Arsenal Transfer News: Zaha for £65m plus one Jenkinson and a sexy car
Crystal Palace think Wilfried Zaha is worth £80m? Is he? Arsenal think he’s worth £55m plus £10m in add ons should they win the league (10-1) or Mustafi mishit a pass that lands on the moon (7-1). For a player who flopped the last time he left Palace, £80m could look like a huge risk – Zaha transferred to Manchester United in 2013 only to return to Palace in 2015. A player happy to be the star at one lower mid-table club might not shine at a club with loftier ambitions and a more demanding fanbase.
But Zaha has improved. And of that time at Manchester, where he played under the limited David Moyes, Zaha offered:
…Moyes took issue with the way he dressed and even the car he drove. Zaha felt further let down by the club’s failure to shut down false rumours he was sleeping with Moyes’ daughter and that his absence was due to an attitude problem. He remembers being ‘belittled’ in training by one United coach after scoring. On another occasion he was shown a video of himself in tricky winger mode for Palace and was asked how he could recapture that form, having already been told by Moyes to cut out the fancy footwork. ‘You see the mind games they were playing?’ a bewildered Zaha asks. ‘But when he took me out of the Champions League squad and put in Adnan Januzaj, who had never played for the first team, I knew then that this is way bigger than I ever thought and had gone way beyond footballing reasons,’ he says. ‘When it was not about football or ability, what could I do?’
“There were rumours that the reason I wasn’t playing [many games] for United was because I slept with [then manager] David Moyes’s daughter, and no one [at the club] attempted to clear that up.
“So I was fighting my demons by myself, these rumours that I knew weren’t true. I was dealing with this at 19; living in Manchester by myself, nowhere near anyone else, because the club had a hold over where I lived. They hadn’t given me a car, like every other player [had]. Nothing. I’m living in this hell by myself, away from my family, and I thought, ‘If this doesn’t make me stronger, what will’?”
He’s stronger now with oodles of charisma. How Arsenal need him…
Posted: 22nd, July 2019 | In: Arsenal, manchester united, Sports Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
