verlaine1979

He does have ridiculous skill on the ball though - anyone managing to set him on the straight and narrow will have quite a player

He'd never get another job in football. The union would close ranks.

Almost all team ball games ultimately turn out to be decided by turnovers of possession. You give the ball away close to your goal more than they give the ball away close to their goal, and you'll be very lucky to win the game. Last night we gave the ball away within 30 yards of our goal more times than I can remember us doing in years. If the other team happen to be faster than you, conceding possession there is even more likely to hurt, as they'll be in the box by the time your lumbering players have completed their turning circle and attempted to catch up. It was painful watching, and the pace with which Leicester attacked was a big factor, but the major factor in us losing the game was how carelessly we looked after the ball when we had it.

Huh, now that the Ballon d'Or is rolled into the Fifa World Player of the Year award, hasn't Messi effectively won it three years in a row (last ever Ballon d'Or in 2009, and Fifa WPY in 2009, 2010 & 2011)? I know Keegan was big news, but Messi is a different level altogether.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw1MmNwf3kI Impudent.

Unfortunately, goalkeeper is probably the one position where you can't afford to coddle a 'confidence player'.

What an incredible goal, honestly...

Regarding JWP and Reeves - thought JWP looked pretty tidy in midfield (though Schneiderlin was on a completely different level), but wasn't impressed with Reeves - he didn't appear to have a particular good first touch, and some of his passing in around the box was dreadful. As for the rest of the team, Holmes looked slow, Forte was dire, Cork didn't look comfortable at CB, De Ridder looked much better on the left cutting in than on the right, Harding provided decent width in the first half, Butterfield struggled to get a cross past his marker, Martin looked fairly solid. I agree with whoever it was who said they looked afraid of shooting - a couple of times in the first half, De Ridder drove into space about 20 yards out with a clear line to goal, but elected each time to attempt a disguised through-ball to Forte or Reeves, who invariably wasted it.

Passing was awful, incredibly lucky to have nicked a point. Great goal though.

It wasn't so much the filming, or the sex, as the bottle. It's not like he was a little kid at the time - if he was a misogynist in his early twenties with the benefit of a private education behind him, I don't see any reason to suspect that time will have taught Frank the error of his ways since.

Lampard is no different to the two you mention, he just has marginally better PR. Perhaps you've forgotten the video he made with Kieron Dyer?

Leicester looked to have a lot of potential going forward based on the highlights of the game against Forest. Gelson Fernandes looked dominant in midfield, and might be very difficult to keep quiet.

In fairness, you do have to have scored several belters before someone can cut them together into a montage. There were four very good long(ish) range finishes in the video, all of which looked measured rather than hit and hope. No amount of careful editing can turn a miss into a goal.

12 in 93 according to the Dutch stats site linked on Wiki.

Vela - good shout. Great finisher, would love to see him here.

Brilliant signing. Schneiderlin & Cork should be an excellent combination.

I wonder why Man U want him when they've got Ravel Morrison who is around the same age, same position, and looks every bit as good (if not better)?

Yes, great player.

Yes, unfortunately the idea of young black men being 'uppity' does have very strong racist overtones - see the furore in 2008 caused by a Georgia congressman when he described then candidate Obama in those terms. It's very simple - Jason Puncheon clearly felt himself to be sufficiently talented to deserve a shot at playing in the premier league, he presumably (since none of us know) pursued that through generally accepted channels, and ultimately won the opportunity to play at a higher level. Then, in holding down a regular position & scoring goals in that Premier League team, he rather proved his point. I'm sorry, but wanting the best for yourself, pursuing it, and proving that you were right doesn't make you a 'billy big balls' or uppity or anything else; and unfortunately, within memory, this particular contour of argument seems to emerge most strongly when a non-white player is involved. Puncheon may, personally, be a deeply unpleasant individual. I have no idea, having never met him. My problem is with the generic criticism and broad brush-strokes of the language on here; they're the product of lazy thinking, and lazy thinking tends to be regressive. And unfortunately you don't have to regress too far into our history for racism to switch from covert to overt. Oh, and between you and me, I find the argument that racial sensitivity is racist in and of itself, both illogical and self-serving.

I'm going to use my last post of the day to point out the irony in your rebuttal of racist undertones essentially boiling down to calling Puncheon uppity. Well played, Sir, well played...

As I stated way, way up-stream in this thread, I actually agree with you. I think your argument is more nuanced that most people on here are giving you credit for. This isn't a simple dichotomy; it's not a question that all black players will be derided and all white players adored. The idea is simply that for various deep-seated cultural reasons, non-white players are perhaps not giving the benefit of the doubt quite as readily as white players are. You only have to look at the language in question to see it is a continuation of a particular thread of racial stereotyping that has existed since the 17th century (laziness, fecklessness, unreliability etc etc). You don't have to consciously be a bigot for these currents to have effect. As a specific example, if you contrast the language used to denigrate a player like Pulis, he's decribed as "sh*t" or some other abstracted fecal derogation. Puncheon on the other hand seems excessively likely to be criticised with language that, dare I say it, seems designed to remind him that he's forgotten his place? The language people use reveals a great deal about their unconscious prejudices. I'm still waiting for the canard of 'naive' African defending to die out from modern commentary, so to suggest that everything is (ahem) now lilly-white in terms of football's attitude to race, is utterly absurd.

Yeah, I've never been entirely comfortable with the frequency with which labels such as 'lazy', 'unreliable', 'arrogant', 'bad attitude' get hung around the necks of non-white players. There's too long a history of this kind of insidious (albeit in places perhaps unthinking) stereotyping for it to be allowed to pass entirely unacknowledged. Not saying it's necessarily the case here, but I believe it is unavoidably the case that you have to think doubly hard before throwing those kind of terms around if you don't want to just end up contributing to the reinforcement of an entirely pernicious history.

Pleasure

I see you're as trenchant in your analysis of football as you are stylish with your prose. Without his very well executed back-heel under pressure from a couple of defenders, there would have been no unopposed cross, and thus no tap-in. I've no doubt at all that he's a disruptive influence and lacks the requisite quality to be a sustained influence in games week in week out. However, from someone who watched the game today and can thus speak from the pedestal of, y'know, actual experience, he was one of their better players.

He was actually instrumental in setting up their second goal. Nice back-heel to feed the eventual cross that got turned in.