Cole aims to become video nasty

Carlton Cole has been giving the rewind button on his DVD player a serious workout these past two months. The 25-year-old West Ham striker has used the time it has taken to recover from a serious groin injury sustained while playing for England against Slovakia to do his homework on some of the world's top strikers. He has been studying the way such as Chelsea's Didier Drogba and Aston Villa's John Carew dominate defences and he hopes what he has learned will earn him a place back in England manager Fabio Capello's squad. Cole, who hopes to start for the first time in two months against relegation-threatened Middlesbrough at Upton Park, said: "I watch Didier Drogba and Bolton's Kevin Davies, he's one of the greatest in the Premier League at holding up the ball. I watch Zlatan Ibrahimovic, too. They are similar to me, big players who cause defenders a lot of problems. "I talk to Didier a lot and he feels I can progress even further. I talk to Carew, too, because he is a striker who has scored a lot of goals everywhere. "I've scored a few more goals than in previous seasons. I've worked on my game by looking at those DVDs at how other players play. It has been a lot of hard work away from the field as well as on it."

Source: Eurosport