Sheaf Saint

As a player, he was a winner. No doubt about that. FWIW, I don't really care if the players like him or not. It's not a popularity contest. Mourinho has a habit of rubbing people up the wrong way but, importantly, he gets results. By all accounts, not many players who played for SAF liked him very much either. I really don't think that is an issue. As for not being able to organise a defence, I think that's a little harsh. He managed to guide a limited Stoke side to successive top ten finishes by making them hard to beat, as we discovered each time we played them during that time. Don't get me wrong - I'm not exactly excited by the prospect of him being our manager. It seems an underwhelming appointment and one that we would only be making due to his immediate availability above anything else. But I think some of your criticism is a little unfair.

Still growing, apparently

I think this is a very valid point. It went wrong for him towards the end of his time at Stoke, but that doesn't make him a bad manager. Sometimes managers/players need to make a move elsewhere to rejuvenate themselves. Look at Carlos Carvalhal - took Sheff Weds to the brink of promotion two seasons running, then things went wrong at the club for reasons outside of his control. I doubt many Swansea fans were too excited about his appointment at the time, but he's turned things around massively there and will, most likely, keep them up after they looked dead and buried earlier in the season.

We were seemingly prepared to spend £30m on Quincy Promes in the hope he would keep us up. Seeing as we didn't, spending £5m to pay off one of the worst managers in PL history instead to help keep us up seems like a bargain.

We are so fooked now. Not a chance we're going to come back from this. It will take a miracle and/or some incredibly inept refereeing for us to get even a draw. The infuriating thing is that MP will point to that second goal as vindication for his insistence on not committing too many players forward.

I just can't fathom it. Every other attacking player has been rotated in and out of the first 11 at some point this season, regardless of their form. Yet despite being sh!te for the entire season, Tadic is seemingly undroppable. If MP insists on shoehorning him into the team, I wish he would at least recognise that his best position is on the left and play him there. But no, apparently that concept is too far out for our tactical genius manager.

I just can't fathom how MP hasn't worked out how much more effective Redmond is on the right. On saturday against Stoke, when Tadic went off and Redmond switched wings, within seconds he had made a brilliant run to the byline and put in a superb cross for Boufal who couldn't get his header on target. Then factor in how we all know that Tadic is more effective on the left, it beggars belief that MP keeps starting them on the opposite sides.

Yes, I do.

I guess mostly because the current opposition aren't doing a sufficient job of hammering their points home, and are not seen as a good enough alternative by a large amount of middle-ground voters. I've not doubted that for the duration of this thread. But I would also venture that it is also largely to do with the fact that these kind of things are generally not reported in the kind of media outlets that traditional Tory voters read.

Well I only watched the 2nd half and from what I saw we were very positive going forward and were quite clearly the better team. But Stoke do what they have done since they were promoted and defended in numbers, and they did it very well because we just couldn't find the space for any clear chances. Butland made 3 or 4 decent saves but none that you wouldn't expect a decent keeper to make. Our best chance was Boufal's header that went just wide. Ultimately, its not good enough. It's another great chance to take 3 points at home that we couldn't take. My gut feeling is that we will just about scrape enough points between now and May, and we will stay up on GD.

Do keep up https://www.saintsweb.co.uk/showthread.php?59446-Stoke-Build-Up&p=2601156#post2601156

You should find a way to be comfortable with it, because there is feck all we can do about it. The best players will always move to richer clubs for more money. There is genuinely no point getting worked up about it. Life is too short.

I remember coming away from the 0-0 at WBA in our relegation season (when Prutton missed that sitter) having watched the snow come down during the game and not being able to feel my feet for the entire 90 minutes or the walk back to the car.

Yes, I agree, in that context it does seem like a classic case of whataboutery. But I wasn't responding directly to your post when I made mine. In fairness though, this thread has long since moved on from being solely about JC, and has quite distinctly morphed into a general debate (if you can call it that) about British politics in general. Maybe it's time to re-name the thread appropriately, because the initial suggestion that the election of JC as leader would lead to the 'death' of the Labour party has proven to be completely false.

Should we start a separate thread for each party then?

I wasn't suggesting at all that it makes Corbyn any better. I was pointing out that they are equally as crap as each other and that we need an alternative. I was actually agreeing with one of your previous posts.

Meanwhile, over at Tory HQ... Ben Bradley's grovelling apology for his libelous tweet about Corbyn becomes the most re-tweeted item on Twitter so far this year Boris Johnson, in his capacity as Foreign Secretary, claims the post-Brexit border between NI and Eire will be no different than driving between two London boroughs. Jeremy Hunt is caught out as being jointly responsible for setting up the bogus awards ceremony where he received a humanitarian award. And it is revealed that they are being forced to pay people to pretend to support them on social media because their online popularity is so poor. It's all such a sorry state of affairs. Like Hypo said recently, the country desperately needs a credible alternative to the current options.

They did show it, but for some reason they only showed it from one angle that didn't really prove anything. Looked a close call but AM clearly released the ball when he realised he was going to carry it over the line, and the ref was perfectly in line to see f he did or not.

Bertrand can play CB if necessary.

Would still be getting on the same trains for most of the way though. I'm not 100% certain, but I expect for both journeys you would need to change at Manchester? If so then I seriously doubt the plod would be happy about that.

I'm glad you brought up the abortion opinions, because he is openly against all abortion laws (including in cases of rape) but then makes a tidy sum from sitting on the board of a company that makes contraceptives. He's happy to vote in favour of things like the bedroom tax, but then happily accepts £7m of public money to refurbish his wife's ancestral home. He believes the existence of food banks in the 6th richest country in the world is a wonderful thing. He strikes me as somebody who would happily take us back to Victorian times if he could, throwing the poor into workhouses. To me, he personifies the very worst kind of corrupt, self-serving, entitled, out-of-touch elitist in our society. A relic of a bygone age that refuse to die out.

But they are not "miles off" are they. Depending on which polls you put your faith in, there is only a couple of percentage in it right now. It would only take a massive disaster from the Tory government (like, let's say, making a massive f*ck up with Brexit) to put Labour ahead. Yes, they should be doing better given how utterly incompetent May's government is proving itself to be, but to suggest they are "miles off ever winning power", is miles off the mark

If you bother to read my earlier post from yesterday, you will find that I am not a Corbyn 'supporter'. But then you always have been fond of using strawman arguments. I actually agree with you in a way. With the Tories being in such disarray and reliant on a massive bribe to an extremist NI party to maintain their majority, a better opposition would have them on the ropes. It is to the detriment of all of us that we don't have that better opposition. But I have to take issue with your assertion that Labour are miles ahead in the muppet/unsavoury type top trumps stakes. May, Gove, Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Hammond, Fox, Grayling, Patel... I could go on, but you get the picture.

But how exactly can you say that about the current incarnation of Labour/Momentum, when they are not, and never have been, in a position of power to do so? Or are you just lazily comparing them to other, historical far-left regimes like the Soviet Union?

Can you give me some examples of this? I'm not a devout follower of Labour/Momentum looking to defend them at all costs by the way - far from it. I'm just genuinely interested to find out why you think this way and why you presume that the problem is worse than it is in other parties.