25: Marouane Fellaini - Short, Back, in Side

the jellyman wrote:included in this weeks euro team of the week

http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/blogs/pitchside-europe/european-team-week-november-2-4-125028302.html


££££££££££££ bill must be buzzing

Yankthattoffee wrote:

the jellyman wrote:included in this weeks euro team of the week

http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/blogs/pitchside-europe/european-team-week-november-2-4-125028302.html


££££££££££££ bill must be buzzing

Even Messi and Ronaldo couldn't get into the team. BK thinks "Ka-ching!!"

Made 4 Gwladys wrote:

Yankthattoffee wrote:

the jellyman wrote:included in this weeks euro team of the week

http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/blogs/pitchside-europe/european-team-week-november-2-4-125028302.html


££££££££££££ bill must be buzzing

Even Messi and Ronaldo couldn't get into the team. BK thinks "Ka-ching!!"

read something today that Le Arse are targeting Felli as their main target in January .. why the fuck he'd want to play at a lower level is beyond me though

Goodison_Gringo wrote:

Made 4 Gwladys wrote:

Yankthattoffee wrote:

the jellyman wrote:included in this weeks euro team of the week

http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/blogs/pitchside-europe/european-team-week-november-2-4-125028302.html


££££££££££££ bill must be buzzing

Even Messi and Ronaldo couldn't get into the team. BK thinks "Ka-ching!!"

read something today that Le Arse are targeting Felli as their main target in January .. why the fuck he'd want to play at a lower level is beyond me though

if he left I presume we'd be looking for £25m. Can't see Le Arse spending that kind of money.

SEFTON wrote:

Goodison_Gringo wrote:

Made 4 Gwladys wrote:

Yankthattoffee wrote:

the jellyman wrote:included in this weeks euro team of the week

http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/blogs/pitchside-europe/european-team-week-november-2-4-125028302.html


££££££££££££ bill must be buzzing

Even Messi and Ronaldo couldn't get into the team. BK thinks "Ka-ching!!"

read something today that Le Arse are targeting Felli as their main target in January .. why the fuck he'd want to play at a lower level is beyond me though

if he left I presume we'd be looking for £25m. Can't see Le Arse spending that kind of money.

No they won't.Only shitteh /united/Chelskie can afford Fellaini.If he leaves? which i doubt very much that he will go.

Bluejags wrote:Opening offer gentlemen and a big one. £30m which is an acceptable price to set the bar. Discussing it on Sunday Supplement now as well. However a January transfer would be huge blow to our ambitions. I think we need to finish in fourth to have any hope of holding onto him however I feel he is partly playing so well this season to get a big move away.

Incidentally, why is Oliver Holt wearing an alice band ala prima donna footballer?


http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/transfer-news/chelsea-line-up-30m-january-1430150

hairy cataract wrote:

Bluejags wrote:Opening offer gentlemen and a big one. £30m which is an acceptable price to set the bar. Discussing it on Sunday Supplement now as well. However a January transfer would be huge blow to our ambitions. I think we need to finish in fourth to have any hope of holding onto him however I feel he is partly playing so well this season to get a big move away.

Incidentally, why is Oliver Holt wearing an alice band ala prima donna footballer?


http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/transfer-news/chelsea-line-up-30m-january-1430150

Would be a good buy for Chelsea but, on current form and with the money they wasted on Torres, we have to hold out for closer to £40m. I mean, he cost us £16m. If Carroll = £35m and Torres = £50m, I would put Fellaini comfortably in the £40m bracket. To be honest, he's playing in bursts of around twenty minutes a match - the rest of the time he's shambling around stratching his arse and trying to maim people with his elbows, but if you watch MOTD you only see the good bits. Despite the money at stake, I get the feeling the big clubs mostly base their January transfer targets on what they see on MOTD. January is Amateur Hour isn't it when it comes to the transfer window?

From our point of view, who the fuck could we get to replace him? Without his unique if somewhat bizarre qualities of height, incredible chest control, and an ability to bewilder refs into being unsure whether to pat him on the back or send him off every time he challenges for a ball, we would struggle a little. I've grown to like him, after hating him for the first couple of seasons. He's become a powerful and game-changing player in the past year. Fuck it, let's ask for £45m and take it from there.

Made 4 Gwladys wrote:Everton midfielder Marouane Fellaini admits he wants to play for 'one of the biggest clubs' but insists he is prepared to be patient.

The Belgium international has been in sparkling form this season, fuelling speculation that he could be the next high-profile figure to head through the exits at Goodison Park.
Talk of a big-money move during the January transfer window is currently doing the rounds, with Chelsea among those said to be keen.

Fellaini, who is under contract at Everton until 2016, concedes that he has ambitions of gracing the very highest level, but he will not be pushing for a move and, at the age of 25, appreciates that time is on his side.

"There is in interest in me," he is quoted as saying by ESPN.

"But Everton are an ambitious club as well.

"I don't think they will let their best players go just like that.

"I want to play for one of the biggest clubs one day. But I am patient."

http://www1.skysports.com/football/news/11671/8249229/

Made 4 Gwladys wrote:Everton midfielder Marouane Fellaini admits he wants to play for 'one of the biggest clubs' but insists he is prepared to be patient.

The Belgium international has been in sparkling form this season, fuelling speculation that he could be the next high-profile figure to head through the exits at Goodison Park.
Talk of a big-money move during the January transfer window is currently doing the rounds, with Chelsea among those said to be keen.

Fellaini, who is under contract at Everton until 2016, concedes that he has ambitions of gracing the very highest level, but he will not be pushing for a move and, at the age of 25, appreciates that time is on his side.

"There is in interest in me," he is quoted as saying by ESPN.

"But Everton are an ambitious club as well.

"I don't think they will let their best players go just like that.

"I want to play for one of the biggest clubs one day. But I am patient."

http://www1.skysports.com/football/news/11671/8249229/

hairy cataract wrote:Obviously they should shut the fuck up, but on the other hand you can;t really blame them for wanting to play for a "big club". You go to Chelsea and you double your wages, you get swarmed all over by the media, you go to the West End clubs, you get to shag slappers from all over the world, you become "mates" with superstar names, you get to play the odd CL game, you sit on a really nice bench when you are out of the first team, you have reached the pinnacle of your profession.

Thing is, I wouldn't go to Citteh necessarily because they just don't have that "big club" aura yet, just a rich club like that mad Russian club which keeps signing greedy arseholes. Fellaini should really only consider Chelsea, ManUre or Arsenal in this country - and the latter only if he's given assurances about other signings. Funny how the Shite really are considered neither a big club nor a rich club any more.

If I was Fellaini right now, I'd be tempted to jump ship while my star is in the ascendency. If he waits another year, he may be old news, or get injured. The main problem is, where would he fit in at a "big club"? Would anyone else play him as that spoiler type frontman, or would they be happy to stick someone as slow as he is in the midfield?

I think we'll also struggle to hold on to Miralas for more than a year too if he carries on playing the way he has. £35m for Fellaini and £20m for Miralas, spend it on pies for the lads.

Barney Ronay
The Guardian, Friday 16 November 2012 14.29 GMT
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Watching Everton's Marouane Fellaini it is tempting to conclude that the chest is an unfairly neglected tool. Photograph: Clive Brunskill/Getty Images
As the January transfer window approaches it is possible to hear already the distant bustle of tents being pitched, sleeping bags unfurled, sandbags piled, prime pavement spots sniffily contested. Every year there is at least one guaranteed object of sales day frenzy, the season's most desirable must-have item to be scooped up by the January shopper with the sharpest elbows.

This year it is already clear who this going to be. The Bone China Tea Set Player of this year's January sale will be the Belgian Marouane Fellaini of Everton, a player who has consistently drawn ominous and unsettling attention to himself by playing with unsustainable excellence at a merely mid-to-high ranking club. There is a kind of unavoidable burden attached performing like this beneath the eyes of the Premier League's ruling powers, like coming into bloom as a beautiful peasant daughter in some seigneurial mediaeval fiefdom.

Cover yourself my dear, you can almost hear David Moyes hissing from behind his plough. Be not too becoming. The master shall notice.

This week Fellaini has been linked again with a move to Chelsea, on this occasion by none other than Fellaini himself, albeit in the form of a carefully nuanced denial. "I want to play for one of the biggest clubs one day, but I am patient," he said, ruling nothing out and ruling nothing in, but forced to squirm and equivocate in the familiar manner of the player who commits an offence against the natural hierarchy by remaining outstandingly well-used where he is when he could instead be experiencing the elite alienation of big‑club fringe-dom, high-fiving substituted team-mates, running on in a suit when other players win trophies, looking mildly concerned in a beanie hat and so on.

If this is a familiar story, Fellaini himself is an interesting case. Billed most often as an attacking midfielder, it is his sheer physical scale that tends to generate a familiar buzz of folkish excitement: the unusual breadth of his limbs, that vast bobbing head shrouded in its lustrous Bel-fro, the fact that often in the Premier League he looks a bit like a man kicking a balloon around in his socks at Christmas."Fellaini can be unplayable ," it is sometimes said, and English football has always loved this word with its suggestion of some state of unanswerable psychical ultimacy, of tiring of all the difficult, intricate stuff and simply turning the Scrabble board upside down, ripping up the exam paper. Andy Carroll in his best moments is described as "unplayable", albeit his career ambitions seem to have narrowed in recent weeks into a repeated attempt to execute successfully a flying overhead kick, leading him to spend large parts of any game writhing on his back like a giant doomed woodlouse.

It is easy to wonder what Fellaini might bring to Chelsea's already well‑stocked attacking midfield. At first glance, with his outsized physicality, his double-thickness limbs, he looks like another example of that recent phenomenon the Undercover Big Man, an attacking midfielder who lurks in fashionable areas but is there to perform what is essentially an old-fashioned concussive function, not so much playing in the hole as ripping you a new one.

Much has been made of Yaya Touré's highly effective runaway-caravan role at Manchester City, those periods when he is encouraged to gallop with the ball towards an opposing defence, a gambit that in its more unhinged moments brings to mind the final Lycra-ripping, vein-popping stages of the barrel-running round of the World's Strongest Man.

It isn't just size, though. Fellaini brings his own specialised skill: a unique ability to play football with his chest. Really, he is the best at this. A while back, Sky Sports' Goals on Sunday did a montage of Fellaini chest-skill and it was genuinely awe-inspiring, the Fellaini chest seeming to caress the ball, to guide and persuade it with a craftsman's precision.

Like all good players Fellaini can pass, run and finish. But uniquely this is a man who can also run a game with his chest, leaping to grab the ball out of its flight like a man taking a bullet for the president, cupping it, swilling it around, redirecting it with a single practised flex of a chest that must by now have the texture of a delightfully weathered and worn wicketkeeping glove of the 1930s.

Watching Fellaini it is tempting to conclude that the chest is an unfairly neglected tool. It slips through the gaps, failing to register in terms of stats or strategy in a world obsessed with the more obvious charms of the feet and forehead. Currently the chest probably stands a distant third in footballing importance, just in front of the knee. Perhaps part of its problem it is that it lacks a vocabulary of skills. You might want to describe Fellaini, for example, as having "an educated chest", but we never hear this kind of talk: a cultured chest, a jack-hammer of a chest, or for those whose chest work is obviously inadequate, a chest he just uses for holding his neck up. And the fact is the chest is a very difficult technique, a matter of timing, peripheral vision and basic courage to brave those moments where the ball strikes the chest with the horrible hollow thud, the nipple-skinning howl of pain familiar to any Sunday league player foolish enough to attempt it with insufficient give, timing or muscle bulk. All the more surprising, then, that there is no mention of the chest in any of the FA's headline coaching manuals of the last 30 years, not even in the long-ball bible of the 1980s The Winning Formula, with its seven pages on "lofted passes", its preoccupation with "the prime target area" and its single-page entry for something called "patience".

If the chest has always tended to be a source of mild distrust in English football, seen as a compromise, a fudge, halfway towards a handball, there have been plenty of great chesters around. I remember seeing Roberto Carlos pull a huge spiralling goal-kick out of the air with his chest. Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who made his first appearance in top-level football only this week, is a brilliant chester. During Sweden's most rampant long ball period he would often use the chest to angle and flick and redirect like a man offering slip catching practice. Mark Hughes gave good chest. Joe Cole, by contrast has always seemed slightly troubled by the chest, constantly trying to tame some horribly bouncing ball surrounded by brontosaurus-thighed aggressors, chesting always in desperation where Fellaini, for example, wears the ball like a scarf.

For the neutral it is to be hoped that Fellaini will stay at Everton in January, if only because this seems to be good for him and good for Everton, not to mention good for those who admire chest work of the highest class. And perhaps in the end the chest simply needs a standard bearer.

This may yet be Fellaini, a man who – as it was once said of Ferenc Puskas's left foot – has a chest that is "like a hand". For now those going to watch football this weekend could even be encouraged to celebrate the chest a little when it appears, to lead a small ripple of connoisseurial applause of the type usually reserved for a sideways pass or a defensive punt into the top tier, sparing a thought for the third way, the game's one neglected border town between hoof and head.

The President wrote:Suspended

Yankthattoffee wrote:

The President wrote:Suspended

I saw the yellow card in the stats bit at the end of MOTD, but I can't recall the incident. Was in the Cobden bog at the time?

hairy cataract wrote:Obviously they should shut the fuck up, but on the other hand you can;t really blame them for wanting to play for a "big club". You go to Chelsea and you double your wages, you get swarmed all over by the media, you go to the West End clubs, you get to shag slappers from all over the world, you become "mates" with superstar names, you get to play the odd CL game, you sit on a really nice bench when you are out of the first team, you have reached the pinnacle of your profession.

Thing is, I wouldn't go to Citteh necessarily because they just don't have that "big club" aura yet, just a rich club like that mad Russian club which keeps signing greedy arseholes. Fellaini should really only consider Chelsea, ManUre or Arsenal in this country - and the latter only if he's given assurances about other signings. Funny how the Shite really are considered neither a big club nor a rich club any more.

If I was Fellaini right now, I'd be tempted to jump ship while my star is in the ascendency. If he waits another year, he may be old news, or get injured. The main problem is, where would he fit in at a "big club"? Would anyone else play him as that spoiler type frontman, or would they be happy to stick someone as slow as he is in the midfield?

I think we'll also struggle to hold on to Miralas for more than a year too if he carries on playing the way he has. £35m for Fellaini and £20m for Miralas, spend it on pies for the lads.

Made 4 Gwladys wrote:

Yankthattoffee wrote:

The President wrote:Suspended

I saw the yellow card in the stats bit at the end of MOTD, but I can't recall the incident. Was in the Cobden bog at the time?

I think he was booked for gobbing off when Coleman gave away the penalty

Goodison_Gringo wrote:

Made 4 Gwladys wrote:

Yankthattoffee wrote:

The President wrote:Suspended

I saw the yellow card in the stats bit at the end of MOTD, but I can't recall the incident. Was in the Cobden bog at the time?

I think he was booked for gobbing off when Coleman gave away the penalty

Was going to get banned sooner or later. Better he misses the Norwich game than one of the December fixtures I suppose.

Yankthattoffee wrote:

Goodison_Gringo wrote:

Made 4 Gwladys wrote:

Yankthattoffee wrote:

The President wrote:Suspended

I saw the yellow card in the stats bit at the end of MOTD, but I can't recall the incident. Was in the Cobden bog at the time?

I think he was booked for gobbing off when Coleman gave away the penalty

Was going to get banned sooner or later. Better he misses the Norwich game than one of the December fixtures I suppose.

The problem is we have no height in the side for the Norwich game.
We look dreadful from short set pieces like the Reading 1st goal. Not the first time we've been exposed like this.
Dizzie has to play on Saturday.

mindyerho? wrote:

Yankthattoffee wrote:

Goodison_Gringo wrote:

Made 4 Gwladys wrote:

Yankthattoffee wrote:

The President wrote:Suspended

I saw the yellow card in the stats bit at the end of MOTD, but I can't recall the incident. Was in the Cobden bog at the time?

I think he was booked for gobbing off when Coleman gave away the penalty

Was going to get banned sooner or later. Better he misses the Norwich game than one of the December fixtures I suppose.

The problem is we have no height in the side for the Norwich game.
We look dreadful from short set pieces like the Reading 1st goal. Not the first time we've been exposed like this.
Dizzie has to play on Saturday.

Keeping the ball on the floor would do us very little harm. Baines best crosses are the chest high ones to the near post.

Yankthattoffee wrote:

mindyerho? wrote:

Yankthattoffee wrote:

Goodison_Gringo wrote:

Made 4 Gwladys wrote:

Yankthattoffee wrote:

The President wrote:Suspended

I saw the yellow card in the stats bit at the end of MOTD, but I can't recall the incident. Was in the Cobden bog at the time?

I think he was booked for gobbing off when Coleman gave away the penalty

Was going to get banned sooner or later. Better he misses the Norwich game than one of the December fixtures I suppose.

The problem is we have no height in the side for the Norwich game.
We look dreadful from short set pieces like the Reading 1st goal. Not the first time we've been exposed like this.
Dizzie has to play on Saturday.

Keeping the ball on the floor would do us very little harm. Baines best crosses are the chest high ones to the near post.

I'm thinking more defensively. Jags only one with any height. Despite his name, number 5 is not heightinger.
We look dreadful from short set pieces like the Reading 1st goal. Not the first time we've been exposed like this.