The Barclays Premier League Thread 2013/14

[Lineker]

West Ham confirm that manager Sam Allardyce will lead the club next season after "constructive talks" with the club's board.

[Arjen Robben]

[Lineker]

West Ham confirm that manager Sam Allardyce will lead the club next season after "constructive talks" with the club's board.

Apparently the condition is that they must finish in the top ten and play "the West Ham way" - and an attacking coach will be appointed accordingly.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

What's the West Ham way? I know they won the World Cup and all, but that was nearly 50 years ago...

[METALMAN]

Yeah, I doubt the majority of fans have been alive long enough to see them play "the West Ham way".

[Hobo]

Coming from the Irish guy, really?

We know our league doesn't matter!

[Arjen Robben]

Yeah I'm sick of hearing them bleating on about the "West Ham way". I dont remember them playing some attractive attacking style in recent history.

[-A-]

A lot of the memorable recent West Ham teams played a more attacking than normal style of football. The 2006/2007 season the team came up and pretty much kept playing the same way. Benayoun and Reo-Coker at their best, Marlon Harewood scoring an inexplicable number of goals, Dean Ashton looking like a bargain signing. Pardew never really played timid football and that season was one of the most exciting. Next year was the Tevez/Mascherano fiasco, but the football that season was pretty good. Not glamorous, but more positive than a newly-promoted team would be.

Likewise with the 'too good to go down' relegation team. Di Canio, Kanoute and Defoe, Joe Cole and Trevor Sinclair. Maybe not world-beating attackers, but the team played the 'attractive' football these kind of fans are obsessed with. The same kind that Pardew seems to want to play at Newcastle

[Szumi]

I personally enjoyed the football under Gianfranco Zola as well. The midfield of Behrami-Parker-Noble-Collison was quite fun to watch.

[TCO]

Coming from the Irish guy, really?

I watched Cork City knock NEC Nijmegen out of the Intertoto Cup. The Dutch league really doesn't count!

Edited May 21, 2014 by TCO

[stokeriño]

Patrick Bamford might be part of the Chelsea first-team squad next year... Here are quotes of his:

Because I was doing well at Derby and I’d done well at Milton Keynes, [i went to Cobham for] a discussion about that and the planning for next year. They were hinting at a new contract but I don’t know yet what’s happening there...

From what they’ve said, ideally I’ll be third striker, but you never know really in football. Hopefully I get a good pre-season, especially with the World Cup, because a lot of the big players are going to be away, so it’s going to give some of us youngsters the chance to get some game time to try and show him what we can do.

Nothing concrete yet of course, but it seems that Chelsea are at least discussing the idea of using Bamford as a third striker.

Costa/Lukaku/Bamford, maybe?

[Rafael]

Well, I think loaning Bamford to a Premier League team would be a better move. Let him prove himself in the top flight, then consider him as a choice in your squad.

[brenchill]

Loan him to Vitesse until he's 30.

[Ant]

I'd have him. Can't be any worse than Tonev

[Jimmy]

I still Lukaku will go to fund a move for Costa. Chelsea shouldn't do that, but Mourinho seems really resistant to publicly praising him in a way that would suggest he wants him at Chelsea.

But that might be blind optimism that he'll join Spurs

[Lineker]

Lukaku will never come to Spurs. But it would be bloody fantastic if he did.

[stokeriño]

Okay...I actually went and read the full (Guardian) article that those Bamford quotes were lifted from, and here's the bizarre thing:

It is a slightly surreal story and one that 20-year-old Patrick Bamford tells with a smile as he explains how he found out via One Direction’s Niall Horan that José Mourinho not only knew all about him but had been sending text messages to the singer every time the Chelsea striker scored for Derby County.

Already out on loan at MK Dons when Mourinho returned to Stamford Bridge last summer, Bamford never had chance to speak to the Chelsea manager until he was invited for a meeting a couple of months ago, when the possibility of being the Premier League club’s third-choice striker next season was discussed.

It was a few weeks before that when Bamford learned that Mourinho was following his progress on loan at Derby much closer than he could have imagined, albeit it through an unlikely source. “Niall from One Direction is a big Derby fan, he came down to the club and I was talking to him,” Bamford says.

“Niall said: ‘Mourinho knows all about you, he texts me all the time.’ I said: ‘No he doesn’t.’ He showed me his phone, and because he was doing his treatment at Chelsea, for his knee injury, he knew all the Chelsea boys and Mourinho. And he had texts from Mourinho whenever I scored, saying ‘Bamford again!’ That made me smile. That was the first time I knew that Mourinho knew about me.”

...Why on earth is Mourinho text buddies with a guy from One Direction? Boggles my mind.

[brenchill]

What the fuck? That's just bizarre.

[Plubby]

A lot of the memorable recent West Ham teams played a more attacking than normal style of football. The 2006/2007 season the team came up and pretty much kept playing the same way. Benayoun and Reo-Coker at their best, Marlon Harewood scoring an inexplicable number of goals, Dean Ashton looking like a bargain signing. Pardew never really played timid football and that season was one of the most exciting. Next year was the Tevez/Mascherano fiasco, but the football that season was pretty good. Not glamorous, but more positive than a newly-promoted team would be.

Likewise with the 'too good to go down' relegation team. Di Canio, Kanoute and Defoe, Joe Cole and Trevor Sinclair. Maybe not world-beating attackers, but the team played the 'attractive' football these kind of fans are obsessed with. The same kind that Pardew seems to want to play at Newcastle

What, three?!

[brenchill]

Villa bought him on the back of those 3 goals.

Just looking over his stats, his scoring record for Villa was awful. 5 goals in 29 games.