He's Back!

You'd smile too if you were on his wages

Well one of my new year wishes has borne fruit, I just hope that Claudia and Cameron haven't lost my mobile number in the rush to get a taxi. There are so many things wrong with this deal, the length of the contract, the amount Liverpool are having to pay him to go away and play for another club being the two most obvious but there won't be a bigger cheer at the Boleyn come Sunday than when Joe Cole's name is announced.

West Ham (and England for that matter) should have built their teams around 'Jinky' as he was known in his youth, instead manager after manager didn't know what to do with him - except ironically when he was on loan at Lille. I would have thought that he would have fitted into Liverpool's new tippy tappy style being a ready made player in the style of Leon Britton who played a similar role under Brendan Rodgers at Swansea, but it was not to be.

He left West Ham at a time the club were in financial meltdown (that was the first meltdown not the Icelandic one) and is one of a group of ex-Hammers who neither celebrate when they score against us or are booed by the home crowd, see also Michael Carrick, Glenn Johnson, Yossi Benayoun and Rio Ferdinand but not Jermain Defoe, Freddie Kanoute or Frank Lampard.

I hope it works out for Joe. He's not the player he was when he left back in 2003, the season he became captain and Hammer of The Year, he's a lot richer after being on £90,000 a week for the last eight years plus he has three Premier League winners medals and two FA Cup winners medals but injuries have also removed most of the pace he had as a young hip gunslinger. Putting him and Kevin Nolan in the same team will be a risk because it will put more pressure on Noble and whoever else is in the double holding role that Sam prefers as neither Joe or Nolan are that keen on tracking back.

Fingers crossed.