People are having a hard time believing that Morgan Rogers would voluntarily choose Chelsea. Did he have no choice?
We also have lots of mails on Harry Kane and the late Kevin Keegan. Mail us at theeditor@football365.com
Buck Rogers: Does he want to go to Chelsea?
I got a message from a mate around 20:00 on Saturday night saying ‘Rogers to Chelsea, tell me it’s not true’. He’s an Oxford United fan and so has no real skin in the game. He just couldn’t understand the transfer from Rogers’ point of view.
I was pretty annoyed as a Villa fan when it was all confirmed but I’m now just wondering if this a really strange transfer. In as much as it sort of works for everyone and yet it doesn’t at the same time. Good money for Villa but do they really want to sell, or just feel like they have to? A good signing for Chelsea but at an over-inflated price. Rogers will no doubt say he wanted to move, but we’ll never truly know.
Maybe Villa said ‘We need the cash Morgan, off you trot please’. Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure Rogers is being well compensated and is okay with the move as I guess he could say ‘No, I don’t want to’ to Villa. It just doesn’t strike me as a ‘dream club’ type move.
I dunno. Just seems like a bit of an odd one to me. I guess Villa maybe see Rogers as the only asset likely to fetch that kind of fee and thus a kind of now or never opportunity to undertake a reset. Manzambi and Gomes feel like a good start.
Gary AVFC, Oxford (Happy to wave bye to Emi)
READ: The Caicedo, Wirtz and Pogba transfer records which will be smashed when Rogers joins Chelsea
Are we really going to do another season of this?
Howard, if you’re going to go Arsenal really are the most unpopular, uninspiring champions ever narrative then you should probably get your facts straight when doing it.
Rogers didn’t simply pick Chelsea over Arsenal. Chelsea offered the amount of money Villa wanted, Arsenal didn’t. It’s pretty basic stuff. At least we are back to hating on Arsenal now after a summer of everyone crying about conspiracies for Argentina. How do you people even enjoy football? We can’t do this same shite again next season with Arsenal, for the love of God please find another talking point.
Dion
Do England need a new captain?
Back in 2021 England reached their first final in 55yrs. We’re not sure what to expect against a limited but experienced and supremely organised Italy. From nowhere England take a early lead but then as the game progresses the inexperience starts to show and we s$$t ourselves slightly defend too deep and end up throwing it away, rather than managing the game and keeping them pegged back. This was the first time in an age we had made it and the players will learn and come out stronger so well done everyone.
Fast forward 5 yrs and that all sounds strangely familiar and clearly the experience has done nothing to the now snr players still involved. Now enough has been said about Tuchel but his comment about DNA is an odd one and that he was just reacting to what the players would do (as a highly paid manager you’d think he would actually try to change that but alas no).
Maybe it’s time for a new captain; Kane was there in 2021. Where was his experience shouting at players to not sit back pushing them forward using that experience to get the players around him on board and in the faces of Argentina. Instead he sat back and pinged Hollywood balls to no one and just walked around running his fingers through his hair like he does.
It’s time to get the arm band to Bellingham his drive and energy looks like a force of nature and his calmness under Argentina provocation shows a new maturity. It feels like he might get a rise from this crop of players and help prevent another meek surrender in 2 yrs time.
Phillip Branch
READ: Ranking the England centre-forward options that make Bellingham most likely to replace Kane
So England need a new striker?
Been noticing a few murmurs lately about what England are going to do up front once Kane is “too old” for the next Euros or retires from international football.
He’s going to be 35? So what?
Modern footballers who look after themselves are extending their careers all the time, and let’s be honest, Kane’s played like a 35-year-old for the last seven years anyway. It’s not as though he’s suddenly going to lose a yard of blistering pace. My guess is that in two years he’ll look much the same as he does now. We were having this exact conversation two years ago after the last Euros.
Now, before anyone jumps on me, I think Harry Kane is a phenomenal footballer. He carried Spurs for years, has gone to Bayern and absolutely thrived, and his England goalscoring record speaks for itself.
But not wanting to go full ‘no proper goals for England’ mode, it’s also fair to say that a huge proportion of those goals have come from penalties, and when it comes to the biggest knockout games, he too often goes missing or fails to make the decisive impact. That’s not a hot take anymore it’s a pattern.
For me this tournament went pretty much how I expected. Kane scores a few in the groups, maybe another in the round of 128 or whatever it was… and then when you reach the business end… very little. Worse still, he ends up dropping deeper and deeper until he’s basically playing quarterback because he’s barely getting touches in the opposition box.
It’s a cycle we’ve seen before. Just like Rooney, England never really give anyone else a proper run. A few token minutes here, a dead rubber against Moldova there, the replacement looks underwhelming, and everyone says, “Thank God we’ve still got Kane.”
But do we actually need an elite, world-class No. 9 to compete?
When was Spain’s last truly elite striker? Torres? Yet they’ve continued to win tournaments with forwards who fit the system rather than dominate it. Morata is hardly one of the world’s great centre forwards.
I could obviously go back further but I’ll go the late ’80s: Lineker, Shearer, Owen, Rooney, Kane. Five elite, undisputed centre-forwards, one handing over to the next.
What have we actually won?
I’m not saying chuck Liam Delap in, coz good god he’s terrible. But if Kane simply wasn’t there and we’d given Watkins 15 or 20 games as the main man, who knows? Maybe he’d have developed into exactly what England needed. Maybe games where Kane dropped deep looking for the ball would instead have been stretched by a striker constantly running in behind.
We’ll never know, because we never really try. Maybe a false 9 is the answer it can’t have gone unnoticed that we scored 6 against France without Kane when England stop ‘trying’ to be elite or whatever mindset they try to get in and just play the game in front of them rather than pandering to try to fit some system, we’re much better
I just think this sense of ‘faux trepidation’ over England’s life after Kane is a bit over the top. We’ll be fine. We’ve always been fine.
And by “fine”, I mean reaching quarter-finals and semi-finals before finding a way not to win it anyway.
David Hitchen
Leave Harry Kane alone
There is a pattern to England not quite making it over the line in a tournament. Take the lead, retreat, lose the lead, get beaten, analyse what went wrong, blame Harry Kane.
I love Harry Kane and when this happens I feel like his dad and want to protect him.
When the team is set up to play to his strengths, Kane truly is a world-class player. This is to have quick wide players to stretch the opposition and create space for him and Bellingham to play. The second purpose of having the wide players is for them to beat their man and get a cross in. This is where it fell down. Madueke and Rashford on a number of occasions did beat their man, but either shot from silly angles or put a cross in that went straight out, hit the first man or was too long. Gordon got better and was far more productive as the tournament went on. Saka also was effective in cameos, and who knows if he had been properly fit to play all the games, things might have been very different. But overall the service from the wings was poor.
On top of that we rarely had control in midfield, and put together with malfunctioning wide players meant that we rarely had sustained control of any of the games.
When we retreat in the crucial games, we stop playing to anybody’s strength (apart from Dan Burn) and we really do look a bit clueless. Tuchel has to take massive responsibility for putting on the defensive players, but maybe part of that is because he did not trust the wingers to receive and keep the ball or the holding midfielders to have control.
Harry becomes ineffectual in this type of game. Even Messi (and I’m not suggesting Kane is in his class) can look pedestrian if the team is not playing to his strengths – as demonstrated up until England’s retreat against us and the whole time against Spain. Bellingham also barely had a touch after whatever that was against Argentina.
During these games, Kane’s lack of real pace becomes more obvious making him look a bit cumbersome leading people to think that he really isn’t all that. Plenty of that in today’s mailbox, with Ben Teacher’s one particularly unreasonable berating him for only scoring one non penalty goal with his feet. Quite apart from that goal being absolutely brilliant, do the headers not count? The first one against Croatia was a great header (though shocking marking) and the other two were of the highest quality, with him timing his runs and jumps to perfection to get in front of the defenders.
Not getting the best out of a generational talent is just one of the problems with the England team and I thought that Barney Ronay’s piece in the Guardian last week was particularly good at discussing the issues.
Sean, East Finchley
…A little brain-teaser for a Tuesday, shall we?
This striker has 442 goals in 647 appearances, with 101 Senior assists to boot. Leading to a career senior goal contribution per minute at just over 92 minutes from just over 50,000 on field minutes across over a decade
They’ve scored 8 goals from 15 games facing Real, Bayern, Barca, PSG
He’s right footed, with 60% of his goals from his dominant foot but carries an impressive 20% headers, and 20% with his left
Their international record, including 10 goals from their 13 appearances against Germany, Italy, and France, has been at a goal every 1.42 appearances (bettering both Messi and CRonaldo’ goals per appearance)
As an odd bonus, in their peak years, since 2020 theyve only been unavailable for 15 games for club and country. A remarkable resiliance after 600 games of football.
He’s apparently not world class, which might be the giveaway, and if that wasn’t enough of a reveal, has recently been decried as a terrible captain despite no evidence to support this.
It is of course, my namesake, big Harry Edward Kane.
The Champions League’s 10th highest scorer despite having played less games than 27 of the 32 surrounding him in the top 30 (including those tied at 30th), and half of those appearances being for literally Tottenham Hotspur
I just cannot with the noise that Hairy Gains has somehow held back England (ever), the man is not only a goal machine, but a fine playmaker to boot and when were back to “making do” with the usual quality of English striker (go and compare our Harry without pens to Owen, Rooney, and Shearer, dare you – and that comes from a huge fan of 2 of 3 of them) I’ll be quietly rocking in my chair to Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi (definitely not the abysmal Counting Crows cover)
There is literally no world where the great Lewandowski gets treated the way Kane does by the wonderful people of Poland – and I bet half of you who don’t rate Kane, think Big Bobby Lew is an absolute beast because he isnt an ex-Tottenham player.
Sincerely yours, Kane’s biggest fan, this is
Stan
I mean Harold Edward Hooler
World Cup half-time show opinions nobody will care about
Look, far be it from me to rant about something nobody wanted and nobody knew would go well but I’m more annoyed at this half time show then I want to be so I’m going to write this and hope the powers that be are mad enough to let it get published.
First off, I love them to bits as players but the hell were Ronaldo and Ronaldinho doing there? What connection did they have to anything besides the fact they were winners when I was in secondary school? Are the rest of the potential options pundits?
And I get Shakira being there, she did the theme of the tournament, and I get Justin Bieber because he’s Canadian. Why were BTS there? I feel like them being there was more cynical than anything else especially when they’re not even at the peak of their power anymore! And Korea wasn’t even in the tournament so it comes off more jarring.
And far be it from me to involve Coldplay but if Chris Martin was going to run the show and be on stage anyway…just have Coldplay perform. Why cap the show off with kids who weren’t very good even if the intention was solid enough?
Also, the camerawork and direction just felt so basic and half assed, it made the venue seem small despite it being a massive arena, especially the Bieber bits and they missed important contexts at times. Sesame Street and The Muppets were together for one of the few times since Disney brought the latter and you’re not panning at all of them? Was The Count the only one who showed up despite it not being too far from him?
If you look at half time shows in the past, they reflect the performers who are doing it like Bad Bunny or Kendrick Lamar or Beyoncé or whoever both to get people to watch and give the show its unique flair. Heck, even with Olympics and Paralympic shows involve showcasing the country you’re in whether culturally or historically. You never really got the sense that it was there, you just got a bunch of acts that were marketable with no real cohesion as to why they were there and even if “marketing” was the intention, you make it interesting enough to distract people from that.
It all felt like an easy fix, too. Make it 20 minutes, have the Muppets be the ones “running” it and have skits where they’re trying to find Shakira and other people perform in her stead until she closes it. And those acts would be actually from the States, Canada and Mexico because that’s where the World Cup is based! Showcase yourselves!
A lot of people were saying “Wow, how American is this show?” and the essence of the problem was that it wasn’t. It felt like a bunch of Zurich based executives throwing darts at a dart board, picking a guy clearly not up for it and hoping it all comes together. It’s annoying enough this happened in the first place (and I absolutely wouldn’t have done it at all if I had the choice) but if you are going to do it, put some thought and attention to it and don’t waste my time.
At least I won my friend group’s bracket with Spain who I was sure were going to get creamed by France so something good came out from all of this.
Eoin, Dublin, Ireland
P.S. I feel like Ted Lasso bringing on an acoustic guitar wielding Justin Bieber should get the same scolding as Thomas Tuchel did for taking off Anthony Gordon for defenders. He essentially, in the “story” of the show, parked the bus at the final, how can he be considered for international management?
Kevin Keegan RIP
…and Keegan’s gone. Rest in peace Kev.
RHT/TS x
…Peter Thompson was my first LFC hero but that was more down to my dad, by the time I was old enough to attend matches without parental control, a real hero emerged, I was probably 10 yards away when he scored on his league debut after only 12 minutes and I was hooked.
For the next 6 years I probably saw more of his games than I missed and not once did i see anything other than 100% commitment,100% desire to win and the emergence of a
He may not have had George Best’s ability but he was a lot better than many people gave him credit for, one of my best memories is of him leaving two of the leagues Best defenders, Colin Todd and Roy Mcfarland on their backsides in a space of about 2 yards!
There were a few dissenting voices when he announced his impending departure and I recall getting into a very heated argument during a match which almost ended in a full on scrap on the Kop as more people got involved. That season he was superb and the main reason Liverpool came within one game of winning the treble.
Best memories, his first game, his final game, the punch up with Billy Bremner, UEFA Cup Final goal in Bruges and bunking in to the celebration party and meeting him face to face, finally his last game at Anfield, a 6-0 drubbing of his Hamburg side.
His poster on my bedroom wall was the joint biggest, the other and this was before he joined, Kenny Dalglish!
RIP Kevin, the first king of the kop, and thanks.
Howard Jones
…I just read of Kevin Keegan’s passing and I’m truly upset about the news. My thoughts are with his family.
I watched Kevin play as a kid. He was amazing. How a guy that small could be so fast and get on the end of crosses and fight with defenders 6 inches taller than him was amazing. He is the only Englishman to win the ballon d’Or twice and one of only 10 players period, to win it more than once, think about that for a minute boys.
A lot of our younger folks may only remember him from managing, but make no mistake he was so much more, he truly was amazing. This is truly a sad day for English football.
I’m getting older now and players I loved watching and pretended to be in my back yard and on pitches are leaving us, I feel older by the day and I don’t like it.
I’m not a Liverpool or Newcastle fan but I am a worshipper of football and this is truly a sad day for us.
For all our younger people, Enjoy every moment you can with the teams and players you love. Take them into your hearts and memories and just love our game, Kevin would like that.
Rest easy Mighty Mouse.
Wade. A gunner