Distin Set to Join

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DISTIN SET TO JOIN MAGS By Damian Spellman, PA Sport

Newcastle boss Bobby Robson expects to tie up a loan move for French defender Sylvain Distin within 24 hours.

The Paris St Germain player was on Tyneside on Tuesday morning for a medical with a view to completing a temporary move to United for the rest of the season which could eventually lead to a full transfer.

Robson has been chasing the former team-mate of winger Laurent Robert for several weeks and has pounced after the Frenchman turned down the chance to join Premiership pace-setters Bolton Wanderers.

"I can't deny that we have Sylvain Distin here," he said.

"He's undergoing medicals with a view that hopefully we will be able to sign him.

"We are signing him on loan, which is really great for us because it means we'll have him all year and we can have a look at him.

"He's left-footed which is one of the big reasons why I am signing him.

"I just like left-footers on the left side of the pitch and he gives us that option.

"He's a high quality player. He's 6ft 4in, he's an Olympic sprinter and he's got a left foot.

"There were lots of clubs after him but he's chosen us.

"He refused a move to Bolton two weeks ago and other clubs are interested in him, but we've just beaten them to the punch and we've got him here."

Distin would become the fourth addition for the United squad since the end of last season after £10million pound signing Robert, Craig Bellamy and Robbie Elliott.

Robson has worked hard to try to strengthen his defensive resources after suffering a nightmare run without a clean sheet last season, and is hoping that the Frenchman will battle for a place along with current first choices Nicos Dabizas and Aaron Hughes, and back-up Andy O'Brien, plus the Caldwell brothers, Steve and Gary.

Dabizas will be rested for the Worthington Cup second round clash with Brentford at St James' Park, handing O'Brien a rare chance this season, while Gary Caldwell is also included in the squad.

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2001

Answers

"He's 6ft 4in, he's an Olympic sprinter and he's got a left foot"

Attention to details eh, sign of a good manager.

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2001


Pace at the back as well! Will YBR try out three out the back again, now he has a tall, fast, left footed defender available? Interesting...

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2001

Let's just hope he has a right foot too!

Actually, Teamtalk reckon he has already signed, viz:

The Magpies have finally officially completed the loan signing of Sylvain Distin after the French defender passed a medical this morning.

United have agreed to pay Paris Saint Germain £500,000 to keep the 23- year-old at St James' Park until the end of the season. But Bobby Robson will have to decide by December whether he wants to sign Distin permanently next summer.

Distin will not feature in tomorrow's Worthington Cup tie against Brentford, but there is an outside chance he will be on the bench when Manchester United visit Tyneside on Saturday.

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2001


What puzzles me is "Why do PSG want to let this player go?".

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2001

Apparently they have a surplus of CBs Rik. Hang on, so do we. Perhaps they have a surplus of good CBs.

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2001


Rik, I've been on the PSG sites and the view seems to be that he's fast and quite good but he has fallen out with the coach just like Lolo did. They also have any number of centre backs and can't use him at left back because they are using one Didier Domi. Basically, there's a question mark against his attitude which may be why we are only interested in a loan at this point.

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2001

Will we be offloading Dabizas, Hughes,O'Brien or Caldwell to make way for him? can't see any of them being too happy at his arrival.

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2001

Rik,

You could also ask why PSG were happy to lose Laurent Robert - different coaches have their favourites and these things happen - ask Stephen Glass.

Regarding our existing CB's. They have had ample opportunity to prove we don't need fresh blood. The reality is our defence is still rubbish, and we don't have a totally effective pairing among the lot of them.

BR will presumably use Distin in combination with Dabz, O'Brien and Hughes, and perhaps Steve Caldwell to see if any of them gell together. When he has finished that process, one or more of them may well become expendable.

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2001


Remember Darwin's survival of the fittest theory. Well it makes sense to me with regards to our CBs.

Dabs I like but he's error prone. O'Brien seems canny but I've not seen enough of him to really tell. As someone on here remembered well together Dabs & O’Brien were god awful at Liverpool last year. Hughes has good qualities for example man marking; he did well against Roma I recall and again in the 2bob against that Jorman short arse play- maker - can't think of his name. However, I'm not a great fan of his. At times against hammer thrower types he's as strong as a glass of water. At corners, set pieces and crosses his marking is quite frankly shite. Sooper has made a twat of him more than once. His contribution when we have the ball is ordinary. The Caldwells are young but at an age where they should be pushing for a first team slot - Steve is an international after all - so do it lads. Marcelino f*ck him.
I don't recall seeing a convincing partnership for seasons, also having a little wee goalie compounds our frailty.
I’m happy this position has been pinpointed. Strengthen Bob then flog the buggers that don’t measure up.

Right I’m off to eat more red meat.

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2001


Is anyone else's defence better than ours though?

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2001


I'm slightly concerned about all this pace in the side. Is Distin reall "Olympic" sprinter, or does that just mean he played Marseille once.

If we have pace at centre half, and with Dyer, Robert, Bellamy then I'm going to have to get used to moving my eyes faster at the match.

I remember watching Shearer warming up for his first ever home game for us. He was at the edge of the box hitting shots in at the goalie. The first one was saved the second went passed the post and hit the hoardings. The thing that shocked me was that when I looked to see it hit the hoarding it was already back in to the goal area. His shot was so much faster/harder than anything I'd seen before.

I want our pace to upset teams, attacking is best, but if you've got defenders with it then that's great. Maybe Owen won't run away from our players so easily.

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2001


Rik asks a very good question actually, because there haven't been that many clean sheets so far this season. I mean, Man Utd had Laurent Blanc and the sainted Wes Brown in the centre of defence on Saturday and still conceded a goal, Liverpool had the PL's best (statistically speaking anyway) defender (Hyppia) playing on Saturday and they conceded three, Arsenal have lost at home already, the much praised Villa defence of Alpay and Mellberg have conceded goals. In fact, most teams, even those with so-called good defences, have conceded goals. Last season both George Graham and Arsene Wenger bemoaned the lack of genuine good quality centre halves and the decline of defending quality in the Premiership at large. Hard though it is to believe, until Christmas last season, we had about the fifth best defence in the PL, then players started getting injured and we started fannying about with the back four and it all went to shit: Jesus, we kept three clean sheets at the start of last season. The point I'm trying to make is that a good defence is the hardest thing to put together and we could buy Jaap Stam and he wouldn't necessarily make our defence impregnable (cue, Screach to make joke on this word ;)). Furthermore, defence is a team activity - your forwards need to hold the ball up, you need to have at least one good holding midfielder etc. As a team, we don't defend well. We excuse Nobby's failures in this regard because he is so good going forward but when he loses the ball, he puts the defence under pressure. No criticism of the Nobmeister but it's a fact. It takes time to put this sort of failing right and while Distin's pace may help our attacks, I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for entire strings of clean sheets.

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2001

And furthermore, both our goalies are shot-stoppers, pure and simple.

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2001

My free (as in 'if I'd had to buy it, I wouldn't be posting this') copy of the Mail has us putting in a £1.5 mill bid for Nzelo Lembi, but only hoping to complete a loan deal for Sylvian Distin.

Ancient history as far as Distin is concerned cos he could show his face against manure, so how much credance can we place in the Lembi bit ?

Being the rag it is, probably none.

As an aside, is it now going to be par for the course that all of our transfer negotiations are going to drag on for weeks and weeks, driving us all up the wall ?

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2001


Who really gives a s**t about the defenses of other teams - I want our team to be able to defend professionally and competently. BR's been in charge two years now and it's about bloody time we saw an improvement.

Dougal makes a perfectly valid point about the importance of "team defending" - we have a relatively weak midfield and this does help our overall defensive capability. However, this is not contributory to our inability to mark attackers, and to defend corners and free kicks. We have a problem, and BR is quite right to be trying to do something about it.

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2001



Clarky - I couldn't give a f..k about anyone else's defence either but I would suggest that there is a defensive malaise over the whole of the Premiership and we can't expect to find a magical answer to this ourselves. Actually the point I was trying to make is that there is a distinct lack of good centre halves so we shouldn't assume that buying a new one will help immediately. You're right that we should be able to mark attackers but how many times last season did we hold out, only to give away a goal from a set piece? Take the Christmas period - we only conceded one goal to Leeds from a set piece (freekick given away by Bassedas) and one to Man Utd (Griffin gave away the pen) or a bit later, losing by a penalty to Ipswich and giving away a penalty at Everton. Again, your centre backs should be leading the defence of setpieces but you need assistance from elsewhere, too. As a point about how poor our whole team is at defending: Acuna brought down Ince to give away the free kick that gave them their goal, Robbie Elliott could have been sent off for one of his early tackles, Given was a twat hauling down Ince like that, Dabs was constantly roaming forward, Barton was getting skinned by that old SMB geezer, Hughes and Dabs couldn't deal with their front two swapping around so much. It's going to take a bit of effort to correct all of this. A new centre back isn't the only answer.

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2001

Clarky, believe it or not, we have seen an improvement since YBR came: I believe our goal difference was -12 when he joined.

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2001

Off the point, but how good is our defensive coaching and who is doing it now that John Carver is doing general coaching. I ask this because we read of Derby's defence being "magnificent" these days: they got a new defensive coach last season and had an almost overnight improvement with (by and large) the same personnel. Maybe Bobby should stick with John Carver as his number 2 and really give a thought to procuring a top class defensive coach instead of a new number 2?

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2001

correct me if im wrong but one Dean Richards was available for FREE when we signed Marcie and Goma for 10 million

Richards is for sale at that same price now, while we suffer with our Spanish disaster

mmmmm

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2001


Aye, hindsight. Isn't it marvellous.

-- Anonymous, September 11, 2001

Do you mean like Mark Lawrenson Dougal?

-- Anonymous, September 12, 2001

Derby's defence was immediately boosted by Wadsworth swooping for Delap when he joined up with Southampton....

-- Anonymous, September 12, 2001

This is all true.

1) The new balls are brill, I’ll remember the first goal Twwwa scored at the Gallowgate for a long time. I was right behind the line of fight the serve the ball took was breathtaking.
2) Footy is almost a non-contact sport.
3) Professional players = professional cheats, a canny few anyway.
4) Shirt pulling and holding simply can not be Reffed, it happens 20 times per set piece.
5) No handling of back-passes by the Goalie.
6) Very little time wasting because the game is no longer played with one ball but with many hoyed straight back on to the field of play.
7) Bookings.
8) The last man sending off rule.

The game must be played with this in mind.

-- Anonymous, September 12, 2001


As far as who stays and who goes, Buff quoted an article on another thread suggesting Stevie C would be looking for another club as he's fed up. Another four CB's (I'm leaving Marcelino out of the equation) doesn't leave us overstocked. The problem as ever is that none are natural leaders. O'Brien or Hughes, for instance, would probably do pretty well with a Stam/Elliot/Adams figure alongside, but together, or with Dabz (who's supposed to be a skipper) you never know who's steering the ship.

-- Anonymous, September 12, 2001

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