English Premier League: Goals For Sale

Cuts. The new age of austerity. Money too tight to mention.

Aye, right.

Not in the English Premier League this January transfer window.

Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City and Aston Villa all spent big. And everyone of them threw cheques at attackers.

Money might have grotesquely disfigured football. But the essential simplicity of the game remains.

You have to score goals to compete. And you have to compete with massive money to score goals.

Mark Briggs has been hanging around Hadrian's Wall with his night vision binoculars to bring us a guest post on the comings and a-goings in the London Stock Exchange English Premier League:

What do we want? Goals! When do we want them? Now!

And we are prepared to pay for them!!

The January transfer window has a reputation as being a bit anti-climatic. All talk, no trousers. Damp squib. Any others? Pointless?

But not this year. The English Premier League is known as the most exciting league in the world and I think that is in no small part due to how much teams are willing to spend on strikers.

Firstly, and it almost seems to have snuck under the radar, Manchester City stumped up from of their vast reserve to buy in the ‘Bosnian Diamond,’ Edwin Dzeko.

After tallying 66 goals in 111 games for Wolfsburg he’s arrived at Eastlands to help out the one man attacking unit that is Carlos Tevez.

At a cost of £27million, he isn’t a gamble for City who don’t need balance books (yet). It does look like he will require City to change their tactics though, and play two up front. Maybe with a bit more attacking intent. We live in hope.

Villa were next up. Splashing £18million and rising on Darren Bent. Say what you want about him, he scores a lot of goals, where ever he’s been, however good his team.

At Tottenham, where a terrible miss and lack of interplay ultimately cost him, he is perceived to have failed, but scored at a healthy ratio. Villa need goals and they need them now, Darren saw something there which made him decide it was a good career move to drop around 10 league places. So the deal was done.

‘Crazy money!’ People cried. Little did they know what was coming on deadline day.

Torres £50m, Carroll £35m, Suarez £23m, plus David Luiz for another £25m. Big, big deals.

Liverpool could have waited to sign Carroll in the summer and maybe got a better deal. But in an interview with the Guardian John Henry (Liverpool’s new owner) said the team still had aims for this season, and Carroll would help them meet them.

He also, interestingly said the price of Torres was dependent on how much Newcastle wanted for Carroll. His negotiation tactic was he wanted Carroll plus £15million for Fernando Torres. I’d say (laying aside the mind boggling sums of money for a second) that’s a good deal.

Add in the sale of Babel and Liverpool are only £2.5million worse off, and probably have a better squad.

They failed with a last minute £14 million bid for Charlie Adam. He would add something to them, but is worth more than that to Blackpool who, in my opinion, need him to stay up. But he wont last till next season and, even if not to Liverpool, I think he’ll leave after being denied his big move.

So who has come out of this well?

I think everybody except Sunderland. They don’t have a replacement striker. And none are in sight. Yes, they have the money but players who cost that much might now want to play for Sunderland, no matter how high up the league they are at the moment. They need consistency at that level to draw in big names. Without their big player that may prove difficult.

You can repeat that last paragraph but read Newcastle instead of Sunderland.

Chelsea gave their team a lift, splashed some cash and said “we are contenders” and Liverpool can now think about who is coming in, not worrying about who is going out.

Did Arsenal need a centre-back? Tottenham another striker? Maybe.

This season has been damn good so far. Thrills, spills, big transfers.

Football is great again.

Now the trophies are up for grabs from here on in.

The Carling Cup must surely be Arsenal?

The Champions League is Barcelonas to lose?

The FA Cup is far too early to even guess. But, Chelsea?

The English Premier League?

Well, Manchester United are a good few points ahead and tend to get stronger in the spring.

I’m going with Manchester United, although I think it will be a proper title race, with Chelsea, Arsenal, and Manchester City all hopeful of a late burst to the line.

English Premier League: Bent Transfers In England

Football's versions of the January sales - inflated prices and manager's traipsing far and wide with the desperation of a father searching for a Buzz Lightyear toy on Christmas Eve.

Regular English Premier League guest blogger, Mark Briggs, is back with a look at the moves and speculation as Kenny Dalglish looks to revitalise Liverpool, Charlie Adam and Blackpool face up to a parting of the ways and a calm and collected Aston Villa are in no way panicked into a big money move for Darren Bent. And Scottish managers take control:

With December now behind us, and festive waistlines deflating quicker than English confidence in Wayne Rooney, it's time to look at the stage of the season where the games become mere fodder and filler compared to the noble art of transfer speculation.

Last month we saw Chelsea slip and recover. Aston Villa moved from saying “we’re not worried” to “we’re in a fight no doubt about it” in a week or two. It looks like we’ve got a proper title race, with Manchester City confirming they are contenders.

Arsenal look like they are going to give it all they have to win something this season. Yet despite seeming progress, they are currently 0-1 down to Ipswich in the Carling Cup, needed a last minute penalty and a replay to see off Leeds in the FA Cup and face Barcelona in the Champions League. Things may not look so rosy in a month.

But they’ve played well enough to have the chairman asking where they left the key to the trophy cabinet, despite being on the third goalkeeper of the year.

The Manchester teams are in good little battle of their own, with the blue half splashing the cash on Dzeko and having a bit of a clear out of players who didn’t quite make the grade.

Alan Pardew rode in on a white horse and with promised to play “sexy football”… No, wait. Getting my managers confused, that was Kenny Dalglish way back when, or was it that bloke now in charge in Chechnya?

I am too young to remember with any detail the last Anfield reign of King Kenny but (despite some mediocre results) he has already given Liverpool a sense of belief. They don’t have a good squad and are not challenging for trophies but a feeling has been created that this is now a temporary state of affairs, whereas a few weeks ago it seemed inevitable. They will need more players to come in this month, and they need quality, but optimism is on the rise.

An interesting little side note brought to my attention the other day: There are currently more managers working in the English Premier League from Glasgow than from the whole of England. (Ferguson, Dalglish, Moyes, McLeish, Kean and Coyle vs Redknapp, Bruce, Holloway and Pardew)

Blackpool look to be facing up to the inevitability of their success, the realisation that they aren’t big enough to hold on to your truly good players. So how much is Charlie Adam worth? And, more importantly, when to let him go? Now at an inflated price, at the end of the season after hopefully staying in the Premiership, or for free in 18 months? Pros and cons to all. Tough job being a football manager.

The big news, about six months after losing Martin O’Neil because of lack of investment, Aston Villa have been forced to shell out £24million for Darren Bent because they can't score goals and might go down. Worth the trade? Tough job being a football chairman.

It's staying interesting people!

Will blog again once the transfer sagas are done and dusted to try and make sense of the prices, winners and losers.

The Scottish Football Blog News Feed

Book review: Martin O'Neill - The Biography

By Simon Moss (John Blake Publishing)

It's a tricky thing, writing an unauthorised biography. How do you pitch it? Do you go for the muckraking reportage of rumour and innuendo like Kitty Kelley or Albert Goldman? Or just use existing sources to build a portrait of the subject.

In Martin O'Neill: The Biography, Simon Moss takes the latter approach in a workman-like book that ultimately fails to satisfy.

Partly this is the fault of O'Neill himself. A complex, intense character he deserves more than a life illustrated by old cuttings.

Even here though you feel Moss could have done better. O'Neill's relationship with Brian Clough obviously shaped both his playing career and his subsequent attitude to the role of manager. Moss refers to it a lot but fails to properly examine it.

Similarly the way events in Northern Ireland affected O'Neill as a young Northern Irish Catholic living in England are alluded to but not really analysed. That might be excusable in a football book but they must have played some part in shaping O'Neill and certainly influenced his relationship with Neil Lennon when he joined him at Celtic.

And brevity is not always the author's friend. I feel that a sentence like "O'Neill...may have been immune to the troubles taking place in his homeland, but Forest had their own problems on the pitch" veers towards the offensive when the year in question is 1972.

So we are left with a chronological tour through O'Neill's career. And there's nothing wrong with that, especially for Celtic fans as the Parkhead period is given the lion's share of the book.

Personally I'd have like to hear more about the playing years. I know a little about that strained relationship with Clough but I was unaware, for example, that O'Neill scored for Irish club Distillery in the Nou Camp as a teenager.

Still, that's a minor quibble in a book that is clearly geared towards those interested in O'Neill the manager - an approach that might yet have Liverpool fans snapping it up in the weeks ahead.

Less easy to overlook are the errors that litter the pages. The Manchester United of one sentence become the Untied of the next. It becomes laughable when "former O'Neill charge Emily Heskey" gets what must surely have been a memorable equaliser. It is perhaps unfair to judge Moss' work on the failings of his editor - Lord knows this blog is not without errors - but when "Nemanja Vidi?" is making an appearance on the second last page this reader's patience was sorely tried.

An editor with a knowledge of Scottish football would probably have also realised that Celtic were unlikely to be playing "Livingstone" (Doctor, I presume). Similarly The Herald is suddenly transformed into Sydney's Morning Herald.

There are numerous examples of this: O'Neill is quoted as saying that John Clark told him the Celtic team of 1976 never got booed. Why Clark would pick a season five years after he left Celtic is unclear. Unless, of course, he was talking about 1967. A big mistake that as far as Celtic are concerned.

When, on page 213, "O'Nell was forced to blood nineteen-year-old David Youngster" in goals at the Nou Camp, these errors had me snorting my tea. Still, for a marshall, Youngster did very well.

And that's all a shame, because the book deserves better. It's not a classic, it's not the definitive O'Neill story, but it's a worthwhile look at a man who has been involved in senior British football for almost forty years.

It's certainly readable - I particularly enjoyed having my memory jogged about Celtic's run to the UEFA Cup final - and remains so despite some of the more glaring errors.

But you can't help picture O'Neill's demented leaping at so many missed opportunities if Moss was playing for one of his teams. In the end this book leaves you wanting more. For that we might have to wait for Martin O'Neill: The Autobiography.

If he can ever sit down long enough to write it.

You can buy Martin O'Neill: The Biography and loads of other stuff at The Scottish Football Bookshop. Mercy me, I need the cash.