{"id":2889,"date":"2014-03-20T21:20:58","date_gmt":"2014-03-20T21:20:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/?p=2889"},"modified":"2014-03-20T21:20:58","modified_gmt":"2014-03-20T21:20:58","slug":"mourinho-sacrifices-torres-as-chelsea-manager-reshuffles-squad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/football\/mourinho-sacrifices-torres-as-chelsea-manager-reshuffles-squad\/","title":{"rendered":"Mourinho Sacrifices Torres As Chelsea Manager Reshuffles Squad"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><\/div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<p>Fernando Torres has left the door open for a return to Atletico Madrid and admits he would like to work with former team-mate Diego Simeone again. That gives Chelsea\u00a0the perfect bargaining tool in their bid to make Atletico striker Diego Costa the Blues&#8217; big summer signing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p>Chelsea are also ready to give goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois the chance to return from his Atletico loan at the end of the season and challenge for the No 1 spot, which may lead to a tough decision over the future of Petr Cech.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p>Chelsea striker Torres turned 30 on Thursday and will still have two years to run on his Stamford Bridge contract at the end of the current campaign.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p>Manager Jose Mourinho is planning a major reshuffle of his forwards, with Torres likely to be made available and valued at around \u00a320 million.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p>Costa is currently top of a list of four strikers Chelsea have identified, with the club considering whether to meet the \u00a332m release clause in his Atletico contract.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fernando Torres has left the door open for a return to Atletico Madrid and admits he would like to work with former team-mate Diego Simeone again. That gives Chelsea\u00a0the perfect bargaining tool in their bid to make Atletico striker Diego Costa the Blues&#8217; big summer signing. Chelsea are also ready to give goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[60,80],"tags":[37],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2889"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2889"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2891,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2889\/revisions\/2891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}