The Daily Mirror has a big piece on Javier Mascherano headlined: "Argentina World Cup hero Javier Mascherano goes from Mullins' back-up to the Maracana." While the Daily Mail runs a similar story headlined, "Javier goes from West Ham reject to the World Cup Final." The Mirror does claim there were suspicions West Ham couldn't play Mascherano that often because of financial clauses in his contract, but it still seems incredible that Pards only started him five times and Curbishley didn't select him at all. And for a time Marlon Harewood was played ahead of Tevez. Hayden Mullins, now at Notts County, was an honest player — but clearly not in the same league as Mascherano, even if Javier might have had settling in problems in London. Only West Ham could manage to mess up signing two world class players and also get fined £5million for doing an iffy third party ownership deal…
3 comments:
Its pretty obvious that the club new there was an issue with third party ownership and were hoping that we could survive without them playing. Once they new we couldn't, Tevez started playing and scoring, and the rest is history.
Mascherano had an awful record for west ham though. 7 games, 7 loses, with the team not scoring a single goal! Can you blame them for leaving him out. Besides we survived that season so could have been a different outcome with him playing instead of Mullins.
Mullins played fairly well that season, I agree, though I thought Mascherano looked decent when he played despite the seven losses, and it was well known that he was a world class midfield anchor man, so odd he never got a run. As you say, I suspect the club knew there was something dodgy with the third party issue and wanted to shift him on to LIverpool quick. He then started to play well for Liverpool immediately so couldn't have been that bad! Would be interesting to hear what Curbishley says about it now…
I said before the World Cup started, Argentina made a big mistake not taking Tevez. Di Maria got injured, Aguero started out injured, Higuain and Palacios were poor; that put too much strain on Messi - who supposedly insisted Carlito didn't go. But you surely should take your best players - and Tevez was by a million miles the best player fit and available for a qualified team, but who wasn't chosen.
Mascherano was great; but those of us at Man City who saw him vainly chasing Ishmael Miller for 80 yards up the wing, before setting Samaras up, would have been forgiven for not expecting it.
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