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Football365's Top Ten Window Losers...

Last week we brought you the winners (Sol Campbell, West Ham etc) and this week we bring you those for whom January was a nightmare - the fans, managers and players who suffered...

Last Updated: 09/02/10 at 17:26 Post Comment



10) Jason Scotland
To be fair, you can have no complaints when you fail to score in 20 Premier League games, but when the manager brings in not one but two strikers on deadline day you have to get the feeling that your number is up. And true enough, Scotland was on the bench at Sunderland on Saturday but watched first Marcelo Moreno and then Victor Moses climb off the bench while he was stuck alongside perpetual sub Scott Sinclair. January has not gone well for Mr Scotland.


9) Birmingham fans
The talk was of £40m being spent in the January transfer window, and then £20m and then just £10m. In the end they spent £6m on Michel and Craig Gardner and did not add the attacking player they were chasing with moves for Roman Pavlyuchenko, Kenwyne Jones and Ryan Babel. Any disappointment will be tempered by the Blues' unexpected safety with more than a third of a season to play, and the acknowledgement that the money will still be there to spend in the summer, but Birmingham fans who dream of overhauling Aston Villa would have liked to see a few headline-grabbing big-name arrivals.


8) Thomas Sorensen
Clubs like Stoke do not spend £3.25m on a keeper to let him sit on the bench and you hae to assume that Tony Pulis sees Asmir Begovic as his long-term number one, with Sorensen eventually being pushed out in the cold. But the most galling thing to Sorensen will be the links with a loan move to Arsenal. Although Arsene Wenger has since denied the approach, the Dane will obviously be left with thoughts of 'what might have been' whilst he's aiming long balls at Mamady Sidibe's head and wondering when Begovic will take his place.


7) Anderson
Fined for going AWOL, banished to the reserves, frozen out of United's last four games - things are not going very well for the Brazilian at Old Trafford, where he has earned himself the ire of Sir Alex Ferguson. The possibility of a move to France and regular football under a more regular manager was mooted in January but apparently fell through because of doubts about Owen Hargreaves' return to the club. So Anderson remains at United, where he remains about as popular as the man who designed that 'Welcome to Manchester' poster.


6) Sam Allardyce
Aruna Dindane was "in the building right the way up to five o'clock", according to Allardyce, who had already failed to agree a deal for Benjani because of work permit problems. So Benni McCarthy left and on Saturday, the Blackburn boss fielded an XI with only 13 goals between them this season at Stoke. They were lucky to get nil. After a month of being linked with the likes of James Beattie, Alardyce eventually came away from the transfer window with a weaker squad. Anyone believing his line that he's perfectly happy with the players he's got for the relegation run-in?


5) Michael Owen
The real nad news for Owen came on December 23 when Mame Biram Diouf was granted a work permit. The problem intensified on January 10 when Diouf came off the bench ahead of him and impressed, and then on January 16 Owen's status as fourth-choice Manchester United striker was sealed when Diouf scored his first goal for the club. Owen is now so surplus to requirements at Old Trafford that nobody would have been surprised if rumours of a deadline-day move to Aston Villa had turned out to be true. When half the United team are jetting off to SA this summer, Owen may well wish they were.


4) Mick McCarthy
"We have offered to pay over the odds on three or four players but it is just not going to happen. We have been prepared to do it and we have bid more than others, but they don't want to come or the clubs don't want to sell," said the Wolves boss, utterly desperate to add some quality to a side over-relying on Kevin Doyle. They bid a massive £5m for Stephen Hunt (he's good, but £5m?) while McCarthy admitted an ambitious move for Robbie Keane had failed to come off. Could there be anything more frustrating to a football manager than facing a relegation battle with money in the bank that you just can't spend?


3) Roman Pavlyuchenko
He wanted nothing more than to leave Tottenham while boss Harry Redknapp would probably have helped him pack his cossack hats, but both reckoned without Daniel Levy and his insistence on running his football club like a business (crazy talk, isn't it Hammers/Palace/Pompey fans?) and not accepting massive losses on valuable footballers just because they are only the fourth-choice striker. Levy wanted £13m for Pavlyuchenko and that kind of money was not being bandied around by anyone in January, particularly not the sensible Scot in charge of the purse strings at Birmingham. So the poor lad is stuck for now.


2) Avram Grant
Things weren't exactly looking sunny in the Pompey garden as the transfer window opened but they were within touching distance of survival thanks in part to the efforts of Younes Kaboul and Asmir Begovic. So of course the club sold Younes Kaboul and Asmir Begovic to raise enough money to pay the rest of the rotten squad that are now seven points offf 17th and surely doomed. Add in another change of ownership and the very public humiliation of visiting a 'massage parlour' and we suspect that 2010 has already become Grant's annus horriblis.


1) Arsenal fans
There's money available and big gaping holes in the squad to fill with said cash, as every Arsenal fan draws up a list of possible striker targets from the ridiculously optimistic (David Villa), through the interesting but unlikely (Ruud van Nistelrooy) to the possible (Roman Pavlyuchenko). There's also the small matter of a new goalkeeper, centre-half and central midfielder (all preferably over six foot) alongside assurances from everyone inside the Emirates that Arsene Wenger had been given money to spend. So what did they get? A 35-year-old centre-half whose only previous game of the season was against Morecambe in the fourth division. And he was rubbish.


Sarah Winterburn

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ood article, as I've stated already those who consider Webb favoured United are blind to reality.

rascal87
Webb Did United More Harm Than Good...

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AAAAA!!!! Adam Johnson and Welbeck cheated period, why is it so difficult to call a spade a spade in this country?! Alan Shearer did not disappoint me when he tried to defend Johnson but YOU!!!!

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Webb Did United More Harm Than Good...

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ntil fans are prepared to denounce their own players for diving, there is no moral high ground to be had on the issue.

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