FOOTBALLER IN TWITTER OUTBURST SHOCK
“Hats off to West Brom!” might have been the reaction to the Baggies’ imperviousness to Tottenham’s imaginatively-structured bids to lure Twitter Outrage’s Saido Berahino to White Hart Lane. The Fiver suspects that Tony Pulis’s cap will remain firmly in situ, though – firstly because it is affixed to his head with a grip that no amount of Swarfega could slacken; secondly because sulky, entitled footballers don’t generally fit the mould cast for his sides and he now has the unenviable task of reassimilating his second-best striker into the fold upon the inevitable disingenuous, Euro 2016-focused piece of backtracking that will be wrung out before the next round of Premier League fixtures begins in earnest.
You have to wonder what Pulis would like to do to Berahino, whose assertion that he would never “play Jeremy Peace” (sic) was less a blot on the CV for any future Hollywood career than a shot across the bows of anyone who thought he might just knuckle down and get on with playing for the club that made him.
Pulis has quietly – perhaps more quietly than anyone – made some sensible additions to his squad during the summer and perhaps the final piece in the jigsaw would be to step down the evolutionary scale a few notches and coax Rory Delap from retirement to hurl freshly-dried balls at Berahino’s head while the rest of his team-mates train to do their very best at the sport from which he appears to have opted out.
Still, the advantage of having one’s credulity so frequently stretched by footballers’ logic means that the Fiver batted nary an eyelid at stories that, while Berahino “took to Twitter” (a curious but now commonplace turn of phrase that conjures images of frantic, scared spleen-venters with simply nowhere else to turn), Norwich’s Gary Hooper was turning down a loan move to Sheffield Wednesday due to a lack of contractual leeway for a hospitality box. Not true, said the Canaries, while Hooper took to Twitter to say “Not true”. Hooper remains a Norwich benchwarmer and that, Saido, is loyalty.
Perhaps Berahino would not have made too much fuss about the level of contracted luxury at White Hart Lane, although it doesn’t seem too wise to put anything past him. His has admittedly been a moderately entertaining diversion from wringing the hands over net spend or pondering WHY ARSENAL HAVEN’T SIGNED ANYONE?, and as soap operas go it ought to hold the attention as much as a missed deadline and a botched PDF. But there is still the sense that West Brom aren’t going to win much here in the long run; the player will be surely reintegrated to some initial vitriol and media excitement, the gaze will move elsewhere, Berahino will perform competently if huffily for the next few months and, with his value looking in some danger, someone will take a successful punt. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Jeremy Peace or anyone else – the end result may just be that Berahino played all of us.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“That look he gave Giggs … what a scoundrel. Van Gaal is a scoundrel; hopefully those in England realise he treats his players poorly” – former Mexico star Hugo Sánchez takes aim at Louis van Gaal over his treatment of Javier Hernández and gives him both barrels via a late 16th-century insult.
FIVER LETTER
“What’s all the fuss about Saido Berahino’s deadline day tweet that he ‘will never play Jeremy Peace’? As I read it, he’s accepted that he’ll be at West Brom until at least January and he’s simply making an early claim as to what roles he won’t consider for the Baggies’ Christmas panto” – R Reisman.
• Send your letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. And if you’ve nothing better to do you can also tweet the Fiver. Today’s winner of our prizeless letter o’the day is: R Reisman (there wasn’t much competition. Get scribbling ...)
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BITS AND BOBS
Dimitar Berbatov has relocated his pipe and slippers from Monaco to PAOK Salonika and will spend the next year strolling elegantly and ineffectively around Thessaloniki.
Tact’s Vicente del Bosque has warned David de Gea that he better start playing for the club he has made it clear that he wants to leave or he won’t get in Spain’s Euro 2016 squad.
Meanwhile at least one club involved in the De Gea brouhaha will no longer have time-keeping issues after “Manchester United’s official timekeeping partner” Bulova unveiled its new Manchester United club watch. According to the associated PR guff, “the beautifully-crafted timepiece pays homage to the club’s history by including nine separate commemorative design features,” one of which is, presumably, a function that extends the 90th minute.
And Meeeelan’s chief suit Adriano Galliani has revealed the club’s maritozzi, sfogliatelle and cappuccino have been all that were necessary to turn Mario Balotelli into a good player again. “Coach Sinisa Mihajlovic often wants the players to have breakfast at 8.30am and Balotelli’s always there before eight,” trilled Galliani. “He’s changed radically.”
STILL WANT MORE?
Paul Wilson’s blog on how Swansea have done the best business of the transfer window includes the words shilly-shallying, zilch, bloated parody and “hang on a minute officer”. Which at least woke the subs up.
But Marina Hyde saw him and raised him by getting manscaped president, high-camp photos, holibobs, pumping iron and “barbecuing deep inside each other’s personal space” within the first paragraph of her attempt to get Michel Platini to do something about Vladimir Putin.
Oddly, the “what went wrong” section of Jamie Jackson’s investigation into Manchester United’s summer spending is longer than the “what went right” section.
Owen Gibson gets out his calculator and Big Book O’ Football Rules to work out quite how Manchester City could splurge £130m in one transfer window despite the existence of FFP.
Proper journalist David Conn casts his beady eye on to the transfer window and concludes that mid-ranking Premier League sides now have more b0oty than Beyonce.
What would the England team look like if it was picked on current form, asks Martin Laurence. It wouldn’t have Wayne Rooney in it for starters.
