 when they ended up with the lowest points total in Premier League history.

It would be fair to say that their fans are long-suffering and have had to put up with a relative lack of success for far too long. Villa are a big club with one of the largest catchment areas in Europe (the West Midland metropolitan area has 3.7 million people). They have seven league championships and a European Cup, all won in the pre- Premier League era, that was equal with Manchester United when the Premier League first started. So, what's gone wrong?

The club has been badly run for an awful long time. Both the previous owner, Doug Ellis and the current one, Randy Lerner, have failed to invest properly in the club. And managerial appointments have mostly been very poor, with the honorable exception of Martin O'Neill. O'Neill himself was very unlucky, Villa always seemed to come unstuck in the Spring while going for the Champions League places, and let's not forget the 2010 League Cup final against Manchester United and Phil Dowd's terrible decision not to send off Vidic for a clear professional foul within the first five minutes of the match. United eventually won 2-1 and O'Neill, such a talented manager, later resigned citing a lack of backing from Lerner in the transfer market. 

Fast forward to 2015 and Villa sold their two best players over the summer without being able to properly replace them. Again, a familiar pattern of bad luck and bad leadership emerges; They were incredibly unlucky to lose their two players in the same transfer window, any club would be severely knocked back by that, but they should never have been relying so heavily on them to begin with.

Villa fans deserve much better than what they've had to put up with recently. But maybe if relegation results in a change of owner it might not be such a bad thing?

Jose Mourinho and the sycophants.

Jose Mourinho is the person to blame for Chelsea's problems this season, it's clear. He has obviously lost some of the players - I suspect, at least in part, because of the Eva Carneiro incident. He has also spectacularly failed to improve the squad from last season - Pedro and Falcao have been totally useless signings. Lastly, he has been getting his tactics badly wrong as Frank Lampard and Jamie Carragher explain here http://youtu.be/_iBAAww3KwI

What's more he has, quite frankly been behaving like a cunt, complaining about referees far too often and always trying to pass the blame on to someone else for his own failures. He deserves to get sacked.

Like many people I am thoroughly enjoying watching Chelsea and Mourinho twisting in the wind this season. But what I find most interesting is the slavish way in which the mainstream media and Chelsea fans are making excuses for him. We keep getting told that it's the players fault, and that most of them have lost form at the same time. We have also been told that Mourinho needs time to turn it around. 

Regarding Chelsea fans, I can understand why they love Mourinho, but fans CAN get things wrong sometimes. I'm sure most Liverpool fans would recognize that turning on Benitez in 2007 was a huge mistake. Similarly, West Ham fans would admit that Alan Pardew was very harshly treated. And some Manchester United fans would be embarrassed now to admit that they wanted Ferguson gone when Manchester United failed to qualify for the Champions League knock-out stages back in 2005. My point is that I think Chelsea fans are badly misguided in being so loyal and sycophantic to Mourinho now.

But the behavior of some of the mainstream media has been far more disingenuous (or to put it another way, has been a complete and utter fucking disgrace). Why do the worship at the feet of this man? Why do some of them refuse to criticize him while going way overboard in their criticism of other managers? The only possible reason I can think of is that a lot of journalists believe in the narrative that Mourinho is some sort of 'evil genius' who is superior to other managers and can win matches almost through sheer force of personality. Chelsea's results this season clearly go against that and many pundits just don't know how to take it. It's pathetic!

While Chelsea are 16th in the league Liverpool were 8th when Rodgers got sacked by Liverpool. And many pundits think Monk at Swansea should be sacked despite them being two places above Chelsea in the table. If all managers were treated equally then Mourinho would have been canned a long time ago.

The most over-rated player in Premier League history

Stevie G audio blog

Still the best league in the world

Despite the poor record of English teams in Europe this year I still do think the Premier League is the best league in the world (although, how would I know? I don't watch any others).

Chelsea and Arsenal played poorly in the home leg of their respective round of 16 ties and lost for that reason; it's not that they weren't good enough to win, it's that they didn't play as well as they can do. Obviously Manchester City were beaten by a superior team, but although both Barcelona and Real are currently far better than any English team at the moment, the Premier League is still far more competitive and has more strength in depth than La Liga. 

I also think that recent poor results in Europe are just a blip. Chelsea won the Europa League as recently as 2013, remember?! And Manchester United were extremely unlucky to get knocked out by Real Madrid in the quarter-finals of the Champions League that year.  Chelsea were also unlucky to come up against an exceptional Atletico side in 2014.

It hasn't helped that English clubs don't alway seem to take the Europa League too seriously. I'd really like Everton to go all the way this year and show the likes of Spurs and Villa how it's done

And I'm sure that English clubs will do extremely well in Europe next season.

Fergie was bigger than Manchester United itself

Fergie was a genius who contributed greatly to making the Premier League the success it is today. He nurtured Cristiano Ronaldo (the greatest ever player to have played in England, in my view) and helped make him the force of nature he is today. Fergie created an exciting and very attractive brand of football which people wanted to watch. Fergie is bigger than Manchester United itself in that any club he had managed would have enjoyed the phenomenal success that Manchester United had. If he had joined Ipswich or West Brom they would have won lots of trophies and now be a gigantic and hugely successful club. United in some ways have been nothing more than a shell or a vehicle for Fergie to work his magic with.

United fans have deluded themselves into thinking they have a divine right to win things, that delusion is now being exposed as United struggle (much to many people's delight). But Fergie was literally a talisman who turned one of the best clubs in England into the best in the world. Before the Premier League (and Fergie's unprecedented success) started Manchester United were a big club, but not that big.

Here is a list of the biggest clubs in England from 1992.

Liverpool: 18 League titles, 4 European Cups

Arsenal: 10 League Titles

Everton: 9 League Titles

Aston Villa: 7 League Titles, 1 European Cup

Manchester United: 7 League Titles, 1 European Cup

Sunderland: 6 League Titles

Here is the present day list with Fergie included.

Liverpool: 18 League Titles, 5 European Cups

Fergie: 13 League Titles, 2 European Cups

Arsenal: 13 League Titles

Aston Villa: 7 League Titles, 1 European Cup

Manchester United without Fergie: 7 League Titles, 1 European Cup

Sunderland: 6 League Titles

So, in 21 years he won more League titles than any club in history but Liverpool and Arsenal, and more European Cups/ Champions Leagues than any English club bar Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.

I rest my case!

Red is the new Black

Chelsea are the new Manchester United

Manchester United under Ferguson were unpopular because they were winners, but they did also have some scumbags in the team over the years to make them extra dislikable (I'm thinking in particular of Cantona, Keane, Giggs and Rooney, but I could go on). The manager may have calmed down in the later years of his reign, but he was still a genius at influencing officials, mind games and generally rubbing people up the wrong way. Lastly, Manchester United fans had an infuriating sense of entitlement and of superiority over fans of other teams.

But now the magic talisman has retired, United have been replaced by Chelsea as the club everybody else loves to hate. The manager and John Terry are clearly the two major problems but Diego Costa is also a major controversy waiting to happen. And what can you say about the fans? The recent incident on the Paris subway made them seem like over-privileged, upper-class yobs and has seriously damaged Chelsea's reputation. 

Manchester United are the new Liverpool

Liverpool in the 90s, that is. I think Manchester United will go through a very long period without winning a thing, just like Liverpool did after a long period of success. United may be only one or two percent below the level they were under Ferguson, but the big difference is psychological. Just as they did against Liverpool, other teams raise their game against United now thinking they can get a famous result whereas before they were intimidated by United and just wilted. 

Manchester United may never be the same again.

Arsenal are the new Nottingham Forrest

Forrest under Brian Clough once went eight without winning a trophy (1980 - 1988)  and were a shadow of their former selves in 1993 when he retired. Just as Arsenal have never been quite the same since Viera left in 2005, Forrest were never quite the same after they won their second European Cup and Clough's drinking started to become a problem.

Incredibly, Clough actually got Forrest relegated from the Premier League in his final season; he was also lucky not to have been charged with accepting backhanders from player transfers (called bungs) after he had retired. 

But nobody remembers those things. Instead we remember the European Cups he won with Forest, winning the league with Derby County and the incredible charisma he had. I'm sure that Wenger will be remembered for the Invincibles, not for the decade of injuries and underachievement since then.

On Sean Dyche

Sean Dyche has very much flown under the radar this season but I really think he is a potential star manager of the future. Burnley have looked well organized every time I've seen them play and this has been reflected in their results. They've only had two heavy defeats all season, 4-0 and 3-0 against West Brom and Arsenal respectively, surprising for a team which have just come up from the play-offs.

Burnley are in the relegation zone at the moment, but have by no means disgraced themselves this season. They are punching well above their weight against teams with far greater financial resources.

He also conducts himself very impressively in interviews. See below (half way down the page) where he calmly and rationally analyses some of the incidents from the recent Chelsea - Burnley game. He doesn't rise to Mourinho's bait, he doesn't try to influence referees, he speaks articulately and coherently. I am impressed and I have respect for him.

https://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/blogs/paul-parker/chelsea-will-never-be-champions-off-the-pitch-with-jose-mourinho-in-charge-132242575.html

Contrast Dyche's performance here with Mourinho's shrill ranting and tell me who's more likable and who you have more respect for.

As an aside, I am completely fed up with Mourinho now, he's an attention seeker and I agree with Paul Parker that he doesn't try to protect his players at all but makes it all about himself. I've lost respect for him. I'm tired of him complaining all the time and I'm tired of Chelsea's dirty little tricks (e.g. surrounding the referee etc) they do every single game. I hope he gets fired from Chelsea because he's a cancer inside the body of English football. 

Back to Dyche, I hope Burnley stay up and I hope he gets a chance to establish himself as a top manager. From the evidence so far he deserves the opportunity to manage a big team.

Sean Dyche as the next England manager, anyone?

On Form

A classic study by the psychologists Tversky, Gillovich and Valone (1985) on 'hot hands' in basketball is still as relevant to sports today at it was 30 years ago.

In the study, the researchers analyzed thousands of basketball matches and concluded that 'hot hands', whereby a player is said to be 'hot' if he sinks three or four baskets in a row, is just a cognitive illusion, a trick caused by our brain's compulsion to try to see patterns in everything and to attach causal factors to those patterns, even when there is no good reason for doing so. Psychologists call this the local representativeness heuristic.

In fact, the players didn't do anything differently in terms of movement or technique when they had 'hot hands' than when they didn't. Sinking four baskets in a row is just a random act of chance for a top player, there is no causal effect. Although some basketball players (and some teams) are clearly better than others, this can only be demonstrated over the long-term (I.e. only when a large statistical sample is available).

But what's all this got to do with the Premier League? Let me explain.

Say your favourite team achieves the following sequence of results.

WWWLLL

A typical pundit or fan would say that the team were on form for the first three games but not on form for the last three. They would put it down to some problem with the tactics, or the fact that a certain player is (or is not) playing. They may also go further and hail the manager as a genius if he wins three games in a row, and then condemn him as overrated, out of his depth, or someone who has 'taken the club as far as he can' if he loses three in a row. 

But now consider this sequence:

WLLWLW

A typical fan or pundit would say that this team hasn't been either particularly in or out of form. The BBC pundit Mark Lawrenson would say that their 'form has been mixed'.

But the statistical probability of either sets of results happening is exactly the same. The spread of the results is completely random. A team can win or lose several consecutive matches completely by chance, by a mere statistical fluke. Similarly, a player who scores 20 goals in a season might score in six games in a row completely by chance; he's not on form but it's just the natural spread of random results. Therefore form does not really exist at all here. Our minds are simply tricking us by seeing statistical patterns and attaching causal factors to those patterns which are actually completely unjustified.

Fans and pundits following the Premier League fall for this trick far too often.  They say that a striker who doesn't score for a while is experiencing 'a goal drought' rather than just acknowledging that this will happen sometimes in a natural spread of random results. Worse, if a team experiences a few bad results in a row we say the manager is overrated and should be fired, even though he achieved excellent results in the past (think Brendon Rodgers, Alan Pardew and the clowns who wanted them fired earlier this season). We really should be judging managers on a season-by-season basis (i.e. a sufficiently large statistical sample) not on an arbitrarily selected number if matches. Radomness plays a far greater role in sports than we like to acknowledge.

Postscript

The full hot hands study can be read here:

http://cs.bc.edu/~straubin/cs244-2015/hothands.pdf

On Harry Kane

Harry Kane is obviously the main man at Tottenham now in the same manner that Gareth Bale once was. He is also seemingly a shoe-in for Young Player of the Year in May, and for a place in the England starting line-up in March. But how good could he actually end up being?

Kane has scored 23 goals in 35 games this year, better than Ronaldo (23 in 53 games)  and Bale (11 in 41 games) and almost as good as Messi (38 in 51 games) at the same age. It's also worth pointing out that Gareth Bale's best season total for Spurs was 26 which Kane is well on course to eclipse already.

Of course stats don't tell the whole story by any means; Kane does not seem to (yet) have the ability to do truly spectacular things on the pitch like the aforementioned players do on a regular basis. And we don't know much about him off the pitch yet either. Truly great players have a persona of some sort (e.g. Cantona, a philosopher with a nasty streak; Henry, a cool guy and a gentleman ; Beckham, a Hollywood star; Messi, quiet and shy etc). That is why someone like Alan Shearer isn't up with those players, he scored a lot of goals but he's a boring bastard. 

In terms of his playing style, a friend recently compared Kane to 90s footballer Teddy Sheringham. I reckon that's rubbish because Kane has pace whereas Sheringham was known for being very slow. I also think that Kane is going to be a better player than Sheringham ever was. No, I think a more apt comparison might be Gabriel Batistuta (an Argentine striker who played for Fiorentina in Italy in the 1990s) in the way he drops deep to pick up the ball and run at defenders and in his incredible shooting accuracy. And that is high praise indeed because Batistuta was one of the great players of his era.

In terms of England, I don't think Kane is going to be able to do very much, unfortunately. Football is a team game first and foremost and it doesn't matter how good our strikers are, (Rooney and Welbeck actually have excellent scoring records for England already) we are lacking in too many other areas. England have one of the best defensive partnerships in the world in Terry and Cahill, of course. But the former doesn't want to play for England because he has been vilified by our idiotic fans and morally bankrupt media. 

Harry Kane is obviously going to be the Premier League's next big thing. I hope he's also going to be England's next big thing, but we need to change the way we treat our players if we are going to ever have a successful team again.

How much do you know?

Instead of a prose blog this week I have created a quiz based on the transfer window and other events in football this week. Check it out below (should work on all devices).



file:///C:/Users/User/Documents/Tom/footballquiz(1).htm


One last thing, I'm certain that Harry Redknapp wouldn't have quit QPR had they been fighting for a Champions League place rather than against relegation. The guy has no loyalty or integrity at all.

Just sayin'

Trash talking a pundit

Jose Mourinho had some harsh words to say about a certain pundit after Tuesday's League Cup semi-final. He said that 

"you are very well paid, much more than some managers that have to put their ass for 90 minutes every week on the bench. You have a very good seat, very good money, no pressure. They are always right, they never lose, they always win.”

I sympathise with Mourinho's frustration over pundits who often come close to spoiling my enjoyment of the game with their idiotic, often uneducated comments. And I am going to be strongly criticizing some of them in the next few weeks in a vain attempt to somehow hold them to account.

So, let's start with the presumed target of Mourinho's criticism, Sky TV's sharply-dressed Premier League pundit cockney, Jamie Redknapp.

As a player, his time with Liverpool coincided with the club's longest trophy drought since the 1950s (between 1992 and 2001 they won one League Cup). As a pundit, his time on TV has coincided with some of the worst broadcasting I've ever seen.

In his defence, he hasn't been afraid to criticize Mourinho on a number of occasions when he probably deserved it. But he's made far too many gaffes to be credible. See here, for example, where he misunderstands Jamie Carragher's proposition to award either a red card or a penalty, but not both, for a professional foul inside the box.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lGvw0q-vbEA

Talk about missing the point!

And here Redknapp is on transfer deadline day earlier in the season when he said that Arsenal should sign Falcao because they don't have any world class strikers (despite just having signed Alexei Sanchez).

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=642qGOPLnkk

Sanchez is now of course one of the favorites for footballer of the year whereas Falcao has been a complete flop. Redknapp is a wazzock.

I also have never seen him give the kind of intelligent, in-depth analysis which the likes of Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher provide. Redknapp just seems to be an undeniably good-looking but rather thick, ex-footballer celebrity Spice-boy.

Quite frankly, I wish he would just stick to the film premiers and leave punditry to the smart lads.

A correspondent writes

Q. I'm sure it's on the way but why can't the league do action replay reviews for contentious issues like offside calls and penalties?

In fact it's not on the way, unfortunately Kelly. I'm totally with you that we should have it though. The sinister Swiss, Sepp Blatter and other administrators in the game believe that reviewing action replays would slow the game down too much. Others say that refereeing mistakes for and against a particular team even themselves out over the course of a season. But I'm just not buying it.

I do think that having one or more challenge per game would be too much. The danger then would be that they could be misused as a tactical ploy in order to disrupt the flow of the game.

One solution might be to give every team something like five opportunities to challenge a referee's decision per season. In that case teams would only use their reviews for serious incidents and would be unlikely to misuse them.

Q. Why do teams often bring on substitutes with only one or two minutes left?

Good question. I think the main reason is to waste time. Referees are supposed to give 30 seconds added time for every substitution, but in reality I don't think this always happens. Also, if a player walks of slowly he can waste a lot more than 30 seconds.

Added time itself has become a kind of archaic anachronism. The amount of time which is added is no more than a best guess from the referee and I don't think there is an established method for how it's calculated. In any case, referees are not even bound by the amount of added time given. There was a famous incident in 2007 where the referee ended the match two minutes into four minutes of injury time..........in the Champions League final!!

I'm sure that an algorithm could be designed to accurately calculate how much added time there should be at the end of each half. And an automatic hooter could be used to finish games. It's only the intransigence of Blatter and his corrupt cronies stopping that from happening.

Q.  What is the point of making decisions on red cards retrospectively?

I agree that the way it is done currently is not good enough.

The corpulent West Ham manager Sam Allardyce has argued that a team can be doubly punished if an opposition player is not sent off during a game but is banned retrospectively. For example, if Chelsea play Leicester City and Diego Costa is not sent off but is given a three match ban afterwards that would negatively affect Leicester again if Chelsea were due to play Burnley next.

Perhaps any red card could automatically be reviewed on the action replay since there is a stoppage anyway. If not, opposition teams should be given a choice of whether an opponent be banned retrospectively or not.

On Bony and Monk

Well, it's been a tumultuous last few days for me personally. It's nice to be able to settle down to write this and forget about everything for a couple of hours.

I think Wilfried Bony is a bargain at £28 million (including performance related bonuses) for Man City. First and foremost he's a proven goal scorer in the Premier League (he was the top scorer in the 2014 calendar year with 20) which is crucial. Plenty of strikers have come in on big money from other leagues (e.g. Soldado, van Wolfswinkle,) and found it very difficult. City can be very confident that Bony will settle in quickly and start scoring goals. That's invaluable and they should have to pay a premium for that. Secondly, he's the perfect age, 26. He's old enough to have already proved himself but he still has his peak years ahead of him. Thirdly, he's not cup-tied for the Champions League like most other top strikers are. Fourthly, strikers with similar Premier League goal scoring records have gone for significantly more money at the same stage in their careers, Suarez was £65 million, Bale was £80 million, Torres was £50 million a few years ago. Now obviously Bony doesn't have the flair and entertainment value of those players, and I'm not comparing him directly to them, but I am saying that I would have thought that he would be worth a bit closer to those sorts of figures.

He will be a big loss to Swansea City of course. But Gary Monk is a great young British manager and they'll be fine. The only problem I have with Monk is his complaining about referees all the time.

I understand why managers complain about referees. It's a tactic in order to get more decisions in your favour further down the line. If the referee knows that he'll have hell to pay if he makes decisions against a certain team then he less likely to actually do so. This isn't dishonesty on the referee's part, it's human psychology - the pleasure/pain principle. Subconsciously, referees know they will get more negative media coverage if they give a 50/50 decision against a Chelsea or a Manchester United than against a Swansea or a Burnley.

Monk is just trying to stick up for his team....but he's driving me nuts!