Downing tools works! Five infamous Premier League transfers that show striking Alexander Isak will get Liverpool move
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THERE is a reason why the National Union of Alexander Isak has downed tools, hoping to stage a one-man Jarrow march to Anfield.
And it's this: Going on strike in the Premier League actually works.
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Alexander Isak has downed tools at Newcastle
Credit: PA
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But history suggests he will get his way
Credit: PA
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Plenty of stars have downed tools to get a move, including Dimitri Payet at West Ham
Credit: Getty
There is a recurring theme with players who refuse to play and demand a move — throw your toys out of the pram and you will get your own way.
High-profile examples include Dimitar Berbatov from Tottenham to Manchester United, Raheem Sterling from Liverpool to Manchester City, Diego Costa from Chelsea to Atletico Madrid, Dimitri Payet from West Ham to Marseille and William Gallas.
Gallas even threatened to score own goals as a Chelsea player unless he was sold to Arsenal.
The fascinating aspect with Isak is that nobody has ever previously tried going on strike when their ultimate bosses are the richest owners in world football.
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Newcastle United's Saudi paymasters are not known for tolerating dissent.
So how will the bankrollers of the Saudi Public Investment Fund cope with such a flagrant show of defiance out here in the free world?
Their natural inclination will be to play hardball and not to lose face by capitulating to the demands of a player who has three years left on his contract.
And while the Saudis certainly do have more money than sense, they are also acutely aware that PSR regulations are hampering Newcastle and that an improved bid of around £140million would make financial sense.
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Adding to the intrigue surrounding Liverpool's interest in Isak is the fact that Arne Slot's champions are heading to St James' Park on Monday night.
It is surely unthinkable — even if Liverpool make a serious improvement on their initial £110m bid — that Newcastle would strike a deal before that fiendishly-scheduled fixture.
How Arsenal survived Man Utd's attacks with 'forcefield defence'
Should Isak make his Liverpool debut at St James' Park, it would make Luis Figo's return to the Nou Camp — after joining Real Madrid from Barcelona — look like a teddy bear's picnic.
On that occasion, almost a quarter of a century ago, Figo had an actual pig's head thrown at him as he prepared to take a corner.
But if Isak's move to Liverpool happens, it would surely come much closer to the September 1 transfer deadline.
Either way, there seems to be no way back for Isak at Newcastle. Players who go on strike are rarely reintegrated, even temporarily.
For fans this is the ultimate betrayal. Quite rightly, they have no sympathy with a player who is earning £6m per year and demanding even more.
Even though the Swede's current wage is well below the going rate for a world class striker.
And for team-mates, who generally understand a fellow professional's desire to better himself, refusing to play crosses a line.
Newcastle, decked out in Saudi green, played without a specialist centre-forward as they failed to break down ten-man Aston Villa on Saturday.
And it is reasonable to assume they would have won that match with Isak in the side.
To be short-handed for just a couple of matches can make the difference between success and failure come the end of the season.
Yet, equally, Isak's desire to win the biggest trophies is being stymied by Newcastle's PSR shackles.
At 25, he is approaching his peak and knows his current club are unlikely to win either the Premier League or Champions League this season or next.
Liverpool, always holier-than-thou, will stand on the sidelines as if butter wouldn't melt — and history suggests they will get their man.
Unless the Saudis keep Isak in isolation. And there are plenty of people not usually inclined towards praising the Saudi state who would admire them if they do just that.
Hammer blow
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Graham Potter may have to become Iron man to save his job at West Ham
Credit: Getty
WEST HAM became the first team in three years to lose a Premier League match in August to a newly promoted club when they were gubbed 3-0 at Sunderland.
Graham Potter always felt like a bad fit for the East London outfit — the man with a degree in emotional intelligence meets supporters who go around in public making crossed-arm gestures and shouting 'Irons! Irons!'
After five wins in 20 games for him — and this, one of the most alarming opening-weekend defeats in years — Hammers vice-chair Karren Brady says the club will not panic and tend to stick with managers.
Still, Potter has already outlasted his predecessor, Julen Lopetegui, who survived for only six months in the great London Stadium atmosphere vacuum.
Potter's former employers Chelsea arrive there on Friday — and any repeat of Saturday's debacle on Wearside would put his job under serious threat.
Tick tock
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Refs need to stick with implementing the eight-second rule for goalkeepers
Credit: Alamy
THE new law which penalises time-wasting by keepers with the concession of a corner is a good one.
Referee Michael Oliver clamped down on Burnley's Martin Dubravka in the opening minutes of the Clarets' 3-0 defeat by Tottenham.
Let's hope refs actually stick with this edict — unlike several other new-season law tweaks which are usually forgotten about by September.
Pool-ful of cash
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Ben Doak is the latest star PSR kings Liverpool are selling for big money
Credit: PA
LIVERPOOL have agreed a £25million fee to sell Ben Doak to Bournemouth... and if you're not sure who Ben Doak is, he's a teenage midfielder who has played three Premier League games for the Anfield club.
If you think this fee is extraordinary for such an inexperienced player then what about Sepp van den Berg, sold by Liverpool to Brentford for £25m without ever having played a league match for the Reds.
Or Fabio Carvalho, sold by Liverpool to Brentford for £22.5m after 13 Premier League appearances for the Merseysiders.
They aren't the only Liverpool youngsters who have been flogged for millions after failing to nail down regular first-team places.
There's Jarell Quansah to Bayer Leverkusen for £35m, Tyler Morton to Lyon for £15m, Bobby Clark to Red Bull Salzburg for £10m and, going back a little further, Rhian Brewster to Sheffield United for £23.5m and Jordon Ibe to Bournemouth for £15m.
This is how you win at PSR.
All gone to (set) pieces
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New Brentford boss Keith Andrews saw his team concede a set-piece inside five minutes
Credit: Shutterstock Editorial
THERE was plenty of doom and gloom surrounding Brentford in pre-season following the loss of their manager, top scorer, captain and keeper.
And when you promote your set-piece coach, Keith Andrews, to the managerial hotseat, conceding from one such play inside five minutes of the opening defeat by Nottingham Forest, is not a good look.
Moneyball
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Let us hope Premier League chiefs don't follow LaLiga's international match plan
Credit: Premier League
BARCELONA will face Villarreal in a LaLiga match in Miami — a development which should worry us all.
The December fixture was supposed to be Villarreal's home match — giving Barca a clear advantage over every other team in Spain.
It also means that Yellow Submarine fans must now travel across six time zones in order to watch their team play at 'home'.
Premier League chief executive Richard Masters claims the English top flight has no plans to follow suit.
Let's see how long that lasts when they realise there's money in it.
Cannon fodder
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Spurs' long throws will go up against Arsenal set piece giants in the North London derby
Credit: Getty
WITH Arsenal the undisputed kings of the set-piece and Thomas Frank's Tottenham carpet-bombing opponents with Rory Delap-style long throw-ins, we can all look forward to November 22.
That will be the first North London derby ever to be contested entirely under Pulisball.
Stoke Newington is the new Stoke City.
Keeping it real
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Maybe Marcus Rashford should have been tried as a goalkeeping coach
Credit: Getty
RUBEN AMORIM said last season he would rather name his 65-year-old goalkeeping coach Jorge Vital as a sub than Marcus Rashford.
Yet if Manchester United's keepers carry on committing match-losing mistakes, maybe Amorim should have tried out Rashford as a goalkeeping coach?
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Before Chelsea's visit on Friday night, they have taken ten points from their past 12 matches, and he is fighting to convince an under-pressure head coach in Graham Potter that he is worth a place in an underperforming team. In the loss to Sunderland on Saturday he came on after 71 minutes and the game slipped from 1-0 to 3-0. This may be the beginning of the end or just another bump in the road. Regardless, he has earned a moment of appreciation. About 550 players will take to the field in the Premier League this season, but not one of them uses this rectangular canvas quite like Soucek does. He may well be unique in English football. Soucek, you've probably noticed, was not blessed with pace. We can quantify this: with a top speed of 30.2km/h (18.8mph), he was the fifth-slowest player in the entire top flight last season, behind Bernardo Silva, Craig Dawson, Mikel Merino and Casemiro. However, he uses his limited gifts of locomotion in an extraordinary way. According to a fascinating article by Ali Tweedale for the Opta Analyst website, last season Soucek spent a higher percentage of his game time jogging than any other player in the league, and a lower percentage of his game time walking than anyone else (he spent just 54.2 per cent of his time walking, compared with 77.6 per cent for Matheus Cunha, the top outfielder by this metric). As a result, only Dejan Kulusevski covered more ground per 90 minutes than his 12.2km. In other words, in a game increasingly tilted towards explosive, high-intensity bursts, Soucek is a total outlier, cruising around the pitch with the slow, incessant, purposeful motion of a robot lawnmower. And as he moves, he affects the game in an assortment of ways that no one else comes close to emulating. Consider: since his Premier League debut on February 1, 2020, only 24 players have scored more than his 36 non-penalty goals, and only three of them — James Maddison, Bruno Fernandes and Kevin De Bruyne — are midfielders. He has scored only two fewer than De Bruyne, even though, in that period, Manchester City have averaged 65.2 per cent possession, whereas Soucek has been working with 43.8 per cent. He is an exceptionally efficient shooter: his 36 goals have come from 262 shots. De Bruyne has taken 356 for his marginally superior haul, and Fernandes, for four more goals, has attempted 539. Only four players have scored more non-penalty goals than Soucek from fewer shots: Yoane Wissa, Alexander Isak, Jamie Vardy, and his new team-mate Callum Wilson. What makes Soucek even more unusual is that he doesn't really do any of the things that prolific midfield goalscorers typically do. For example, in those 5½ years, Maddison, Fernandes and De Bruyne have played a combined 303 through-balls; Soucek has played two. Last season Scott McTominay had a sort of 'deluxe Soucek' season at Napoli, crashing the box and banging in goals and using his big frame to win duels and aerials. But he also made 56 progressive carries (moving the ball either into the box or at least ten yards towards the goalline) and attempted 88 take-ons. Soucek, in a comparable number of minutes, mustered nine progressive carries and 12 take-ons. On the other hand, if we look at the 26 Premier League players who, since Soucek's debut, have scored more or as many non-penalty goals as him, they've averaged in that time 10.3 blocks and 67.5 clearances. Fernandes has the most, with 17 blocks and 197 clearances. Soucek has made 98 blocks and 492 clearances, a number of defensive actions which, in that company, even considering that he has spent more time out of possession than most, looks absolutely prodigious. Soucek has said that his way of playing is 'a lot about intuition' and that he is guided by the impulse to 'simply be useful at the back and going forward'. You may not be surprised to learn that he was not a shining academy prospect: in fact, his formative loan spell at Viktoria Zizkov only happened when the manager, Jindrich Trpisovksy, who was initially reluctant, was prevailed upon to take him because the loan was free. (When he went back to Slavia, the coach, Dusan Uhrin Jr, was honest enough to admit he too was unconvinced. 'It didn't look very good when he was running,' he told BBC Sport.) Because he wasn't a prized starlet, Soucek continued to play with his high-school friends in the Prague grassroots league, the Hanspaulka, up until his late teens, and it's this which is the most visible and interesting influence on how he plays: that connection to the untutored, amateur football of weeknights on astro and one-man-and-his-dog Sundays. Soucek plays football, essentially, like any of us might, if we were gifted with elite-level mentality and engine and heart: putting himself about the pitch, making himself useful, obeying the instinctual satnav of his own brain. As he put it in an article for Bez Frazi, in what sounds like a fallacy but is actually, I think, a profound and meaningful statement: 'I learnt football by playing football.' Of course, he's not a flawless player. Soucek has some big weaknesses that affect West Ham in real ways. All the things those sceptical coaches saw in his youth are still kind of true: he is slow. His passing is ordinary. For a player in his position, of his size, he doesn't win the ball a lot. Potter, who is trying to get back to the best work that he did in his latter seasons at Brighton & Hove Albion, when he had much more technical midfielders like Alexis Mac Allister and Moisés Caicedo, hasn't seemed enamoured of him, and West Ham have lately been linked to midfielders including Southampton's Mateus Fernandes and Barcelona's Marc Casadó. Yet Soucek, for all his limitations, has that thing you can't teach: stickability, resilience, the drive to get the absolute most out of himself game after game, year after year. Of all the players signed in that January window, only Soucek, Fernandes and Jarrod Bowen are still at the same Premier League team 5½ years on. West Ham have signed six midfielders since then — Nikola Vlasic, Flynn Downes, Lucas Paquetá, Edson Álvarez, James Ward-Prowse and Guido Rodríguez — and, besides Paquetá, Soucek has outlasted or outperformed them all. They have tried to evolve beyond him before, and every time he has hung on to his place with the obstinacy of a limpet. Maybe this is the moment when Soucek's sheer determination finally stops being enough. Or maybe we haven't seen the last of the man who can't be moved, and who never stops moving.
