Pardew in a pair spree?
Posted on December 20th, 2011 | 70 Comments |
Newcastle United are pursuing (at least) two centre-backs according to rumours and Alan Pardew insists that Taye Taiwo isn’t one of them.
The rumour-mill has been doing the usual stuff and the latest has Newcastle interested in a pair of defenders.
The first is Douglas Franco Teixeira who is a 6ft 4in, 23 year old Brazilian who – in the tradition of Brazilians – is simply known as ‘Douglas’. Why do they do that anyway? And why isn’t Wayne Rooney simply known as ‘Wayne’, for example?
Anyway, Douglas started his career with Joinville, which sounds like a cartoon place but, as I’m sure you know, it’s in the Santa Catarina State in the south of Brazil. However, he only played two senior games for them before being snapped up by FC Twente where he’s been ever since, netting 8 times in 108 appearances.
The rumour of our interest comes from ‘sources in Holland’ who also suggest that Aston Villa and QPR are interested too. Cheick Tiote will know Douglas from his time at FC Twente and that could work to our advantage if we are indeed looking to recruit him.
‘Transfermarkt’ estimates he’s worth about £7.5m, although I have no idea where they get their figures from.
The second rumour concerns a Brazilian defender who’s currently plying his trade a bit closer to home and that’s Chris Samba. The 6ft 4in, 27 year old has been at Blackburn since 2007 after moving there from Hertha Berlin.
Now this particular rumour immediately sounds wrong to me because he’s 28, which is a bit old for our usual recruits, and playing for a Premier League team, which again doesn’t fit our typical recruitment strategy. You never know though. Maybe for the right price we’d be interested.
Apparently Mike Ashley is pressing Alan Pardew to shore up the defence and last week Pardew said:
“Mike has already asked me, ‘when are we going to get a centre-half?’“
If that’s true then there’s clearly money set aside to deepen our shallow defence, which is good news. It remains to be seen whether either of these two be part of it.
Pardew has however killed of the alleged interest we had in AC Milan’s Taye Taiwo, saying:
“There’s no interest. I don’t know anything more about that.“
Remember it’s all gossip and rumours. Occasionally one turns out to be true but most are as likely as me discovering the Higgs Boson in my trouser pocket.
I am more concerned that we have to keep looking for other players like these as we are unable to hang on to our quality players. To me this is all an added headache teams know offer enough and NUFC will sell their best to you. It would be nice to be untouchable like the top teams, this will never happen if we cant keep a bedrock of players at the club. Pardew I think tries to keep it real he has come to expect that we will sell if it comes to it. He has no definative answers but has to be positive at the same time, hence the odd statements he gives at times.
While NUFC is financially stable which is great there is an air of Russian Roulette at St James, i.e. who is next to go be it contracts or bidding wars. At least half of our team is shrouded in uncertainty and Who is to say we will keep BA if we are offered enough….