honesty of effort should come for free, its 5m for the duracell bunny, and the bunny would have a better first touch
Watched him a few times with Reading this season and he has been excellent.
I’m disappointed he’s leaving Reading for Wigan though is all.
Jay Tabb has been signed by Reading, I presume to replace him…Might get his chance with Ireland now
He any good Puke? Never heard of him I must say
Handy enough pikeman…Saw him a handful of times for Coventry and he seems to be a better player than Hunt in terms of technique, migtn’t be lightening but likes to take on the full backs and looks to have the ability to make the step up to a higher level…No harm in having another option down the right hand side for Ireland rather than using natural left wingers like McGeady and Duff
[quote=“Pikeman”]Watched him a few times with Reading this season and he has been excellent.
I’m disappointed he’s leaving Reading for Wigan though is all.[/quote]
Likewise when I have ever seen him I have been impressed this season.
I think Wigan will suit him. His hardworking style will impress Bruce. His crossing and set pieces are generally very good and I can see him chipping in with a few goals. Good for him. A 5m transfer is some turnaround from being available on a free from Brentford or Bradford or wherever he was only a few years ago.
[quote=“KIB man”]Likewise when I have ever seen him I have been impressed this season.
I think Wigan will suit him. His hardworking style will impress Bruce. His crossing and set pieces are generally very good and I can see him chipping in with a few goals. Good for him. A 5m transfer is some turnaround from being available on a free from Brentford or Bradford or wherever he was only a few years ago.[/quote]
Brentford, think Coppell was his manager there as well
[quote=“Pikeman”]Watched him a few times with Reading this season and he has been excellent.
I’m disappointed he’s leaving Reading for Wigan though is all.[/quote]
No offence to Hunt but he was unlikely to get a move to a Barcelona, Celtic, Milan or Manchester United.
Wigan are a solid club now and he’ll have every opportunity to play regularly in the EPL.
[quote=“Bandage”]No offence to Hunt but he was unlikely to get a move to a Barcelona, Celtic, Milan or Manchester United.
Wigan are a solid club now and he’ll have every opportunity to play regularly in the EPL.[/quote]
Too right. Glasgow Celtic arent in a position to spend 5m on a player. Doubt even Noel Hunt would be interested in a move back to the SPL to be honest.
I think everyone has done well from this deal. He didnt sulk too much when the move to Everton broke down. Wigan is about his level I’d say. Reading have got a great return on a player they got from free not too long ago. Losing him is a big blow to their promotion hopes.
Really hope it goes well for Hunt at Wigan. Trappatoni seems to favour Duff. Wigan are more high profile than Reading so the issue of club form may give Hunt more of a profile in future.
In fairness, its a good move for him. Wigan will suit him and Bruce is an manager that will like his style.
Up until now Steve Coppell was the only manager he has ever had in England.
Fran, should be able to tell you who his last manager before Coppell was… (Anthony Browne at a guess)
I would have liked to see Hunt join Everton to be honest. Moyes is an excellent manager (albeit a moany, moany cunt) and they are not likely to go down any time soon.
[quote=“Bandage”]No offence to Hunt but he was unlikely to get a move to a Barcelona, Celtic, Milan or Manchester United.
Wigan are a solid club now and he’ll have every opportunity to play regularly in the EPL.[/quote]
Know that, it’s just I followed Reading closely since Doyle joined and became a fan of them and will be disappointed to see Hunt go as he’s been flying there the last few years. Wigan ain’t a bad move I suppose but no great shakes going there either (apart from, of course, playing the Premier League-which I think Reading will be at next season anyway)
[quote=“HangBlaa”]In fairness, its a good move for him. Wigan will suit him and Bruce is an manager that will like his style.
Up until now Steve Coppell was the only manager he has ever had in England.
Fran, should be able to tell you who his last manager before Coppell was… (Anthony Browne at a guess)[/quote]
It was Coppell at Crystal Palace, his first club, I’m not sure if he’s stayed with him all the time he’s been in England though. Anthony Browne would’ve been the last manager at Johnville but he played a couple of years with Carrick United before crossing the water.
I’m surprised he’s left Reading aswell. Pushing hard for promotion again, there’s a good contingent of Irish including his brother there.
There’s talk that Spurs have come in for Stephen Hunt now.
Marina Hyde has destroyed this Garry Cook character in The Guardian in the wake of the collapse of the Kaka deal. She certainly doesn’t hold back - good read:
Why Cook’s City-pops taste bitter
Nothing about the Kaka farce was worse than Manchester City’s executive chairman masquerading as a gentleman besieged by vulgarians.
Does anyone know where we are on those Manchester City-branded energy drinks proposed by Garry Cook, the club’s mesmerically ghastly executive chairman? Mr Cook caught his new owners’ eye with an 83-page thesis entitled A New Model for Partnership, a sort of footballing Das Krapital, wherein he predicted City’s full-spectrum dominance of planet Earth, within the structure of a Premier League of 10 to 14 clubs, with no promotion or relegation.
Among his many brainwaves was the creation of three City energy drinks City Powered, City Energy and City 24/7 and one could not help but feel that Garry might have drunk deep from an experimental sample of one this week, when he fumed that Milan had “bottled it” over the Kaka transfer.
How else to explain his being reduced to such emotional language? How else to explain the needy blitzkrieg of post-Milan briefings, in which he detailed the venal and amateurish nature of his adversaries and the lack of pastries in their lawyers’ offices while attempting to occupy the moral high ground? It all seems most out of character. After all, until this week’s fiasco, Garry had cultivated the air of the type of affectless sports executives grown in petri dishes in Nike’s Oregon labs.
It was Nike whence he came, of course, where he was in charge of Michael Jordan’s brand, another chap how to put this? who has never allowed himself to be held back by the dead weight of principle. When the segregationist Republican senator Jesse Helms ran against a black Democrat in his home state of North Carolina, Jordan famously declined to take sides on the basis that “Republicans buy sneakers too”.
And no sooner had Garry been lured to Eastlands by the erstwhile owner Thaksin Shinawatra than he revealed himself to be a similarly gifted fence-sitter. Asked how he felt about working for the former Thai PM, condemned by Human Rights Watch as a “human-rights abuser of the worst kind”, Garry replied: “Is he a nice guy? Yes. Is he a great guy to play golf with? Yes. Does he have plenty of money to run a football club? Yes. I really care only about those three things. Whether he is guilty of something over in Thailand, I can’t worry I worked for Nike who were accused of child-labour issues and I managed to have a career there for 15 years. I believed we were innocent of most of the issues. Morally, I felt comfortable in that environment.”
Alas, there isn’t the space to wonder what handicap some of history’s less-alluring leaders played off, or indeed to speculate whether they’d have stood their round in the clubhouse. But what we can say is that Garry has been looking distinctly less comfortable this week. Quite understandable without the figleaf of a big-name signing, the big-talking chairman must feel a little exposed in front of his owners. (That his earlier scalp, Robinho, should choose this very moment to go awol from City’s winter training camp is an instance of curious synchronicity.)
Less understandable is the manner in which he has chosen to “move on” from it all. For a while, the role of cretinous lightning rod at Eastlands was taken by Sheikh Mansour’s deal frontman, Dr Sulaiman al-Fahim with comments about the imminent acquisition of Cristiano Ronaldo. But with Dr al-Fahim now stood down from jester duties, it seems to have fallen to Garry to step into his shoes and what a quick understudy he has proved.
Your ears did not deceive you. Following the collapse of the Kaka “deal”, the club chairman really did return from Milan in high dudgeon, affecting distaste that money had been mentioned so often. He really did gabble something semi-intelligible about City’s emphasis on “humanitarian potential factors”. He really did synthesise confusion that Kaka should have chosen to miss out on the opportunity to come “on a journey”. And he really did suggest Milan lacked dignity. This would be disingenuous were it being spouted by Ron Manager. Coming from a man whose public credo has hitherto been bowdlerised Nietzsche, it begins to look like a demented form of self-parody.
Of all the poses Garry Cook should now choose to adopt, that of a gentleman ambushed by cowardly vulgarians is easily the most preposterous. Is this how real big hitters behave? When he eventually comes down off his City Energy high, the City chairman would do well to admit that for all its vaingloriousness, and for all its farce, nothing about the entire Kaka saga has made the club look more amateurish than his charmless bleating about it afterwards.
Spurs have agreed terms with Sunderland to take Pascal Chimonda back to White hart lane, he will have a medical tomorrow
Weird transfer. He’s muck and they only got rid of him last summer.
'Arry’s cracking…
How much for?
With signings like this 8/1 for Spurs to be relegated seems good value.
Certainly does, would love to see them go down. Harry is becoming more and more dislikeable by the day.
[quote=“Mac”]How much for?
With signings like this 8/1 for Spurs to be relegated seems good value.[/quote]
3 million squid according to Talksport this morning.