Chelsea and Arsenal both attempted to sign Juventus wonderkid Kenan Yildiz in the summer transfer window, per a new report.
| Follow GOAL on WhatsApp! 🟢📱 |
Leeds United are set to be without winger Dan James for their clash with Tottenham Hotspur in the last Premier League match before the international break on Saturday.
The Wales international has suffered an ankle injury and is now set to be out of action for “weeks”, per reporter Graham Smyth, which is a blow for Daniel Farke.
James has yet to deliver a goal or an assist in the Premier League in four appearances so far this season, but he was a key player for the Whites in the Championship.
The 27-year-old speedster ended the 2024/25 campaign with an eye-catching return of 12 goals and nine assists in 36 appearances in the second tier, as Leeds racked up 100 points to win the title, per Sofascore.
His absence in the coming weeks means that Farke will need to find solutions in the right-wing position to make sure that Noah Okafor and Dominic Calvert-Lewin have enough support at the top end of the pitch.
Brenden Aaronson has shown some promising signs this season as a right winger, but it is now time for the USA international to step up and prove his worth.
The American attacking midfielder has started the club’s last three matches in the Premier League on the right flank, and is yet to deliver a goal or an assist in the division this season.
Aaronson’s lack of quality in the final third is a cause for concern for the West Yorkshire outfit, because it was a big problem for him and Leeds in the 2022/23 Premier League campaign.
The Whites were relegated from the division that season after Jesse Marsch brought the American in from RB Salzburg, and his struggles in front of goal played a role in that failure.
|
22/23 Premier League |
Brenden Aaronson |
Percentile rank vs AMs |
|---|---|---|
|
xG |
3.87 |
Top 37% |
|
Goals |
1 |
Bottom 21% |
|
Assists |
3 |
Top 36% |
|
Dribble success rate |
41.5% |
Bottom 23% |
|
Duel success rate |
39.8% |
Bottom 33% |
|
Aerial duel success rate |
17% |
Bottom 12% |
|
Stats via FotMob |
||
As you can see in the table above, Aaronson underperformed in front of goal as a finisher, scoring between two and three fewer than expected, whilst he was also a liability out of possession.
The 24-year-old lightweight, who has lost 67% of his aerial duels this season (Sofascore), needs to show that he can be relied upon physically and technically, because his Premier League career to date has been underwhelming.
Aaronson, who failed to provide a single goal contribution against the top six in the Championship last season, has created three ‘big chances’ in the top-flight this term, but he needs to add a greater goal threat and more reliability physically to his game.
With James out for weeks with an ankle injury, the USMNT star may get a few more opportunities to prove his worth from the start in the Premier League.
Chalkboard
Football FanCast’s Chalkboard series presents a tactical discussion from around the global game.
Whilst Aaronson is looking to change his reputation at Elland Road, there is another player in the squad who is on the opposite path and is in danger of becoming the next version of the American.
Ao Tanaka was a certified star for Leeds in the Championship last season as part of Farke’s dominant possession-based side that stormed the league. The step up to the Premier League, however, has come as a bit of a culture shock to the central midfielder.
The Japan international won the Players’ Player of the Year award for Leeds in the 2024/25 campaign, which shows what his teammates thought of his exceptional performances in the second tier.
Tanaka, who was described as a “tiger” by Farke, won 55% of his duels across 43 appearances in the Championship. He was dominant in his physical battles, per Sofascore, whilst also providing quality at the top end of the pitch.
The 27-year-old midfield maestro scored five goals and provided two assists in the division for the Whites, to go along with his tigerish play out of possession.
However, the step up in physicality in the top-flight has left Tanaka struggling to break his way back into the team ahead of Sean Longstaff, Ethan Ampadu, and Anton Stach.
Journalist Graham Smyth recently raised concerns over the midfielder, saying: “My concern with Tanaka was physicality in the Premier League. He got run over a few times towards the end of the last season. I worried a little bit, against the most elite athletes in the Premier League.”
The central midfielder has played four times in the Premier League so far this season, per Sofascore, and he has struggled to deal with the ‘most elite athletes’ that he is now up against in the top-flight.
|
25/26 Premier League |
Ao Tanaka |
Percentile rank vs CMs |
|---|---|---|
|
Tackles |
1 |
Bottom 5% |
|
Duels won |
3 |
Bottom 3% |
|
Duel success rate |
16.7% |
Bottom 3% |
|
Ball recoveries |
8 |
Bottom 28% |
|
Dribbled past |
6x |
Bottom 5% |
|
Fouls committed |
2 |
Bottom 25% |
|
Stats via FotMob |
||
As you can see in the table above, Tanaka ranks incredibly poorly among his positional peers in a host of defensive and physical metrics, which illustrates how difficult the adaptation to the league has been for him, winning just 17% of his duels.
Per Sofascore, the midfield star has not won a single aerial duel in 169 minutes of action in the Premier League, whilst he has also lost 80% of his duels on the ground in that time.
Tanaka lost four of his five duels in a ten-minute cameo against Bournemouth on Saturday, per Sofascore, which led Smyth to express his concerns over the midfielder’s struggles with the physicality of the Premier League.
Of course, he has only played four matches in the division, and there is still plenty of time left for him to adapt to the physical nature of the league, but his performances so far have been concerning.
Bigger bargain than Longstaff: Leeds star is now "one of the best in the PL"
This Leeds United signing was an even bigger bargain than Sean Longstaff.
By
Dan Emery
Sep 30, 2025
Therefore, Tanaka is in danger of becoming the next Aaronson at Elland Road, as the American lightweight has struggled with the physicality of the division throughout his career in West Yorkshire.
Taiwo Awoniyi is in an induced coma after an emergency surgery on a near-fatal injury that he suffered against Leicester City.
Article continues below
Article continues below
Article continues below
Awoniyi crashed into the goalpost against Leicester
| Follow GOAL on WhatsApp! 🟢📱 |
AC Milan are set to appoint Massimiliano Allegri as head coach for a second time, but the Italian will miss the start of next season.
Article continues below
Article continues below
Article continues below
| Follow GOAL on WhatsApp! 🟢📱 |
Barcelona are closing in on signing Marcus Rashford from Manchester United this summer. The Blaugrana have reportedly sent a loan proposal with an option to buy next season, which United have accepted. The player is also keen on joining the Catalan giants and finally ending his nightmare at Old Trafford. Talks are now in their final stages between the two clubs.
| Follow GOAL on WhatsApp! 🟢📱 |
He says the freshly-installed selection panel, headed by Tharanga, had him in their T20 World Cup plans
Andrew Fidel Fernando15-Jan-2024Expect to see more of Angelo Mathews in Sri Lanka’s T20 side this year. Expect to see him bowl more frequently. And because this is late-career Mathews, coming back into the white-ball frame after years of being picked only for Tests, expect him also to be driven by grievance to some extent.Following his first T20I outing in almost three years, Mathews seemed to take aim at the previous set of selectors – headed by Pramodya Wickramasinghe – for working to their own “agendas”. He also said the freshly-installed selection panel, headed by Upul Tharanga, had him in their T20 World Cup plans.In any case, in his first international T20 outing since March 2021, Mathews played a critical role in a last-ball win, top-scoring with 46 off 38 balls. This is after he had taken the new ball and bowled two overs for 13 runs. He thinks he shouldn’t have spent so long in the white-ball wilderness.Related
Upul Tharanga, Ajantha Mendis named on five-man Sri Lanka selection panel
Angelo Mathews back in T20I squad after three-year absence
Angelo Mathews stars in thriller as Sri Lanka go 1-0 up
“In the last two Lanka Premier League (LPL) seasons I batted and bowled well, but unfortunately I wasn’t selected for the T20 World Cups, and I wasn’t given reasons for that,” he said after the game, having picked up the Player-of-the-Match trophy. “If you take decisions that are driven by agendas, these kinds of things can happen – we haven’t even qualified for the Champions Trophy.”But one thing I believe is that if you train and play wholeheartedly, you can create an environment for yourself where you can perform. I kept my efforts up over the last couple of years. I think I can play for a little while longer.”Mathews’ bowling has been a sticking point over the years. He had been an important member of the attack in arguably Sri Lanka’s best white-ball sides (between 2007 and 2014), where he frequently bowled in the powerplay in T20s. But a growing catalogue of injuries over the years had either prevented him from bowling, or put him in a frame of mind to play only as a specialist batter, depending on who tells the story.More recently, though, he has become a regular contributor of quiet overs again – a role he said he relishes.”The communication with me and the new selectors is quite clear. They asked me what my plans were for the future and [told me] their plans as well. We had a very good discussion. They said that I’m in their plans for the T20 World Cup, and if I could bowl a few overs. I said: ‘Absolutely – if I can help the team in any way’.”I’ve been bowling in the LPL as well, and you saw me bowling in the [domestic] one-dayers as well recently. If I can bowl a few overs that helps the balance of the team and the captain can decide whether he wants to play an extra batter or a bowler.”In this particular match, which he helped Sri Lanka win from a dire position, Mathews said he relied on his experience. Sri Lanka needed 61 off the last six overs, with four wickets in hand, when Mathews and Dasun Shanaka came together at the crease. The pair added 55 runs off 34 balls together, when Mathews was dismissed trying to hit the winning runs (they would come off the bat of Dushmantha Chameera eventually).”When we batted together I talked to Dasun about how if one of us gets out it will be really difficult,” Mathews said. “We thought it would be better if we batted until the 16th or 17th over, and keep the required rate at an achievable level – around 10 runs an over. In the end we had to go after their best bowlers as well. We took some calculated risks.”Dasun played a good innings, and the person who played the most important innings was Dushmantha Chameera who got six off the last two balls, or else everything else we did would have been meaningless.”
USWNT returns to the pitch in October, announcing three games against Portugal and yet-to-be-named opponent
Shane Warne’s line against right and left-handers, and Andrew Strauss’s control
On the ball with S Rajesh and Arun Gopalakrishnan08-Sep-2005Shane Warne has been the outstanding bowler for Australia in this series, and he proved it again on the first day of the final Ashes Test. Pressed into service before lunch on a first-day pitch, Warne winkled out three wickets in the morning session, and then picked up two more over the course of the day to end with splendid figures of 5 for 118. The highlight of his performance was his control against both left-handers and right-handers. There was no rough on the track yet, but Warne pitched 83 deliveries to the right-handers on or outside leg, and kept the batsmen down to only seven runs, an indication of his class and the batsmen’s respect for him.Warne has contributed 33 out of the 80 wickets taken by Australia in this series – that’s more than 41%. And Australia’s reliance on him is further highlighted by the fact that Warne has taken the first wicket in England’s innings five times out of nine in this series – twice each in the second and fourth Tests, when Glenn McGrath wasn’t around – and in the first innings here.If Warne was Australia’s hero, then Andrew Strauss ensured that England didn’t completely throw away the advantage of batting first. Strauss hasn’t had a very happy time of it in the series so far – especially against Warne – but today he went some way towards getting his own back. The stand-out feature of his innings was his assurance at the crease: his in-control factor – that’s the number of deliveries middled, left alone, or padded up to – was an impressive 87%. Though he was finally dismissed by Warne, for the fifth time in the series, Strauss handled him with assurance throughout the innings, achieving 90% in-control factor (70 out of 78) against him. In fact, England batted more comfortably throughout the day than the scoreline suggests – their in-control factor against all bowlers was 82.5%, and, quite surprisingly, the bowler they handled most easily was Glenn McGrath, against whom their control factor rose to 87.7%.
James Anderson and Alex Loudon have been omitted from the Test squad to tour India
Andrew Miller13-Jan-2006
|
|
|
At times, towards the end of a disillusioning tour of Pakistan, it was hard to recall the values that turned England’s cricketers into the stand-out team of 2005. Run-down and defeated, their collective body-language screamed for a break from the grind, as they surrendered first the Test series and then the one-dayers with a barely a shrug of their weary shoulders.Happily, the first and most crucial of these values was back on display this morning, as England unveiled a 15-man Test squad that was a model of selectorial consistency. With Michael Vaughan, Ashley Giles and, crucially, Simon Jones, making good recovery after operations on their knee, hip and ankle respectively, all that remained was the rubber-stamp from the ECB headquarters.Matt Prior retains his place as the reserve wicketkeeper, with the other 14 places going to each of the men who have represented England’s Test team since the start of the Ashes. Liam Plunkett and Shaun Udal, newly capped in Pakistan, retain their slots, while Jones’s return revives the prospect of England fielding the same 11 that did the hard work in those crucial first four Tests against Australia.Jones’s last outing came at Trent Bridge back in August, but his absence has been keenly felt ever since. As the one England bowler who has truly mastered the art of reverse-swing, his skills would have been invaluable on the bland Pakistani wickets, where the lack of pace and bounce meant that for long periods of an innings, England’s remaining bowlers were forced to sit tight and await the return of the new ball.The fact that England have called on just 14 caps in six months implies that a 15-man squad should be more than ample for a three-match Test series that is crammed into barely three weeks. Yet, there is still room for one more spinner, as back-up for Giles and Udal, neither of whom were at their most incisive in Pakistan.The romantics have been hankering for Northants’ 23-year-old left-armer, Monty Panesar, who is expected, sooner or later, to become the first Sikh to play for England. But Alex Loudon, who trained in India in December as part of a spin-bowling camp, remains firmly in the reckoning.”Loudon went on the first tour and had a fantastic approach to his game,” said David Graveney, England’s chairman of selectors. “Monty Panesar has done very well for Northants and Ian Blackwell is in the one-day squad. We can work with them on their games and it just gives us a little more. We didn’t want to make any hasty decisions.”Loudon and James Anderson are the two Pakistan picks that have missed the cut this time, but in Anderson’s case especially, that is probably for the best. He’ll be back in time for the seven-match one-day series, to continue an international rehabilitation that earned him a Man-of-the-Match award in the last one-dayer at Rawalpindi, but after three consecutive winters of carrying the drinks in foreign climes, he has a chance to lead the attack for England A in the Caribbean – where, incidentally, he can expect to be in 14 months’ time when the World Cup gets underway.Though the selectors have shown faith in the men who underperformed in Pakistan, that will count for nothing unless the lessons of that tour have been heeded and distilled. There remain some very real questions as to the balance of the batting in particular, with Paul Collingwood failing to convince as a genuine frontline option – his 96 and 80 in Lahore notwithstanding – and Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff appearing more reckless than daring with their gung-ho approach to middle-order batting.Even so, the Test squad remains the model for England’s overall approach, if the make-up of the one-day side is anything to go by. Darren Gough’s omission comes as no surprise, not even to the man himself, but Vikram Solanki has been replaced by Ian Bell, which suggests that the grand plan is for both England squads ultimately to be drawn from the same pool of players.That is all well and good, but it overlooks the small matter of player burn-out. Flintoff, who is expected to miss the third Test in Mumbai to attend the birth of his second child, was noticeably withdrawn during the closing stages in Pakistan, and yesterday his agent, Chubby Chandler, appealed for him to be rested from the ICC Champions Trophy in September – given that England are likely to be on international duty for more than 300 days in the next 12 months.On the one hand, England’s selection consistency is admirable. But the flip side will only become apparent when the injuries and fatigue start to pile up in the course of a gruelling 2006 season. In fact, the more interesting squad – the A team to tour West Indies – has yet to be announced. It is a fair bet that several of these players will find themselves fast-tracked by circumstance as the year progresses.
Soumya Bhattacharya on the joys of watching cricket in England
Soumya Bhattacharya21-Jul-2007
|
|
|
I first went to Lord’s in the summer of 1993. I was then a student in Britain. I still have a picture of myself in a tweed jacket (as English as I could make myself), maroon tie, and white shirt, leaning against a board that said, “No standing when there is bowling at the other end.” I remember clearly what I’d felt that day.I had felt cheated. The ground was not bathed in the kind of sunshine with which I had thought Lord’s would be. It had rained a lot that day, and there wasn’t much cricket. The grass didn’t seem as green as I’d expected. The slope at the Nursery End had less of a gradient than I’d imagined. (What had I imagined? A real hill inside a cricket field?) And the players – county players playing an insignificant match on a rain-spattered afternoon – seemed to be going about their jobs with little enthusiasm.I wonder now what it was that would have made me happy. And I don’t know the answer.The trouble was that Lord’s and the notion of watching cricket in the English summer had been until then constructs of my imagination. They were born of airwaves (Test Match Special commentary) and literature, of poems like Edmund Blunden’s “Forefathers”:On the green they watched their sons
Playing till too dark to see,
As their fathers watched them once,
As my father once watched me;
While the bat and beetle flew
On the warm air webbed with dew.
When I went to Lord’s for the first time, I was ready for the “warm air webbed with dew”, but not for what I really saw. Cricket in the English summer in my mind had always had something to do with the quality of light, the shifting season, the sun, and the long days after the bleakness of winter. In , VS Naipaul eloquently describes the English winter light: “It went dark in the room, and I noticed that the light outside was strange. It was dead, but seemed to have an inner lividness.”Summer in England is the time when that inner lividness bursts through, when the light is as alive in shades and texture and depth as it can ever be. And cricket was the summer game (it still is called that in England, though the English team, like all international teams, play it all year round), the pursuit that to me most exemplified that season. But all of this was in the imagination. And at Lord’s in the summer of 1993, I was confronted with the reality.Once I had overcome the gulf between my construct of how things ought to be and how they really were, there were unexpected delights. For someone who had grown up watching cricket on the subcontinent, I was struck by how the whole experience could be, how civilised and pleasurable. I associated watching the game with eking out eight inches on a concrete bench for my bum, queuing endlessly for food and water, being pelted with an orange or worse if I stood up to applaud. Here there were sumptuous lunch hampers, there was wine and beer, as much space as I wanted for myself, a book for the breaks, and the patter of measured applause. Everyone seemed to be having a good time. Sometimes the cricket seemed only incidental.
|
For someone who had grown up watching cricket on the subcontinent, I was struck by how comfortable the whole experience could be, how civilised and pleasurable |
Of course, cricket in England prided itself on its measured applause, in maintaining its distance from the yobs and lager louts who were invading the football stadiums. Watching cricket in Australia, I found out later, is a great thrill. It is just as comfortable as watching in England, but it is much more participatory, much more effervescent and inclusive, than watching it in England.England wasn’t in those days as multicultural as it is now. The Indian economy, having just opened up, wasn’t anywhere as strong as it is today. That summer none of the teams from the subcontinent toured. And even if they had, you wouldn’t have seen the swathe of brown faces and flags that you do now. You traditionally saw great support for West Indies at the Oval, since the south London ground was close to the areas in which thousands of immigrants from the Caribbean islands lived. But being at a game at an English cricket ground was largely the preserve of white, middle-class males – or so it seemed to me.There was a lot happening in English cricket that summer. There was the Ashes series (a six-Test one, no less), and Australia battered England 4-1. Michael Atherton became captain in the fifth Test. He won the last one. Ted Dexter resigned as chairman of selectors. Middlesex, led by Mike Gatting, won the county championship. And, yes, it was the season of the Ball of the Century: MW Gatting bowled Shane Warne for 4 in the first Test at Old Trafford.I later came to love English grounds, especially the smaller ones and their prettiness and quirks. But that first summer, my experience of watching cricket in the English summer was defined more by absence than anything else, by the lack of things that I’d believed ought to be there: the hill, the light, the shade of the grass, the genuflection from players at what I then thought was cricket’s shrine.It happens when imagination collides with reality.