Lampard rejects new Chelsea contract

[red g]

one deluded fat ****

[dww]

To be honest I suspect this story was peddled to the press y someone at Chelsea hoping to get him to sign a new deal. I have my doubts that the stumbling block will be the cash now, I suspect that eithe the length of the contract of the fact that he wants a clause to match any new highest earners is the problem.

Otherwise he is more of a moron than I thought. Unless of course he has already sorted out his dream move abroad and whoever it is are keeping quite in order to not get in trouble for tapping him up.

[Maestro]

But you're an Evertonian so you're not.

Well maybe you could give me more of an insight, seeing as you are?

Come on Chelsea. Mourinho can turn this around. I'd love to hear his half-time team talk. It's sure to be stirring, intelligent stuff.

He's a gentleman. He genuinely believes our goal at Anfield shouldn't have stood. And you know what? The Sky experts agree so if we're honest, Jose must be right.

[Neil Young]

You f***ing stalker.

[cannotmakeit]

I meant to ask, are you guessing or are you claiming a ?

I bet Sven would love to sign Lampard. I just can't see why Lampard would go there.

I have no and its IMO only.
But why is he holding off from signing a contract that pays him more than Ballack and Sheva when that was what he wanted. He is engineering for a move elsewhere and I'll bet Man city, flush with cash will want to make a statement. Sven loves him and always picked him instead of Stevie for England.

[cannotmakeit]

Ranieri Rules Out Juve Lamps Swoop
Tue 03 Jul, 05:09 PM



Former Chelsea boss Claudio Ranieri has ruled out signing Frank Lampard for Juventus.

Lampard has been linked with both the Turin giants and Barcelona this summer but the England midfielder insists he wants to stay at Stamford Bridge.

Now Juve have ruled themselves out of the running, with new head coach Ranieri insisting the Italians are looking for a defender to boost their ranks.

Ranieri, who signed Lampard from West Ham for ?1million in 2001, declared: "We are full in midfield and won't be signing anyone else there.

"Frank is a fantastic player - I know that better than anyone - but the only player we need before the start of the season is a central defender."

However, Ranieri is a confirmed admirer of the 28-year-old.

He said: "Many people said Frank wasn't worth the money when I signed him but he worked very hard and went on to become one of the best midfielders in the world. That made me very proud.

"We had a great relationship when we were at Chelsea and it was good to catch up with him after England's game against Brazil last month."

But while Lampard's future was beginning to become a little clearer, Real Madrid gave Chelsea further food for thought by targeting Lyon winger Florent Malouda.

The Spanish champions are already in the hunt for Chelsea's Holland winger Arjen Robben who has, so far, failed to agree a new long-term contract with the club.

Negotiations between the two parties are understood to be ongoing but, as yet, no agreement has been reached.

Madrid have been long-time admirers of Robben and president Ramon Calderon named the Dutchman as one of the players he wanted to bring to the club during his election campaign last year.

Chelsea have already had a ?2million bid for Malouda rejected by French champions Lyon and Real's interest will pile more pressure on both Robben and the Barclays Premier League club.

Madrid have made it clear they will only sign one winger and if they land Malouda then Robben will miss out.

Calderon told Real's official website, www realmadrid.com: "We like Robben and Malouda. But they play in the same position and we will only sign one of them."

Malouda has already set his heart on a move to Stamford Bridge, where he would link up with former team-mate Didier Drogba but Chelsea are reluctant to meet the ?7million asking price for the winger.

Lyon president Jean-Michel Aulas fears Malouda's move to London may not materialise because he is unsure Chelsea want to cement the deal.

Lyon are already back in training ahead of the new season and Aulas does not believe the Blues have the appetite to finalise the transfer.

Aulas said: "I said to Flo that I wasn't sure the deal was going to materialise and that it was necessary he went to Tignes [Lyon's training base].

"I am not sure Chelsea have the desire or the means to call out to Florent Malouda. [Chelsea chief executive] Peter Kenyon said to Flo he was leaving for Moscow to meet the club's owner [Roman Abramovich]. Sometimes, things happen quickly.

"But I don't feel these people really want to tie up this deal."

Malouda, who has also been linked with Liverpool, was not at Tignes on Monday for the Lyon squad's first day of pre-season training.

Meanwhile, Chelsea have sold versatile Cameroon defender Geremi to Newcastle in a free transfer
http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/030720...mps-swoop.html

haha does anyone want the fat one?

[ronan]

excellent article on this by lawton today.

Lampard rejects the world of real value by measuring respect in piles of money
Even in this age of fake achievement, there is a limit to how far you can have it both ways
Published: 03 July 2007
If it should happen that Frank Lampard wins his contract battle at Stamford Bridge, if along with John Terry he pushes his wages up around the £121,000-a-week mark enjoyed by the former superstars Andrei Shevchenko and Michael Ballack, he might do himself a huge favour by jettisoning a trademarked gesture.

You know the one. It accompanies every moment of personal triumph out on the field. He kisses the Chelsea shirt with a reverence rarely seen outside an enclosed monastery. There is no reason, however, why his thumb and his forefinger should be suddenly redundant when he sends the ball into the net.

Instead of using them to pull the precious blue shirt to his lips, he might rub them together in the universal statement of avarice.

This might not be terribly attractive to the more romantic Chelsea followers, assuming any have survived the years of the Oligarch, but then it might well head off a need for a general issue of sickbags. The point is that while it would probably be naive to expect Lampard and Terry to separate themselves from the rest of the Premiership feeding frenzy, it it is surely fair to ask them to stop insulting the intelligence of those who have provided them with such extravagant rewards.

It comes down to the plain old truth that even in an age befuddled by celebrity and fake achievement there is a limit to how far you can have it both ways.

Before his desperately clunking performance in last summer's World Cup, few professionals had ever built such an enviable reputation as young Frank Lampard. The son of the excellent old West Ham full-back, Frank Senior, the boy seemed to inhabit older, truer values than so many of his contemporaries. When he was voted player of the year he delivered a speech of touching humility; he talked of his debts to team-mates and all those who had helped him to a position of such prominence in the game that had given him everything.

Then, after a string of dauntingly consistent and relevant performances, he touched a nerve in every football man who remembered how the game had first invaded the imaginations of so many ordinary people.

He said he would always be a Chelsea fan, always be utterly devoted to the club. Indeed, such feeling would stretch beyond his days as a player and possibly even a coach. No, it would be a lifelong romance, the one between him and Chelsea. He could see himself as an old man walking down the King's Road alive with hopes for the team's next game.

So much for such dreamy idealism. As Chelsea currently give every sign of a club in the throes of appalling misdirection, when the owner Roman Abramovich denies, at least until a dangerously late hour, his apparently profoundly disliked coach Jose Mourinho the means to strike back at Sir Alex Ferguson's Manchester United strengthened by a £50m spending surge which has now netted England midfielder Owen Hargreaves, Lampard and Terry fight indignantly for their right to be Chelsea's best paid players.

They imply that new offers of £120-odd thousand a week constitute an insult. Not only have they been short-changed but disrespected. Where has all that shirt-kissing ended? In a brusque request to kiss the seat of the designer jeans worn by one of the richest men in the world. Heart-rending - or gut wrenching. You pay your money - or you don't.

Lampard, particularly, seems to believe that he is suffering a terrible short-fall in respect. He wasn't so much angered as shocked by the level of criticism he and his under-achieving England team-mates faced after their miserable effort in last summer's World Cup. Simple respect for past achievement should have prevented such a disgraceful reaction. Such bizarre thinking is entrenched in Lampard's current pay demands. Looking at himself, he has plainly mistaken impressively worthy professional standards for something entirely more elevated. He believes he deserves the rewards of a truly great player, and as he does so bemuses plain-talking and thinking football men who believe they know the difference between a player of strength and determination and one who has the capacity to turn any game at however high a level.

When you consider all of this it is hard not be reminded of an early morning collision between one of the truly great Chelsea players, Roy Bentley, and a young colleague at his new club, Fulham, the future World Cup-winning full-back George Cohen.

Fulham were in a Bristol hotel on the dawn of a league match. Bentley knocked on the door of Cohen's room, demanded he got dressed and accompany him on a walk through the empty, early-morning streets. They hiked all the way out to the Clifton suspension bridge. The veteran, an old Navy man, pointed out the beautiful piece of engineering and said to the rather bemused young pro: "Remember George, however great you think the challenge of playing football, think of how it must be to build a bridge like that." Many years later, after winning his Wold Cup medal, making and losing business fortunes, winning battles against life-threatening illness three times, Cohen said: "Roy Bentley was a wonderful player and a great colleague and he taught me so much about the game, he was a great striker and then he played in midfield with tremendous touch and vision when he lost some of his pace.

"But he never taught me anything so valuable as on that morning when we walked out to the great bridge." What Roy Bentley taught George Cohen was that there was a big wide world of achievement out there beyond the boundaries of a football field, a place where respect could be measured by so much more than loadsamoney.