Sheaf Saint

Doesn't look like a back 5 to me.

A Cornish fisherman who voted for Brexit said the fleet had been "sold down the river" because foreign boats were still fishing near the coast. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c103ldej4qvo "I didn't think the leopards would eat MY face" claims man who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces party.

Will it be trailing a "Lowe Out" banner?

Right, so when you said "those goals", what you actually meant was "those Ipswich goals". That wasn't clear because my post referred to other games as well. So let's examine those Ipswich goals shall we... Screen_Recording_20240516_072420_YouTube.mp4 Screen_Recording_20240516_073353_YouTube.mp4 If you genuinely think no keeper could have saved either of those then I really don't know what to say. Edit: And just for clarity, some on the match thread were criticising Baz for their first goal, but not me. It was at the near post from a tight angle, but it was an absolute thunderbastard of a shot and would have caught most keepers out. But the second and third goals were speculative toe-pokes and he got nowhere near either of them.

Really? You think no keeper in the world could have saved this? Screen_Recording_20240515_200310_YouTube.mp4

Nonsense. If Baz had managed to keep the ball out of the net at Portman Road, the gap to Ipswich in 2nd would have been only 3 points. I can also think of two other late equalisers - against Rotherham at home and Watford away - that a better keeper could/should have saved. That would have given us an extra 4 points.

WTF is she on about? Some of us wear rainbow lanyards, and nobody ever wastes any work time debating the rights or wrongs of that, in the same way no time is ever lost discussing the colour of employee's socks. At least until now. No doubt there will be some internal comms sent round shortly as a result of McVey's comments, which will ironically lead to some wasted work time about something that it otherwise wouldn't have. Superb example of the Streisand effect there. Well done Esther, you fucking cretin.

I reckon it's largely to do with the fact that he was a long-time admirer of a certain chippy Welsh bloke and was utterly convinced he was the right guy to take us to the next level.

Funny you should mention drums. There was a Baggie guy walking around outside the ground banging a massive drum on Sunday, but I didn't hear a peep from him during the game. Very odd.

What power would Goldie Looking Chain have to ban blackboards? 🤔 In all seriousness, I work in the public sector and although the specific organisation I work in is not technically part of the civil service, it pretty much is in all but name. We have a large LGBTQ+ network, and there are plenty of people wearing rainbow lanyards in our offices. And you know what? NOBODY cares! And if they tried to ban it, everyone would just ignore the ban anyway because the colour of someone's lanyard is completely irrelevant and has no bearing on anyone's ability to do their jobs. This is just another load of culture war bullshit. And you would think the minister for common sense (as if that's a real fucking thing!) would know that better than anyone.

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.