Walder takes up Exeter Chiefs coaching role
Walder has also spent time as Bristol's backs and skills coach and joins Exeter as the club comes to the end of their worst season in the top flight.They have won just four Premiership games all season and are guaranteed to finish second from bottom.Walder will be part of the Exeter coaching team for Sunday's trip to Harlequins."I've known Dave a long time, and I really appreciate the work he put in for a lengthy period at Newcastle," Baxter said."I thought he did a fantastic job there with relatively limited resources. He always brought out the best in the group that he had working with him."More recently, he's been working with some of our England Under-20 players, and those guys have only had positive things to say about him."It's fantastic for us to have someone of his experience and capabilities joining us. "Hopefully he'll take us forward with our attacking game and how we want our backs to play. With him coming on board, we're really looking forward to getting on with the remainder of the season."
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Palace boss makes transfer admission with star midfielder close to departure
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Horse racing tips: ‘He's unexposed and like a bullet out the gates' – Templegate's huge 12-1 NAP for day three of York
TEMPLEGATE tackles day three of the York Ebor Festival confident of bashing the bookies with his best racing tips. Back a horse by clicking their odds below. NIGHT RAIDER (3.35 York, nap) He has shaped better than his form figures suggest, especially when sixth behind JM Jungle at Goodwood. He was the winner on the wrong side of the track there. Still unexposed at 5f and can improve again. ZGHARTA (4.10 York, nb) She was a typical Goodwood hard-luck story last time and this more conventional track should be ideal. She finished with running left and the return to this trip on fast could suit ideally. She is on a workable mark and shapes as one firmly on the up. The Gosden stayer can reel in another nice prize after his demolition job in the Gold Cup at Royal Ascot. He made all that day and surged clear of a strong field, backing up a dominant win in the Henry II at Sandown. Proven over the trip and fine on this quick surface, he looks the class act here and hard to oppose. 1.50 NAQEEB looks primed to land this hot handicap after a huge run at Goodwood, charging home for second despite losing a shoe during the race. That backed up a storming third at Royal Ascot and he's crying out for this sort of test. A strong traveller with proven form on quick ground, he's weighted to strike and looks ready to cash in. Mount Atlas is a big danger up in class after a smooth Ascot win. He's clearly thriving but has a little bit more on his plate here from a career-high mark. Insanity is one to note after a luckless third in the same race – he wasn't ideally placed that day and could easily hit the frame again. This Songisforyou was pitched into Group company last time and didn't disgrace himself – he'll find this easier and shouldn't be overlooked. French Duke hasn't fired this season but has talent and is slowly coming down the weights. 2.25 TRAWLERMAN can reel in another nice prize after his demolition job in the Gold Cup at Royal Ascot. He made all that day and surged clear of a strong field, backing up a dominant win in the Henry II at Sandown. Proven over the trip and fine on this quick surface, he looks the class act here and hard to oppose. Al Qareem is thriving, especially at York, and arrives chasing a hat-trick after front-running wins in Listed and Group 3 company. He'll push the pace again and won't go down without a fight. Sweet William is consistent and stays all day but often gives ground away early and may need to be sharper from the gates to land a blow. Al Nayyir bounced back with a narrow defeat to Coltrane last time and does stay this far, though he's yet to score at this level. Dubai Future has plenty of back class but has been found wanting in top races this term, while three-year-old Shackleton is a likeable type for the future but needs a big step forward to trouble these old hands. 3.00 DO OR DO NOT can get off the mark in the Gimcrack. This son of Space Blues has danced every dance this summer, hitting the frame in three consecutive Group 2s. He was just behind high-class performers at both Newmarket and Goodwood, shaping like a colt crying out for a big pot. He's tactically sharp, handles quick ground and looks rock solid with first-time cheekpieces added to the mix. Reciprocated went backwards at Ascot after two easy wins and needs to settle better, while Rock On Thunder ran well at Newbury but needs more in this company. Egoli has won twice and fared best on the wrong side of the track at Goodwood. Any improvement on that would put him in the picture. The speedy Comical Point needs a revival after flopping in the July Stakes at Newmarket last time. Lifeplan impressed on debut but faces a major class hike, while Irish Fighter and Yorkshire Puds both look up against it in this good company. 3.35 NIGHT RAIDER can land a smash and grab in the £700,000 Nunthorpe (3.35 York, nap). Karl Burke's flyer is ideally drawn in stall eight and deserves a change of luck after winning on the wrong side at Goodwood last time. He has loads of pace and will be right up there. JM Jungle beat him and a few of the others in that race and looks dangerous again. Arizona Blaze and Aussie Asfoora are in the mix too along with youngster Lady Iman. Here's my guide to the field, where I rate them from one (worst) to five (best): JM JUNGLE 4 JUNGLE boogie. Thriving sprinter, has improved through the season and comes here on the back of a Group 2 win at Goodwood. 5f ideal, handles fast ground well and is a strong contender at a track he likes. KERDOS 2 DON'T Ker. Well beaten at Goodwood but didn't really get the run of the race. Has shown flashes of form this year, including a solid Group 1 run at Ascot. 5f suits but might find a few too sharp. MANACCAN 1 NO Man. Back from a break this season and took a step forward last time in handicap company. Has Group form at best but looks vulnerable in this calibre of race. NIGHT RAIDER 5 NIGHT fever. Has shaped better than his form figures suggest, especially when sixth behind JM Jungle at Goodwood. He was the winner on the wrong side of the track there. Still unexposed at 5f and can improve again. RUMSTAR 3 STAR potential. Didn't seem to like soft at the Curragh last time after a career-best Sandown win. Consistent and will prefer this going. Could bounce back and one of many place chances. SPARTAN ARROW 1 BLUNT Arrow. Listed winner earlier this season and solid handicapper but hasn't looked up to this grade in recent runs. Latest Goodwood ninth confirms he's got something to find at this level. WASHINGTON HEIGHTS 3 WASH and go. C&D winner in Listed last month, and third in a strong Haydock Group 2 earlier this season so deserves to be here. Ggoes well fresh, so could easily run into the frame again. AIN'T NOBODY 1 NOBODY'S fool. Yet to score in 2025 but fair placed form in Pattern company earlier this term. Last two runs have been below that standard though and this looks a stretch on known form. ARIZONA BLAZE 4 BLAZE on fire. Improving colt with a turn of foot and showed that with convincing Group 2 win in Ireland last time. Has high-level form at 5f and arrives at the top of his game. Major player. ASFOORA 4 AS a chance. Australian mare with top-class back form, including a Royal Ascot win in 2024. This season's efforts have been decent without being electric but now third-up and fitter. Should be thereabouts if able to bring her best form. FROST AT DAWN 3 DAWN chorus. Group 1 runner-up earlier this summer and consistent at 5f. Fourth behind JM Jungle at Goodwood last time was solid. Likes fast ground, and strong pace will suit her style. MGHEERA 3 HEER we go. Classy mare with two Group wins already this year. Not at best in Ireland last time but needed the run after a break. Has pace and on the each-way shortlist under Buick. SHE'S QUALITY 3 QUALITY counts. Very solid filly, placed in last four Group runs and just denied by JM Jungle at Goodwood. Consistent, speedy and suited by conditions. Likely to run her usual honest race. CELANDINE 2 HARD Cell. Good run at Chester last time and a previous Group 3 scorer. Ground no issue and course winner too but this is her toughest task to date and she may just get outpaced. SAYIDAH DARIYAN 3 SAY maybe. Impressive winner of the Summer Stakes here last time over 6f and is improving. Likely to be ridden for a late burst and has claims if pace collapses. Needs another career-best. LADY IMAN 4 IMAN of the moment. Unbeaten 2yo filly who took the Molecomb in style at Goodwood. Gets huge weight-for-age allowance and clearly fast. First time taking on older horses but her profile screams serious Group 1 potential. SPICY MARG 3 NICE and Spicy. Has done little wrong so far and bolted up in minor race last time. Faces far stronger opposition but her finishing kick is potent. Gets lumps of weight and can hit the frame. 4.10 ZGHARTA was a typical Goodwood hard-luck story last time and this more conventional track should be ideal. She finished with running left and the return to this trip on fast could suit ideally. She is on a workable mark and shapes as one firmly on the up. Wonder Star is a big threat after nearly landing a similar contest at Goodwood. She travelled well there and is improving, but her draw and lack of experience in deeper handicaps are small concerns. Akecheta caught the eye from off the pace at Goodwood and is well suited by a strong gallop. She's handicapped to strike again soon. Cape Flora was visually striking at Leicester. This is tougher, but she's unexposed. Callisto Dream has shaped with promise all this season and she could improve for this step up in trip. Templegate's tips Commercial content notice: Taking one of the offers featured in this article may result in a payment to The Sun. You should be aware brands pay fees to appear in the highest placements on the page. 18+. T&Cs apply. Remember to gamble responsibly A responsible gambler is someone who:
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Why Tomas Soucek is unique player in Premier League
During his first months at West Ham United, after the medical and the signing and the debut had passed in a blur and he was beginning to settle into his new surroundings, Tomas Soucek became aware that he was missing something when his team-mates talked about the club's Rush Green training ground. His English wasn't great at that point, but it didn't have to be to detect the fizz and jest of playful banter. Eventually he got the message: Rush Green was commonly considered, by Premier League standards, pretty basic. When he found out that they were dissing the training ground, Soucek was genuinely and sincerely amazed. It had never occurred to him that it was anything other than top-notch. At his previous club, Slavia Prague, they used one training pitch all year round, and in the winter it was bumpy and hard to pass on. Here, they had five pitches, beautifully mown and perfectly flat, each one a gorgeous, lucent green. He turned up to training each morning and felt like a holidaymaker arriving at a resort with five swimming pools. 'Everyone told me it was basically a second-division training ground,' he told the Czech website iRozhlas, 'and I was like, 'What more could you want?' ' Obviously, this story sums up some of the qualities that have made Soucek, in his 5½ years in England, a cult hero to West Ham fans. His lack of hauteur. His uncomplicated way of going about things. But in hindsight I wonder if it's even more telling than that, if it hints at something essential about Soucek the footballer. To him, you see, the absence of luxurious trappings beside the training space was an irrelevance. To him, the space was the luxury. At the start of his seventh season Soucek is facing one of the lowest moments in his West Ham career. 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.
