Tev -vs- Nev: The Guardian tomorrow

[hyper]

Didn't work Gillie, not for me anyway.
Can someone copy and paste the whole article before this thread turns to total shit??!

Don't bother, I've just read it and its just another journo taking a swipe to get lots of hits and comments on his blog. Best to avoid as not to give them the satisfaction.

MRM did you get Trojan js redirector message when you clicked on that page?.

The only reason the link doesn't work is the word u-n-i-t-e-d at the end on the web address has been changed to U***d by this forum. Click on this link and then add a 'd' to the end of the web address.

[bluej]

For those that want to read it (its really not worth it)

Carlos Tevez and the philanthropic folk who own his "economic rights" constructed a myth around themselves that El Apache was pushed out of Old Trafford by Manchester United's coldness. In their version, Carlitos trudged across town to join Manchester City because the champions just weren't showing him enough love.

Gary Neville was right in spirit to assert that Tevez was "not worth £25m" but applied the wrong sum. City have yet to present a convincing denial of the revelation that Tevez actually cost them £47m, or £83m if you include a five-year contract at £140,000 a week. If the rebuttal comes from Garry Cook, the City chief executive who got his dates all mixed up over the approach to Roberto Mancini, that £47m figure is just going to sound more credible.

The £25m charge for Tevez's signature related only to his two-year loan deal with United. It wasn't his general transfer fee. In those two seasons in the red half of town he won a couple of Premier League titles and a Champions League medal, which enabled his owners to bump the price up. City are reliably reported to have paid £15m, plus two further lumps of £16m: or £47m in all.

United admit they pushed the negotiations to keep him "to the wire" but were influenced by a decline in his effectiveness in matches and on the training ground. His second season (five Premier League goals in 29 appearances) was much less impressive than his first (14 in 34 games). The coaching staff were giving him lower marks on the fields of Carrington. As the dénouement approached, Tevez's advisers were insisting they had not spoken to other clubs while United were being told that Chelsea and City had offered more to the consortium than the original £25.5m.

Neville thinks Tevez is over-priced and Tevez fires back that Sergeant Nev is an "idiot", a "boot-licker" and a tarado (moron). Which accusation are you going to go with? The origin of the bitterness among some United players is their suspicion that Tevez acquiesced to a lucrative move to Eastlands while posing as a victim of lovelessness. "He's been disappointed at the way he's been treated," said Kia Joorabchian, the head of his entourage. Like United's fans, the players clocked those "Welcome to Manchester" billboards featuring Tevez in sky blue. Part jest, part provocation, the posters still come up in conversation most days around the two clubs.

As for the charge of being poor value, City's hot-streak scorer has struck against Arsenal, Chelsea and United this season and is on a crusade to kick his old club out of the Carling Cup. An expert once described him to me as a "busy fool", meaning that his industriousness sometimes lacked an outcome. Evidently he loves a grudge. But his general scoring record of one every three matches for United hardly entitled him to shoot up to fifth on the all-time list of highest transfer fees, behind Cristiano Ronaldo, Zinedine Zidane, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Kaká. He's not in their class.

City's willingness to pay over the odds was legitimate gesture politics of the sort that brought Robinho to the club for £32.5m. The intention there was to break the British transfer record and scatter the herd. Nothing wrong with that, in football's twisted terms. You don't bring Chelsea and United down playing Uriah Heep. But the truth is that United had offered the full £25.5m to his owners when he announced it was all "too late" and framed his move to City as a matter of principle.

That's principle spelt "£140 grand a week": an estimated 75% pay rise. Alternatively, you could write it as £50m. Whoever the people are who own him, they bought those economic rights in 2004 for £14m. Tevez and Javier Mascherano were like two people blindfolded and cut loose in an alien metropolis when they were parked at West Ham pending a more lucrative arrangement. Mascherano found one at Liverpool and Tevez earned the syndicate an £8m loan fee for two seasons at United, before City's approach offered them a chance really to cash their chips.

Interesting dude, though, Tevez. Selling your soul to a speculator is bound to seem more attractive if you start out from Fuerte Apache, the notorious barrio near Buenos Aires. And Tevez could argue that it all worked out with his summer sashay across Manchester. Carlitos Way, they could call it. Even his yap-yap gesture at Neville was hardly offensive until he followed it up with his shoe-sucker or boot-licker crack on Argentinian radio.

"It was lack of respect for a compañero," Tevez complained of his former team-mate's original remark. Notice that it was a taunt based on money that set him off.

Vile, pointless article. Since when do you start counting the wages within a transfer fee as well?

There's a quality comment in the comments section that just takes the article to pieces (not that its that hard)

i'm not a fan of Carlos Tevez personally nor do i think he's an outstanding player (though certainly decent enough), but apart from the fact that this article is about someone who plays football, what on Earth does it have to do with the sport? this is as pure a character assassination piece as i've ever seen in a mainstream publication of any kind, and the Guardian should be ashamed for running it.

what parallel dimension has Paul Hayward been living in for 30 years to commit so much undue outrage to print?

accusing a footballer of acting out of financial self-interest rather than some vague sense of loyalty to the people who bought him? and of all people, one who's rights are controlled by a third party, which makes it difficult to find the player totally culpable for the transactions that surround him? does this columnist not cover The Richest League in the World? for a living? i wonder how, then, a footballer preferring money over "love" or loyalty is shocking to him?

unless, says the cynic, this columnist has indulged his own love of money for writing a push-back piece on behalf of United or their monied interests who didn't like the direction of this latest story on the back of all the other recent stories about their finances and the mishandling thereof?

Selling your soul to a speculator is bound to seem more attractive if you start out from Fuerte Apache, the notorious barrio near Buenos Aires.

i'd wager most of us reading this would have "sold our soul" (if by "soul", we mean simply the rights to our footballing skills and image) to a third party if they promised to make us millions and lift ourselves and our family out of poverty and one of the most treacherous ghettos in Argentina, yet it seems as though Hayward is using this decision to accuse him of something or further impugn Tevez's character. that, if true, is vile and worthy of real condemnation.

[legget]

For some reason, I can't paste in the link.

Try guardian football - paul hayward

the reason being that the forum world filter fuxs up the url. If it happens again just use tinyurl to sort it out. It ends up looking like this:
http://tinyurl.com/yatrz45

[DoomMerchant]

Want some fail with that?

PMSL. that was classic.

[ronk]

Charming. Well, that's a decent example of why everyone hates the rags.

They alternate seamlessly and without irony or shame between being the richest most powerful club in the world to being self-made working class heroes (like Chuckle) that started off without a pot to piss in.

He was West Ham's player, they never gave them any sympathy.They had an option, the price was based on the loan fee they started off with, so they would have been playing a higher price than £25m anyway, but we won't worry about that.

Tevez was always going to get a pay rise because he was on a shorter contract. Scum would have had to pay him more if they wanted to keep him, and that's regardless of whether we ever were taken over or not.

Again the doublethink flits between how they desperately tried to sign him at the last minute after publicly humiliating him but he somehow engineered the whole situation for money to how he wasn't really worth even close to £25m, would have been lucky to get £15m. Doesn't matter in the least that the rags weren't his only alternative; the price we paid wasn't to beat them, it was to make Real look elsewhere. They took Benzema away from the scum, all the better.

[ant london]

this is funny....well, it made me laugh! (see also the letter from today's Fiver at the bottom)


"High Society" Gary Neville

THE INDUSTRIAL SLUMS OF BURY

Despite the best attempts of Sir Alex Ferguson, Fingergate rumbles on like Mahatma Gandhi's stomach at the end of a hunger strike. The Manchester United manager struggled even more than usual to hide his irritation upon being asked about Gary Neville's spat with Carlos Tevez during his press conference today, adopting the confrontational forward-lean-with-hands-under-table pose instead of the more relaxed back-lean-with-hands-clasped-behind-head pose that generally signifies he's in a mood that's not so much good as less bad than usual.

"I'm no interested," he och-ayed wearily, rolling his eyes so far towards the heavens that they did a full 360-degree revolution in his skull. "[Tevez] is not our player anymore so I've nothing to say about it ... at all. Players argue with each other ... time and time again and it's not an issue for us." While Tevez's baiting of Neville, the one-fingered salute that greeted it and the Argentinian's subsequent description of his former team-mate as a "boot licker" and "a moron" may not be a big deal to Fergie, the Argentinian press have read rather a lot into it. One columnist, presumably Argentina's answer to Polly Toynbee, felt moved to declare that Tevez is "the prototype of the struggle against class inequality", which explained his gesture towards "high society Gary Neville".

Now far be it from the Fiver to tar all Argentinian columnists with the same brush, but is it really conceivable that there are people in Buenos Aires who believe that, when he's not jogging sideways up and down the sideline at Premier League grounds, Neville strides manfully from wing to wing of Neville Hall in a top hat and tails, white gloves and a monocle, savagely beating insolent servants with his silver-tipped cane? OK, so Tevez had a tough upbringing in the Barrio Ejército de los Andes, but compared to that endured by Neville in the industrial slums of Bury, his must have been an idyllic childhood.

Meanwhile at Eastlands, Roberto Mancini has also drawn a line under Fingergate, saying: "I think these things can sometimes happen after a match. The players are tired and sometimes they do not think what they are saying. It is important that this matter is finished now, as we need to focus on our next game." Sadly Tevez will sit out City's FA Cup game against Firewall FC on Sunday, in order to seethe ahead of the increasingly mouthwatering return leg of Lord Snooty v the Riff-Raff in the Struggle Against Class Inequality Cup next week.


"Re: Neville having a harder upbringing than Tevez (Friday's Fiver); I totally agree, unless Carlos's father is called Martin Martinez, the sons of Neville Neville must have endured a far worse time in their school playgrounds" - Sam Thomas.