CB Fry

Not entirely sure that "stuff happens with the municipal administration of the city of Rome" was covered in great detail in the Operation Yellowhammer report but if it's important to you sweetheart, it's important to you.

I remember very clearly the passionate campaigning that if you voted Remain then something something something the Rome Mayoral election in 2021.

Jesus. Terrible news. No age at all, by which I mean my age. Feel so sorry for his wife and children. Remember seeing them as Corky all those years ago. Great voice.

We haven't avoided relegation by the skin of our teeth since the Pellegrino/Hughes season. If you haven’t noticed then try to pay more attention.

Except there isn't really anyone saying "it's all down to Brexit". But there are people, like you, desperate to say its nothing to do with Brexit whatsoever. There's a difference.

Nice one - like many on here I watch Strictly with my daughters who love it but like you say there is plenty for the Dads as well. Kai was friends with my brother's daughter when they were kids so we'd known about him for a while - he was on Britain's Got Talent a few years back as well. On first outing he could be nicely on track - and if he wins it he will have achieved more than his dad did in his profession. COYK

We were never, ever, ever going to let Ings run his contract down. Whether he went to Spurs for £20m on deadline day or to Villa as he did, he was going. It's about manageable financial risk - the fact is there are plenty of football clubs that have not been relegated without Danny Ings in the team so not unreasonable to think we can plan to mitigate that through replacements, re-investing. But letting Ings just run his contract down and leave for no return is a significant financial risk with really only one mitigation: sell him. So dont bother with the "well, the cost relegation is much higher than Ings staying blah blah blah" stuff. So what. He was always always always going.

I always find this line of argument incredibly tiresome. It's basically exactly the same argument you could use to not have sacked Mark Hughes in the first place. Hasenhuttl wasn't appointed following some poll of the fanbase.

Don't see it at all. As a club we have gone "all-in" with this guy. We will have to be solid bottom 2 or 3 in December for him to get the bullet. And when we do sack him there will still be people on this forum saying he didn't get a fair chance.

Knowing Ralph's square-peg-round-hole approach, he'd probably put him in charge of the team Christmas piss-up.

4 wins in 27 games and 21 points in the calendar year? No no no, that can't be right. They way I understand it today is if you say we're doing badly then that's just a typical short term knee jerk reaction from impatient fans to a completely unlucky freak result that bears no resemblance to how brilliant the team is and how great we're playing. I mean, if the stat was true and we had only won four games in a calendar year then surely people would be justifiably disappointed. Nah, today is a completely freak result, an out of character blip.

You're saying we should have sacked Ralph at the end of the season we finished 11th? Okay then, genius.

I don't think anyonecan judge Ralph when he is still stuck with Claude Puel's squad.

"I've never walked away from anything in my life, and I'm not going to start now."

Shane Long is coming on so that means goals goals goals.

No one has stopped the government improving working conditions or investment in training and development for hauliers in the last five and a half years apart from the fact that they had no fucking interest whatsoever in doing anything of the sort.

Disappointed to see so little coverage of Southampton born and bred Kai Widdrington (son of Saints midfield legend Tommy). Absolutely smashing it on Strictly despite looking 42 years old while in reality being only 26. Let's all cheer a Southampton winner to a glorious final come Christmas. He looks like Robbie Rotten off Lazy Town so deserves our support. COYK

Pretty sure most of the Brexit hardliners wanted to leave to facilitate a bonfire of employment regulations and workers rights, the old Brussels "red tape" holding back growth. Apparently now actually what they really really wanted to do is invest in lots of training, improve working conditions and increase everyone's wages. But of course.

Players taking up different positions and roles all over the pitch you say? Defenders ending up as attackers, you say? A kind of, I don't know, total football approach? This is definitely a brand new thing that has only just happened in the history of world football when Pep turned up.

Whoosh them cars went. Whoosh.

No but the point people are making is that the formations/roles/positions/tactics have all been there. What is new is technology and a proliferation of theories. Your dismissal of a diamond formation 4-4-2 as not being the same as some jolly exciting modern formation is a case in point. There aren't many new ideas at all, all that there is, is a room if 14 analysts going into the minutiae of the detail and then an entire industry selling that data back to TV companies and other media to create content. I think you need to accept that the history of football is a lot more complex than everyone was a caveman 442 slogger until Pep and Carling Opta stats turned up.

Well, I know for a fact that there wasn't a single Ipad in that coaching set up, none of them had a clue about XG and the level of freeze frame video analysis of formation and positioning was absolutely woeful. Are where were the computer game data guys? Nowhere. So no wonder it didn't work. Quite frankly I struggle to see how any teams won anything back in those days. Hopeless.

What's the hipster name for the Terry Venables Christmas Tree formation?

Please come over here and take our jobs.

Well, Cummings has said in interviews that VL would not have won without it. It was a claim with huge cut-through and spontaneous recall with the general public - even now people remember it well, which is a huge achievement for any advertising slogan/pitch let alone a political one. And there was research showing huge chunks of the population believed it, so it was hugely effective on every single metric. Plenty of people believe the central premise even now. There's not really "a debate" around how influential it was. It was hugely influential and believed. The people who created it planned for it to be influential and it was. That's why they put it everywhere. Being that the entire vote could have swung the other way on a small percentage and how close it was, it is very easy to say that the message convinced enough to swing the result in a particular direction. You have a marginal vote and in the middle of that campaign you have the single most effective political message in the last thirty odd years. It clearly moved the needle. But I know that doesn't suit your usual "ah well, I'll guess we'll never know" routine, so not really sure why I've bothered to write that out. But there we are.