With the sudden introduction of drama to the World Cup, it’s all gone a bit quiet on the Premier League front. While England’s brave not-captain John Terry heroically stabs his manager in the front, the French give up in the face of adversity for a change, and the clamour rises for Brazil to be removed from the tournament and replaced by the Republic of Ireland in light of Luis Fabiano’s handball, there has been little call for column inches devoted to our humble domestic game. There have, however, been a few transfer deals which may have escaped your attention – keep coming back to Premier League Blog for all yer transfer latest.
Wolves have continued their very busy summer by completing the signings of Hull duo Steven Mouyokolo and
Mouyokolo is Wolves' latest recruit
skull-crunching relegation specialist Stephen Hunt for a combined fee of around £5.5m. The addition of the highly-rated defender and workhorse midfielder takes their total summer spending up to around £17m, having already completed the transfers of Steven Fletcher and Jelle Van Damme, and made Adléne Guedioura‘s loan spell permanent. Wolves’ surprising spending spree can be considered a statement that they are very much planning on a prolonged stay in the Premier League, despite the confirmed presence of bad luck charm Hunt, who has been relegated with both Reading and Hull City. Their squad certainly looks capable of comfortably achieving safety next season, and Mick McCarthy should be applauded for finding time to conduct all this business in between branding international goalkeepers ‘big tarts’ on live television.
Elsewhere, Sunderland have signed young Belgian goalkeeper Simon Mignolet, and Zoran Tosic has been discarded by Manchester United and picked up by CSKA Moscow. Tosic’s departure draws something of a transfer farce to a close for Sir Alex Ferguson, who signed Tosic amid much fanfare eighteen months ago alongside compatriot Adam Ljajic. The deal for Ljajic was swiftly cancelled, and Tosic only featured in two league games for United before he was sent to Cologne on loan. Clearly even the very best managers get it wrong sometimes.
Meanwhile, the list of individuals linked with the unenviable job of keeping goal for Arsenal next season grows
Westwood to Arsenal says... The Guardian
by the day. Our Rumour Accuracy Generator (RAG) has taken in the following list of potential Gunner custodians from Tribal Football et al since May 25th:
Igor Akinfeev, Vincent Enyeama, Robert Green, Doniéber Alexander Marangon (Doni), Federico Marchetti, Sergio Romero, Mark Schwarzer, Oleksandr Shovkovskiy, Salvatore Sirigu, Thomas Sorensen, Kieran Westwood.
So there you have it, Arséne Wenger’s radical plan to resolve Arsenal’s goalkeeping problem is to play eleven of them. At least one of them has to be quite good.
Finally, an update on RAG’s findings themselves. The current accuracy ratings for each tracked publication are as follows:
The Times 18.8% accurate
Daily Star 12.5% accurate
The Guardian 12.5% accurate
The Sun 8.2% accurate
The Daily Mail 6.5% accurate
Goal.com 4.2% accurate
Daily Mirror 3.9% accurate
TribalFootball.com 2.9% accurate
imscouting.com 2.6% accurate
Caughtoffside.com 1.74% accurate
It’s probably not much of a surprise to see the dot coms down the bottom, although the Mirror should probably hang its head in shame. Still, there’s plenty of time for rumours to become realities, so stick around until September 1st when we’ll be able to officially separate the In The Knows from the No Ideas.
