Transfer news LIVE: Wirtz to Liverpool announcement IMMINENT, Chelsea ‘lead Gittens race', Napoli ‘want Nunez'
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Liverpool are reportedly keen on adding Marc Guehi to their defensive options.
The Times have claimed that while Jarell Quansah is not being pushed out of the door at Anfield, they have his replacement in mind.
Guehi is one of the Premier League's top defenders outside of the top six and has long been linked with an exit from Selhurst Park.
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Daily Mirror
2 hours ago
- Daily Mirror
Kostas Tsimikas shares Arne Slot's golden rule that changed it all for Liverpool
Arne Slot led Liverpool to Premier League glory in his first season in the dugout and defender Kostas Tsimikas has opened up on what the Dutchman changed after succeeding Jurgen Klopp Liverpool defender Kostas Tsimikas has opened up on the tactical tweaks put in place by manager Arne Slot in his first season in charge. Slot, who took over from Jurgen Klopp in the summer of 2024, won the Premier League title at the first time of asking. Defensive solidity was key in the early part of the season. Slot's Reds didn't concede at all until the fourth game of the season, and let in just three goals in their first eight games to open up a lead at the top which they never surrendered. "Slot changed the whole tactical approach," Tsimikas told Greek outlet Sport24. "The detail he put into every workout was incredible, in some things that were the A and Z for him. "One of them is defence in five seconds. He set a rule, when we lose possession all players must be behind the ball within five seconds "This instruction, along with his tactical mind, with the new ideas, with the way we would play, all of this together was what we were missing in previous years to win the championship. When you defend with 10 men and a goalkeeper, it's something very important, that was the first thing he told us from day one, that this is exactly what he wants." Tactics weren't the be all and end all, though. Slot's new ideas helped the team improve on the previous season, when they finished third under Klopp, but the former Feyenoord boss needed his players to be committed to the cause. "In every meeting we had before the game, he used to say a line that I think is the most important: 'Beyond all the tactics I can show you and tell you how to play, if you don't put your feet up, if you don't really want it, there's no way we're going to win anything,'" Tsimikas added. Slot isn't resting on his laurels after clinching the title. He has already spoken about the potential for new additions, with Florian Wirtz due to join in a club record deal following the arrivals of Giorgi Mamardashvili and Jeremie Frimpong. "I don't know if it's going to be a lot but we know, the club, Richard [Hughes], the ownership, we are all aligned on what we are trying to achieve," Slot told Sky Sports in May. "It is already very, very positive that we kept Mo and Virgil and a few others that we are trying to sign look positive. "We are very happy with the squad that we have. This club has always shown that if they can strengthen, that's what we do. Big summer or not, it is already big because we won the league." Join our new WhatsApp community and receive your daily dose of Mirror Football content. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice.
Times
3 hours ago
- Times
Lions legend with calves the size of footballs who sold jeans to KGB
There are two spaces, about 450 miles apart, where Maurice Colclough persists. The first is at Stade Chanzy, where Angoulême reveres her former England lock; a small espace in his name where supporters can congregate on match day. The second is at 32 Broad Street in Blaenavon, at Welsh General Store. He never stepped foot in the latter, yet his memory is here. Colclough was, on paper, a great rugby man: a grand-slam champion with England, and a starter in eight consecutive British & Irish Lions Tests in 1980 and 1983. Yet his legacy is almost rugby adjacent, different from the fruits of Willie John McBride, Martin Johnson or Bill Beaumont (Colclough called Billy, his second-row partner, 'head boy'). Mountainous in stature and will, yet his family laugh at how ungainly he could be. Rugby was not his raison d'être, merely the vehicle by which he lived and which gives cause to remember him. Early one Friday, Colclough's wife, Annie, sits at a table at the back of Welsh General Store with her four daughters: Fen, from her first marriage; Morgane; and the twins, Brogane and Freya. It is a riotous morning of storytelling, punctuated by light dabbing of eye, for a husband and father who died in 2006, aged 52. Through chemotherapy and disgusting broccoli smoothies, he survived with a brain tumour for almost four years when six months was expected. The invincible man who could drop a breeze block on his foot and hardly wince, carrying on building a wall, was cut down. Colclough was outsize, a bon viveur. A second row whose calves were described as footballs, so big they would rub together and wear holes in his socks, and who sat on a bench at Freya's parents' evening and broke it. Even if he were on the delicate seating at the back of the shop now, he would not have been telling the stories. Colclough left that to others — and everyone has a yarn about Maurice Colclough. It inspires a question: is the man also the myth?His wanderlust took him to France, where he was Marquis de Colclough, running cruises as Holiday Charente and keeping a bar in Soyaux called Liverpool. Angoumoisins such as Fabrice Landreau, the France hooker who spent time at Bristol and Neath, worshipped Colclough. He remains a prince in those parts. He also played for Swansea and conducted business in South Africa, returning his family to Wales after a car-jacking. 'He directed the hijackers,' Brogane says. 'He was actually really funny. 'Would you like my watch?' ' 'I arrived in this country with a rucksack over my shoulder and £25 in my pocket,' Colclough said in 1982, a rare example of him as narrator. Story time. The legend of Colclough's arrival is that he was kicked off a train, having paid the wrong fare, and hitchhiked with a man who happened to be the coach of Angoulême. Brogane retells this. 'Oh, I didn't know that,' Annie says. This is how two hours in Blaenavon unfold: a torrent of five sources providing collective memories, or individual offerings and details pieced together. Here is a flavour of some greatest Colclough hits. He toured the Soviet Union and sold jeans to the KGB. He performed perorations inspired by Churchill, Kipling and Shakespeare as captain. He swam naked across the Liffey in Dublin to waiting policemen. He locked out a team-mate on a window ledge in Canada. He beat Fen's South African rugby friends in arm-wrestling and so they had to do the family's gardening. He frequented a French all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant with such abandon that they had to change policy. A recent Rugby Journal essay recounted some of the tales. 'A couple of things in there we didn't know,' Freya says. Now for the most famous tale, of which variations exist. Colclough, in a post-match function, downed what appeared to be a bottle of aftershave. Colin Smart, the England prop matching his consumption, did so too, but Colclough, a prankster, had switched his liquid. Smart had not. Cue stomach pump. 'He'd gone in before, he'd tipped it out, he'd put white wine in,' Brogane says. 'What Dad said he thought would happen is he'd basically put it in and then spit it out.' At Brogane's wedding last year, every guest had a bottle of aftershave with limoncello in it. 'I actually think the one where he shot the bullet through the roof is better,' Brogane adds. That was on tour when a policeman came to quell rugby rowdiness and Colclough, thinking the safety was on, aimed at the ceiling. Maurice met Annie at Cardiff Arms Park and settled in south Wales. Both were entrepreneurial. He bought a trawler called the Picton Sea Eagle with plans to turn it into a floating restaurant. When in South Africa, he was involved in slot machines. 'I remember taking him to Cyril Ramaphosa's house,' Fen says. 'For business.' A week before this interview, Ramaphosa was at the White House as president of South Africa. In her father's image, Morgane opened Welsh General Store on St David's Day this year. It used to be a bookshop with 10,000 books — she points to the sagging roof — and, seeking a change from London, she bought it in an online auction. Annie ('the veg deliverer'), Fen and Morgane live nearby. Brogane has travelled from London, Freya from Manchester, to recollect. The quintet hammer home the sense of adventure he instilled. 'Excess is best' was his motto, giving one's all but having fun. 'Life was about risk,' Freya says. When Colclough had a boat that needed to sail from Spain to South Africa, via Brazil, he enlisted a 17-year-old Fen. 'That was my choice, but I would never have made it had he not brought me up,' she says. 'I did sail with him across Biscay, so we did sail on the boat together. He bought a boat off a Russian spy, basically, and it still had all the spy stuff on it.' That included a 'spy pen' that exploded. The travelling companion fainted, and Colclough carried on sailing solo with a damaged finger. Theirs was an active childhood, with rugby as part of it. Twenty years ago the family featured in The Times as Morgane and the twins played sevens for Llandovery College (Maurice was in Vienna, having been told the wrong week). At a memorial match in France after his death, Morgane was asked to begin proceedings. 'It says she did a drop-kick in that article,' Freya says. 'She did not do a drop-kick.' Morgane adds: 'They had to restart the match. It went about two metres.' For Colclough, it was all a game, a fraction of life. The sisters chortle at his love of sports day, once sending a camera crew when he was unavailable, and training the twins for the three-legged race so well that they were almost banned. 'The head teacher was like, 'Sorry girls, you can't compete together in the three-legged race, it's not fair,' ' Brogane says. 'Dad has never gone to see a head teacher before. Ever. He turned up in the school. He must have been in the office for 30 seconds. He came out, he's like, 'It's fine.' ' No one gets in the way of a Colclough and sports day. Such activities were far more important to Colclough than publicity. 'Head boy' Billy was captain on A Question of Sport and until recently chairman of World Rugby. Colclough was a player first and last, and the family agree that he would have known no trivia. 'He didn't have any real interest in celebrity,' Brogane says. Fen adds: 'Other people are more interested in rugby than he is. He would never watch it.' Freya tells another story: 'We went camping and fishing on his motorbike and I was on the back and we turned up at this camping site, just the two of us. We were just signing in and the man that was signing us in was like, 'Oh, Maurice Colclough, there used to be a famous rugby player called Maurice Colclough.' Dad said nothing and I was like, 'That's him!' ' At the start of this interview, Annie had laughed and said: 'Sorry, can I just ask? What is the reason for this?' It was to hear memories not from the Lion's mouth, but from the cubs. 'It's sad, obviously, to think that he died at 52, but I swear to God, that man lived 12 times more in those 52 years than so many other people do,' Brogane says. Now Annie: 'I'm just trying to think what he would have thought. He did philosophy, and he could be quite philosophical. Trying to imagine him, what he'd be doing now, and that's quite painful to think about. But then I don't know if he would actually enjoy being older.' Unanimously, they believe the seriousness of professional rugby would have been anathema to him. Those who recall him are still excited when they find out they are in the company of one of Maurice Colclough's daughters. 'One of our regulars found out and he's just brought in a Lions book today that he had,' Morgane says. 'He put notes where Dad's name was.' Rugby, again, as the gateway to the man. His approach to life continues fivefold through the women on a street in Blaenavon. 'I think about it more and more now — there is so much of Dad in all of us,' Brogane says. 'I feel like I've got that tin-of-beans-on-someone's-head energy.' Oh yes, the beans on the head. Well, that's a story for another time.
Daily Mail
3 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Eddie Hearn reveals dad Barry suffered a heart attack during Leyton Orient play-off clash - before attending boxing fight just FIVE days later in rapid recovery
Barry Hearn suffered a heart attack last month during Leyton Orient's play-off semi-final clash against Stockport County, his son Eddie has revealed. Barry, a legendary sports promoter, who has been involved in snooker, boxing, darts, football and more, previously owned the Os between 1995 and 2014. And, according to Eddie, a renowned boxing promoter, Barry felt some discomfort during the first leg of play-off encounter against Stockport and had to be taken to hospital. The 77-year-old, who has had two previous heart attacks, then had a third stent installed. A stent is a small mesh-like tube that helps to keep arteries open and is a common procedure following a heart attack. Thankfully, Barry recovered and despite the ordeal, he was remarkably present at Dave Allen's boxing clash against Johnny Fisher just a week later. Reflecting on what happened, Eddie told Boxing Social: 'He's fine. Obviously it's always very scary, that kind of thing. It was at the Orient match. It will do that to you, Leyton Orient. 'Five minutes in and he said "I'll just see out the game". Unfortunately he had to go down to the doctors and get taken to hospital, he had a heart attack. 'He had another stent. He's had three stents now, three heart attacks. As far as he's concerned he's brand new now. He played cricket at the weekend for Essex Over-70s. He scored 60. 'It actually happened the weekend before the Johnny Fisher fight, so it was back in May, and he went to the Johnny Fisher fight, five days after the heart attack.' Speaking further about his father's rapid recovery and return to normality, Eddie provided further context. 'On the Monday he had a stent put in to his artery,' he added. 'Tuesday they let him out. So he gets back home Tuesday. 'So I'm like "right, well you won't be coming to the Johnny Fisher fight". He says "no I'm f***ing coming to the Johnny Fisher fight". 'No, what are you doing? "I'm not missing the Johnny Fisher fight!" I said "dad, chill out". He goes "I'm not living my life like that, I've had a new stent, I'm brand new".' Eddie continued: 'That's what you're dealing with. When he goes, my dad, it could be next week, or it could be in 10 years, you just never know when your time's up. The 77-year-old owned Orient, who play in League One, for 19 years from 1995 to 2014 'But you will be able to say he lived to the absolute max of his life. And that's a great thing to be able to say.' Orient went on to draw the first leg against Stockport 2-2 before they progressed to the final on penalties following a 1-1 draw in the second leg. However, the Os - who were owned by Hearn when they last reached the League One play-off final in 2014 when they lost to Rotherham - were beaten 1-0 by Charlton to consign Richie Wellens' side to another season in the third tier. Hearn had previously explained the painful nature of that dramatic defeat by Rotherham 11 years ago and how it had impacted him. 'I've been paying for therapy ever since that day against Rotherham!,' he said. 'I get nightmares about it. This (the Charlton game) is my opportunity to cleanse myself, take away my therapist bills, go back to normal sleep patterns.'
