Liars like you live the shortest lives

Today we have one article still looking at the Champions League Final and then otherwise, it's all about the transfer rumours.

Paul Wilson argues that Barcelona are so hard to beat because they've worked out the new rules of football better than anyone else, especially English teams:

Fifa are also in overall control of refereeing, for instance, literally in charge of the way the game is played, and the more one studies the evidence from last week's Champions League final the more it becomes clear that English football is in danger of becoming isolated on the pitch as well as in the corridors of power.

Sir Bobby Charlton, along with several others in good positions to judge, observed after Manchester United's Wembley defeat that the effect of two decades of Fifa refereeing directives has been to turn football into virtually a non-contact sport. Take the physicality out of the game, he reasoned, and English teams are immediately put at a disadvantage.

...

While Barcelona may well be the best club side the game has seen, it is important to understand that if they are impossible to beat it is because they are better than everyone else at playing by the new rules. They are not exploiting referees, simply taking advantage of that fact that if you can move the ball around quickly and accurately it is now extremely difficult for opponents to get a foot in cleanly and legally. Their ability to retain possession for minutes on end tends to frustrate opponents and produce clumsier tackles or, in the case of Antonio Valencia at Wembley, frayed tempers.

It was significant that several commentators noted that Barcelona seemed to be playing a different game, perhaps even a different sport from United, because they were. Keep-ball is not football as we know it. 

He then, obviously, makes Arsene into English football's Obi Wan Kenobi, but suggests he may be about to betray his principles:

Surely as long as Wenger is at Arsenal the Premier League will not be completely out of touch with the new football, or so one might have thought.

Rather depressingly, Wenger has just blamed the season's failures on an inability to defend set pieces, and said his priority over the summer will be to sign some taller players. That strategy may just pay off in the Premier League, where tall players and goals from set pieces will probably last forever, but one would have expected Wenger of all people to notice that Barcelona rule the world with a team of midgets who do not concede corners and rarely head the ball.

The challenge facing English football is either to emulate or to nullify them, not to become a bit more like Stoke.

Onto the transfer gossip and we'll start with The Sunday Mirror.  Of all the papers The Mirror's transfer rubbish is the worst of all.  Today they report on Nani's future.  Their approach seems to be 1) If Ashley Young is coming who does this affect? 2) Nani 3) Let's write some rubbish about him being on the way out 4) but, to give it more ooomph, we'll add a few other reason to why he might leave.  The story is, Young to displace Nani:

Nani’s future at ­Manchester United will come under ­scrutiny once the Premier League champions have ­completed the capture of ­Ashley Young.

That seems to imply that we might no want him, he'll be surplus to requirements.  And yet it continues:

The Portuguese winger is unhappy that United have ­refused to offer him an ­improvement on the £70,000-a-week contract ­extension that he signed last March.

Which seems to have nothing to do with us wanting rid of him, or with Young joining the club - and that's ignoring the fact that why would he be disappointed at not getting a new contract when it's not so long ago he signed his current one? Then they compound it further by offering yet another reason:

Nani was ­bitterly disappointed that ­Ferguson left him out of his team to face ­Barcelona in the ­Champions League last week at the end of a ­season which saw him named United’s ­Player of the Year.

This remind's one of Freud's "Borrowed Kettle":

We all remember the old joke about the borrowed kettle which Freud quotes in order to render the strange logic of dreams, namely the enumeration of mutually exclusive answers to a reproach (that I returned to a friend a broken kettle): (1) I never borrowed a kettle from you; (2) I returned it to you unbroken; (3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you. For Freud, such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments of course confirms per negationem what it endeavors to deny - that I returned you a broken kettle... 

Or in The Mirror's case, confirms that their story is absolute rubbish.

There's differing versions of where Alexis Sanchez, the Udinese winger, is going to end up, with The People saying we're going to beat Barca to his signature and The Daily Star claiming that Barca are beating man City to his signature.

The People report that Liverpool want to "hijack" "our deal" to sign Sunderland's Jordan Henderson:

Henderson is reported to be shocked by developments, particularly Liverpool’s proposal to hand him a £65,000-a-week contract, when he currently gets £15,000.

They also report, in the same article, that Sunderland want to keep Danny Welbeck on loan, which could give us an extra bargaining chip if we do actually want Henderson.