WHO Poll
Q: 2023/24 Hopes & aspirations for this season
a. As Champions of Europe there's no reason we shouldn't be pushing for a top 7 spot & a run in the Cups
24%
  
b. Last season was a trophy winning one and there's only one way to go after that, I expect a dull mid table bore fest of a season
17%
  
c. Buy some f***ing players or we're in a battle to stay up & that's as good as it gets
18%
  
d. Moyes out
38%
  
e. New season you say, woohoo time to get the new kit and wear it it to the pub for all the big games, the wags down there call me Mr West Ham
3%
  



Alan 12:01 Sun May 30
Sunday newspapers (includes West Ham)
BBC

Manchester United are keeping tabs on Juventus and Portugal forward Cristiano Ronaldo with the Italian club open to offering the 36-year-old in exchange for France midfielder Paul Pogba, 28. (Gazzetta dello Sport via Express)

Manchester United will make a move for Borussia Dortmund and England winger Jadon Sancho, 21, this summer in preference to Tottenham Hotspur and England striker Harry Kane, 27. (Mail)

Tottenham are interested in Manchester City's Brazil striker Gabriel Jesus, 24, which could lead to a cash-plus-swap deal for England striker Harry Kane, 27. (Star)

Midfielder Dani Ceballos, 24, says he wants to either remain at Real Madrid next season or leave the club permanently after spending two seasons on loan at Arsenal. (Mail)

Burnley plan to launch a £10m bid for Nottingham Forest's English centre-back Joe Worrall, 24. (Sun)

Former England and Crystal Palace manager Roy Hodgson is on the shortlist to take over again at West Bromwich Albion following the departure of Sam Allardyce. (Mirror)

Tottenham are keen to begin official talks with Paris St-Germain on Monday in a bid to bring Mauricio Pochettino back to the club. (Sun)

Aston Villa fear they may be on the verge of losing star midfielder Douglas Luiz, 23, with former club Manchester City considering activating a buy-back clause for the Brazil midfielder. (90 Min)

AC Milan will start negotiations with Chelsea on Monday to try to sign England defender Fikayo Tomori, 23, on a permanent basis. (Sport Witness)

Arsenal have told Roma manager Jose Mourinho they want £17m for Switzerland midfielder Granit Xhaka, 28. (Gazzetta dello Sport)

West Ham United are emerging as favourites to sign Red Bull Salzburg's Zambia striker Patson Daka as they look to replace Sebastian Haller. The 22-year-old has also interested Liverpool, Manchester United and Manchester City. (Zam Foot)

Galatasaray have put in a £12.9m bid to sign Sheffield United midfielder Ismaila Coulibaly. The 20-year-old spent last season on loan at Belgian side Beerschot. (Sky Sports)

Leeds United have no plans to reignite their interest in Liverpool's 24-year-old Wales midfielder Harry Wilson this summer. (Football Insider)

Newcastle are in pole position to sign Wigan's Scotland Under-19 striker Kyle Joseph, 19, with Sheffield United among the other clubs interested. (Chronicle Live)

Brighton chairman Tony Bloom is willing to listen to offers for the club's most prized assets, with the likes of Mali midfielder Yves Bissouma, 24, and English defender Ben White, 23, attracting interest from Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United. (The Athletic - subscription required)

Southampton are ready to make a fresh bid to sign Everton midfielder Tom Davies after failing to sign the 22-year-old Englishman last year. (Football Insider)

Manchester United's Diogo Dalot has admitted he doesn't know where his future lies after the 22-year-old Portuguese midfielder spent last season on loan at AC Milan. (Manchester Evening News)







Sun

JOHN DOUGH Man Utd and West Ham need £20MILLION for Sam Johnstone as West Brom demand massive transfer fee despite relegation

Alan Nixon

RELEGATED West Brom want a staggering £20million for Sam Johnstone — to scare his fan club.

Baggies chiefs know that Johnstone is keen to stay in the Premier League and his contract is up at the end of next season when he can leave for nothing.

But their valuation is sky high and that is giving Manchester United and West Ham a problem as they look at the 28-year-old.

United are interested in their former player if Dean Henderson or David De Gea leave Old Trafford but they would not go to that massive valuation.

Hammers are also mad keen on Johnstone but boss David Moyes is willing to wait until the price drops.

The Scot sees him as a long-term replacement for Lukasz Fabianski, 36.

United, meanwhile, have strengthened the back-up base lower down their chain of stoppers.

Tom Heaton has agreed to rejoin on a two-year contract, 11 years after leaving Old Trafford.

Aston Villa released the three-cap England ace, 35, on Friday.
And it is thought he will sign a deal with United after returning from a ten-day family holiday.

The Red Devils have been on the hunt for another keeper as the futures of Lee Grant and Sergio Romero are uncertain.

And Heaton will hope to finally make an appearance for United, having come through the ranks from 2005-10 without a first-team breakthrough.




C&H

Hammers linked with Blades bad boy

Claret and Hugh have learnt that Sheffield United strike Ollie McBurnie could be of interest to David Moyes in his search for a striker this summer.

The 24-year-old joined the Blades from Swansea City in 2019 for a transfer fee of £17.5m rising to £20m. He had joined the Welsh club in 2015 for just £250,000 from Bradford City where he spent three years in their Academy.

The Scottish International striker was born in Leeds which where he started his youth football career in 2013 before switching to Bradford.

Following Sheffield’s relegation from the Premier League he has been linked to a summer move to Glasgow Rangers but is thought to be open to offers from Premier League clubs.

McBurnie has a bit of a bad boy image after getting in a number of scraps in his personal life in the last few years.

In 2019 he was caught drink driving and later fined £28,500 and banned from driving for 16 months.

In 2020, McBurnie was warned by the Football Association for his conduct amongst Swansea City supporters whilst attending the South Wales derby when he allegedly made a rude gesture towards Cardiff City fans. This he was arrested following the circulation of a video on social media purporting to show the footballer in an altercation with a man in the street has been released on bail pending further enquiries.

He could be available as little as £10m as he looks to re-start his career and put his troubles behind him.

The frontman scored seven goals from 36 starts for the Blades but has so far failed to recapture his form when he scored 22 goals from 39 starts for Swansea.

He missed the final few weeks of the Premier League season after suffering a foot stress fracture but is expected to regain match fitness in time for a full pre-season.

We know David Moyes is a strict disciplinarian and loves a challenge so it is interesting if this one has any legs.

The Yorkshire based source insisted McBurnie is just one of many striker targets the West Ham manager is pondering.

West Ham could reignite their interest in Duje Caleta-Car this summer according to a report from The Athletic.

At the end of last year, reports broke that West Ham were negotiating with the Stellar Group in a bid to sign the Marseilles central defender before the one-off October transfer window closed.

Stellar which is headed by veteran representative and the player’s agent Jonathan Barnett hoped to get the deal done for a £25 million transfer fee but no agreement could be met by Marseille when Liverpool tried to come in late.

Marseille are now willing to sell defender Duje Caleta-Car for €20million – but a reported move to Liverpool is now unlikely.

It’s claimed that Marseille are ready to sell for around £17million, preferring to sell Caleta-Car so they can try and keep Boubacar Kamara. The report suggests that Caleta-Car’s destination is almost certain to be England, but it’s unlikely to be Liverpool because they’re focusing on signing Ibrahima Konate instead.





Mail

'My stock had dropped... but I have never doubted myself': David Moyes opens up on rebuilding his reputation to lead West Ham into Europe, bouncing back from his Man United sacking, and why 'terrific' Declan Rice will stay at the club

West Ham and David Moyes secured a superb Europa League finish this season
The achievement marked Moyes' pivot from recovery to sealing a fine triumph
Moyes is building again, like he did at Everton, and has his sights set on the elite
Speaking exclusively to Sportsmail, Moyes tells the story of his success this year

By OLIVER HOLT

It is one of the simple pleasures of football to see the green shoots of recovery spring up beneath a good man and a good manager and lift him clear of the toxic hoots and lingering schadenfreude that had become the backdrop to his career. In the season just ended, recovery turned to triumph and carried David Moyes back to the place where he belongs.

For longer than his admirers would have wished, Moyes bore the aggressively bewildered look of a man besieged by adversity as his standing in the game slipped in the public mind following his short-lived reign as Manchester United boss. Those days are gone. The grim chuckle, which has always been the surest sign of happiness in the West Ham United boss, is back.

He is building again. Brick by brick, just like he used to do at Everton in the decade and more that he spent there between 2002 and 2013. He has been given a chance to work how he works best and he has seized it. Building it up and building it up. This season, his first full season at the London Stadium, the edifice shot up until it nearly scraped the sky.

It was only in the last couple of weeks of the campaign that West Ham were forced to give up on their hopes of qualifying for the Champions League. It was a startling transformation from the season before when Moyes, 58, had rescued the Hammers from relegation as the club was caught in the middle of acrimony between some of its supporters and the owners.

When the supporters came back on the last day of the season, there was far less to be angry about. Moyes has seen to that. Little wonder he is said to be about to sign a new 3-year deal at West Ham. 'I actually see the opportunity to make a good club great again,' Moyes says. 'There is so much more that can be done, so much more that can be improved upon. That is the bit that excites me more than anything.

'I have mellowed a bit like most of us do as we get older but I prefer to say I have become more experienced. I have had a really good career but there is part of me thinking 'is the best to come, is the best just round the corner?' And the early stuff was just my apprenticeship and this is me taking the job on properly. I am hoping that is the way it goes.

'When I think back to where I was in my first job at Preston North End, I think to myself that that was probably the best version of me because you don't carry any baggage. You are not thinking about what the supporters are thinking, you are not thinking about what the media are thinking. You manage in all your glory.

Now there is a different world out there. There is media and there is baggage but we just have to keep building.'

He smiles when he hears talk of 'redemption'. He says he can hear the pity in people's questions sometimes when they talk about his fall and ask him how it felt to be brought so low. Sympathy irritates him. He will not identify with his portrayal as a man scarred by his brief tenure at Manchester United, flitting fretfully from one job to another in search of the prize he lost. He does not recognise the picture of that man, he says.

Not when he looks back over a season that has seen him re-establish his reputation as one of the best managers in English football. Not when he knows that he has lifted West Ham from the doldrums of the Premier League into next season's Europa League, finishing sixth, above Arsenal and Spurs. Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola was the League Managers Association Manager of the Year but Moyes was not far behind.

'My stock had dropped,' Moyes says, 'but I never really felt as low as people thought I must be feeling. I get reminded of it by journalists asking questions like 'have you redeemed yourself?' and 'you've made yourself much better, haven't you?' I never really felt that low personally but it sounds like in the outside world, there was that impression of David Moyes.

'I was a bit surprised by that but I can understand it. In a way, it has driven me on to try and challenge it. I would love to be challenging the elite managers again. I was doing that in my best time at Everton. Even at Manchester United, we got to the quarter-finals of the Champions League and stuff like that. People forget. There are a lot of good things and sometimes they are misstrewn.'

There were a lot of good things. Enough good things for Sir Alex Ferguson to recommend Moyes as his successor at Old Trafford and for the recommendation to be accepted. Moyes lasted 10 months before Ed Woodward's nerve failed him, a decision which ushered in a cycle of shallow, impressionable appointments from which United are only now emerging under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.

Moyes' time at Real Sociedad soured after a year, he was swallowed up in the black hole at Sunderland that has devoured so many good managers and then, after he had started well at West Ham in his first stay at the club, the board decided they wanted to turn to a more exotic manager and replaced him with Manuel Pellegrini, who was a disaster.

To the credit of owners David Sullivan and David Gold and chief executive Karren Brady, they were all big enough and smart enough to admit their mistake. In December 2019, with the club hovering a point above the relegation zone, they went back to Moyes and asked him if he would come back to finish what he had started and the manager and the club have never looked back.

'I have felt I probably have had to prove myself again,' Moyes says, 'but I have never doubted myself. You manage Everton for 11 and a half years, I don't think you stay in work that long if you do a bad job. I certainly don't think you get offered the Manchester United job if you are not considered at a certain level.

'But when the job at United came, it didn't work and I didn't do well enough in ten months and I accept that but I do think that people who understand football would also accept there were many other reasons why it didn't work and it is still tough. I needed somewhere where they were going to allow me to work the best I could.

'You start to find out a bit about yourself. I have become a better manager. I am not quite as emotional as I was. I am calmer, even though it might not look that way. I am probably better at delegating now than I was when I was younger. I also think I have retained a real fighting spirit. I love the game totally. I love watching football. I love going to the games. I like being involved with the players.

'All those things meant that when I came back, I needed a club which I could build. If you look at my history, that's where I have been best. This has been my first full season at West Ham and we have qualified for Europe. Nearly all my years at Everton, we were competing for European football. We were always round there.

'If you add the first spell at West Ham into it, I have come back twice and saved them from relegation. So sometimes I don't know if you get the recognition for certain jobs because they are not in the spotlight and you don't get silverware at the end of it.

'I would like to get more silverware in the future and my best chance of winning silverware is building West Ham up and giving them a chance and that is what we did at Everton. We had got to an FA Cup final, we had got to the Champions League once and I think with what is going on unless you have got billions of pounds, I don't know if there's a better way of doing it than building your club up.'

Gary Neville lamented recently that the absence of fans at games for the vast majority of the season just passed has robbed Moyes and West Ham supporters of the chance to bond over the startling improvement in their side after a start to his second spell in charge that was set against the backdrop of a fractious, rebellious atmosphere at the London Stadium.

It may be that in the early stages of the season, when recovery was still fragile, the absence of fans who had grown so unhappy with the board gave West Ham's players more freedom to play without fear in an atmosphere shorn of recrimination and discontent. The transformation in the team that Moyes has wrought means the stadium should have a very different feel next season.

'No supporters like to be near the bottom of the league,' Moyes says. 'When you are up near the top and you are competing and you are introducing a lot of new young players to the squad who you think are committed and determined and all the words you would want as a football supporter, I think we have got that in abundance at the moment.

'We have tried to make the team new and better. We have not changed everything. We have not managed to solve all the problems but we are doing our best to move things on the best we can. Thankfully, now we have got a club which is all aligned, all beginning to go in the right direction, everybody singing from the same hymn book and that is really helping us.

'We have a small recruitment department and that has to be addressed because that is not the situation at any other club. We have to put that in place. We have to have a professional ethic about how we go about our business. We want everybody to know that the job is getting done to the best of our ability and we make decisions for the right reasons. We need the supporters behind us and I want to try to help build a bridge so we become a more all-in-one football club.'

Moyes will be without long-standing number two Alan Irvine next season after his assistant announced last week he was stepping away from the job for personal reasons but to safeguard the progress the club has made this season, Moyes is desperate to keep hold of the key players who have effected the improvement.

That list is led by Declan Rice, the central midfielder who has been an inspiration for his side and is set to play a key role for England at the European Championships this summer.

Rice has been linked with a host of leading clubs, most notably Chelsea, but the fact that West Ham are now part of England's top six and heading in the right direction again may mean it will be easier for Moyes and the club to fend off the advances of other suitors.

'I don't think it will be difficult to keep hold of him,' Moyes says, 'because he is under contract. So we don't have a concern about that. I believe that Declan will stay because he is part of something that he is growing in. He is one of the new group of players, him and Tomas Soucek and Vladimir Coufal.

'Declan is in a position where people will be looking at him. He is a terrific boy. He conducts himself really well. I want him to stay as long as he wants to stay. I like him. He is a really big part of what we do. Like all players, I'm not selling any of them if I have my way.

'Through my journey as a manager, I had to sell Wayne Rooney at one point and you have people who are super talented and it can happen but if it did, it would only be for extraordinary money. We wouldn't want it to happen because we value Declan too much. I enjoy working with him and I think his development here will be really important.

'I think he will play a big part for England at the Euros. His energy, his youthfulness, his ability to be resilient and continue playing, his ability to recover the ball, they will all allow England to have a more positive emphasis in other areas.

'England are filled with incredibly talented attacking players and, to allow them to go and do what they want to do, you need somebody who is going to make sure you are secure defensively. And the other part of that is that when you don't have the ball, you need to be able to recover it and get it to those people. Declan covers those bases.'

Moyes gets up to go. West Ham's emphatic final-day victory over Southampton confirmed that they had achieved their highest points total in a Premier League season, another ringing endorsement for the job Moyes is doing.

'We have not done it right all the time,' he says, 'but we are trying really hard to keep moving forward and not slip back to where we were a few years ago.' Brick by brick, the build goes on.






Replies - Newest Posts First (Show In Chronological Order)

Chrisel 7:41 Sun May 30
Re: Sunday newspapers (includes West Ham)
We have a small recruitment department and that has to be addressed because that is not the situation at any other club.

Stuck or like a route thumb for me

Barty 5:27 Sun May 30
Re: Sunday newspapers (includes West Ham)
20 fucking million, no way

Scerchny will go for cirka 10 million in the summer

I know who I prefer and it´s not the Man U reject

Texas Iron 5:25 Sun May 30
Re: Sunday newspapers (includes West Ham)
Cheers...
Long but good article on Moyes...
Hope he's finally learned how to use subs...early and appropriate
😃

Texas Iron 5:25 Sun May 30
Re: Sunday newspapers (includes West Ham)
Cheers...
Long but good article on Moyes...
Hope he's finally learned how to use subs...early and appropriate
😃

brabrook 3:53 Sun May 30
Re: Sunday newspapers (includes West Ham)
bill green 2:03 Sun May 30

arsene york-hunt 2:14 Sun May 30
Re: Sunday newspapers (includes West Ham)
I stopped reading at the words "by Oliver Holt."

bill green 2:03 Sun May 30
Re: Sunday newspapers (includes West Ham)
ted fenton 1:11 Sun May 30

Vexed 1:45 Sun May 30
Re: Sunday newspapers (includes West Ham)
I'm a bit disturbed by his referring to us as 'them' and Everton as 'we'.

Is it just me that finds that strange?

charleyfarley 1:19 Sun May 30
Re: Sunday newspapers (includes West Ham)
Thanks Al

ted fenton 1:11 Sun May 30
Re: Sunday newspapers (includes West Ham)
Thanks Alan 12:25 Sun May 30

Coffee 12:40 Sun May 30
Re: Sunday newspapers (includes West Ham)
Excellent Moyes article.

Thanks, Alan.

Thanks Alan 12:25 Sun May 30
Re: Sunday newspapers (includes West Ham)
Thanks Alan





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