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Daily Mail, Tuesday, August 13, 2019THE first goal Anthony Martial scored for
Manchester United was against Liverpool.
Marcus Rashford’s introduction to the
domestic game was marked by two
against Arsenal. Both have scored against
every other member of what is termed
the Big Six — Manchester City, Tottenham,
Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea. Martial
has three against Chelsea, two against
Liverpool and Arsenal and one against
Tottenham and City; Rashford has three
against Chelsea, two against Arsenal, City
and Liverpool and one against Tottenham.
Goals in the biggest matches are what
define a world-class striker. Romelu
Lukaku scored once against elite domestic
opposition in two years at United.
He scored four in a friendly against a
Serie D side in his first game for Inter
Milan; but then he would, wouldn’t he?WHY LUKAKU FAILS
THE TOP-SIX TEST
TOM HEATON ended up on the losing side
for Aston Villa on Saturday — but he
looked a potential England goalkeeper again,
even a No 1 if Jordan Pickford’s form dips.BOLTON LET DOWN
BY EFL ON BASSINI
Spurs still in
Eriksen limbo
Christian Eriksen
can still leave totten-
ham this summer. the
club, however, have run
out of time to replace
him. English football
got away with shutting
its transfer window
early last year, but
might not be so lucky
in the coming weeks.
Paul Pogba is
still not talking
like a Manches-
ter United
player, Erik-
sen’s future
is vague. if
a major
offer comes
in for either,
there could
be issues.
United have dug
their heels in over
Pogba all summer, but
Mauricio Pochettino
has a notoriously short
fuse with players
angling to leave the
club. he only intro-
duced Eriksen (above)
to saturday’s game
with aston Villa whenit became possible
tottenham would open
their season with a
home defeat.
Pochettino is one of
three leading manag-
ers — Pep Guardiola
and Jurgen Klopp are
the others — who
believe the unilateral
closing of the Premier
League window is a
mistake. they
are correct. it
leaves Eng-
lish clubs
vulnerable
when a sim-
ple gentle-
man’s
agreement
on domestic
transfers
would have
sufficed. Of course, the
counter-argument is
that tottenham and
United could simply
say no to any late
moves from Europe.
But that was the
case anyway, without
placing their business
in a strait-jacket.LaUrEnCE Bassini
may only have tempo-
rarily delayed the sale
of Bolton last week,
but the fact he is still
haunting the club at
all reflects poorly on
the Football League.
this is a man who was
declared bankrupt
twice in seven years —
which takes some doing
— and banned from
holding a position of
authority at any Foot-
ball League club for
three years in relation
to his time at Watford.
Yet here he is, holding
up Bolton’s takeover by
the Football Ventures
consortium, a ploy
Bolton’s joint adminis-
trator, Paul appleton,
described as outra-
geous and disgusting.
Phil Parkinson,
Bolton’s manager, was
plaintive after the
weekend draw with
Coventry. ‘Mr Bassini,
leave us alone,’ hepleaded. ‘Please leave
this great club alone
to get on with building
its future.’
Yet Bassini (above) is
a vindictive man, who
sent gloating text mes-
sages to the local news-
paper when Watford
lost a play-off final in- he won’t listen.
Parkinson should
instead take it up with
the Football League,
who have somehow
allowed Bassini to
remain active around
English football, to its
utter detriment.
aFtEr close on four years of preparation,
trial and error, Eddie Jones’ extended World
Cup squad includes one member, ruaridh
McConnochie, who has never been capped. he’s
a utility player, always valuable in tournaments,
but even so, it’s not the greatest sign.ANDY CARROLL says he has unfinished
business at Newcastle. That is the
problem. He has unfinished business
everywhere. At Liverpool, where his career
never really got going; at West Ham, where
he spent much of his time injured.
Maybe Newcastle’s incentivised contract will
provide the necessary motivation. Carroll is
believed to be earning a basic weekly wage
of £20,000, with a bonus of £70,000 per start.
And a void beyond if he fails to justify those
numbers his season.Favourite:
Zaha was
greeted
warmly by
Palace fans
GETTY IMAGESA BREAK from tradition for the Football
League with tonight’s Carabao Cup
second round draw. They’re going to have it
at a football ground.Can Palace rekindle Zaha’s love?
GIVEN that Neymar was met by a
banner wishing him gone from Paris
Saint-Germain at the weekend, there
was considerable surprise that
Wilfried Zaha was greeted warmly by
Crystal Palace fans on Saturday.
Not only wasn’t he booed for
attempting to force a move to
Everton, the locals actually sang his
name, imploring coach Roy Hodgson
to introduce him from the
substitutes’ bench. Yet what option
did they have? PSG could win theleague without Neymar, but Palace
might go down minus Zaha, and the
fans know it. Right now, they are still
hoping there is a chance he will
change his mind and decide to stay.
Making Selhurst Park inhospitable
would as good as force him out of
the door. The mood of West Ham fans
towards Dimitri Payet was similar, at
first, too. They hoped to make him
fall in love again. Only when his
behaviour became disruptive and
disrespectful, and it became obvioushe wished to leave whatever, did the
atmosphere change. And it will with
Zaha if January brings more trouble.
As for the deal itself, Palace never
had a decision to make. Arsenal’s
offer was risible and did not improve,
and for all the hullabaloo around the
Everton deal it did not shift beyond
the original £52million. Zaha is worth
considerably more than that to
Crystal Palace. He may wonder why
he is not to Everton before confusing
it with the move of his dreams.it is 50 years this Friday since Shoot!
magazine was published for the first
time. By the time it shifted online,
there had been 1,717 publications. i
wrote for a few of them. When i started
at hayters sports agency in 1983,
Shoot! was a regular commission. they
picked a topic and we’d get as many
people in football as we could to
discuss it. We were all kids at hayters.
We didn’t know many famous
footballers. so there was an office
contacts book in which we would pool
our numbers. and football people were
generous with them in those days.
You could, quite literally, phone Kenny
Dalglish at home — no mobile phones
— and ask if he fancied earning 25 quid
to write a one-off column for a regional
newspaper. he did, too. these were
different times. the problem with the
communal contacts book, of course,
was that any new lead was seized upon
and exhausted by every young
journalist in the room. so someone
would pick up Mark Lawrenson’s
number because Liverpool had played
at Queens Park rangers, and in the
next week he would get called for three
Shoot! features, an Fa Cup preview for
the Crystal Palace programme and two
columns in the Hemel Hempstead Post.
this misdirected eagerness yielded a
conversation with snooker impresario
Barry hearn which, on hearing who
was on the line, began: ‘From hayters?
Do you know, son, last week i’d never
even heard of hayters. now every time
i pick up the phone, it’s f***ing
hayters.’
suffice to say, readers of Shoot!
magazine remained unenlightened on
whether Barry thought extra television
exposure would harm football.Working on Shoot! was
a blast from the past...
the ground — a somewhat
counter-productive move
given Hull were being
watched by the third lowest
League attendance since
moving to the KCOM Stadium
in 2002. Leaving aside that
the club tweets updates on
the state of play quicker than
any fan could, how dare
they? Mawer was indulging in
a communal experience, in
touch with friends or family
who could not be there. It’s
part of the fun. And there are
other reasons why fans text,
too. This was not a televised
match, but fans at the big
games often just want to find
out about a controversial call
from a friend with access to
an action replay. Might theybe expelled too? For seeking
clarification on a match they
have paid to watch?
The heavy-handed steward
was from a global security
company originating in
Israel, Comsec, who are
employed by Football DataCo,
the organisation that licenses
football’s intellectual
property — such as fixturelists and statistics — to the
media. The Football League
have since apologised to
Mawer — although nothing as
yet from Hull. Yet maybe it is
the sport itself that owes fans
an apology. They are
increasingly treated as if the
game is doing them a favour
yet, without them, it’s
nothing.