Venkey's' just don't seem to any ideas do they, I imagine Man U's lawyers will give them a seeing to if they have any problems.
Re: Joe Cole, I remember at the start of the season Gerrard said something about Cole being better than Messi and that Joe Cole would end up getting player of the season.
HE said something that shows exactly why English players are stupid and why we don't make the best players, some players are simply born good, you don't teach Messi to be Messi, a team finds him and plays him, thats all.
It was along the lines of, you should see what Joe Cole does on the training ground with a
TENNIS BALL, its stuff Messi can't do, he's our Messi" blah blah blah.
Soccer AM and the soccer skills thing, its a joke, being able to do a press up with a ball balanced on your back doesn't help you on the pitch at all. DOing fancy flicks with a tennis ball on the training ground is quite simple taking up time you could be practicing your actual football.
English people thinks daft tricks = technical ability, Brazillians, dutch, Spanish all think passing/crossing/tackling/dribbling are technical skills, once you are fantastic at them kickups and other tricks are just a easy side effect at being brilliant with the ball. Joe Cole practiced his kickups and skills, and the rest of his game is average. We've got whole generations of young English guys trying to do Joe Cole's tricks, rather than Fabregas's passing.
As for wages, jesus christ, shut up already. He's not doing slave labour 1st line support, a bad week in his job is training 2 hours a day and having the rest of the day off and NOT playing at matches. He's also supposedly on 120k a week, 60k + 60k adjusted as his signing bonus, IE he gets it paid as a wage rather than a lump sum, going from 120k to 30-40k is a HUGE drop to make and few people would do that. He's I assume asking for a payoff to get the rest of essentially his signing bonus in lump sum as he basically won't have actually had all his signing bonus yet if its being paid weekly. Fair enough.
The VERY FEW players who go off to take a lower wage job are normally at the ends of their contracts and unable to get a higher offer. Getting paid 100k a week for 5 years, contract finishing, then signing on for 40k a week elsewhere is different to 100k a week for 5 years, then moving on to a 40k a week contract 2 years later, when you can just sit around and get 100k a week for 3 more years.