The 19-year-old Nigerian central midfielder is regarded as one of the best young talents in the world but has not played for almost a year because of a contract wrangle between Chelsea, Manchester United and Lyn Oslo.The player claimed he was forced into signing a deal with United in May 2005 and received death threats as the row got out of hand.Fifa, the world governing body, was asked to intervene and although Chelsea were never part of the investigation, they did eventually agree to pay Manchester United £12m and Lyn Oslo £4m for the player’s signature.”I always though it was going to be like this, ending happily with me coming to Chelsea because it’s where I want to play,” Mikel said “It’s where I’ve been wanting to play for a long time. I’m very happy it’s all ended now so I can now play for the club of my dreams.”It was difficult and sometimes I got depressed, but you just need to move on because that’s football Mentally it made me strong.”. Villarreal are still awaiting an official offer for their influential midfielder Marcos Senna from Manchester United but Manuel Pellegrini, the Chilean coach who last season guided the unfashionable Spanish club to the semi-finals of the Champions’ League, gave the clearest indication of Sir Alex Ferguson’s next transfer priority last night when he resigned himself to the 30-year-old’s departure from El Madrigal Stadium. While the scrutiny of Michael Carrick begins in earnest this evening when the £18.6m playmaker makes his United debut against Porto in the opening game of the Amsterdam Tournament, the question of who will provide the steel to complement the former Tottenham man’s silk at Old Trafford this season is something that Ferguson remains anxious to address. Senna is understood to be at the top of his list.
Ferguson disputed suggestions that United urgently require a defensive midfielder at Carrick’s unveiling on Wednesday.

But after confirming that he was interested in the former Arsenal captain Patrick Vieira but was unable to match the contract on offer from Internazionale, he said yesterday: “We may be bringing in another one anyway.”With personal terms believed to have been agreed, only Villarreal’s valuation of the player stands in the way of the Brazilian-born midfielder moving to the Premiership.The Spaniards want at least £5m for Senna, although their bargaining position is weakened by the fact he has only 12 months left on his existing contract with the club.His coach Pellegrini, however, held out little hope of retaining the now Spanish-nationalised Senna in an interview with the sports newspaper, Marca, yesterday. “In the case of Marcos, nothing is 100 per cent finalised,” he explained. “I understand that this is a great opportunity for him but, for us, it is going to be a great footballing loss if he does end up going. If he leaves, I’ll be happy for him but I will be sad for the team.”Pellegrini added: “I am very happy for him because he deserves it. He is a player who has proved his class and I have always found it very strange that nobody came in for him sooner as he is a great player.”Senna has proved a formidable foil for the more polished talents of Juan Roman Riquelme at Villarreal, a partnership Ferguson would no doubt love to replicate with Carrick despite his insistence that: “I’m happy with the squad I’ve got, I must say.

I think we’ve got a good bunch of players and if we don’t get the injuries we’ve had in the last two years we’ll have a great chance [of the title] this year.”Should Senna come on board Ferguson will be left with the issue of replacing Ruud van Nistelrooy before the end of the transfer window, with Feyenoord’s Dirk Kuyt under consideration from both United and Liverpool, who have had a £10m bid rejected for the Dutch international and are now weighing up their next move. United have an additional £12m to spend above their transfer budget this summer, money received from Chelsea for the Nigerian teenager John Obi Mikel and which their chief executive, David Gill, has promised Ferguson will be reinvested in the squad, although the manager, never one to discuss a weakness, insists his existing forward line is equipped to sustain a championship challenge this season.The United manager explained: “We have one or two decisions to make about the strikers, [Giuseppe] Rossi, for instance. But the Villa chairman has been anxious to have his preferred managerial candidate in place ahead of the new Premiership season and looks to have landed his man after almost a fortnight of negotiations and assurances to O’Neill.The goalkeeping coach, Eric Steele, had been placed in temporary charge of the tour of Germany and the Netherlands, which commences this morning, after the caretaker manager and former assistant to O’Leary, Roy Aitken, withdrew on health grounds.Steele, a popular member of the Villa back-room staff who has taken on a wider coaching role since O’Leary left the club, could find his stay in charge lasting all of 24 hours, however, if O’Neill commences work with immediate effect having decided that he can work with any consortium that eventually takes over.Lerner held further talks with Ellis yesterday and is favourite to complete a deal that looked signed and sealed last week only to be derailed by an unforeseen late hitch. Though the future ownership of the Midlands club remains clouded in uncertainty, with four consortiums currently attempting to convince Ellis that they possess both the wealth and the strategy to take the club forward, the veteran chairman has staged his own coup by convincing the former Celtic coach and one-time candidate for the England job to take control.
It is believed Villa could be in a position to announce O’Neill’s appointment today, with the Ulsterman meeting his new squad for the first time tomorrow at the start of their nine-day pre-season tour of Germany and the Netherlands.O’Neill’s appointment will delight not only the consortiums interested in buying out Ellis for a figure of around £64m, but the Villa Park faithful who have staged protests against the club chairman for several years and whose disillusionment at his regime reached a peak when the unpopular O’Leary departed four weeks ago.The Ulsterman has resisted numerous job offers since leaving Celtic at the end of the 2004-05 season to care for his ill wife, Geraldine, interest in his undoubted managerial skills arriving from Middlesbrough and Sunderland among others, plus the Football Association, who interviewed O’Neill at length before opting for Steve McClaren.Ellis may be in no hurry to accept the offer of the American billionaire Randy Lerner to buy Aston Villa – though the owner of the NFL side Cleveland Browns remains the favourite to assume control – or indeed the proposals presented by a group of investors fronted by Sven Goran Eriksson’s agent, Athole Still, Nicholas Padfield’s AV06 group and a fourth consortium led by Michael Neville, a local businessman. I would think that, in three weeks’ time, he’ll be back in the lion’s den again as a centre-forward with real guts and determination He’s a different option for us. But, after that, you look around and there aren’t that many centre-forwards who you’d go for.”.

Martin O’Neill is expected to bring his 15-month exile from football to an end today by officially accepting Doug Ellis’s invitation to replace David O’Leary as the new manager of Aston Villa. We’ll have some alternatives for attacking roles in Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Wayne Rooney and Louis Saha. And, of course, we have Alan Smith doing fantastically well in training. That’s been a real surprise for us, how well he’s come on.”Ferguson added: “He’s actually not that far from taking part in a real football game now. It’s more likely that he’ll stay now that Van Nistelrooy’s left We’ve got Ole Gunnar Solskjaer back and doing quite well The more games he gets now will be good for him. I knocked Gerrie Coetzee flat on his back with a good punch, a right hand.

I took some stick when I first fought him [in March 1986] from those anti-apartheid people or whatever They put spray on my car They said I should never have fought him. “It’s an adventure, sometimes good, sometimes bad.” Is there one punch for which he would like to be remembered? After all, he shook Tyson with a huge left hook? “Yeah, but I only shook him on to the other foot Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. What’s it like going into the ring with Mike Tyson, which Bruno did twice? “It’s one of the most nerve-racking, exciting, tingling, weird experiences,” he says. The same as you.”I tell Bruno that I enjoy meeting boxers, or ex-boxers, because what they do or did is so far outside my own experience I’ve played cricket, football, rugby, golf, tennis I have never had someone trying to punch me into next week. I’m always here at Champneys, and my boy’s getting into skiing, so I go to [the dry ski slope at] Milton Keynes quite a lot.