Robert Lewandowski has put Europe’s top clubs on red alert after admitting he could leave Borussia Dortmund next summer. The Daily Mail reports.
The Polish international has attracted the interest of Chelsea and Manchester United, while Juventus and Bayern Munich are also keeping tabs on the forward.
He scored 30 goals for Dortmund last season as they secured a league and cup double before leading the line for Poland at Euro 2012.
The German champions have kept a firm stance over their star man claiming he is not going anywhere during the remainder of his contract.
But it could be increasingly difficult to hold on to a player who is contemplating a future away from Dortmund.
He said: “I don’t set myself any limits. I don’t know what will be after this season.
“I can’t and don’t want to rule out anything. This would not be professional.”
Lewandowski has two years left in his current deal, but amidst the uncertainty surrounding his future, he intimated that he is willing to see it out.
“I have another two years on my contract. This is a long time. I don’t have to decide today if I extend it or not. But, like I said, I only concentrate on Borussia right now”, he added.
It’s 38ºC in Adelaide and the Indians find themselves in the hot seat. It’s the business end of the tournament and even if their countenance suggests they are relaxed, the sweat is steadily gathering across those creased foreheads.A loss tomorrow against Sri Lanka will push them to the bottom of the points table. They will not want a situation where their last league game becomes virtual semi-final. Meanwhile Sri Lanka have played one game less and are taking it easy despite being at bottom of table for now.There’s no ignoring that fact that the pressure levels are mounting for both teams, especially now that Australia have entered the safety zone with three wins in five games. Both India and Sri Lanka have themselves to blame for making Australia’s job easy, considering both were on top of the hosts in the last two encounters. Sri Lanka stuttered chasing a modest 233 in Perth last week while India, having restricted the Australians to 203, slipped miserably to 153.These two opponents meet for the third time with Sri Lanka holding the slightest of edges, having scored an emphatic eight-wicket win in the rain-reduced clash in Canberra which was nearly a Twenty20 affair. Mahendra Singh Dhoni will gather solace from the fact that his bowlers have toppled oppositions consistently and it is just the batting order that needs to pull its act together. Sri Lanka’s problems are doubled with both their batting and bowling yet to fall in to the place.Mahela Jayawardene admitted as much though he felt Sri Lanka stand to push forward the advantage they accumulated in Canberra. “We’ve been inconsistent with the bat. I thought the bowlers have lifted their mark, but we haven’t batted well at all,” Jayawardene said, before his team’s practice session at the Adelaide Oval. He agreed the battle was now between Sri Lanka and India with Australia all but in the finals. “Now it’s like a two horse race to get into the finals,” Jayawardene said.He also felt both Sri Lanka and India had to realise the reason Australia were sitting pretty, despite playing inconsistently, was because they had prospered on the mistakes of their two opponents. “We are not pushing the advantage. Australia haven’t played good cricket. I don’t think the two other teams are capitalising on their weaknesses. He said it was Australia’s experience and their bowling that had saved them from losing twice over.Lack of experience might be one of the reasons behind India’s inconsistent display with the bat. Dhoni’s young batting line-up, especially the middle order, has proved to be thin on patience whenever they have found themselves in a tricky situation and Australia proved it right on Sunday while defending a small total. Irfan Pathan, who took four wickets in that game, looked at the flipside to the squad’s inexperience. “It is actually good for the players and the team in a way because they will start thinking of what they need to do and learn from it, Pathan explained. “Some guys in the middle order are young. We have to give them time, no one is going to come and show maturity [immediately].”The Indians opted out of a practice session today but they will be busy working out the right combination considering how crucial tomorrow’s match is. On Sunday India played with five bowlers but following the loss, it remains to be seen if they will stick to the same combination. Dhoni hinted last evening that he had intended to play five bowlers against Sri Lanka. But now with Virender Sehwag expected to be fit for tomorrow’s game, Dhoni might be tempted to go with an extra batsman to guard against an imminent collapse.If that were to happen the only change would be Munaf Patel or Sreesanth making way for Sehwag. It is likely that the team management will pick Sreesanth because though Munaf bowled within himself on Sunday, if he has an off day he becomes a liability with his inability to perform with the bat or in the field. Sreesanth, on the other hand, despite proving expensive gives the promise with his aggression.Jayawardene felt the five-bowler theory has worked for teams thereby suggesting he might be thinking of sticking to that policy. Fast bowler Ishara Amerasinghe, who had to sit out of the last two games after an impressive beginning in his first two games due to side strain, comes in for Nuwan Kulasekara.Teams: India (likely) 1 Virender Sehwag, 2 Sachin Tendulkar, 3 Gautam Gambhir, 4 Rohit Sharma, 5 Mahendra Singh Dhoni, 6 Yuvraj Singh, 7 Robin Uthappa, 8 Irfan Pathan, 9 Harbhajan Singh, 10 Sreesanth, 11 Ishant Sharma.Sri Lanka (likely) 1 Sanath Jayasuriya, 2 Tillakaratne Dilshan, 3 Kumar Sangakkara, 4 Mahela Jayawardene, 5 Chamara Silva 6 Chamara Kapugedera, 7 Farveez Maharoof, 8 Chaminda Vaas, 9 Ishara Amerasinghe, 10 Lasith Malinga, 11 Muttiah Muralitharan.
“Dey wukkup in de West Indies bowling!”Relentless cut-tail has the remarkable power of stripping the veneer of decorum from any occasion, moving Adriel Richard, the CMC CricketPlus producer, to draw on his Bajan dialect, in the midst of a “live” update, to describe the extent to which West Indies bowlers were torn apart by South Africa’s rampant batsmen.”357 to win. Just like the caliber of bullet WI should shoot themselves with.”As this text message from a disgruntled fan back home revealed, a macabre sense of humour also prevailed at the interval in Grenada, with supporters of the regional side everywhere finding different ways to express their frustration, anger and pain at the manner in which the team on whom they have invested so much emotional energy dragged them to a new low in what has already been an increasingly dispiriting World Cup experience.Even for a people given to often unfounded levels of optimism, especially in apparently hopeless causes involving their beloved regional side, it was asking a lot of a deflated home team to get anywhere close to a daunting target of 357 needed to keep any lingering Caribbean interest in this tournament alive, a prospect made all the more depressing with two Super Eight matches still to play next week in Barbados.Maybe it was the memory of how humiliated they felt four years ago when, as hosts, they could not even advance out of the first-round grouping that prompted the South African top-order’s merciless plunder in the quest to keep their own ambitions alive after the shock defeat to Bangladesh last Saturday in Guyana. It was an assault that silenced boisterous home fans keen on celebrating the magnificent reincarnation of the Grenada National Stadium.More than the other new or redeveloped venues around the region, this impressive structure is symbolic of what can be achieved by the people of our tiny territories (with a little help from the Chinese, let’s not forget) when properly motivated, even after the ravages of two devastating hurricanes only two-and-a-half years ago. Issues of accountability and sustainability notwithstanding, the point is that we can achieve a minor miracle, even if the fact that it has primarily been at the prodding of external forces and with the enticing prospect of financial rewards that will remain more than a little troubling.At 87 for 3 after 15 overs, with Brian Lara and Ramnaresh Sarwan in the middle, rebuilding a stadium almost from rubble would have seemed to be like chicken-feed compared to pulling off a record-breaking World Cup victory.The poignancy of the moment was hard to avoid: a beleaguered captain in partnership with his talented but often impetuous deputy trying to rebuild the crumbling edifice of what were, just over two weeks ago, grandiose expectations of glory on home soil come April 28.For all of Lara’s proven genius with the bat and Sarwan’s felicitous elegance, the overwhelming feeling was one of an effort too little, too late, even in the midst of strokeplay that almost took the breath away.Patently fallible as captain and tactician (his decision to delay employing the final power-play until the 45th over was a recipe for even greater carnage), he remains peerless, even three weeks from his 38th birthday, as a strokeplayer, a square-drive off Andre Nel to the point boundary in the 17th over reminding everyone as to just how majestically destructive he can still be. His dismissal, though, bowled off the inside-edge by Jacques Kallis, was probably the lethal gust of wind that effectively left Caribbean aspirations in ruins.
Too little, too late may also define the efforts by the World Cup organisers to bring some “West Indianness” to the tournament. Again it was more than a little unusual to see the ground, on a national holiday, for an ODI involving the West Indies, with hundreds of empty seats. If the desolation was not as stark and the atmosphere not as suffocatingly sterile as at other venues so far, most notably the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium, there was still an artificiality about it all. Apparently the new campaign to energise the World Cup atmosphere is entitled “Ram de Dance”. But they could have called it “Rama the Jamma” and it wouldn’t really matter, simply because too many people feel betrayed by the entire event, taken for granted in what was expected to be their unstinting support for West Indies in particular and cricket in general, to the extent that they would not bat an eye at the boot camp-style restrictions in their desire to be part of the spectacle at any cost.As they say, you can fool some of the people all the time, but even for people as gullible as we tend to be around here, you can’t fool all of us all the time. Yet the mamaguile continues. On Monday, the media were advised that there was no such thing as “cheap tickets” for matches in Grenada. Troy Garvey, media communications director for the LOC here, explained that the prices of tickets had not been reduced, just the sizes of certain categories.So, for example, if tickets for a certain category were going slowly, that category was reduced and the extra seats incorporated in a cheaper category.If you can see any difference between that explanation and saying that tickets are now cheaper, then you’re as disconnected from reality as so many key personnel involved with this World Cup.
Sachin Tendulkar has had a successful keyhole operation on his right shoulder in London this afternoon. “He underwent arthroscopic (keyhole) surgery to stabilise the shoulder joint and decompress the cyst,” Andrew Wallace, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon, said after an hour-long surgery at the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth.”The surgery proceeded successfully without any complications,” Wallace continued. “At the time of the operation, we found clear evidence of instability associated with a tear of the rim of the socket of the shoulder joint. The tear extended through 75% of the biceps tendon and had created a large cyst that was impinging on a nearby nerve. The damaged biceps tendon was divided and reattached to the shaft of the humerus [upper arm bone].”His arm will be immobilised in a sling for up to six weeks and it is unlikely that he will be fit for selection for international cricket for up to two to three months, depending on regular review,” Wallace added. That effectively rules him out of the tour of the Caribbean which starts on May 18.Tendulkar will spend the night in hospital before being discharged on Tuesday.
Shivnarine Chanderpaul, the West Indian captain, was suitably delighted with his and the team’s performance so far in the first Test against Pakistan in Barbados. Chanderpaul notched up an unbeaten 153 – his first Test hundred against Pakistan – as West Indies made 371 in their second innings, giving them an overall lead of 572. At close of play on the third day, Pakistan were struggling at 113 for 4, needing a further 460 to win.”It’s always good to get a Test hundred, no matter who you are playing against,” Chanderpaul was quoted as saying by . “It’s my first against Pakistan, I’m happy. We needed someone to stay out there and give us a good innings and most of the batters went already so I had to put my head down and stick it out.”Earlier in the match, Brian Lara scored first century against Pakistan, and in the process became only the sixth batsman to score hundreds against all Test-playing nations. Chanderpaul hasn’t yet reached the three-figure mark against New Zealand, Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka – he hasn’t yet played a Test against the Lankans – but for the moment, Chanderpaul’s focus was firmly on wrapping up the victory.”Coming out with a win is going to be a big booster for us. Hopefully, we can do that probably tomorrow (Sunday) or the next day and help the team confidence.”Meanwhile, Fidel Edwards was quite chuffed after his five-wicket haul in the first innings, and attributed it to his improved fitness. “I have been working pretty hard over the last couple of days, mainly on my fitness, trying to prepare for this game and it paid off,” Edwards told the daily after the second day’s play. “The last couple of Test games I played, I was struggling to get some wickets and I really wanted to get some wickets in this game and prove my worth.”Edwards was forced to leave the field in Pakistan’s second innings due to a hamstring problem, but by then he had already done enough damage, taking 5 for 38 in the first innings, and then dismissing Salman Butt for a duck in his first over of the second. It was a welcome return to form for Edwards – his last four matches had fetched him three wickets for 442 runs. His career was also set back when he sustained a back injury during West Indies’ tour of England last year. When he returned, against South Africa at the same venue last month, Edwards conceded 112 runs and went wicketless. This time, he insisted, the wicket made a difference too: “The pitch had a little more bounce than the last time we played here. It is still a good track for batting and bowling and hopefully we can get the job done.”One aspect that didn’t impress him as much, though, was the lack of support from the crowd – only about 3000 people turned up for each of the first three days. “It’s very disappointing. Even in the South Africa series [it was the same]. The support is decreasing a lot and the more support, the better it is for us in the long run as a team trying to get back up there.”
Cricket Victoria selectors have today announced the Bushrangers squad to play the `re-scheduled’ match against the West End Redbacks starting at the MCG on Sunday, 8 February.All rounder Ian Hewett has been added to the squad of 12 that beat South Australia at the Adelaide Oval this week.The Bushrangers squad is:
Darren BERRY (C) Matthew ELLIOTT Ian HEWETT Brad HODGE David HUSSEY Mathew INNESS Michael LEWIS Andrew McDONALD Jonathan MOSS Matthew MOTT Graeme RUMMANS Allan WISE Cameron WHITE
Cricket Victoria has also announced the 2nd X1 team to play Queensland at the Junction Oval from February 9-12. Please note play begins at 10.30am.The 2nd team is: Peter Roach (C), Jason Arnberger, Aiden Blizzard, Matthew Gale, Darren Groves, Nick Jewell, Brendan Joseland, Brad Knowles, Glenn Lalor, Ricky Marcy, Graeme Rummans.
The South Australian Cricket Association (SACA) has confirmed that fast bowler Trent Kelly will remain in Brisbane, on standby for the Pura Cup game against the Queensland Bulls, which commences in Brisbane on Sunday, January 19.Kelly will remain in Brisbane as back-up for fast bowler, Paul Rofe, who dislocated a finger during the ING Cup game at the GABBA today (January 17).Kelly was due to fly back to Adelaide from Brisbane tomorrow (January 18) to take up bowling duties for his grade club, West Torrens, and for the Australian Under-19 squad. The Australian Under-19s are due to play the English Cricket Academy from Monday, January 20.Rofe will undergo a fitness test in Brisbane tomorrow, and if deemed unfit to play, will make way for Kelly’s debut in the four-day competition for the Redbacks.
Last week’s drawn Test series between Zimbabwe and India hasconsolidated both teams’ existing positions in the ICC TestChampionship, according to an ICC media release.The 1-1 series result adds a single point to both countries’ totals,meaning the home team remains in ninth position and India in seventh.The effect of this is that Zimbabwe now has six points from 13 seriesand an average of 0.46 and India 10 points from 13 series and anaverage of 0.77.The fixture was the first series played between the teams in Zimbabwe,following one off Tests between them in 1992 and 1998.The updated Championship table now is as follows:
Tottenham Hotspur have been handed a major boost in their bid to bring Stefan De Vrij to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in the summer transfer window.
What’s the talk?
That’s according to a report by Italian publication Gazzetta dello Sport (via Sport Witness), who claim that, after being left out of Inter Milan’s starting XI in the 1-0 victory over Juventus on Sunday evening, the 30-year-old no longer appears to be an essential part of Simone Inzaghi’s first-team squad.
The report goes on to state this is something that could lead to the Nerazzurri deciding to cash in on the Netherlands international this summer, with an asking price of €25m (£21m) expected to be placed on the centre-back.
This is sure to come as a huge boost to Antonio Conte, who is reported to have requested the signing of the defender from Fabio Paratici earlier this season, with Tottenham believed to be willing to offer De Vrij a salary of €6.5m-per-year (£5.5m-per-year) – around £106k-per-week.
Dream Conte signing
Considering just how impressive De Vrij was for Conte during their shared time at the San Siro, it is not difficult to understand why the 52-year-old would be interested in a move for the defender this summer.
Indeed, over his 32 Serie A appearances last season, the £31.5m-rated centre-back was an influential part of Inter’s Scudetto-winning side, helping the Nerazzurri keep 11 clean sheets and scoring one goal, as well as making an average of 1.3 interceptions, 0.9 tackles, 2.9 clearances, 57.4 passes and winning 3.3 duels – at a success rate of 60% – per game.
These returns saw the £116k-per-week player Mauricio dubbed a “monster” who “deserves to be at a big club” average an extremely impressive SofaScore match rating of 7.03, ranking him as Conte’s tenth-best performer in the top flight of Italian football.
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As such, considering it has been reported that Paratici will be prioritising the signing of a left-sided centre-back in the summer transfer window – a position in which De Vrij has primarily featured for Inter for the past three and a half years – it is clear for all to see that the 30-year-old would be something of a dream signing for Paratici to get over the line ahead of the club’s 2022/23 campaign.
AND in other news: Huge blow: Alasdair Gold reveals fresh Spurs development, Antonio Conte will be fuming
Stuart MacGill says he will definitely be available for Australia’s Test tour of Pakistan but he is not ready for a first-class return in New South Wales’ next Pura Cup match. On Sunday MacGill played his first game, a club outing, since having surgery for carpal-tunnel syndrome on his bowling hand in December.He sent down 12 overs and finished with 1 for 39 and although the results satisfied him, he said lining up for the Blues against Victoria in a match starting this Friday would be a stretch. “I’d love to play against the Vics,” MacGill told the , “but I think bowling ten overs is a whole lot different to bowling 30 and maybe 30 again the next day.”I don’t think I’m ready for that and I don’t want to be fooled by an encouraging day. The most important thing for me is not to let anybody down when I do get back on the field.”MacGill said he was extremely tense before taking the ball for Sydney University, as he had only bowled about 15 balls in the nets since his operation. “The nerves were 100 times worse than my first Test,” he said. “I was very, very nervous to the point of considering not bowling.”However, he believes he will have no fitness concerns by the time of the Pakistan visit, which is scheduled for late March. There is still doubt over the future of the trip but if it goes ahead MacGill is likely to be picked along with Brad Hogg and perhaps a younger spinner.”After today I’ll definitely be fit for the tour of Pakistan, definitely,” MacGill said. “I bowled all of my variations and I bowled at least one good one of all of them. So they’re all there and there were no side-effects. Everything I had before my surgery I have now, it’s just I’ve got to make sure I bowl a few more goodies in a row.”