Injury Record / Look who's Defending Putin / Torres

Few stories floating round in the Twitter-verse that I thought I'd comment on in more depth.

Firstly, the guy over at Republik of Mancunia produced one of his periodic stats analyses, with the goal, I presume, of showing that United have the worst injuries record in the prem. However, in his analysis, he was forced to admit that we, in fact, have the worst injury record out of the top English clubs. According to the table provided, we have had, on average, a staggering 67 injuries per year since 2002, which is ten more than United, who have the second worst injury record out of us, them, Chelsea, City, Spurs, and Liverpool. We are not imagining it - there is something about our squad which means we pick up a lot of injuries, whether its our medical team, the way we train or our style of play. The analysis is slightly flawed, as it doesn't really account for length of injury, but it's still something to chew on. Hopefully the new medical centre, combined with the more direct style of play we have this year, will change things, but who knows. We already have all four of our full-backs injured, after all.

Elsewhere, this heartwarming story emerged from Russia. Usmanov has apparently sacked members of the management at the paper he owns, Kommersant, for poking fun at Putin for the rather dubious, to put it mildly, elections that just took place in Russia. Good to see our second-largest shareholder defending a tryant. Something worth bearing in mind for all you David Dein lovers out there.

Lastly, there's a lot of rumours flying about that Torres is going to leave Chelsea in January. Now, Torres has been, in essence, a failure at Chelsea. He has perhaps not been awful, but he has not justified the absurd £50m pricetag put on him. But even if Chelsea were to sell him in Jan, I very much doubt we would stump up the £20m supposedly required for him, especially when a similar amount might land us someone like Podolski. In fact, I would be very surprised if Torres moved anywhere until at least next summer.

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