XHAKA CAN<\/p>\n
Correctly installed as lava-hot favourites to be relegated back to the Championship, seconds after the final whistle was blown at the end of their last-gasp playoff final win over Sheffield United, Sunderland promptly lost their standout player, Jobe Bellingham, to a far more successful club who might conceivably win a trophy more prestigious than Fizzy Cup in the next 70 years. Instead of raging about cosy cartels, the unfairness of PSR and the fact their billionaire owner isn\u2019t allowed to spend money on players that the football club he owns hasn\u2019t earned, mackems have since looked on with increasing intrigue as their club\u2019s hierarchy have unveiled a series of new signings that, while unlikely to prompt talk of a serious title tilt, may at least ensure that Sunderland do not feature in any conversational comparisons with Derby County and their record low Premier League points tally of 11 in the coming months.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a near-certainty that Enzo Le F\u00e9e, Habib Diarra, Simon Adingra, Chemsdine Talbi, Noah Sadiki and Reinildo Mandava won\u2019t all go on to achieve Hall of Fame status on Wearside. But, in signing the six players, the club have shown they at least intend to make a decent fist of trying to stay up, while also putting the Sunderland \u2018Til I Die days of Jack Rodwell on \u00a370,000-per-week in League One, paying \u00a34m for Will Grigg in an ill-advised deadline-day panic buy and that Oxbridge fop in the red trousers sound checking Ibiza anthems over the Stadium of Light PA long behind them. Of course, this being Sunderland, the possibility of sky-high farce and a snake belly low league position can never be discounted and despite these signings, the club\u2019s head coach, R\u00e9gis Le Bris, looked at risk of embarking on his first ever Premier League campaign with a callow and whey-faced squad boasting little or no top-flight experience.<\/p>\n
A grizzled old hand was required. Ideally a handsome, tough-tackling midfield veteran with more than a century of caps. A man whose leadership skills were held in such high regard by his peers that he famously topped the players\u2019 poll for the position of Arsenal captain in 2019 without recourse to a recount. A man so impervious to the slings and brickbats of his once-adoring public that he would go on to \u2026 er, lose that captaincy after throwing a strop in the face of fan derision<\/a> for being substituted against Crystal Palace. A man who realised the Sisyphean futility of trying to win a title at the Emirates and went to Germany to win one instead<\/a>. And a man who realised he was unlikely to win another one because Leverkusen are now managed by Erik ten Hag. What Sunderland needed was the man, the warrior, the myth and the occasionally contrary red and yellow card-magnet that is Granit Xhaka.<\/p>\n And hell\u2019s bells, if they haven\u2019t gone and got him<\/a>, in the process landing the kind of transfer coup which suggests that if they are to eventually go down next season, they will at least do so swinging haymakers of both the metaphorical and literal variety. \u201cI\u2019m very proud to be here,\u201d roared the man who finished 16th on last year\u2019s Ballon d\u2019Or list and has signed a three-year deal for a fee of around \u00a320m. \u201cWhen I spoke to the club, I was excited and I felt the energy and the mentality that all the people and players have. It\u2019s exactly what I wanted and I have a very good feeling.\u201d Having made it clear before his move that he was hell-bent on moving to Sunderland, Xhaka\u2019s arrival has prompted several questions, the most pertinent of which seems to be why exactly he was so hell-bent on going to Sunderland. \u201cWe are back to where this club needs to be, and we want to stay here to write our own history,\u201d yodelled the Swiss legend to his adoring public from the central tower of Durham Cathedral. \u201cI feel that I\u2019m ready to help the team with my experience but with quality as well.\u201d And while history is famously written by the winners, there isn\u2019t a mackem alive who won\u2019t be delighted if next season it\u2019s chronicled by the team finishing 17th.<\/p>\n QUOTE OF THE DAY<\/p>\n \u201cWe have done this immediately, following an assessment by engineering specialists who can no longer confirm that the North Stand is safe for spectator use\u201d \u2013 after yesterday\u2019s Football Daily<\/a>, Sheffield city councillor Joe Otten reveals the outlook is even more grim for Wednesday fans after they were been banned from opening Hillsborough\u2019s North Stand<\/a> to spectators due to safety concerns, with the new season little more than a week away.<\/p>\n Perhaps the reason for Sheffield Wednesday\u2019s 10-man, 16-0 defeat to Halliwell FC in 1887 (yesterday\u2019s Football Daily<\/a>) was that not all members of the 1896 FA Cup-winning squad were trusting of the Victorian time machine technology that the club were clearly using at that time?\u201d \u2013 Garreth Cummins (and others).<\/p>\n Although the number<\/a> is the same as Football Daily\u2019s pedants, my only knowledge of \u2018Bonnie Blue\u2019 is that I thought it was an affectionate name for Cowdenbeath\u2019s home kit. And that\u2019s the story I\u2019m sticking with\u201d \u2013 Simon Mazier (and 1,056 others).<\/p>\n Re: Forest\u2019s ownership. Guy Stephenson is partially correct (yesterday\u2019s Football Daily letters<\/a>); it is the same Evangelos Marinakis who put his shares into a blind trust earlier in the year, but it\u2019s also the Evangelos Marinakis that reversed the situation in June<\/a> when it became apparent it wasn\u2019t required\u201d \u2013 Jim Hearson.<\/p>\n If you have any, please send letters to the.boss@theguardian.com<\/a>. Today\u2019s winner of our prizeless letter o\u2019 the day is \u2026 Rollover. Terms and conditions for our competitions, when we run them, are here<\/a>.\u200a<\/p>\n RECOMMENDED BOOKING<\/p>\n On Thursday 11 September, join Max Rushden, Barry Glendenning and a host of your other Football Weekly favourites live on stage for an evening of unfiltered football punditry at Troxy in London and livestreamed globally. Book now<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"XHAKA CAN Correctly installed as lava-hot favourites to be relegated back to the Championship, seconds after the final…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35105,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":["post-35104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35104\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}