Beef Bagel

Thanks to them at Premium TV, who I must say were very good to me despite some teething problems with Spurs TV, I was able to watch MJ and his men pick up the Vodacom Challenge trophy from the comfort of my own home. Actually, huddled over a dusty lap-top on an unforgiving wooden chair is not exactly how I like to watch my football but perhaps that had more to do with the quality of what was on offer.

The first 20 minutes was a stunner with 3 great goals, a fine looking Darren Bent and a rather sorry South African outfit and I’m not referring to those shirt and trouser combos that Mandela likes to wear. To say we switched off is a bit of an understatement, so count yourself lucky if all that you see are these highlights…

What you should realise, if you didn’t manage to pick it up, is that Darren Bent is looking lethal. Gone are my reservations about his purchase. It’s frightening to see what he can do with some decent service for the first time in his life. According to MJ…

“He’s got real penetration and he stretches defences,”

…which all sounds rather painful and will no doubt leave a number of Premiership centre halves feeling pretty nervy.

What I see is that there is no doubt in his mind when he strikes the ball and bugger me can he smack it. Looking forward to seeing him live and this time playing for us.

The other thing to note is that Taarabt is good but he’s got some work to do. He loves to beat players with his fancy footwork but he’s got to learn when to do it. He gave away possession a couple of times in front of our own area and on both occasions the Pirates should have scored. A Premiership team would have.

The game, in fact, the whole tournament was hardly a test, particularly when you look at who arsenal are playing in their pre-season matches. You’d be a fool to write off our North London rivals for the top four this season and we may find better purchase trying to dislodge Liverpool.

Now, we had a nice little discussion over the weekend on what we need to take us forward and I’d agree that we’ve got to stop the rot at the back if we’re to be contenders in this campaign, although The Bagel is very keen for a left sided midfielder. There were games last season when we looked very 2-dimensional and once Little Aaron and Dimitar the Great had been put into check we never looked like scoring.

Whatever your school of thought, it’s most heartening to see good strong links to good strong players in the press this morning in all three of the areas where we need to improve.

“I’ve said it many times before that I want players here who want to play for the shirt so we can move the club forward together.

We’ve sold Jason Koumas, Diomansy Kamara and Paul McShane (who?) who all made it clear they wanted to leave.

We’ve now an opportunity to build a new team with players who are fully committed to taking the club forward.”

That’s number one from Baggies boss, Tony Mowbray, on the future of Curtis Davies who looks a dead cert to move now. The question is where and seeing as they already got £6m for Kamara and £4.6m for Koumas it’ll surely be a question of who stumps up the £8m-10m first.

Whether it’s the same roll of notes or just another in our seemingly bottomless biscuit tin stash, we look happy to spend the same amount in a bid for the services of Swedish international lefty, Kim Kallstrom. Despite having a girl’s name, he’s a very tempting prospect and a big chap too, which could be handy in defending some of those meddlesome set pieces.

Strictly speaking he’d rather play behind the front two and with a shot like that, it’s not difficult to see why but perhaps we could just put him out on the wing and paint our strikers’ heads to look like the goal? This could bring as much concussion to our front men as it would success but hey, we’ve got five of them to rotate.

Our offer seems somewhat speculative just now with competition from Valencia and not a peep from Kallstrom’s owners Lyon. With 28 appearances and seven goals for the Champions League outfit last season they may be less than keen to part with the 24-year-old but I feel something in my crumbs on this one. He just looks like a Spurs player to me. I have a vision of his name on the back of a Lillywhite shirt and balance we’ve long been seeking.

The third this morning is Prince Kevin and what we hear today is that yes, yawn-yawn, negotiations over his personal terms are still ongoing. It sounds to me like he wants to come to us, we want him to come but there’s still some posturing to work out his best possible wage. I believe he’s passed the Yiddo Test.

The comedy transfer of the day comes from Norway as ex-Spurs winger Emil Hallfredesson is sold on by Lyn Oslo after less than three weeks.

“It is a very good deal for all parties. We are pleased,” said club director, Torgeir Bjarmann (do they just make up these names for the British press?) which seems to read that they’re glad to be shot of the lad. I wonder how long he’ll last at new club Reggina? At this stage I’m sure he’d settle for one game of football or perhaps just a stadium tour.

Big ‘b’, little ‘a’, little ‘g’, little ‘e’, little ‘l’….Bagel prize…to hell with the prize.

The Bagel.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 11:53 am and is filed under Bagel News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.