By Myles Palmer
I got a call this morning which clarified some important issues.
The two new Irish shareholders at Manchester United want to buy Sky’s shares.
That would give them 20% of the company.
Fergie’s mates want to install him as chairman of the football club, replacing Martin Edwards.
Fergie wants Bayern’s Ottmar Hitzfeld to succeed him.
So United don’t want Arsene Wenger. And Arsene would not go there anyway. And he certainly would not go there to work under Fergie.
Arsene’s new contract is done. It’s just a matter of fine-tuning the most tax-efficient deal for him.
He is a foreigner living here, but not a resident.For tax purposes he is non-domiciled.
The shareholder shenanigans at Old Trafford might mean that Fergie’s final season is NOT a vintage one.
Basically, Martin Edwards had wanted to be chairman of the PLC. But Roland Smith,the guy with the City track record who was brought in by Edwards, told the City that Edwards could NOT run the PLC after he,Smith, steps down.
So Edwards, who was chairman of the football club and chief excecutive, gave the chief exec job to Peter Kenyon, who joined from Umbro.
Clearly, there is a big power battle coming up there.That and Fergie’s Hampden dream will open the title race up for Leeds.
Leeds can keep clean sheets, Arsenal can’t, and Liverpool’s manager is in hospital and will miss half the season at least.
Liverpool’s team seems to change every week in an arbitrary way, and Houllier seems to have bought too often in an odd way as well.
So Liverpool, like Chelsea, cannot win the title.
LEEDS don’t score enough goals.
And they don’t have anybody as good as Veron or Vieira or Gerrard in midfield.
But they are BY FAR the hungriest team at the moment.
And Rio Ferdinand is threatening to be as dominant this season as Sami Hyypia was last.
Great players are spinal players, as I keep saying.
If Man United keep playing 4-5-1 they will not win their important matches.
It’s daft to buy the world’s best passer,Veron, and then give him only Ruud and Ryan to aim at. Stupid, really. Self-defeating.
But Sir Alex can’t see it and there’s nobody there who will say boo to him.
He is ruining his team and his season by insisting on finding a place for Scholesey.And that’s fine by me.He can do that for as long as he likes.
SCHALKE 04 v ARSENAL?
Well, AFC keep losing 1-0 away in the Champions League but this will be more than a 1-0 defeat if Inamoto and Edu start together in central midfield.
At Highbury I was VERY impressed by Waldoch and Hajto, the big centrebacks.Two of the best defenders Arsenal have faced in Europe.
Against that, Ebbe Sand has not scored a league goal this season after scoring seven goals by this stage last season. So Sand is a wreck, a shadow of the Bundesliga top scorer he was last term.
Brian Clough said that if a centre forward had not scored for three weeks you might as well throw him in the Trent. I dread to think what Cloughie would have done with Sand.
Tonight’s dead game is beginning to remind me of a jokey old line from Punch. My boss Miles Kington, the literary editor, used to love German football clubs with silly
names.
He would invent scorelines like Schalke 04 4 Arsenal 0.
29th October 2001.