Tiote gives injury the finger

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. (more…)