Sheaf Saint

Osvaldo had two players free on the edge of the box there. If he could have just laid it off first time we would have been in but instead he tries to dance through the defence himself and loses out.

If Fonte is fit enough to be on the bench then he is fit enough to be on the pitch. Get him on Mauricio.

Poo. Once again our backup players let us down. Hooiveld and Gazza between them should have dealt with that. Gonna be a long afternoon now.

Is Cork playing at RB with Chambers in midfield?

Lovely ball in from Chambers there.

Gazza far too slow off his line there. Lucky let-off.

Oh no! Scientists have put air temperature gauges in urban areas! The entire foundations of climate science must be false!!!! George you are such a muppet I don't know why I bother engaging you, but stupidity like yours needs to be challenged. The accounting and adjusting for the urban heat island effect is taught to 1st year students. Jesus, even I learned about it in an Open University taster course that's lower even than level one. Do you honestly think that the world's climate science community has completely overlooked it?

Yep, can't disagree. Thanks very much for the memories F1 but it's time we moved on I'm afraid. The double points thing is just the worst kind of stupidity imaginable. Imagine a driver just edging out his rivals (not blowing them away as Vettel has done for the last couple of years) over an entire season and going into the last race with a modest but healthy lead and then losing out because of the double points. Bernie you are a tool for agreeing to this.

I don't know. We weren't at our best up there last year, but I would say that a dodgy penalty decision and an goal that blatantly should have been ruled offside were the actual difference between the teams.

Good question. My understanding is that you are correct regarding decimal places or significant figures. In science whenever you write an equation you should always present your answer to the same significant figures as the value with the lowest in the calculation. I just did a quick search for something where I could find some raw data and came across this (I know the observatory at Mauna Loa records air temperatures because that's where the monitoring of CO2 concentration began) and it looks as though they are indeed using 3 decimal places... http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/6/1685/2010/cpd-6-1685-2010.pdf

Oh for the love of god George, are you still desperately clinging on to that 'climategate' bullsh*t? I realise that nothing I or anybody else can post will ever make you realise how wrong you are about climate science, but do you seriously not realise how much of a tool you look by carrying on using that as 'evidence' to support your argument?

I wondered whose turn it was to have a scapegoat thread started about him immediately after the game tonight.

Been out and only got back for the last 5 minutes. Seems as though we actually played pretty well and deserved to win but got mugged. It's football - that happens. Anybody remember away at Villa last season when we won thanks to a dodgy penalty? What about the Leeds game in our Championship season?

If that's the case then I can see Cork leaving in January to get the first team football he should be playing, seeing as he isn't even first choice backup in his position.

Much like us, Villa's defending is much improved this season. They were abysmal at the back in that game last season. Can't see Gaston having as much of an effect against them this time around.

Now we are a third of the way through the season, how do people view our progress? My take on it so far... We've played 13 games now, four of which have been away at Liverpool, Man Utd, Arsenal and Chelsea, and we're sitting 7th above both Man Utd and Spurs. I doubt anybody (excepting, perhaps, Cortese himself) had any higher expectations than that at the start of the season. Despite the two consecutive defeats, we still have the joint best defensive record in the PL. Up until yesterday we have pretty much held our own against every team we have played, but the manner of the defeat at Chelsea shows we still have a long way to go before we can seriously challenge the top four. Moving forward... The loss of Boruc will be a blow, as we all know neither of our back up keepers are really up to it at this level. Too often we look toothless up front and that's something that might need to be addressed in January, because so far both of our very expensive international attacking players have failed to deliver the goods. My gut feeling is that we will finish somewhere around where we are now. If we continue performing as we have then anything below 8th/9th come May will be a disappointment.

Very frustrating day, but Chelsea were simply much better than us. No disgrace really because there is a very good reason they have the home record they do. I too am getting very concerned about our seeming inability to create decent openings up front. I have very much defended Osvaldo so far but he was totally anonymous today. True he didn't get any decent service, but when that's not happening you need a striker that can create chances for himself, and the only player we have that looks capabale of that currently is J-Rod. Wanyama didn't have one of his better games today, and when that happens we look a lot less assured in midfield and at the back. Needed a big game from him today to counter the threat of Ramires and Mata, but he was too casual at times, as he has an infuriating tendency to be. Oh well. Draw a blue line under it and move on. It's disappointing to have dropped but with two consecutive away games against teams that will undoubtedly be in the CL places at the end of the season it was always going to be a mammoth task to keep our momentum going.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/25074373 Were we well beaten at Arsenal? Well the scoreline suggests so, but the reality was somewhat different. I thought we did a very good job of containing them and they only scored thanks to a suicidal piece of goalkeeping and a penalty that 99 times out of 100 wouldn't have been given. Arsenal are the real deal this season. The table doesn't lie and the 7-point gap they have opened up at the top this weekend is no fluke. With our regular first eleven I firmly believe we would have got a better result against them, which is why I am confident that we can get a result at Chelsea today because they have been hit and miss so far this season (despite sitting 3rd currently) and are a lesser team than Arsenal IMO.

I haven't had much time for gaming this year so I bought very few new titles. My out and out favourite though has to be Far Cry 3. Ubisoft brought together all the very best elements of the first two games and made something spectacular out of it.

Ouch. I'm 38 and Some of those are painfully true!!

Oh don't get me wrong, I had the cravings for a few weeks after I quit as well. But I found it much easier to overcome them (they go away after a couple of weeks anyway) because I had reached the stage where I just didn't want to smoke any more, and didn't want to be identified as a smoker. Of course there is a physical side to the addiction, but the psychological aspect shouldn't be overlooked. People who want to quit and say things like "I'll just finish this packet and that's it" inevitably give in and start again, because they are essentially saying "I don't really want to quit, but I'm going to try". If you build it up in your head and convince yourself that quitting will be really hard then it will be. That's why tobacco companies are more then happy to go along with the whole 'get help to quit' thing because they can be seen to be doing something to help people stop, but they know full well that people with that mindset are more likely to start smoking again.

It's all about your mindset. If you are serious about not wanting to smoke any more then you won't need patches, gum, hypnosis or any of the aids that are available, as you will just stop and you won't find it hard. If, on the other hand, you don't really want to stop but feel as though you should then you are doomed to fail I'm afraid. Smoking is the most irrational thing that anybody can do, and it is incredible the lengths people will go to to try and justify their habit rather than face the obvious truth: that they are just hopelessly addicted. Once you can accept that, you will find quitting so much easier.

The strangest thing for me was the fact that in the wild only 1% of orcas suffer from the collapsed dorsal fin issue that manifests in just about all the animals that are kept in captivity. Whether that's to do with their diet or it's caused by psychological trauma appears to be unclear, but it is firm evidence that keeping them in captivity clearly has a physical effect on them that is not present in the wild.

Got it running today after I upgraded my OS. There have already been a couple of major update patches, one of which includes joystick support. Mine is working perfectly. It's very different from the previous versions so getting the hang of navigation and trading will take a while due to the sheer scope of it. I agree the graphics are a little disappointing, but if it means they have put more effort into the gameplay then ultimately that won't bother me. Could have done better though. As for the voice acting - yes it's crap but it was just as terrible on all the previous ones (due to the translation from German, I assume) so I had no expectations there. Looking forward to getting out and exploring the galaxy.

Indeed. Look at the Stoke v Sunderland game yesterday. Wes Brown got red-carded for what looked a very good tackle, and later Begovic wasn't penalised at all for a shocking studs-up tackle on one of the Sunderland players. You can see why Poyet was so furious. Really poor refereeing. Then there was the red card in the Hull v Palace game which looked completely innocuous to me as well. I really don't know how much longer the FA/FIFA can continue to resist the introduction of video replay technology.