As Fernando Torres prepares to come face-to-face with his former club on Sunday he has warned the Liverpool fans that the full story behind his transfer to Chelsea in January has yet to emerge. nfl jerseys cheap
ugg boots outlet The Spaniard left for Stamford Bridge in a £50m move on the final day of the January transfer window and made his debut for Chelsea against Liverpool at Stamford Bridge five days later.

Liverpool won that game thanks to Raul Meireles’s goal, much to the delight of the travelling fans who taunted Torres throughout. But the 27-year-old has revealed that the fans who once adored him are in the dark as to the real reasons behind his move.

”Liverpool’s fan have stuck with the story the club gave and they don’t know the real story,” Torres told the Spanish newspaper Marca. ”I don’t feel bitter towards them, they will always be special for me.”

Torres also paid tribute to the former Liverpool manager Rafael Benítez, who brought him to the Premier League from Atlético Madrid in 2007. ”I owe so much to Rafa Benítez, no one understood me like him,” he said. ”He’s a great coach. His teams go out with just one thing in mind: compete. Even with a smaller budget his teams can compete with the best.”

Though Torres has struggled to find form following his transfer, scoring just three league goals in 22 appearances, he thanked the Chelsea fans who have stayed supportive of him during this time, but warned that the team cannot afford to drop any more points following two defeats in their last three league fixtures.

”I feel indebted to the Chelsea fans. They have really supported me Vancouver Canucks Jerseys and when I see them they encourage me. If I have learnt one thing in life it is never to give up. I look at myself and I know I can get back to my best,” he said.

”Against Liverpool we cannot allow ourselves to drop more points. It will be special. Liverpool are a team in transition and you can’t do that overnight. You need time. They’ve made an effort economically and, like any project, it needs time to bed in.”

Torres was booed by England fans after coming on as a substitute for Spain in Saturday’s defeat at Wembley and he is expecting a similar reception from Liverpool fans on Sunday. ”I am sure they will boo me more [than the English fans did],” he said.

The proliferation of Twenty20 cricket has ”allowed some really bad people back into the game”, according to Lord Condon, who set up the International Cricket Council’s anti-corruption unit.

The former Metropolitan Police commissioner, who led the ICC unit from 2000, also believes the vast sums of money on offer to elite players in some 20-over competitions tempted those on the rungs below to earn cash through illegitimate means.

Condon, who believes the ICC must have the ”nuclear option” of nfl jerseys cheap
ugg boots outlet ultimately excluding national boards who fail to clean up the sport in their country, told the Cricketer magazine: ”Probably the greatest trigger point [in the rise of corruption] was the explosion of T20.

”The ’anything goes’ party atmosphere allowed some really bad people back into the game. Some of the notorious fixers from early years started to re-emerge on the circuit in India, Pakistan, South Africa, Australia and the UK.

”It almost legitimised the bad guys being back around cricket again, and fixers were even seen in promoters’ boxes and at matches. What up to then had been pretty tight and regulated suddenly became a free-for-all.”

Condon added that Twenty20 ”took away the discipline and rigour [the unit] had been enforcing” and that players were exposed to ”lots of people making very, very big sums of money”.

He continued: ”I think the temptation was to do a little fix here and a little fix there and still win the match – and they were not seeing it as criminal.”

Condon revealed he had suggested putting Twenty20 cricket in ”quarantine” Vancouver Canucks Jerseys in order to contain the threat of corruption spreading. He told the London Evening Standard: ”I remember saying [at an ICC board meeting in 2008] you’ve got two choices.

”You can either say T20 is such a crazy form of the game, you quarantine it. If current Test players go into that, they can’t come back to Test. But that would never work.

”You’ve got to have a fit and proper regime, as you would with gambling, and a proper anti-corruption endeavour to monitor tournaments. However, there was a lot of anger from the Indian representatives who said I had no right to suggest that. They felt I was challenging the legitimacy of the Indian Premier League.”

Yorkshire called in two of their most famous sons, Geoffrey Boycott and Michael Vaughan, to help stiffen their resolve to break with tradition and recruit non-Yorkshire coaches following their shock championship relegation last season.

Boycott and Vaughan still have an influential role behind the Cheap NHL Jerseys scenes at Headingley and both joined the lengthy interview process which resulted in Yorkshire appointing the Australian Jason Gillespie as first-team coach and the Kent-born Paul Farbrace to run the 2nd XI.

Yorkshire’s chairman, Colin Graves, expects the players to respond positively to changes that have seen three Yorkshire-born coaches, Craig White, Kevin Sharp and the long-serving bowling coach Steve Oldham, dispensed with. ”There’ll be some heads rolling if they don’t,” he said.

It was Graves, the founder and chairman of the Costcutter supermarket group, who condemned Yorkshire’s players as ”a disgrace” after their relegation in September and if it was assumed that restructuring the coaching staff was an admission that he had got it wrong, not a bit of it.

”I still don’t change what I said,” he said. ”The players got us to where we were – relegation – which was disgraceful. Four or five of them certainly didn’t pull their weight. They thought they could just uggs boots outlet turn up and it would happen and it didn’t.

”It was hurtful but I have got home to them. A lot of people had been thinking it but nobody had the guts to say it. There was no point blaming Martyn Moxon and the coaches – it was the players.”

Yorkshire hope that Gillespie’s arrival will begin a resurgence of the kind that saw them win the championship during the coaching tenure of another Australian, Wayne Clark, 10 years ago. Moxon remains as director of cricket but with a more supervisory role.

”I wanted to change this coaching structure two years ago but I supported Martyn because he didn’t want to change it and was very loyal to the coaches who were here,” Graves said. ”This year when it went wrong I had to put my foot down.

”He reflected on it and he agreed it was time for a change. We had a flat-level coaching structure where eight different people were reporting to Martyn and I could see him being pulled into all directions. We brought in Boycs and Vaughanie and what’s more they did it free, gratis.”

Gillespie, who promised from Zimbabwe to ”bring more fun and enjoyment to Yorkshire cricket”, will end a two-year coaching stint with MidWest Rhinos in Zimbabwe before joining Yorkshire in time for a pre-season tour of Barbados. But, if anything, it is Farbrace’s appointment that has brought more widespread approval. Farbrace resigned as Kent’s director of cricket in December in frustration at cost-cutting and declining playing standards but he coached several Yorkshire players at England Under-17 and Under-19 level and his time as Trevor Bayliss’s assistant with Sri Lanka gives him strong international credentials.

Yorkshire were struck by Farbrace’s application only for the 2nd XI Vancouver Canucks Jerseys job because he wanted to return to coaching young players. Graves said: ”Our philosophy is to produce our own players. Paul said he wanted to get his hands dirty. His experience will be the key to helping those lads take the step to first-team cricket.”

Moxon referred obliquely to differences of opinions in the coaching ranks last season when he said: ”This isn’t a knee-jerk reaction to relegation. This was about having the coaching skills but also making sure that coaching unit was unified and created an environment where the players can flourish.”

Andrew Gale, the captain, was so distressed by Yorkshire’s relegation that rumours abounded in September that he was about to resign. Instead he had several heart-to-hearts with Vaughan and went off on a charity bike ride to get things in perspective. ”Some of my friends had even heard I was about to join Lancashire,” he said, shaking his head. ”You never like those decisions because I had worked with some of those coaches since I was 13 years old but we had to move forward.”

Yorkshire, who have also signed the Australian Phil Jacques as an overseas player on a two-year contract, are bracing themselves for a £1m loss, to add to the £2m they lost last year, before budgeting for a £400,000 profit in 2012. Gale, Joe Root and Moin Ashraf have signed long-term contracts. The talented squad that Graves condemned as ”a disgrace” will all be around for a good while yet.

The doubters and the sceptics had better take cover because Manny Pacquiao will have more than Juan Manuel Márquez in his sights when he steps into the ring at Las Vegas on Saturday night for the final fight in one of boxing’s most heralded trilogies.

Three years after earning the most controversial victory of his ugg boots outlet
nfl jerseys cheap gilded career Pacquiao, now 32, is aiming to bury once and for all the notion that he has been the beneficiary of larceny in his two previous meetings with the rugged Mexican. Many observers believe that Márquez won both fights.

The ringside judges, in their infinite wisdom, thought otherwise, ruling the first fight, in 2004, a draw. The pair met again four years later and despite Márquez again being on top for much of the fight, a split-decision fell to the eight-division Filipino world champion.

Bedlam ensued, followed by a million saloon-bar arguments and then the inevitable march to a third and final instalment. Pacquiao is predicting a victory and is hoping for a decisive one. ”What I need to do with my performance on Saturday is prove that I won the fight, so that there can be no argument this time,” he said.

The only sure way to avoid any debate would be to stop the contest before the regulation 12 rounds but for all the Filipino’s brilliance, that is easier said than done. Márquez, as he proved in getting up from four knockdowns in their two previous meetings, is durable as well as rugged. He will also step into the ring carrying a strong sense of injustice. ”I know I’m going to have to win the fight in a very convincing manner and hope that the judges score what they are seeing. They were not very impartial the last time,” the 38-year-old said.

The Mexican is stepping up to the welterweight division (144lbs) for this fight and is noticeably bigger and more muscular than he has been before — a transformation he attributes to his new strength-and-conditioning trainer, Angel Hernández.

Yet if the boxer is happy with Hernández, the coach’s presence in the camp has seen accusations fly. Three years ago he was the key witness in the US government’s case against the former track coach Trevor Graham, testifying in court that he had supplied the former Olympic sprint and long jump champion Marion Jones and the men’s former 100m world-record holder Tim Montgomery with a wide range of performing-enhancing drugs.

Victor Conte, the former owner of the infamous Balco drug laboratory which supplied steroids to dozens of US athletes, has been among those critical of Hernández’s involvement in Márquez’s preparation.

”The Feds rolled him over on everybody involved in the case, including several world champions and Olympic medallists. Bottom line. We both know people from the dark side of the sport, and I’m certainly suspicious of current activities,” Conte recently said to Ring Magazine.

Hernández has responded with the threat of legal action, while 传世私服
Pittsburgh Steelers Jerseys Márquez has insisted he is happy to be drug tested, as long his opponent is similarly checked.

But Pacquiao has remained above the fray, preferring to discuss the fight in strictly boxing terms. ”It has been a long time since our last fight and seven years since our first fight. I think over the years I have become a much better boxer. My style and my technique have improved, I am more experienced and I have developed my right hand,” he said.

”When we fought before I had never really studied how to fight counterpunchers like Márquez. Now I am ready to fight a counterpuncher.”