Adrian Durham

Adrian Durham. I’m not 100% sure if he is on the wind-up with everything he ever writes, but I choose to take him at face value to highlight the ridiculousness of his “journalism”.

His thoughts on Mourinho pre Man Utd v Real Madrid:

He once questioned a referee who then got death threats and decided to retire. So much for respect.

When Mourinho joined Chelseain June 2004 he gave a press conference where he claimed he was “a special one”. Later that same month Imran Khan, Pakistani cricketer and politician, and Jemima Khan, daughter of the late Anglo-French billionaire Sir James Goldsmith, announced their divorce.

So much for the sanctity of marriage.

Mourinho has reportedly sent Tito Vilanova his best wishes but, for me, there is something deeply wrong with the amount of celebrating Real Madrid have done in the Barcelona faces after recent victories in El Clasico. Vilanova is in the USA having treatment for cancer.

This bit is beyond parody.

If Real Madrid go through they will have deserved to go through I suppose, but I prefer people who love football to be winners, not people who depend on off-the- field nonsense as part of their tactics. 

Managers who depend on off the field nonsense, like say Alex Ferguson?

Then we move on to Olivier Giroud, Arsenal’s mildly disappointing RVP replacement.

The previous day at Blackburn one of the Football League’s hottest properties right now, 5ft 9in Londoner Dwight Gayle,scored a hat-trick to lift my team Peterborough United off the bottom of the table. It was a perfect hat-trick: the first with his left-foot, the second with his head and the third with his right-foot. 

This hat-trick was scored from a combined distance of about 15 yards. It was decent finishing on good chances in the box.

Gayle, a 22-year-old pacy striker who feels his biggest strength is his finishing, could have been playing for Arsenal. He was with the Gunners as a schoolboy, but released at the age of 12 when the club told him he was too small, that he lacked height and strength

You’d think it’s obvious where this is going, and indeed he does hit us with:

What a shame Arsenal didn’t work hard with a young player and turn him into their first homegrown English star striker to come through under Wenger since... well there hasn’t been one during Wenger’s reign.

Like Wenger can magically invent a striker out of nothing. No credit for Wilshere, Ashley Cole and Gibbs, they aren’t strikers you see. Only strikers count I’m afraid. Also implies there is a limitless amount of young English strikers just waiting around that Wenger just can’t be bothered with. Fact is that the current English crop of young strikers wasn’t available to Wenger because they weren’t born or living near North London.

Then we take a turn for the crazy with the following:

The big clubs in England have a terrible recent record at producing strikers through their academies

He goes on to list players produced including

Danny Welbeck
Daniel Sturridge

Andy Cole

Kevin Campbell

Carlton Cole

Robbie Fowler

Michael Owen

Wayne Rooney

Andy Carroll

Followed by:

The big clubs in England should be ashamed of their poor record of producing strikers. Do academy coaches really know what they’re doing?

So arbitrarily deciding non-strikers don’t count, then producing a list of successful strikers anyway and he still comes to the wrong conclusion!

England’s most capped players currently active were youth products from:

Man Utd
Liverpool
Arsenal
West Ham
Liverpool
West Ham
Everton
Chelsea

Summary:He is talking nonsense.