Sheaf Saint

OK, now I've had a chance to calm down I will give an objective analysis. In case anybody was still in any doubt about SRL's ability to score goals in this league, that's two already and both against the two best sides in England last season. I always thought Schneiderlin would make his class show in the PL and he didn't disappoint today - I thought he was immense and is my MOTM. Puncheon had a very good game and was unlucky not to get a goal, forcing an excellent save from the Utd keeper. Not entirely sure why people are slating Kelvin for that - he saved a penalty FFS, and he can't really be blamed for any of their goals - he very nearly saved the first one. I am seriously concerned about the rest of our defence though. Fonte is a total liability and Hooiveld has already conceded two needless penalties so far this season (although KD has got him off the hook both times so far). Fox was anonymous today - Gave Valencia far too much time and space every time he got forward, and didn't contribute anything going forward either - very poor. Clyne was the only defender who came out of that game with any real credit. As for United though - aside from RVP they were very average and were there for the taking I thought, so it's especially frustrating that we came so close and ballsed it up defensively from a commanding position. Overall, there was a lot to be positive about, and we gave Utd's defence a real game which they may not have been expecting. If we can sort out the defensive issues and play like we did today going forward, I have no doubt we will be fine this year. But the commentator on the stream I was watching came out with a rather alarming statistic - that no newly promoted team has ever lost their first three games and survived!

Really? I'm absolutely certain he isn't up to it. Him and Fox are going to cost us a lot of goals this season.

Great to see Jenson find some pace in his car at last. He's been really struggling to get it working for him since winning the opening race, but if Maclaren can maintain that performance over the second half of the season then both he and Lewis could still challenge for the title I reckon.

It's amazing that a pathetic non-story from a vile, worthless rag like The Star has provoked so many responses. I wouldn't even use that 'newspaper' to wipe my arse with.

Indeed, it is. But hopefully it may result in a season like the one we had during the Chris Nicholl era, where we conceded quite a lot of goals, but more often than not scored more. Will make for an entertaining season I reckon, and win or lose, that's what it's really all about for us the fans.

Thanks for your contribution Billy. Good luck at Forest. I really hoped you would be given a good chance to prove yourself in the PL, and maybe one day you still will, be it with Saints or another club.

Because all he ever does is start threads with a very controversial (that usually turns out to be boolocks) topic and leaves it at that without contributing anything to the discussion. It's getting really tiresome now.

What's the betting he gets injured playing for Uruguay next weekend and misses the first 4 months of the season?

Right, before I get flamed for being a conspiracy theorist nutjob or whatever, I would like to point out that I am very skeptical about this sort of stuff. However, it does interest me greatly. I have read before about US government attempts to use remote viewing, clairvoyants etc.. and I also remember watching a video talk from David Willcock claiming exactly the same thing that is put forward in this link: that nobody has been able to see further than Dec 2012. It could well be all mumbo-jumbo of course, but there is no doubt that the US and other governments have dabbled with experimentation into the occult and it would be foolish to believe they haven't. A lot of it actually has a sound basis in scientific theory, such as the Montauk Project and the Philadelphia experiment. Interestingly though, I have also read a fair bit about the ancient Mayans and their renowned long-count calendar which ends on Dec 21st this year. A lot has been speculated about it over the years, and it is a common misconception that they prophesied the end of the world at this time. What they genuinely believed would happen at the end of the long-count is not fully understood, thanks to the efforts of the Catholic Church to systematically destroy all references to the old spiritual and religious teachings in that part of the world following the Spanish conquest. But studies of what little remains of their literature have shown that 2012 was believed to be the culmination of the 9 'Underworlds' that were central to their beliefs, and would signal the beginning of an era of great spiritual understanding. It is entirely possible that the ancient Mayan astronomers were aware of a possible celestial event at the point of the Winter Solstice in 2012, because it has been shown that their understanding of astronomy and mathematics was far in advance of what the modern, western world would expect for a society that was believed to be primitive and savage. Aspects of the design of their temples and pyramids show that they were fully aware of astral phenomena such as The Procession of the Equinoxes (the process of the sun moving between the 12 regions of the zodiac that cycles round every 26,000 years) and there appears to be some evidence to suggest that the Mayans and other central and south-American cultures were influenced by an advanced civilisation that existed on Earth tens of thousands of years ago (read Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods for a fascinating investigation into this). Is a massive asteroid going to crash into the Earth this December? I guess we will just have to wait and find out, but one thing is pretty obvious to me: if NASA or other government agencies had already discovered this, you can bet your life that they would do everything possible to keep it under wraps to avoid global panic etc...

There's plenty of them in northern Italy

Rick Astley turned up on my doorstep yesterday wanting to borrow my entire collection of Disney Pixar animated films... I told him: "You can have Toy Story and The Incredibles, but I'm never going to give you Up!"

http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/B004FTGJUW/ref=cm_cr_dp_hist_one?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addOneStar&showViewpoints=0 :lol::lol:

I imagine he will be played on the right in place of Puncheon/Guly or on the left where Rodriguez has so far been ineffective.

My heart goes out to you Dr Who. Having your livelihood taken away from you like that, through no fault of your own, is an extremely harrowing thing to face. I know from personal experience.

Of course there won't... Friday is tomorrow

I remember when this thread was nothing but fields.

Yeah I was in Portugal last month and was able to get by very easily with the little Spanish I know. The two vocabularies are something like 75-80% identical.

Sorry BTF, that's 15 words

What about the ones who don't do it for money Frank?

I think you need to re-read View From The Top's post (#105) Again I find myself in almost total agreement with you though FC. It could be argued that forcing your own religious opinions onto your children and making them believe they will burn in the eternal fires of hell unless they conform is a form of psychological abuse. In a totally free and fair society, parents would refrain from imposing their own views on their children and instead wait until they are old enough to use critical thinking to determine for themselves what fits into their own world view. If all parents did this then there would obviously be a much more even spread of religious beliefs in all areas of the world, but this clearly isn't the case, and it is clearly even less so with Islam in particular. As I said recently in the thread about the parents of Shafilea Ahmed, I have a close friend who is from a Muslim family, and her father refused to even speak to her for years after she told him that she had read the Quran and had decided that she did not want to live her life according to the rituals and beliefs contained within it. He clearly felt that his own devotion to the doctrine that he had been subjected to was worth more to him than his relationship with his daughter. Very sad indeed, and it highlights perfectly how religion can poison and divide people.

Interesting viewpoint VFTT. Somebody recently sent me a picture describing Christianity as "The irrational belief that some cosmic Jewish zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat of his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master so he can remove an evil spirit that exists in mankind because a woman made from a man's rib was convinced by a talking snake to eat fruit from a magic tree".

It's because dune has been banned.

The spiritual beliefs of the Aztecs, along with the Incas and the Mayans, died out thanks to a concerted effort from the Catholic Church to destroy any and all references to them. It is a shameful episode in human history that so little remains for us to study of a rich and advanced culture thanks to the insistence of The Vatican that all cultures should be forced to accept their own doctrine or be killed. The same thing happened to Paganism when Christianity was brought to Europe. Indeed. Christianity itself was just one of many religions being followed in the middle east during and after the time of Christ. Most of them died out, but Christianity only went on to become as prevalent as it did thanks to the Romans seizing upon it and using it as a tool to expand their empire. Quite ironic really, given that it was the Romans who supposedly* executed Jesus in the first place. *That's if he even existed, of course.