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Date: Sat May 16 16:59:33 GMT+00:00 1998
Mail: barry@www.red11.org


McClair bound for Macclesfield? 
Sparky in demand 
United play down 'Batigoal' link 
Paris talks for Foe 

Barry Your Editor

This Issue:
1. Ambitious United in pursuit of Argentina forwards  -
2. Becks Article (Telegraph)
3. Choccy McClair bound for Macclesfield? 
4. UNITED £20M DOUBLE CHASE 

++++++=========+++++++========+++++++++========++++++++


 David say's "See ya!" 


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Date: Sat, 16 May 1998 00:00:31 -0400
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Subject: Ambitious United in pursuit of Argentina forwards  -

  Times Report

Ambitious United in pursuit of Argentina forwards 

  BY MATT DICKINSON 

MANCHESTER UNITED can no longer be accused of caution in the transfer
market after the revelation that they want to sign both Gabriel
Batistuta and Ariel Ortega, the Argentina players, rather than just one
of them. 

The club's determination to secure success in the European Cup has
already prompted the £10.75 million signing of Jaap Stam, the Holland
defender, and Alex Ferguson, the manager, confirmed that negotiations
are taking place with Batistuta's representatives and his club,
Fiorentina, who are willing to accept a deal of around £12 million 12
months after refusing to sell the forward for fear that their fans would
riot. 

With Teddy Sheringham believed to be past his best, United are also
anxious to recruit a high-class foil for Batistuta and Ortega fits the
bill. The short, attacking midfield player helped to set up Batistuta's
hat-trick in Argentina's 5-0 win over Bosnia in Cordoba this week before
grabbing a brilliant solo goal. Ortega would cost around £8 million from
Valencia. 

While United are happy to pay the fees, the most likely complication
will be over wages, with the club anxious not to put any one player way
above the next-highest earner. If both signings went through, however,
they could recoup around £10 million by selling Sheringham and possibly
Andy Cole. 

While United contemplate a huge spending spree, Manchester City have
finally sold Georgi Kinkladze to Ajax for a little more than £5 million.
The fee easily beats City's previous record sale - the £3.2 million that
Blackburn Rovers paid for Garry Flitcroft in 1996. City have first
refusal on Kinkladze if he returns to Britain. 

Everton have made an inquiry for Mark Hughes, the Chelsea forward, who
is likely to be offloaded this summer. The 34-year-old will be surplus
to requirements at Stamford Bridge, where Gianluca Vialli is close to
signing Pierluigi Casiraghi, from Lazio. 

Bobby Robson, the new PSV Eindhoven coach, is considering a move for Jon
Dahl Tomasson, Newcastle United's unsettled forward. Newcastle,
meanwhile, have revealed plans to redevelop St James' Park into a
51,000-capacity stadium, incorporating solar power. 



Thanks & Regards,

TanKiaSen

Support PC2 Sriwani HQ Pg
E-Mail Address
mailto:suppc2.shpa@sriwani.com.my





 

 David say's "See ya!" 



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Date:         Sat, 16 May 1998 17:15:33 +0800
Reply-To: Red Devil Marcus 
Sender: "Manchester United Football Club (soccer)"
              
From: Red Devil Marcus 
Subject:    Becks Article (Telegraph)

Shy boy Beckham settles into the book-signing set
By Giles Smith

TO THE ever-expanding list of David Beckham's accomplishments -Manchester
United and England midfielder, fiancée of Posh Spice, official Brylcreem
Boy - we must now add another: author. "I can't actually believe I've
brought a book out," Beckham said. But there was the evidence on the table
in front of him -a slippery pile of box-fresh copies of David Beckham: My
Story, which Beckham was carefully autographing as we spoke.

The author of this work (which was ghosted by Neil Harman and published, it
hardly needs saying, under the aegis of the Manchester United promotions
department) is the grand old age of 23. But then, in the literary career of
the footballer, the juvenilia and the mature work are often the same thing.
Ryan Giggs was only 21 when Manchester United authorised Ryan Giggs: My
Story. In this respect, but probably only in this one, Beckham is lagging
behind.

Unsurprisingly, the new book turns out to contain many colour pictures of
Becks, and in only one of them (on page 95) could he be said to be having a
bad hair day. What is more, some of the shots from studio sessions lend a
whole new dimension to Beckham's remark in the book - "I think I've always
had a bit of aggression in my make-up". As such, the book's very publication
will do little to dissuade those sceptics who, with scant regard for his
astonishing development as a player, see Beckham as a fancy-pants with
expensively teased locks and a gratuitously fast car: Porsche Spice, as it
were.

When we met, Beckham was indeed wearing fancy pants: black bell-bottom
trousers, along with shoes with big rubber soles and a tight black top which
made him look slight. Some of the longer parts of his hair were blond. He
dresses like a member of a boy-band and the people around him exude the same
heat and paranoia which warm the air ahead of pop stars. We were informed
that David would not venture outside to have his photograph taken for fear
of mobbing - this despite the fact that it was a Wednesday afternoon and the
hotel we were in was, effectively, in the middle of a wood.

Beckham, it should be said, does not seem like someone who insists on this
kind of pandering. He is shy and reserved. Years in the Manchester United
mincer (he has been at the club since he was 15) have made him guarded,
media-savvy and unforthcoming in the club's preferred manner. But on the
subject of his own brashness, at least, he was prepared to declare himself.
"I'm not the person a lot of people think I am," Beckham said, carefully
completing another autograph and talking in a Cockney voice so quiet it
barely printed itself on the tape in my recorder. "A lot of people think I'm
dead flash and dead arrogant which I'm not."

This is good to know because, even now, when advertising executives and
other people who don't often go to football matches reckon the game to be
"sexy", football has a way of biting back at players who are perceived as
dead flash or dead arrogant. We may think ourselves inured to the notion of
the catwalk footballer, but English football crowds do not, in general, take
well to players with dyed hair and pop star girlfriends.

Thus a mocking chant began at West Ham at the end of the 1996-97 season
which asked, in no uncertain terms and to the tune of Bread of Heaven, after
the sexual preferences of Posh Spice. The theme was picked up by 30,000
Chelsea fans at the Charity Shield. At Bolton, the singing became so
all-involving that Gary Neville sought out Beckham on the pitch to check he
was OK. For Beckham, a shy lad, even possibly a little prudish ("I don't
like bad manners, I never have done," he informs us in his book), these must
have been, at the very least, testing times.

He sounded gloomy when he talked about it. "It's pretty difficult, when
you're young and you're getting that sort of stick off crowds," he said.
"It's hard to get used to. It's not as if they're saying it about your
football: they're saying it about your private life." But he rallied
slightly and said: "Every time they've said it, I've gone and scored."

He is gifted; he is no faint-heart; he played in every league game last
season; he scores spectacular goals. Yet even now Beckham's name does not
roll around the stands at Old Trafford, where the club's energetic marketing
of its players meets with, in some respects, its firmest suspicion. There is
also the matter of Beckham's origins in Chingford. Manchester has always had
to work hard to love a Londoner (see also Teddy Sheringham and even Ray
Wilkins). So there are no songs for Beckham; whereas there are four or five
for Paul Scholes, a Salford boy, a pugnacious Scally, and no more likely to
model Brylcreem than Elton John is. (Incidentally, you can see Becks sitting
next to Elton on page 153 of the book, both of them guests at a Versace show
in Milan.)

Beckham's line on this may sound mildly ironic coming from someone who has
just put out a 160-page, hard-back picture-book; but he just wishes the fuss
would die down and that people could concentrate on his football. "It's a
shame that my new hairstyle can make the front of the papers when there's so
many more important things going on in the world," Beckham told me
earnestly. "It shocks me. There's kids all over the world that are losing
lives and losing families and then because I've gone blond, it's on the
front of the paper.

"It's not my fault," Beckham went on. "When I go to a restaurant, it's not
because I want to go and get my picture taken, it's because I want to go and
have a nice meal. I can't go to a nice restaurant in a tracksuit," he added.
"I have to dress up for my picture." Frustrating. That said, some of the
paparazzi shots that Beckham is frustrated by appear on pages 42-47 of
Beckham's book.

In the way of football biographies, My Story paints a picture of a childhood
coloured by precocious talent, absence from home at a tender age, tenacious
dedication and exposure to surrogate authority figures. Beckham, up north
from London, says he endured serious bouts of homesickness, but he was
reluctant to talk about self-sacrifice. "I once said that I've given up a
lot in the past when I was a kid; and someone made a comment that I was a
moaning little brat because people in the war had given up more."

At least Beckham could rely on dedicated parents, who even now travel up
from London for any and every game and whom Beckham clearly misses. One of
the reasons he enjoys going to his best friend Neville's house is that
"Gary's mum and dad are up there and it's that sort of family atmosphere".

When I asked him about going to France next month, Beckham said: "We'll be
over there for six weeks. But when you've been away from your home for eight
years, it's nothing really." It is interesting that, at 23 and several years
into a top-level career, Beckham still regards himself as someone who is
living away from home.

In the book, Beckham describes Alex Ferguson as the greatest influence on
his life after his father. "He frightens the hell out of players," Beckham
said, "but when you have a manager for so many years, you get used to his
ways. The best thing is, you know where you stand. If you've done terrible
in a game he'll tell you straight down the line and the next day he'll
forget about it. He doesn't hold grudges."

This would not, I think, make an especially heart-warming epitaph: He Never
Held A Grudge. But Beckham was insistent. "He's the best manager I've ever
had. Well, he's the only manager I've actually had at this level. But he's
the best manager I've ever had."

Ferguson's straight-down-the-line tactics with Beckham have included
relegating him to the bench for the Charity Shield and loaning him to
Preston for a month. For a then 21-year-old kid with a brand new Golf GTi,
this was quite a jolt. "Usually you walk into United and your kit's laid
out, nice brand new towel, nice clean everything - underwear, shorts, the
lot," Beckham said. "I turned up there and there was nothing. They had to
give me odds and sods from all over the place." At the end of training,
Beckham tossed his kit into the middle of the room for the cleaners to pick
up, not realising that he was expected to take it home and wash it himself.

Two years on and how things change. Or maybe not. At the end of our
interview, Beckham's blue mobile phone rang. It was his fiancée, calling to
see if he had remembered to pick up the dry cleaning.


   Marcus Lionel van Geyzel.

   "I can only please one person per day.
    Today is not your day.
    Tomorrow isn't looking very good either". -- Dogbert

 David say's "See ya!" 



Subject:   Choccy McClair bound for Macclesfield? 
            + Sparky in demand «« 

Comments: To: RED-DEVILS@PIPELINE.COM
To: MUFC@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU
X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by eris.web-plus.dk id NAA03416

 
SATURDAY, MAY 16, 1998

McClair bound for Macclesfield? «« 
Macclesfield hope to receive a major boost ahead of their Division Two
campaign with the acquisition of Brian McClair.
Macclesfield manager Sammy McIlroy has reportedly approached Alex Ferguson
with a view to opening negotiations for McClair, who was handed a surprise
free transfer last week.
McClair earlier went on record to state that he hopes to play for two more
seasons.
The deal may be thwarted, however, by the fact that McIlroy himself is
stalling on a new three-year contract because of alleged cash problems at
the club.
It's claimed that the club have cash problems with creditors claiming they
are owed up to £500,000 by former Chairman Arthur Jones, who committed
suicide 18 months ago.
McIlroy, who has taken Macclesfield from the Conference League to the
Second Division, is being linked to a number of managerial positions
including that at Burnley.
The former Manchester United star is pleading for a backer to help the
Silkmen overcome their financial troubles.


Sparky in demand «« 

Just a few days after ending his Chelsea career by sitting on the bench for
the Cup Winners Cup triumph, the clamour for Mark Hughes's signature has
already begun.
Despite the fact that former United hero Hughes is now 34, there doesn't
seem to be a shortage of takers with Liverpool, Leicester City, Everton and
Fulham all said to be interested.
There's also speculation that Hughes is being lined-up for a player-coach
role with relegated Bolton should Colin Todd decide to call it a day.
Now, the first Premiership manager to openly confirm his interest is Harry
Redknapp. 
The West Ham boss has declared that he could be ready to make a move to
sign Chelsea striker Mark Hughes, if he becomes available at Stamford Bridge.
According to Redknapp: 
"I'm a big fan of Hughes, and if he were to become available on a free
transfer then I would have to be interested. He has tremendous ability and
at the end of the day it is not about age, but about quality."
If Hughes does decide to leave Chelsea, then there are sure to be a whole
host of interested parties, so Redknapp could face real competition to sign
the Welsh international.
 David say's "See ya!" 



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Date: Sat, 16 May 1998 00:00:44 -0400

Subject: UNITED £20M DOUBLE CHASE 

UNITED £20M DOUBLE CHASE 

MANCHESTER United's power brokers will hold top-secret talks next week
on a sensational £20million Argentine double bid. Fiorentina striker
Gabriel Batistuta is already an £11million target. And he could be
joined by Valencia's Ariel Ortega, a partnership that's threatens to set
the World Cup alight next month. Batistuta, who has grabbed 150 goals in
seven years with Fiorentina, blitzed his way to a hat-trick in
Argentina's warm up against Bosnia on Thursday night. Ortega, dubbed the
new Maradona and not to be outdone, showed all the panache of the famous
No 10 in beating six defenders before clipping into the top corner. 



SAMMY'S IN FOR MCCLAIR 

Ambitious Macclesfield want to make Brian McClair their major big-name
signing for the Second Division. Boss Sammy McIlroy has approached
Manchester United boss Alex Ferguson for permission to speak to McClair
who was given a surprise free transfer. McIlroy has also been handed the
finances to go ahead and offer the veteran Scottish midfielder a deal to
tempt him to drop down two divisions. McClair plans to play on for two
more seasons and has an open mind on offers. He lives close to the club
and could be persuaded to join them. 

Thanks & Regards,

TanKiaSen

Support PC2 Sriwani HQ Pg
E-Mail Address
mailto:suppc2.shpa@sriwani.com.my





 

 David say's "See ya!" 




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     Take a lesson come to see
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     They deserve to be knighted "


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