Copa del Rey

[skeeta]

Cassano, Ronaldo, Beckham, Salgado, Pavon and Meija have all been dropped from the squad for the Copa del Rey match with Betis tonight.

The Saudi bid for Ronaldo was reported here yesterday and seems to have some basis in reality (unlike much of what has been written on the subject); the club is Al Ittihad (the same one that has "signed" Figo). Today's Marca says that El Gordo has agreed to leave Madrid, but that he is evaluating other offers (including one from a non-Italian European club). Marca also says that the Saudi offer is only EUR 7 million.

I have never given much credence to the Becks to LA stories, but it is increasingly looking like the most likely option.

The Italian papers are going nuts over the possibility that Cassano will wind up at Inter (the hacks got Mancini to say that he would take him earlier this week, but Moratti said he wasn't too keen and didn't see the need, given the presence of Crespo, Zlatan, Adriano, Cruz and Recoba). No doubt Cassano's calming presence is just what the Inter dressing room needs.

Capello has noticably improved the players fitness, but they still iaren't up to standards.

It isn't that they have been awful over the course of the season; it is more that they have been embarassingly bad in certain matches, of which the Depor one is simply the most recent (Lyon in the Champions League was another).

I don't know what you have been reading/hearing, but the focus here has not been on claiming that his team is useless (though he did say after Depor that they weren't up to the standard required), but rather that a relative handful of high profile guys (Roberto Carlos, Ronaldo, Cannavaro, Cassano and Emerson, in particular) haven't been performing up to the level he expects of them. The last three are especially galling cases for him, as he is responsible for them being in Madrid and has relatively recent experience of each of them playing genuinely well on a team he coached.