Premier League team news and more: weekend football countdown – live!

• Fellow footballers pay tribute to Emiliano Sala
• The latest football news before the weekend’s games
• And email Gregg here or tweet @GreggBakowski

11.59am GMT

Neil Warnock has been speaking to the press before Cardiff’s match against Southampton and his focus was understandably on Emiliano Sala, whose body was recovered from the Channel on Thursday evening. He confirmed that Cardiff will hold a minute’s silence against Southampton.

It brings the family peace, offers them comfort. I think we’ve got to pay our respects with the situation now coming to an end, regarding Emiliano. We’ll wear black armbands and have a minute’s silence. I’m sure the Southampton fans will want that as well.

I think that was a little bit over the top. At the time I just said it made you think wether you want to carry on in football. I went in the local paper and put that to bed. It’s a challenge for me with all the things that have happened in the last few weeks. You can see in the last few games, it’s a challenge. But we’re all up for that. It’s a challenge we have to face head on. My mind has been back on football, as it’s got to be. I steer the ship, but I have to say the boys and the staff have been great to me. That does matter when you’re a team off the field as well as on it. You could see the response at Arsenal from the players, probably the best away performance. And the Bournemouth game was very good from our point of view, football wise.

We have to. You never forget things like this – you can’t always put it out of your mind – but fortunately for me the players have grasped that in their performances. And now we have 13 Cup finals in a row.

When I think I’ve seen it all in football, our fans keep surprising me every week now. I don’t think there’s anything that would surprise me with them. And the Arsenal fans, Bournemouth fans, fans from clubs all over. When something like this happens it brings all the football family together. It shows that everybody is thinking on the same wavelength and it’s a loss to everyone in football.

11.47am GMT

Are warm-weather training camps a good or a bad thing? Southampton manager Ralph Hassenhutl is a big fan and plans to take his team on one after the relegation battle with Cardiff this weekend.

What we now try to do is to use this time for hard work and to get perfectly prepared for the last two or three months that we have to go. We have prepared videos for every player about his positive things and his negative things and to show them what we are demanding more and to show them what was good until now. A little bit of feedback is very important for them, and therefore we need a lot of time, but I think they appreciate that and they need that to make their next step and therefore it is perfect to go there and have time together. It is also partly about the better weather conditions when you want to train tactical things on the pitch, because then you can rest for two or three minutes and you can explain more without catching a cold, and you can work in a good atmosphere. I hope that we take a good result on the weekend and then we can go there with a very good atmosphere and that helps us a lot to be critical and also positive in looking forward for the next exercises.

Continue reading…