Tiote gives injury the finger
Posted on February 21st, 2011 | 37 Comments |
When you’re as tough as Cheik Tiote you don’t let trivial injuries stop you playing and such is the case with his ‘minor hand injury’, believed to be a fractured finger.
After recuperating with a robust diet of house bricks and steel girders and some leisure time wrestling enraged alligators, Tiote will apparently be available for next Saturday’s game against Bolton.
This is good news as there’s the small matter of revenge for the 5-1 slaughter they inflicted on us at their place, and Tiote is now a very important part of our midfield line up.
We bought the 24 year old Ivory Coastian (which sounds like a tea set and probably isn’t the right word) from FC Twente back in August 2010 for £3.5m, which seems like a fantastic bit of business now, and he just seems to have got better and better this season.
He had a reputation for being a hard tackler but, whilst that’s certainly true, there’s a lot more to his game than that. He can take the ball forward too and is certainly not shy about taking a shot, with the ball usually travelling fast enough to warp space and time around its path. He scored his first goal to even things up in the 4-4 draw against Arsenal and it was a cracker.
He does unfortunately head our discipline ‘table’ with 9 yellow cards and 1 red card. Some of those are undoubtedly deserved but he also gets caught by some of the namby-pamby, oversensitive refereeing that’s all the rage in the Premiership these days as he’s not at all what I’d call a ‘dirty player’.
Still, it’s good to have him as part of our midfield, which I genuinely believe is up there with any team outside of the ‘Big 3’ (Man U, Chelski and Arsenal) and will be even stronger when the likes of Ben Arfa, Gosling and Ireland are fit.
I’d like to see him playing alongside Barton in the centre of midfield with Jonas and Benny taking a wing a piece, although that would mean dropping Nolan and he gets a lot of goals. Just speculating!
Tiote puts me in mind of Stuart Pearce a bit in some ways – remember him trying to ‘run off’ a broken leg once?
Wasn’t Marcelino out for a year with a sore finger?