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• ‘The reality of what we found here was unacceptable’
• ‘No balance, no tactical level, no understanding of the game’

The Liverpool youth coach Rodolfo Borrell has criticised the “unacceptable” standard of the club’s academy. Borrell’s assessment is that it will take two years before the set-up is close to the right level. “The reality of what we found here was unacceptable,” said Borrell, who joined nearly a year ago having worked with Cesc Fábregas and Lionel Messi in Barcelona’s youth system.

“The under-18s had no centre forward, no balance, no tactical level, no understanding of the game. We are working hard, but you can’t change things overnight. I think we have made a lot of progress over eight months, but we need to improve a lot more to get more players into the first team. I think if we keep working hard maybe in two years somebody can appear in the first team.”

Borrell’s brief from the Liverpool manager Rafael Benítez is to develop more English players. This week the club signed the England youth international Jonjo Shelvey from Charlton. He will go into the reserve squad, as they try to seek to redress the balance having previously brought in a large number of foreign youngsters.

“The best players to defend the Barça shirt are Catalan players, the best players to defend the Liverpool shirt are English players,” Borrell told BBC Sport. “We have to fight to make English players arrive. The rest of the players who are not English must be massive quality.”

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The BBC tell us why they left Benoît Assou-Ekotto’s clash with Vedran Corluka on the cutting-room floor

An interesting editorial judgment at the BBC

During Tottenham’s victory over Stoke City on Saturday, Benoît Assou-Ekotto and Vedran Corluka almost came to blows, a brief flurry of chest-high pushes ending when Stoke’s Ricardo Fuller, who knows a thing or two about fighting with team-mates, pulled them apart. It wasn’t a major incident, but it was an interesting one – yet on Match of the Day that night it wasn’t even mentioned. Sky Sports News, on the other hand, showed it repeatedly the following day.

“We had a seven-minute edit, and the key issue without a doubt was Tony Pulis’s problems with the referee,” explained a BBC spokeswoman – Pulis had attempted to have Mike Dean removed from the fixture, and he promptly sent off his third Stoke player this season. “We didn’t have a camera angle that showed what caused the fight. What we did have is five seconds of footage that showed two players swearing a lot. There was no context to the story and because of the swearing, and because we also go out at 9am on Sunday morning, it wasn’t something we felt we could put in.”

At the end of the game, Assou-Ekotto left the field alone. His performances may have improved over the last year or so – leading to him signing a new four‑year contract last summer – but some doubt about his temperament must remain. Earlier this season, after Spurs’ home defeat to Wolves, he confronted a fan – “There was no violence or anything,” Harry Redknapp said at the time. “Joe [Jordan, the assistant manager] pulled him away and his girlfriend pulled the other guy away, whoever he was.”

After Saturday’s game, Redknapp was asked again about the French‑Cameroonian full-back. “Benoît is a strange boy,” he said. “He’s a bit highly strung and hardly speaks English. If you say something to him he’s hard work. He hasn’t improved his English in the couple of years he’s been here.”

Asked why his left-back had walked off alone, apparently unhappy, Redknapp said: “He didn’t know the result. He probably thought we’d drawn. He’ll turn up Wednesday and play great, but he won’t know we’re playing Fulham until someone tells him. That’s how he is. He’s unreal. He walks off and he’s thinking about the music he’s going to play when he puts his headphones on.”

Intriguing. And also, for terrestrial viewers, invisible. SB

Insúa needs a little protection
It takes a lot for Alan Hansen to single out a Liverpool player for criticism. Over the past decade it’s been easy to gauge who his favourites are because he generally refers to them by their first names – starting with Michael (Owen), the Hansen seal of approval evidenced by his familiarity also includes Jamie (Carragher) and, of course, Steven (Gerrard).

This season, though, he has picked out a particular target first for his ire and now for scorn. Although Emiliano Insúa has not exactly become a scapegoat, his defenestration on last night’s Match of the Day 2 by Hansen was the latest example of the left-back’s failings being highlighted for withering analysis.

The former Liverpool captain’s judgment is based on the Argentinian’s lack of positional discipline and his inability to think like a full-back. Sometimes he gets too tight, on other occasions he stands off his winger and, Hansen maintained, he seems incapable of ushering a right-footed attacker inside by shaping his body correctly while jockeying him.

They were all valid points on his showing at Old Trafford but in his defence Insúa received very little protection from his compatriot Maxi Rodríguez, who was stationed more or less directly in front of him, or from the left-footed Daniel Agger. One way of coping as a team when the full-back is having a torrid time and an attack is under way down that flank is to give the other centre-back the licence to help out while retaining shape by getting Carragher and Glen Johnson to shuffle over to the left with Dirk Kuyt dropping in to right-back.

That didn’t happen yesterday and no other coping strategy was tried. That left Insúa exposed to the crafty movement of Antonio Valencia but to blame the left-back for the defeat overlooks his team-mates’ culpability in leaving him so vulnerable to a winger in peak form. RB

Sunderland are steaming to safety
Darren Bent’s goalscoring streak is one reason for Sunderland’s revival but the way the side has coped in the absence of Lorik Cana and Lee Cattermole, two dynamic central midfielders whose ability to get stuck in on occasion brought to mind Everton’s famed dogs of war John Ebbrell and Barry Horne, is another. They also had to do without Kenwyne Jones against Birmingham, a centre-forward whose positioning prevents the opposition’s centre-backs stepping into midfield and squeezing play. Steve Bruce deserves credit for sticking to his template despite the unavailability of his preferred engine room and has used the marauding runs of Alan Hutton at right-back to create another line of attack to complement Steed Malbranque’s return to form on the left. They still had to rely on Craig Gordon’s inspired performance in goal to win as their second-half display failed to match their efforts in the first but there are definite signs that after a long slump Sunderland’s understudies have got the side back on track. RB

Jamie O’Hara grows up
Last May, Sade Metcalfe told the News of the World about her bad-tempered break-up with Jamie O’Hara, who had left her for serial Wag Danielle Lloyd. “People need to know what Jamie’s really like,” she said. “He used to be so sweet but money and fame changed him.”

O’Hara’s football track-record does not suggest tremendous fidelity either. As a youth player he passed through Chelsea and Arsenal before reaching Tottenham, and after a few loan spells he recently mooted the possibility of a move away from the club in the summer, should he not immediately fit into Harry Redknapp’s plans at White Hart Lane. Meanwhile, having played for England at Under-16, Under-17, Under-18 and Under-21 levels, he is now mulling over an offer from the Republic of Ireland. “It’s an honour to be involved with your country,” he says, “whatever country.” Anything, in short, for a game.

He and Lloyd are now engaged, and due to have their first child in July. Last week the player, currently on loan at Portsmouth, admitted that impending fatherhood had forced him to mature. “It’s made me grow up as a person,” he told Portsmouth Today. “I’ve settled down a lot whereas before I used to go out a bit too much, as you do when you’re young. Now I feel I’m settled and concentrating a lot on my football and then going home and looking after my girlfriend. You become a man overnight once you’re expecting a baby and it has really made me grow up already.”

While his managers have never complained about his application – “He’s a great professional,” Harry Redknapp said after the Carling Cup win over Doncaster in August. “When I came to the club he was the type of lad that was down to earth, got on with it, loved to play, and had a great attitude” – his redoubled dedication can only be good news. As his simple but sublime free-kick against Hull on Saturday proved, he certainly has the ability. “I’d like to hope I’m good enough,” he says of his chances of playing for England, and it looks like he may well be right. SB

Heitinga’s blossoms in spring
Mikel Arteta has rightly come in for praise since his return to the Everton first team after recovering from last season’s cruciate ligament injury. But there is another architect of the Toffees’ revival, one who was signed primarily as a back-four utility player but has slotted into a midfield role with all the aplomb you would expect of an Ajax academy graduate. Johnny Heitinga has blossomed in the position since moving forward after Marouane Fellaini’s injury and his calm assurance on the ball, range of passing, neat link-up play, ability to nick the ball in the tackle, or indeed clear his opponent out, establishes a platform for Arteta to shine. He was exceptional in the thrashing of Hull and shone again in the draw at Birmingham and the defeat of Bolton. His presence has also let Phil Neville remain at right-back to keep the erratic Tony Hibbert out of the starting line-up. RB

Premier LeagueTottenham HotspurLiverpoolSunderlandPortsmouthEvertonSimon BurntonRob Bagchiguardian.co.uk

Today’s blurb is back in business

Excuses, excuses, always excuses. Monday is never the Mill’s favourite day. Even when David Beckham hasn’t just suffered a career-threatening, World Cup ambition-destroying achilles injury the papers are full of nasty, irrelevant rubbish such as match reports, and sadly lacking in the true and genuine lifeblood of our nation’s favourite sport, namely baseless gossip and idle speculation.

And so it is that the first item on the Mill’s notepad this bright and sunny Monday morn reads: “Yogi, a Hungarian Vizsla, won the Best In Show title at Crufts.”

What’s a Vizsla, anyway? Could the Hungarian Vizsla be in any way related to a Polish Wisla? They sound extremely similar, come from the same part of the world and can both claim to be champions, but one is a brown-furred quadruped and the other is a football team from Krakow.

The Mill feels it has a special and unique bond with Yogi. No, not in that way, vile-minded reader. He, like us, is loyal, caring and highly affectionate, but we have both been bred to possess a keen thrill for the hunt and the nose to scent out its prey however well it tries to hide.

And so it was that we managed to scent out in today’s Times, of all places, news that Juventus would be willing to sell Gianluigi Buffon to Manchester City for around £32m. That’s £1m for every year of the not-exactly-one-for-the-future-is-he shot-stopper’s life so far.

Meanwhile Ramón Calderón, the only former Real Madrid president to sound a bit like the lyrics to Gary Glitter’s 1973 chart-topper I’m The Leader of the Gang (I Am), says the Spanish giants have “an obsession to go for Wayne Rooney“.

Over in Merseyside the Rhône Group, a New York-based private equity firm, is close to buying 40% of Liverpool. The money could be used a) to improve the team, Fernando Torres having called on the club to “make an effort and bring in important players and improve the quality of the squad”; b) sack Rafael Benítez, who, according to the Mail, has a clause in his contract guaranteeing that his £4m-a-year, four-years-to-run contract will be paid up, in full, within 24 hours of him getting the boot; or c) refinance a couple of loans and pay Liverpool’s owners a lip-smacking bonus. Time will tell.

World Cup news now, and the BBC is spending £1m on a bespoke studio located on the roof of Somerset Hospital in Cape Town so that Gary Lineker and the rest of their World Cup panel have a nice view to look at this summer. ITV, and everyone else, is to be based in Soccer City.

Work on the studio begins this week with an operation to remove seagull nests from the site. “The move,” reports the Sun, “is seen as a slap in the face for Johannesburg and the capital Pretoria.” Can Johannesburg be slapped in the face? Does it have a face to slap? The Mill, for one, doesn’t think so.

Let’s hope its glazing is fully bulletproof, though. You can never be too sure. Because in a not-at-all bizarrely alarmist report, the Star says that “thousands of football fans have recruited armed guards to protect them at the World Cup in troubled South Africa.” Apparently, even three months before the big kick-off, supporters petrified of the “poverty-stricken locals” are living in “fear for their lives”.

And finally, in today’s Gazzetta dello Sport José Mourinho gives a guide to his favourite places in London. These include Harrods, the Vue cinema on Fulham Broadway – “where I watched many musicals” – and a restaurant called San Lorenzo in Beauchamp Place, which serves an excellent fish soup. “When he wanted a trip outside the city,” the pink paper also reports, “he would choose Ipswich.”

Manchester CityJuventusWayne RooneyLiverpoolSimon Burntonguardian.co.uk