Sniffing around Bullard
Martin O’neill will head the queue to snap up Jimmy Bullard for a bargain £3million if Fulham fail to stay in the Premier League.
The Aston Villa boss has been keeping tabs on energetic midfielder Bullard since his winning goal against Villa last month.
And his reports say the 29-year-old has shown he’s completely over the cruciate injury that threatened his career. Bullard has two years left of the contract he signed when he left Wigan in a £2.5m deal in 2006 but wouldn’t want to drop out of the top flight.
O’Neill, who wants to add more depth to his squad, was amazed at match statistics that showed Bullard found a team mate with 91 per cent of his passes during a defeat that damaged Villa’s hopes of Europe.
My question: why £3 million? Why not £6million? Or 7 or 8? We paid a good amount of money for players who had proven themselves in the Championship this summer. Partly this was Lawrie Sanchez paying a British League Premium, but partly this reflected going rates. Jason Koumas was another to cost a team good money to step up a division.
So, if Jimmy Bullard has proven himself to be a usable player in the division above that, why would he cost less?
One answer is leverage: if Bullard has only two years left on his contract then this makes it harder to hang onto him. We remember what happened with Steed. But I think Coleman played the Steed thing all wrong, and wasted another year of that player for a small transfer fee and short-term ego boost (”I’m the boss, don’t mess” or something). If Malbranque had just played out his contract I suspect Coleman might still be in charge now.
The same should presumably apply to Bullard. Assuming there is no clause in his contract, Jimmy Bullard is more valuable to us than any transfer fee we would receive for him. If we go down then he would be central to our bouncing back. If we stay up he would be important in staying up again. I can’t see a situation where you’d sell him for £3million. There is far more at stake than that now.
So I guess it just comes down to the player. Players have more power than used to be the case, and I assume that if Bullard pushed hard for a move he’d get it. The fans would “understand” because Bullard’s Bullard, an extrovert, an all-action bundle of vitality who everyone can’t help but love. “He deserves to play at the highest level” people might say.
I’m getting a long way ahead of myself, and this is based on nothing but media speculation. But I think the game’s economics have changed so much now that if Bullard goes Fulham must be paid something approximating his worth to us.
“Wisdom” of crowds revisited
Charles the Reading supporter made an excellent and timely comment in our archives today. He’s right, of course. Woops, arse, etc.
An update on my earlier point about how people overwhelming underestimate the capacity for the bottom teams to pick up points. We still have seven games remaining and here are the tallies of their current points vs. their predicted finish: 12 Middlesbrough (34 - 40) 13 Newcastle (32 - 37) 14 Wigan (31 - 32) 15 Reading (31 - 30) 16 Sunderland (30 - 34) 17 Birmingham (27 - 29) 18 Bolton (26 - 31) 19 Fulham (23 - 36) 20 Derby (10 - 12) Or, to put it another way: the number of points necessary for each team to reach their predicted finish: 12 Middlesbrough 6 13 Newcastle 5 14 Wigan 1 15 Reading -1 16 Sunderland 4 17 Birmingham 2 18 Bolton 5 19 Fulham 13 20 Derby 2 This shows that a) things are not looking good for the Cottagers and b) almost every one of these teams (with Fulham being the notable exception) should be expected to beat the average prediction, some by a substantial amount.
Andreasen removed from Denmark squad
Thanks to a Danish fellow on the official messageboard for this.
The gist is that he has a heel injury. Whether it’s a heel injury or a ‘heel injury’ we do not know. But the game is only a friendly so it seems wise to miss it at this point, all considered.
Hopefully Leon will be back in the middle of the park soon.
