English game boosted by arrival of veterans

Henrik Larsson, Vincenzo Montella. At the turn of the year, famous veterans have arrived in English football, Montella at Fulham, quite a coup for a supposedly unfashionable club, Larsson plucked from relative obscurity back in Sweden, at Manchester United, where Alex Ferguson has the highest hopes for him. Both of them on loan.

At Leicester, Montella got his first 19 minutes of English Football as a substitute, but the 32 year old will surely be able to contribute far more than that to a club which has just, surprisingly, but remuneratively, sold their Portuguese star, left flanker Luis Boa Morte to West Ham.

Where last Saturday, I saw him flourish in the second half in a Cup-tie in which his crosses brought two of Hammers' three goals against Brighton.

It was a match in which he himself was surpassed by the dynamic form of the Argentine Carlos Tevez, making the subsequent ill-natured outburst by Alan Curbishley, the Hammers manager who has just arrived from Charlton, all the less acceptable.

Humiliated

This because Curbishley, who after his ill judged Rant, allowed no questions, who certainly have been asked by me why Tevez, who a week earlier had looked West Ham's best player when brought on at half time at the urgent behest of the crowd, never even got off the bench at Reading, two days later, where the Hammers were trashed and humiliated 6-0.

Not a team, which several times I have seen this season, have previously looked so irresistible.

Curbishley was up in arms over what he judged unfair press criticism of the team's somewhat dissident captain, Nigel Reo Coker.

If he had so good an opinion on the young midfielder - who scored the winner for Hammers in the false dawn of Curbishley's first game, a 1-0 win over Manchester United - he wasn't even on the West Ham bench on Saturday.

The strong rumour being that Hammers mean to sell him - big bone of content was supposedly that they wouldn't transfer him last summer to Arsenal - and therefore didn't want him to be FA Cup tied.

Finest coup

As Curbishley marched out of the Pressroom, the word, "pathetic", escaped from my lips.

He wasn't pleased, the other journalists were congratulatory.

As one who has long admired the Czech attacking midfielder Thomas Rosicky , and who believed that in signing him this season from the Bundesliga Arsenal had brought off probably the finest coup of the close season, I was delighted to see he scored those two splendid right footed goals at Liverpool last Saturday, confirming my belief that to use him as Arsenal have tended to wide on the left, is to waste him criminally.

He is essentially a right-footed player as his two goals showed, and the centre of midfield is where he should always play.

Montella's meanwhile, is an unusual story.

He played his way up in Serie C seasons with Empoli. 17 goals in 30 League games, in his last season there brought him to Genoa in Serie B, with another 20 goals.

Where upon Genoa's traditional city rivals Sampdoria, managed to spirit him away. From Samp, he moved to Roma.

He has been capped twenty times by Italy.