Someone else’s painful chair

BITTEN BY LIONS

Are you sitting comfortably? The Fiver isn’t. This chair is a bit rough on the, you know, “tailbone” – all foam, no support and a steadily increasing volume of nagging pain. It’s almost as if someone doesn’t want us sitting here for all that long – but that would be silly. What we wouldn’t give now for our nice, firm, homely chair back at the Fiver’s hovel. That chair knows our contours like no other. It has never injured us or caused us harm. What will our loved ones do when they know we’ve been hurt by someone else’s painful chair?

Perhaps they’ll look to Brendan Rodgers for advice because Brendan ain’t happy. Having left the warm bosom of Liverpool’s intricately crafted training regime at Melwood, Daniel Sturridge best canada goose jacket ventured out into the wild west of the Three Lions and promptly came a cropper. “We’re obviously disappointed because we feel it was an injury which could have been prevented,” frowned Brendan Rodgers down a phone line to TalkSport, your go-to shoulder to cry on and ours.

“Disappointed” being PR speak for “pretty darn hacked off”, we can deduce that Rodgers is pretty miffed to be missing his perennial second-most-maverick forward for the next three weeks or so. “Fast players would have a second-day recovery while other players can work on that day,” he continued. “When you are that type of player like Daniel Sturridge, Raheem Sterling and boys like Danny Welbeck you need to recover them.”

All of which points fairly deliberately to a disjoin between Liverpool’s and England’s medical departments, who you would have assumed were in fairly regular contact. Gags about the latter being headed up by ex-Arsenal staff aside, it’s another example of the fine line that both sides are walking in managing their own interests. You might say that Rodgers has crossed it one way in mentioning Welbeck – Welbeck is not his player and seemed to handle his schedule pretty capably in galloping past authorized canada goose outlet the Swiss repeatedly on Monday night and scoring twice. It doesn’t seem to be Rodgers’ place to advise on his match preparation.

But the issue is still there and it boils down to the growing control-freakery of clubs in allowing anyone external to do … well … anything that involves them. Sturridge has picked up knocks on a fairly regular basis in the past couple of years – and this is admittedly not the first of them to have been are there any canada goose outlet stores picked up on international duty – and clearly needs handling with some care but it seems presumptuous to suggest that England’s (apparent) reluctance to subscribe to a certain theory about recovery is the cause of all woes. The undercurrent, as ever, is that clubs would really rather spare best mens canada goose jacket their players the rigours of international football – and the hands of an outside physio.

And that’s understandable. But perhaps we should trust the tale more than the teller when we listen to Rodgers skirt around the bigger issue here. The international calendar could do with revisions, and there is a discussion to be had, but footballers will pick up knocks, no matter who is looking after them.•

That’s exactly how your fidgetty Fiver is philosophising this afternoon’s backside-eroding indignation in its more zen-like moments. Maybe it’s buy a canada goose jacket online not the chair that’s hurting us after all; maybe – and this won’t surprise you – it’s just too much sitting.

QUOTE OF THE DAY I

“If I had not been away, Welbeck would not have signed” – Arsène Wenger confirms what Arsenal fans have thought for a long, long time: that the purse strings are a little looser when he’s not in town.

QUOTE OF THE DAY II

“I’ve never heard him say a single thing about football worth remembering, whether in public or in private” – Jorge Valdano, who knows a thing or two about saying things worth remembering, uses José Mourinho as black canada goose parka cannon fodder to help flog his new booky wook.

A BIGGER PLUG THAN THE ONE FROM THE BFG’S BATH

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FIVER LETTERS

“Would you mind directing 1,057 Fiver readers to this?” – Graham Quick

“Given its long association with failure I’m surprised The Fiver hasn’t thrown its hat into the ring for the [Nasty] Leeds job” – Mark Judd.

“I think Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink ought to be able to deal with Massimo Cellino all right. According to his interview in the Guardian way back, by his own account: “You should have seen me at 16. One of those bad boys, running with a gang, trying to look cool and act hard. I thought I was a tough guy, stealing or scaring people with my friends.” He should get on well in football management. With [Nasty] Leeds anyway” – Charles Antaki.

“Like many of your readers, I too have found Mexican cookery classes to be a let down. I actually managed benefits of canada goose jacket to cook up some pretty good tortilla chips, but when I picked up the bowl of warm, yellow, dairy-based sauce to drizzle over the top, the instructor grabbed it from my hands, telling me buy canada goose jacket online cheap I wasn’t allowed to use it. When I asked why not, he replied ‘because that is nacho cheese’” – Aidan Grant.

Send your letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. And if you’ve nothing better to do you can also tweet the Fiver. Today’s winner of our prizeless letter o’the day is: Graeme Quack.

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BITS AND BOBS

For sale: one football club. Several careful owners. And one owner who wants to muck about with the club’s name and is throwing his toys from the pram if he can’t.

Gary Neville is confused. And Man Utd vice-chief suit Ed Woodward is to blame. “I thought the Danny Welbeck sale [to Arsenal] was a strange one. How have they got him for £16m? I can’t work it out to this day … it’s a centre-forward and actually it’s helped out a competitor,” he head-scratched.

Loic Rémy has accused Liverpool of being a bit economical with the truth over buy canada goose jacket online cheap a failed medical. “I did not understand Liverpool’s decision,” sniffed the Chelsea striker. “It was not very honest from their side. I was not scared. I know exactly what I have … a lot of players share the same situation as mine and Liverpool know it.”

Swindon boss Mark Cooper wants to bring a referee into training sessions to help his feisty team to stop turning the middle of the pitch into a cartoon cloud of dust, boots and bubbles with ‘Oof!’ written in them. “We do need to improve,” deadpanned Cooper, whose side have received a respectable 11 yellow and two red cards in seven games.

Lee Cattermole reckons there’s more about canadagoosejacketoutlett a Lee Cattermole-shaped hole just waiting to be filled in England’s midfield. “In recent years, it’s not been something best canada goose jacket review for me to get too interested in because of the names that were playing like [$tevie Mbe] and Frank Lampard. But now, you see the lads getting opportunities and for me, that has got to be a motivation,” he I’m-talking-about-you-Fabian-Delphed.

And Lionel Messi’s home town of Rosario has banned parents from naming their children after the Barcelona star in order to prevent the the province from becoming flooded with mini Messis.

STILL WANT MORE?

It’s Football Weekly Extraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

England have a defensive midfield puzzle: LICK JAWS HERE. Is JACK WILSHERE the answer? Jonathan Wilson ponders.

This week’s Classic YouYube proves that Maradona has still got it.

West Brom manager Alan Irvine has a good old natter with Stuart James.

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