Sheaf Saint

Dear lord! Is GM actually crowing about the fact that the Bullshit Social share price is still significantly lower than it was when he 'tipped' it? In other news, Delusional Donny decided to pay tribute to a fictional, mass murdering cannibal after going off at an extreme tangent in a speech about immigration... But don't worry, I'm sure Nic will be along soon to tell us all that this is just fake news.

Blissfully unaware of the blatant hypocrisy of your own post here. You complain that nobody engages in grown up debate, but when I tried to do that once before and asked you to provide some actual evidence to support a claim you had made about Joe Biden, you couldn't and instead just resorted to insults and made-up nonsense.

Leave Stephens out cos he made a number of howlers yesterday and was generally crap. Go back to a back four with KWP / THB / Bednarek / Bree. Apparently we're supposed to accept Manning's poor defending in return for him offering more of an attacking threat, but every time he got forward yesterday, he would invariably just stop and pass it back infield to Aribo instead of actually doing something with it. So if he can't defend, and offers nothing in attack, what's the point of having him in the team? Leave Mara out completely. I know we were hamstrung by the injury to Che, but seriously his performance yesterday was worse than bad. There was a moment in the first half when Arma had busted a gut to press a WBA defender and he succeeded in stopping him from playing the ball he wanted to play. It broke towards their RB and all Mara had to do was copy the effort of Arma to get there first, and between them both they could have put some serious pressure on their goal. But he just jogged over and by the time he got there the defender had cleared it. Fucking pathetic, and you could see how pissed Arma was that he had done his bit but Mara couldn't be bothered. I'll honestly be happy if I never see him play for us again. He's clearly got ability, but his application is just shocking.

Yes.

Stewart was putting himself about and constantly looking for room to move into, but nobody had the nous to try and put him through - just constant recycling of the ball at the back instead. Mara, on the other hand, just jogged about and waited for the ball to come to him. Was useless. I'm happy enough with 0-0 going into the home leg, all things considered. But we need to be more proactive going forward if we want to win the tie.

Mara starts

So what you're saying is we should abandon our usual, high-tempo, dynamic attacking game and just pass it around at the back a bit more, yeah?

Was looking like I might not make it earlier due to massive disruption on the trains from Sheffield, but I'm just pulling into Brum now and getting excited - actually looking forward to my nerve settling shit when I get to New Street.

Imagine if he's accepted her in order to cause massive damage to Sunak and the Tories, and then after she's announced it all and stuck the knife in to the government, he U-turns and removes the whip, based on her views and values "not being aligned with the party" or something. That would be hilarious.

What a strange coincidence. I was in the gym a couple of days ago when a Fluke track randomly popped up on a Spotify playlist I was listening to, and it reminded me just how good they were 'back in the day'.

That is fucking hideous!

He's "close", no doubt.

Maybe Alex can practice his diving/saving, while simultaneously giving feedback and advice to the less experienced takers about where they should be putting their shots to make it less likely they will be saved. Just a thought. I fail to see how there is any downside to dedicating a chunk of the training time to that.

I can't find a quote/link, but Glenn Hoddle famously said he wouldn't get the players practicing penalties in 1998, where we got knocked out by Argentina on penalties.

I did it a few years ago and it wasn't too bad where I was (north Italy, near Lake Garda), but I wouldn't want to attempt it in any of the bigger cities. Especially Rome. One bit of advice I'll give you is you just have to be assertive when pulling into traffic, cos nobody will ever stop and let you in such as is common in the UK. You have to learn to just dive into any gap you can see, and nobody bats an eyelid or gets mardy about it because it's just expected that's what you have to do.

Yeah, cos not practicing for penalties has worked out really well for England over the years, hasn't it.

Is it confirmed we're going with Puma next season? I've flat out refused to ever buy anything of theirs again after seeing this when I was looking for a new gym top in TK Maxx a while ago:

Seeing Kyren Wilson's young son hugging his dad and shouting "World Champion! Get in there!"

John Virgo shouting "WHERE'S THE CUE BALL GOING!?" literally every time it looks like a possible in-off.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-68962192 Great actor. Gone to the halls of his fathers, in whose mighty company he should not feel ashamed.

West Brom then. Quite glad about that really. Didn't fancy trying to get to Norwich and we have a better record at the Hawthorns in recent times (ie we won there this season and only drew at Norwich).

Great job Danny has done at Wednesday. Good on him.

Some very late tackles flying in from Leeds. I counted 3 in that move alone!

If he'd caught him with his leading leg and not the trailing one, it probably would have been.

Stewart coming on!