CB Fry

The main problem with Cummings is that he is absolutely full of shit. If, as he claims, Boris didn't have aclue then what were his advisors doing about it. Like, his chief advisor.

I think it's that if we had sold Mane for £41m to Man United rather than the £36m to Liverpool then we would have won the Uefa Cup by now.

Nice to see him get one. Surprised to see McGinn involved though?

Feels odd to me that Dean Smith is putting himself forward for Norwich within days of being sacked. Have a little holiday mate, spend your compensation. Also dreading the almost inevitable narrative of "Dean Smith loses his last game against Saints to get the sack but he bounces straight back with Norwich in his first game against...." We aint got time to be part of "fancy that" fairy stories or future pub quiz questions, we've got points to get. Just give it to someone like Felix Magath or Bob Bradley Norwich, just get on with being relegated FFS.

Wah wah wah

There is a universe where Liverpool paid their record fee at the time for Mane, which the universe we are in right now. As others have said there is rarely a "bidding war" these days, especially when a player has settled on a club. I have no memory press reports of lots of clubs in for him, i think mainly because, as Mane has said himself, he chose Liverpool and wanted to go there. Honestly, 2016 for gawds sake. Lets say we got another five million for Mane ten transfer windows ago. What exactly would have happened differently than we are experiencing now? I tell you one thing, we probably wouldn't have got all the add ons from Man U and Arsenal l because they ain't won shit. So incredibly likely the "£40m" or whatever newspaper headline fee you desperately wanted to see from them probably wouldn't have matched what Liverpool have had to actually pay us in this universe.

Not really no. There's loads of factors in play and this is one of the smaller ones.

I know you didn't understand anything of what I was saying, and that's fine X x x

We live in a representative democracy - that isn't "how I want things to be" it's the way they actually are. Our voted-in representatives then have the powers to run things and make decisions - like judgements, rules, processes and sanctions for MP's standards and behaviour. That's not "how I want things to be" it's the way they actually are. Therefore the processes, checks and balances to regulate MP behaviour is already there, and through the power of democracy, our collective votes have facilitated their existence. That's not "how I want things to be" it's the way they actually are. The wider public in any constituency do not get to select their candidate for the party they prefer before they get to vote for said party/candidate. We don't have a primary system. That's not "how I want things to be" it's the way they actually are. As a result it is facile, pointless and incredibly cynicial to think that in a general election the public are then able to decide to cast their vote as an entire collective (say a 80k electorate) on one singular issue - the probity of their candidate - rather than manifesto, leader and the myriad other issues that are live in a national general election campaign. To extrapolate that as a proxy validation/exoneration of an individual is cynical and incredibly bad politics. The Conservatives saying "let the voters decide" know this entirely, and you are parroting along with it, which is your choice in a democracy. They know that the Conservatives will win in safe seats anyway, which is a blessing for them to continue to behave as they please. It's playing back the shortcomings of our system for their own benefit. You've swallowed it and are trying to twist it using the facile smears you are trying on me. It's awfully sweet. My entire post was a description to you about the way things actually are. The fact you have interpreted it as some wish list of "how I want things to be" is quite frankly bizarre. And proof positive you didn't understand it. Bless.

Nope, wrong again. You didn't read it, you sure-as-shit didn't understand it. So you just fell back on pointless, lazy slurs because you can't be arsed with a tiny bit of detail/context. In that post I put how I regretted bothering with it because I knew I'd get shit like this so thanks for proving me correct. You can wilfully misunderstand and misrepresent what I said over and over again, I will keep pointing it out. On the last point, well, the proof is there. If it walks like a duck...

He's assembled an army of backroom staff to help him, so from that perspective he is the absolute dream SaintsWeb Forum appointment. Backroom staff is what its all about, and he's got, like, five Danny Rohls he has.

Well, that didn't take long. Excellent wilful misunderstanding. Bravo.

Yes, it's not complicated because I think it is over simplistic. Lots of voters can't name their MP, will vote on party lines not as an endorsement of what the MP does or doesn't do, or they vote because they don't like the leader of the opposition or they oppose a local hospital closing or whatever. I've seen some stuff online this week of people saying "COP is a disgrace no one voted for net zero" when in actual fact pretty much every single person who voted in 2019 did exactly that. They all did but funnily enough they didn't read the manifestos in detail. The mugs. So, it's not correct to put the entire assessment of an MPs behaviour entirely in the hands of a pretty disengaged electorate. You can say "well more fool them, they're fools" or whatever but it's an unfair burden to expect the electorate to make specific judgements on adherence to indivdual standards/rules/behaviour amongst all the other stuff that happens at an election. In the same way we don't ask them specific particular questions about nuclear policy in Kent or Cheshire cheese standards or investment into the justice system for family disputes or teenage knife crime or relations with Ghana. Representative democracy literally means you give people power to do that stuff for you. Like set up independent standard committees for MPs. The last changes to the system were set up by the last government under Andrea Leadsom who was voted for and her ruling party was voted for to government. Voted to sort that kind of thing out. Having a standards and people to assess and uphold them is essential and is baked into the system. Our "democracy" is not quite as simple as "as long as you win your seat you are exonerated and have our blessing to carry on doing whatever the fuck you want until the next election". It doesn't just start and end with a vote. This is too precise a concept for this forum so I already regret writing it. But the point is the Conservatives know this stuff and if they say "the voters can decide later" they know what that really means. Cynical simplistic and populism but they win because of the safe seats they have are not going to be even scratched by this.

Wasn't one of those 12m players that Koeman bought, er, Sadio Mane? Actually no, I've looked, it was £10m. Bizarre.

Japanese super hero kids TV show isn't it?

Disingenuous nonsense but you already know that. Basically what you're saying is any MP in a safe seat can do whatever they hell they like and then at the end of a four/five year term take inivitable reelection as the public's blessing to carry on. And even by some miracle they do lose their safe seat well they've creamed it for four or five years anyway so whats the problem. Winning a seat is basically the starting pistol to fill your boots right up until the next election is called, no questions asked. Great system.

Gerrard being appalling at Aston Villa seems so starkly obvious to me. Achieving at Rangers don't mean shit. Maybe he'll prove me wrong. But he won't, he'll be terrible. Haven't they suffered enough with Tim Sherwood? Actually what do I care, that's a club who can take up valuable space in the bottom six.

Not sure what this is, but it is definitely not a "sanity check". It's batshit insane.

The previous forum nutcase was banging on about 15% of the population being exterminated back in the summer, so this guy is way behind the curve. I remember discussing this insight at the time. Nutcase said 15% dead in a year, it's the government plan, wait and see you'll see I'm right. Etc. It basically means ten million people dropping dead in a single year in this country. Just the 200,000 people a week, every week for a year. A city the size of Reading dying again and again and again. It's pretty weird that this massacre hasn't started yet: I mean I had my vaccine in like June so by rights I should be dead by now, surely?

Your general point is right though. Major and Blair's visit was just one day, it got universally sneered at and no one paid any further attention. It wasn't a topic really in the campaign. It was really only during the treaty negotiations when Theresa May said "No British Prime Minister would EVER (her emphasis) agree to a border down the Irish Sea" that the topic really came up. She was wrong, of course, because the very next Prime Minister did precisely that, won an election on it, and it flew through the Commons with Ian Duncan Smith and all the Brexit Spartans waving it through saying it had all been debated, the ERG Star Chamber had read all the detail and how marvellous it all was and what a wondeful job David Frost had done.

There was a high profile day during the referendum campaign when two ex Prime Ministers from opposition parties travelled to Northern Ireland together to explain and publicise the issues and the risks. Obviously got dismissed as project fear remoaners etc etc etc.

In practice it would. If Liverpool want him and bid £50m, Chelsea only have to bid £38m to "match" it (ie we get the same fee in either scenario).

I'm usually braver than that. If we're on mid-twenty points by the time FA Cup R3 rolls around then I'd start to think we're pretty safe (because at that point we can actually afford to lose five in a row and still stay up).

Agree, it's too early to think we have climbed out of it. We are perfectly capable of losing five on the spin, just like Villa have done. A new-manager bounce defeat to Norwich, followed by predictable defeats to Liverpool, Leicester, and we go into the Brighton match in a very different mindset. People moan about knee jerk reactions to defeats but we win a couple and people are pontificating about which of the pleb teams are going down but obviously not us, we're brilliant.

Indeed he was. And the Newcastle one was going through arbitration panels and hearings and all sorts played out in public and reported by the press.It wasn't just "mentioned in the media".