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Micah
- Thread starter pedigreeblue
- Start date
jus moochin
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- 13 Oct 2011
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- 469
Micah's hard enough to take the knock backs he's constantly received from England. I hope he and Gareth get a good rest, because they'll need it for next season.
I'm sure Woy will get as much as he can out of the team he puts out.
C'MON ENGLAND!
I'm sure Woy will get as much as he can out of the team he puts out.
C'MON ENGLAND!
ANY1aBLUE said:I think its all down to being injury prone, and Richards is.
Kelly has a worse injury record.
jus moochin said:Micah's hard enough to take the knock backs he's constantly received from England. I hope he and Gareth get a good rest, because they'll need it for next season.
I'm sure Woy will get as much as he can out of the team he puts out.
C'MON ENGLAND!
Although I expect that Micah will be undertaking pre season with GB's Olympic squad rather than City
The Future's Blue
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- 13 Dec 2010
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- 3,302
Is that why Pearce called him? 'Do you want the good news or the bad news?', in a very Shreeves'ish sort of way!cibaman said:jus moochin said:Micah's hard enough to take the knock backs he's constantly received from England. I hope he and Gareth get a good rest, because they'll need it for next season.
I'm sure Woy will get as much as he can out of the team he puts out.
C'MON ENGLAND!
Although I expect that Micah will be undertaking pre season with GB's Olympic squad rather than City
Eccles Blue
Well-Known Member
I was really pleased when Hodgson got the job but his squad selection leaves a hell of a lot of questions. The main one being why, if as everyone suspects he didn't pick Ferdinand because of the Terry situation, did he pick Terry? Terry should not be in the England squad until the court situation is sorted out. I have a great regard for innocent until proven guilty (as I have stated in the Johnson thread) but this case has gone on for far too long and until it is finished Terry and Ferdinand should either both be picked or neither be picked.
As for ignoring Micah and choosing almost a quarter of his squad from a team who only managed 8th in the Premiership the man is unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable.
As for ignoring Micah and choosing almost a quarter of his squad from a team who only managed 8th in the Premiership the man is unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable.
jus moochin
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- Joined
- 13 Oct 2011
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- 469
Eccles Blue said:I was really pleased when Hodgson got the job but his squad selection leaves a hell of a lot of questions. The main one being why, if as everyone suspects he didn't pick Ferdinand because of the Terry situation, did he pick Terry? Terry should not be in the England squad until the court situation is sorted out. I have a great regard for innocent until proven guilty (as I have stated in the Johnson thread) but this case has gone on for far too long and until it is finished Terry and Ferdinand should either both be picked or neither be picked.
As for ignoring Micah and choosing almost a quarter of his squad from a team who only managed 8th in the Premiership the man is unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable.
I can see him going for 3 of the Chelsea back 4 for Englands defence, as they are a formidable unit. Cahills injury however has opened up the worm cam. I'm surprised at Woy's replacement- but I still have faith that he'll get a strong performance from the squad he's picked.We haven't got the pool of players that we need-but we may have the most organised team since Sir Alf.
To me its obvious that if Balotelli said Micah was crying, he was joking. I'm pretty sure he didn't anyway-watch the post match video interview where Mario is wearing a daft flat cap.
Danny Taylor in The Guardian tends to know what's going on at City. His articles certainly read like it. He's got a piece on Ferdinand and Micah that sounds true. On my phone so can't link to it.
Danny Taylor in The Guardian tends to know what's going on at City. His articles certainly read like it. He's got a piece on Ferdinand and Micah that sounds true. On my phone so can't link to it.
seemedownkippaxstreet said:To me its obvious that if Balotelli said Micah was crying, he was joking. I'm pretty sure he didn't anyway-watch the post match video interview where Mario is wearing a daft flat cap.
Danny Taylor in The Guardian tends to know what's going on at City. His articles certainly read like it. He's got a piece on Ferdinand and Micah that sounds true. On my phone so can't link to it.
Football reasons, Roy Hodgson had said. "What reasons?????!!!" Rio Ferdinand responded on Twitter, and it is fair to say that keeping his finger pressed down on the question and exclamation marks made it clear what he made of Martin Kelly's callup and where it left his own England career. Finished, almost certainly.
Ferdinand was probably never going to go quietly after finding out, once again, he had been overlooked, this time in favour of a promising yet raw 22-year-old who plays predominantly at right-back. A serial Premier League winner, with a 14-year international career encompassing 81 caps, had just learned of his place in the new order of merit and the anger was understandable when, put bluntly, there is nobody in the world who can convince him it is genuinely about football any longer. For Ferdinand it is simple. All the different strands, the clues, the reading between the lines, and what is now staring him in the face. It all comes back to one man: John Terry.
The England manager has certainly left himself vulnerable to scrutiny and, in the process, it is easy to sympathise with Kelly, a talented player who has acquitted himself ably as Glen Johnson's understudy at Liverpool and can never have imagined that the initial exhilaration of being asked to join the squad, cutting short a holiday in New York, would be followed by the realisation that at least 95% of the country does not believe it is warranted.
Gary Lineker's own contribution to Twitter was revealing in another way: "Yet another injury blow. Gary Cahill out. Time for Rio Ferdinand? No. Micah Richards then? No. How remiss of me, has to be Martin Kelly." Lineker is hardly known for his sarcasm.
The Richards situation should certainly not be overlooked amid all the rancour about Ferdinand and, again, it is not an episode that reflects particularly well on Hodgson. Contrary to popular opinion, Richards would have loved the chance to board the plane to Krakow on Wednesday.
The first thing to consider, however, is that Cahill's absence, with a double fracture to the jaw, is a considerable setback given the understanding he has developed in defence alongside Terry and Ashley Cole and, most recently, a performance in the Champions League final that had a significant bearing on Chelsea overcoming Bayern Munich. Joleon Lescott has had a good season at Manchester City and the same applies to Phil Jagielka of Everton.
All the same, Ferdinand is not demonstrating rampant big-headedness to believe he should be in the team, never mind just the squad. At 33, his fitness has been an issue for three seasons but he has not missed a game through injury since January, and Hodgson emphasised when he announced his squad that Ferdinand was being left out for football reasons rather than concerns about whether his body could hold up to tournament football. What he has never done is explain what those football reasons are.
Ferdinand's mood is not soothed by the fact that Phil Jones, one of his understudies at Old Trafford, is in the squad and that Hodgson was also planning to select another Manchester United player, Chris Smalling, until prevented by injury. In fairness to Hodgson, the fact that Jones and Smalling can also play at right-back was attractive to him but nobody will dissuade Ferdinand now from suspecting that Fabio Capello's successor may well have decided it would not be feasible to include him and Terry in the same squad when the Chelsea player is to stand trial on 9 July for allegedly racially abusing Anton Ferdinand, Rio's younger brother. Terry denies the charge.
What particularly appals Ferdinand is that this case has nothing to do with him and, in his mind, it should have been Terry who was left out if he was facing such a serious allegation. Even after the FA made it clear Terry could play, Ferdinand was willing to travel with the squad and engage in a working relationship. Whether that would have been possible, it is difficult to say, but it is easy to see why Hodgson would have had misgivings. He is aware, for starters, of Ferdinand's popularity within the squad and that several players all but blanked Terry before the games against Spain and Sweden last October. Lescott is understood to be firmly in the Ferdinand camp and will now partner Terry after apparently cold-shouldering him during previous get-togethers.
The case of Richards is very different and would have been solved far more easily had Hodgson spoken to the Manchester City player. Instead, Hodgson asked the England Under-21 manager Stuart Pearce to contact Richards to break the news that he had not made the squad. That was the first mistake because, once Richards had taken in the initial disappointment, he was entitled to be put out that the manager had not contacted him personally but telephoned everyone else himself. His pride was bruised, as it often is with footballers, but it was still a situation that could have been resolved with little fuss.
Perhaps it was that Hodgson felt Pearce, who knows Richards well, could handle it more sensitively. There could be any number of explanations, yet it was unusual in the extreme for a manager to delegate such an important call. Richards then had two conversations with Pearce. The first informed him he had not made the cut, which was a considerable blow given he was coming off the back of a title-winning season and Kyle Walker had already pulled out with injury. Pearce then arranged to phone back later to establish if Richards would go on the standby list. The background context here is that Richards had been almost permanently ignored by Capello, with one disappointment after another. Before the second conversation with Pearce, he spoke to his father, whose advice was to ask, politely, not to be considered – not in a fit of pique, but simply because he was so devastated.
Hodgson sent Richards a short text message the following morning saying he was "disappointed" with the decision and has not been in touch since. In the end Richards arranged a last-minute holiday to Barbados with Daniel Sturridge – in part, to get over the disappointment of missing out.
Ferdinand left on Sunday on a holiday of his own but before swapping rainy Manchester for the Greek sunshine, he was intrigued to find out the FA's reasoning is that Kelly has the advantage of being part of the squad since the Norway game, and that Hodgson was concerned calling up another player would mean bringing in someone who had not played since 13 May. Ferdinand has daily workouts at his home gymnasium, regularly goes into United's training ground and played in a charity match for Park Ji-sung in Bangkok on 24 May.
Fitness should not have been an issue for Richards either, given that he is always among the players at City to have the lowest percentage of body fat when they are checked over out of season. He is back from Barbados now and said to be in a state of mild shock – not by his own omission, but Ferdinand's.