Zion's Combined Manchester IV

Ahead of the super sunday clash between the Manchester clubs at the Etihad this is my combined IV to while away the time. And I must say it wasn’t that difficult considering some players are still playing catch-up as the season progresses.

Formation 4-2-3-1

Goalkeeper:
David De Gea - The spaniard has shaken off an awkward start to become 1 of the best keepers in the BPL. He was the reason United kept Chelsea at bay for that long before Van Persie's equalizer. That save from Hazard's shot was an incredible use of body to narrow the space for Hazard.

Defenders:
Kompany - This is easy. He will easily walk into any defence in the world and be a starter. Such is the influence of the Belgian that City has always looked vulnerable without him to lead the team out. He's the complete defender combining strength with pace and agility. He's kept Diego Costa at bay this season, up next is Van Persie.

Demichelis - He was terrible last season and I think he found the solution in getting rid of his ponytail to cut down time at the salon to train and its paid off this season. He's kept Mangala on the bench and keeps the likes of Phil Jones and Smalling from this squad.

Zabaleta - The businessman. Thats what he is. He does his job without fuss. The Argentine would have been the captain of his club if Kompany wasn't so damn good at his job. Luke Shaw was under consideration but he's only had 1 good game all season against Chelsea.

Sagna - His switch from Arsenal to City has been as smooth as he could have wished slotting straight into the team.  He's one the players who can guarantee you an 8/10 performance in every game.

Midfielders:
Yaya Toure - Another easy choice. The ivorian powerhouse has been a little under it this season not really hitting the heights of last season yet but then who's there to knock him out of this team. Rojo has been good this season but its easier to spot in a united team that is not really up there in terms of performance.

Fernando - This was harder. I was tempted to go with flair in the middle and pick Herrera but this team has much of that upfront so I go with tha brazilian hardman. He's so strong in tackles and hardly pick bookings.  He's efficient.

Angel Di Maria -  His price tag would have got him in there anyway. For United its; if u have the ball give it to Di Maria and problem solved. If you don't have it go for it and give it to him and problem solved. That is how much the team depends on him now.

David Silva - Smooth as silk. Classy. Beautiful on the eyes. The brain to Yaya Toure's brawn. He orchestrates all of City's attack and his absence will be a massive loss to them.

Rooney - United's captain is the current highest scorer in the Manchester derby. His presence on sunday will be a massive boost to the team. He plays just off the striker where he's currently more effective.

Striker:
Aguero - Leading goalscorer in the league and highest league scorer for City. Very difficult to play against. He's fast, he's trickery and he scores. On his good day United are in big trouble.

The big match is tomorrow. A draw will be a massive favour to Chelsea

Giles Smith: Sure-footed and Sensible

For the definition of a ‘banana skin’, you could hardly have done much better than consult our Capital One Cup match at Shrewsbury on Tuesday night.

Lower league club on a hot streak of form? Check. Tipping rain? Check. Pitch tending towards the condition of a children’s paddling pool in certain areas? Check again. Capacity crowd? Check. In fact, specially enhanced capacity crowd. (The sponsors got some extra seats in for the occasion.)

Throw in a few injury problems and suspensions in key areas for the visiting club, and the fact that only about 10 minutes had passed since the final whistle blew on that visiting side’s last, relatively taxing league game, and you had an occasion which, to the viewer of a nervous disposition, could hardly have looked more yellow or more slippery or more obviously strewn across a pavement.

The fact that no chortlesome slapstick outcome ultimately ensued was, then, another reason to take quiet satisfaction in the encouraging sure-footedness of this current squad, now impressively unbeaten in 15 games across all competitions, apparently immune to the concept of ‘priorities’ (be they league, Champions League or Capital One Cup), and capable of traction, we now learn, on both a slippery pitch at Shrewsbury on a wet Tuesday night and a banana skin.

Incredible scenes on the full-time whistle at Old Trafford last Sunday; players and fans, their faces wet with tears of happiness, rejoiced and clutched each other in disbelief, scarves twirled and flags flew, fireworks exploded in the air,

tickertape fell from the skies in quantities unseen since the Apollo 11 astronauts were driven in glory through the streets of New York, and ecstatic supporters jigged in their seats and then danced out into the Manchester night, their revels just beginning.

How tempting it was, in those moments, to imagine a visitor to the planet watching these images unfold, and turning to his human guide to ask: ‘Why are your earthlings so behaving?’ And the guide would have had no choice but to reply, ‘It is because Manchester United have just drawn 1-1 at home.’

I suppose we ought to concede that it wasn’t just any old 1-1 draw, though. It was a 1-1 draw secured with almost the last kick of the game following a highly inconvenient sending-off for the opposition. You certainly don’t see too many of those.

You’ll remember, perhaps all too clearly, how it panned out in those dying seconds. Our right-back had just been booked for (I think) giving a hard stare to Angel Di Maria and simultaneously breathing outwards, causing the United player to stumble slightly. Unfortunately, our right-back had already been booked, earlier in the game, for (again, I think)

sneezing without using a handkerchief. (Apologies if I have got the precise details of those two offences slightly wrong. I’m taking a stab at these explanations on the grounds that, at the time, it was almost impossible to see what the referee was finding fault with. Obviously, I’m sure he had his reasons.)

And then, of course, with our right-back absent from the pitch, there was suddenly a large hole on the pitch, in the exact size and shape of Brana Ivanovic, who had been very much the opposite of a hole up to this point. Which in turn meant that, when the ensuing free-kick arrived in our penalty area, Marouane Fellaini was exactly 100 percent freer than he would otherwise have been, or certainly 100 percent less encumbered by a formidable piece of Serbian defender.

Even then, United didn’t score because Thibaut Courtois (only moments earlier handed the man of the match award by Gary Neville, which felt ominously like a jinx even at the time – and we all know who Neville used to play for, of course) managed to stop Fellaini’s header… only for the ball to drop freakishly into the space in front of him, creating a chance which Robin van Persie, even on current form, couldn’t miss (although, if you look at the replay you’ll see that he gave it a good old go).

Cue those scenes of unbridled joy. Now, you could say that it’s a mark of how spectacularly United have fallen from their former eminence over these past couple of years, that a point at home in the fourth minute of time-added-on is deemed all but worthy of an open-top bus tour. That would be small-minded and ungenerous, though, wouldn’t it?

Better, surely, to point out that life is short, and so is football – even when more than four minutes gets added on to it, as it tends to at Old Trafford – so you take your pleasures where and when you can. And don’t let’s forget that United were on their way to their third league defeat of the season. As it was they came

back to record their fourth draw. Of course, it didn’t feel like it at the time, nor for a number of hours afterwards, but we, too, had some reason to rejoice in the wake of this result, in the sense that, with Manchester City already having contrived to lose that weekend, it usefully expanded our lead over them at the top of the table.

And no one could deny that to be four points clear of Southampton, to be six points clear of Manchester City and to be (count ‘em) 10 points clear of Manchester United, after just 10 games, and with further league trips to Manchester entirely off the agenda for the remainder of the season, is to be in a happy enough position.

Indeed, if we manage to get it right against QPR on Saturday afternoon, we’ll be nine points clear of City and 13 points clear of United before those two sides play each other on Sunday. Though, of course, being a modest and sensible club, who likes to go about our business quietly and with decorum and a sense of perspective at all times, we’ll save the ticker-tape for bigger days.

Giles Smith is a columnist for the official Chelsea FC website and his weekly piece is published every Thursday throughout the season.

Bigger balls

Chelsea still lack balls. We lacked balls in the game against Manchester City and lacked balls on Sunday against Manchester United. The team has improved massively from last season due to the massive improvement on the part of our players and creating a balance in the squad from this summer's transfer activities but it is not far from the truth to say that this team still lacks the massive balls of the 04-05 Chelsea team. They killed the game even before it started. Once they took lead the match was practically over no matter the opposition. This current squad has played against United, City and Arsenal this season and has drawn 2 and won the Arsenal game. In those 2 Chelsea took the lead before conceding late equalisers. The ability to see out the bigs games is a quality that the previous teams had that this team needs to grasp very quickly before the turn of the year. There will be no room for error when the knockout stages of the Champions league begins next year.

United must really have it in for Chelsea. I mean how then do you explain what happened on Sunday? We were cruising to an 8 pts gap and then all of a sudden BANG...... the team is brought to the ground to do damage limitation. I mean this is a United team that is supposed to be not playing well with a questionable backline and even graciously gifted out all 3 pts to Swansea City when school reopened in the BPL  so what did we do that was so bad that they couldn't do the same for us? The least they could have done was play that famous 3-5-2 formation. Isn't the best way to try something new and make it work is to use it against the man you trained so you can all gain some experience? I guess Van Gaal is not that good a mentor after all.

It's been a long time coming. Since the times when we had  Eiður Guðjohnsen,Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and Gianfranco Zola in 2003 all banging in the goals for Chelsea have we had more than 1 forward carrying the team forward on his own and I must say that has practically always been Didier Drogba since then doing the job for the team till he departed in 2010 to be succeeded, albeit unsuccessfully, by Fernando Torres. This makes the amount of silverware the team won in that period all the more sweeter. The team placed second last season and was only a couple of bad results from winning it with a team whose midfielder (Hazard) scored more than the combined total of the strikers .But things look very different this season. The strikers are in super form led by Diego Costa with 9 goals already supported by Loic Remy and The Drog himself. It makes for pleasant viewing when you lose your 1st choice striker to injury and the 2nd choice comes and scores.  You lose the 2nd too then the 3rd choice too comes on and score 3 goals in 3 games within a week. The injuries aside it really makes for pleasant viewing. Manchester City won the league last with all their forwards very potent in front of goal. If the attack can continue delivering the goods the happy one might just turn into the excited one.

2014 FIFA Ballon d'Or shortlist:
Gareth Bale (Wales)
Karim Benzema (France)
Diego Costa (Spain)
Thibaut Courtois (Belgium)
Cristiano Ronaldo (Portugal)
Angel Di Maria(Argentina)
Mario Gotze (Germany)
Eden Hazard (Belgium)
Zlatan Ibrahimovic (Sweden)
Andres Iniesta (Spain)
Toni Kroos (Germany)
Philipp Lahm (Germany)
Javier Mascherano (Argentina)
Lionel Messi (Argentina)
Thomas Muller (Germany)
Manuel Neuer (Germany)
Neymar (Brazil)
Paul Pogba (France)
Sergio Ramos (Spain)
Arjen Robben (Netherlands)
James Rodriguez (Colombia)
Bastian Schweinsteiger (Germany)
Yaya Toure (Ivory Coast)

Everybody knows that Ronaldo is at the forefront to win it but why is James Rodriguez in there and not Luis Suarez?
I guess we all prefer a 5-goal non - biting world cup star to a 31-goal biting BPL star.

Giles Smith - Six Shooters

Some 36 hours after it happened, scientists are still at a loss to explain the appearance of John Terry in Maribor’s six-yard box on Tuesday night.

The bare facts are these: that in the 31st minute of our Champions League group game, our captain was seen defending a corner; and yet that, within seconds, after a run somehow entirely unnoticed by many of the more than 40,000 people in the ground to witness it, he was also spotted in the penalty area at the other end of the pitch, sliding onto a Cesc Fabregas cross and scoring the third of
our cluster of six goals on the night.

‘Was that… Terry?’ said my puzzled companion at the Matthew Harding End.

It was, though I don’t remember feeling quite so bamboozled since a Michael Jackson show at Wembley in the early 1990s when the late King of Pop (a massive Fulham fan, of course)
disappeared in a puff of smoke on one side of the stage – only to reappear almost instantaneously in another puff of smoke on the other side of the stage.

I believe this was an illusion on which Jackson had worked closely with David Copperfield, the great American magician and lavishly well-kempt showman who spent a significant portion of the Eighties and Nineties downwind of a hair-dryer. The stunt was said to involve cunning use of body-doubles and also an elaborate system of pulleys under the stage.

Has Terry been collaborating with Copperfield (who still has a show in Vegas and, I can report, a very brilliant one)? Are there pulleys under the Stamford Bridge turf? Again, we simply don’t know.
What we do know is that the distance of the run, as measured from its starting point just outside his own six-yard area, was 97.8 yards and that Terry was clocked (by police speed cameras, presumably) completing the distance in 13.2 seconds, which is none too shabby given that, so far as we are aware, he wasn’t using blocks, and given that he definitely wasn’t wearing Lycra. (UEFA frown on it, and quite rightly, in my opinion.)

Whisper it, but there may even have been a hint of offside. Which only makes us marvel at this moment still more. When your central defender is possibly a hair’s breadth in front of the opposition’s defensive line a split second after defending a set-piece in his own area, that player is showing a commitment to getting forward on the counter-attack which simply cannot be questioned.
It just seemed perfect that this goal should come directly after Terry’s 500th game as captain, which was marked in the victory over Crystal Palace last weekend. It was also amusing to note that Terry was older than Tuesday night’s referee, Danny Makkelie from Rotterdam, aged 31. (It’s always
good to see the young refs coming through, I’m sure you’ll agree.)

The cliché about Terry at this particular stage in his career, of course, and the one you will hear blithely trotted out in every pitch-side television studio across the land, is that pace is a diminishing
resource but that he compensates for its diminishment with positioning. Tuesday night’s pitch-length explosion rather dynamited that handy punditry nugget. It may actually be the case that, as he gets older, far from lagging, Terry is turning into that all too rare asset: a box-to-box central defender.
Here’s the other thing about that John Terry strike. It wasn’t even the most impressive goal on the night. That was Eden Hazard’s in the 90th minute- the first touch, the double twist, the curled
shot... brilliant. Given its timing. I’m guessing that a number of people missed it, having decided to do the 9.25 Tuesday-night excuse-me and head for the exits to beat the rush. 

This is something which we bash on about in this column a lot, and I know that some people genuinely do have last trains to catch, and so on. But nevertheless, it cannot be overstressed: you can never leave early. Even at 5-0, you can’t leave. Or, at least, you can, obviously. But only at the risk of missing something that you would have remembered forever.

This column is in danger of turning into a slightly breathless goal catalogue – but nevertheless, a big cheer, too, for the Didier Drogba penalty on Tuesday, another moment of take-home magic
from an evening bountifully blessed with them.

Obviously there are distinctions to be drawn between the pressure of taking the potentially trophy-clinching kick in a shoot-out in a Champions League final in Munich, and taking one in the 23rd minute of a home group stage game in which your team is already a goal ahead and fairly conclusively on top.

Nevertheless there was still pressure because expectations were inevitably high that the Drog would oblige us by producing some sort of replica 2012 moment, to the point where, had he punted it wide of the left-hand post, the atmosphere would have pancaked and the traditional descending cartoon trumpet signature (‘wap-wap-wap-waaah’) would have been virtually audible in the ground.

I don’t really know how players summon the nerve to take penalties at the best of times. But to do it while history is squatting on your shoulders and the gods of slapstick are, metaphorically speaking, gathering behind the net into which you are shooting and pulling faces at you, must require a particular kind of steel, and in especially baffling quantities. Credit to the Drog, then. There was fibre in that pen and, accordingly, an awful lot of happy memories were stirred.

Of course, you don’t necessarily turn to the Champions League expecting to see six- and seven- goal spankings and the unusual coincidence of a small cluster of such spectacles on Tuesday night
seems to have led to a bit of grumbling about the competition in general.

Too padded out, the complainers were saying, in the usual outlets. Too inflated with weaker sides, leading to ‘meaningless contests’ in the group stage. Better when it was truly a proper knock-out competition for champions only. Well, it’s a point of view, I suppose. But due respect and humility obliges us to point out that there was only one reigning champion on the pitch at Stamford Bridge on Tuesday night, and it wasn’t Chelsea.

Incidentally, was there a ban on spectators at Anfield this week? I tuned in briefly, about 35 minutes into Liverpool’s game against Real Madrid, and it was like CSKA Moscow v Manchester City all over again – so quiet in the ground that you could hear the players shouting to one another.
And this on what television had promised us would be another of ‘those famous European nights at Anfield’. So what happened there? I’ll look into it and try to get back to you at some point.

Meanwhile we head to Old Trafford for a match which, despite United’s best efforts, still just about retains the status of a ‘big clash’ and can still make it onto the television in one of the live slots.
United, of course, don’t play in Europe these days so they will be well rested. And by the look of their performance at West Brom on Monday, a rest was exactly what they needed. Still, I suspect that all of us, deep in our hearts, know that United’s status as mid-table stragglers is just a delicious phase which is bound to end at some point. They have a number of extremely capable players and a
manager who may one day be able to form those players into a team. Let’s just hope it’s not before Sunday.

Giles Smith is a columnist for the official Chelsea FC website and his weekly piece is published every Thursday throughout the season.

Tactical Nous

Crystal Palace 1-2 Chelsea FC. Not exactly a comfortable scoreline against a team that will definitely be mixing it in to avoid the drop. Manchester City's one-man show against our neighbours Tottenham with 4 - goal hero Sergio Aguero also joining our own Costa as the joint top scorers actually puts our performance at the Selhurst Park in the background. But contrary to all that, this was one of the most comfortable performance from a Chelsea side in a long while. One of the games where the team was able to dominate from the start to the finish. Albeit the game being marred by a red card to a red hot Cesar Azpilicueta for a red hot challenge and Palace balancing the books with a red card of their own to Delaney, the blues looked in full control gor the entirety of the game.

Jose Mourinho has already stated in an interview with Gary Neville for The Telegraph that he does not have a fixed playing philosophy and on sunday it came to the fore. Such is his influence on the blues current game that Cesc Fabregas was being man-marked seriously by James McArthur and with Mile Jedinak trying to boss the middle something had to be done. And so Fab was tasked to move his lapdog to the sides to create space for Oscar and it worked out to be a tactical stroke with the blues enjoying 72% of possession (our highest this season and the fifth highest in the league).

With questions being raised on whether Chelsea could still win without Costa there was no better way to answer them than with 2 goals that had individual brilliance and team play written all over it. That first goal was a fantastic free kick from the ever blossoming Oscar and the technique was quite difficult to execute in that he had to get the ball over the wall to the last pole and still get enough power on it to keep it out of the Keeper's reach. We've seen him done it couple of times and we'll love to see it any day of the week, thank you.
The second goal is best summarised by Mourinho. He called it a Scandal.

17 passes involved

8 players had touches of the ball (Only Gary Cahill and Thibaut Courtois did not touch with Azpilicueta sent off)

9 total touches by Fabregas ( including the final one)
These are the type of intricate play that the team lacked last season.  Fabregas seems to be the key to opening up defences who have their back to the wall.

John Terry
Captain Leader Legend
500 caps as captain
13 trophies as captain

Salute

Giles Smith - Not Musical

Yet another international break has come and almost gone, carelessly drilling yet another two-week hole in the fixture list and leaving us all twiddling our thumbs and staring out of the window in the absence of proper football.

And also, I don’t mind saying, feeling slightly picked-upon because this sort of thing seems to be happening quite a lot at the moment. Wasn't there one of these dire interludes just a month ago, in September? And isn’t there due to be another one in as little as a month’s time, in November?
I’ve just checked and, incredibly, it seems that there is. Who benefits?

Roy Hodgson, I suppose, for one – although you could argue that even he normally doesn’t end up enjoying the fortnight as much as he probably hoped he would. (There were six points in this one for Roy, it’s true, but for that he had to sit through two games of nearly unwatchably boring football, and then endure a tiresome re-ignition of the ‘club v. country’ debate, in the form of the tiredness, or otherwise, of Raheem Sterling. Sometimes you have to think that even Roy Hodgson can’t look forward to the international break.)

Any other plausible beneficiaries?

Well, the interval created, I suppose, a handy news vacuum into which, say, a cricketer might release a volume of autobiography or in which Roy Keane might find himself generating copious headlines by going public with various ancient, trusty rifts and also by the simpler means of shaving off a beard.

And, beyond Keane and KP, I suppose there could equally well have been some profitable way for the rest of us to spend this enforced, football-free purgatory – this period when the things we prefer to think about weren’t there to be thought about. It would have been the perfect time, on reflection, to learn to play the trombone, say, or to master basket-weaving or to redecorate the bathroom, or something constructive along those lines.

In which case, personally, I can’t help feeling that I rather squandered an opportunity, having spent the deserted fortnight learning precisely no new musical instruments, mastering precisely no new time-honoured artisanal skills and leaving the walls of the bathroom precisely alone. Instead (in common with many in this region, I imagine), I seem to have filled the fortnight with fretting about Diego Costa ’s hamstrings and wanting to know that they were safely delivered from Spain. (Needless worrying, as it turned out: the news is they have been returned in workable condition, the best of the week's headlines, in my opinion.)

But aside from the stark and persistent low-level fear of losing one of your key talents to a loose challenge somewhere in Slovenia, it’s the loss of momentum that one mostly worries about. Everyone agrees that momentum is the key for a team that’s serious about doing well in the league. And everyone agrees that momentum is something our current team has been showing impressive signs of achieving in these opening weeks. But just when the momentum seems to be building nicely in your favour, the season has to stop – not once, but twice and, soon, a third time.

Talk about frustrating. You’re trying to get on with something and the doorbell keeps going. And every time it’s Roy Hodgson. And every time he’s come round to ask if he can borrow Gary Cahill .
And we smile weakly and once again hand him Gary Cahill , because obviously that's the neighbourly thing to do. But deep down inside, we're thinking, 'Get your own Gary Cahill .'
Of course, as we know, that frustration can be channelled in a good way. Our team’s response to being rudely interrupted by an international break last time around was to regroup and put four goals past Swansea. You just have to hope that something of the same pent-up irritation is released at Crystal Palace on Saturday.

After all, it’s the mark of a title-worthy team that it can survive the ceaseless distractions thrown into its path by the international football schedule. And it’s a mark of the title-worthy supporter as well.

None of my business, of course, but I did find the fuss generated by Roy Keane about our manager’s shake-of-hands at the end of the Aston Villa match a little hard to comprehend. Last season, Paul Lambert, the Villa manager, complained because of the perceived absence of a handshake; this time the complaints are all because he was offered one. It seems as though you’re damned if you don’t and damned if you do.

And what a minefield for etiquette it turns out to be, down there around the technical areas. Managers must constantly feel like they’re sitting at the table at an extremely posh dinner, and worrying about picking up the wrong spoon for the soup.

At least when football comes back, it comes back properly: the Premier League game against Palace on Saturday is quickly followed by the Champions League match against Maribor at home on Tuesday night.

Straight back into the proper rhythm of things, then, which is a consolation of sorts. Who knows? This time next week, it could almost be as though football had never gone away.

Round Up from the International Break

BPL managers have periodically complained about the scheduling of the international break and the toll it takes on the players who have to travel long journeys to play for their countries. From the look of things the battle between club and country does not look like going down considering the number of crocked players coming back from the break

Injured BPL players in this international break:
Hugo Lloris - Tottenham Hotspurs (France)
Gareth McAuley - Stoke City (Northern Ireland)
Dejan Lovren - Liverpool (Croatia)
Laurent Koscielny - Arsenal (France)
Vincent Kompany - Manchester City (Belgium)
Mesut Ozil - Arsenal (Germany)
Eden Hazard - Chelsea (Belgium)
Raheem Sterling - Liverpool (England)
Marko Arnautovic - Stoke City (Austria)
Chris Brunt - Stoke City (Northern Ireland)
Danny Welbeck - Arsenal (England)

The clubs will be compensated for the loss of the players but no amount of money can compensate for the effect Hazard's loss will have on Chelsea or Vincent Kompany on Man City or even Sterling on Liverpool. These are players who are the livewire or backbone, in Kompany's case, of their respective teams and their loss in the upcoming games will make for bitter swallowing for their managers.

It had to happen at some point but what a relief it must be for Diego Costa when he finally broke his duck in Spanish shirt in the 4-0 thumping of Luxembourg.  He'll have no problem that its against a less glamorous team like Luxembourg. Its amazing that it took him 7 games to get there considering his level and the team but its not all that surprising considering the team and Costa's style of play.
Spain is not playing to suit him and his style of play is ironically more suited to the country he rejected than the one he joined. But at 26 he still has lots of years ahead of him to score more goals for his adopted country. We only hope his next goal doesn’t take this long.

Jaimie Redknapp said: “Why on earth did Hodgson say it?
Honesty is not the best policy. Why has Roy got into this? He could have said ‘I want to freshen this up.’ This wouldn’t even be a conversation.”
Gary Lineker tweeted: "Teenagers do get tired and even moody.
He's young, still developing, we should cut him some slack."
Darren Lewis wrote: “ He was tired. It happens. Physically or, more
importantly, mentally he didn't feel up to it. Hodgson could - and should - have done far better to handle the situation and protect the player ”

Everybody is saying something and here is mine. From the starting
XI against Estonia only Chelsea's Gary Cahill, with 1164 minutes, had played more often this season. Sterling has been on the go more than Jack Wilshere, Jordan Henderson, Leighton Baines and
Phil Jagielka and he's only 19.
His workload has more than tripled within the same period from last year. And people find it difficult to understand that he asked for a break.
Rooney would have benefited from such breaks before tournaments, Jack Wilshere is now becoming more injury-prone than Ledley King because he wasn't bold enough to ask for such breaks when he clearly needed it. England should have more than enough in their team to qualify for the EURO'S and if they cant because a 19 yr old wants to rest and prolong his playing career then that's not his fault.