egg

11am ain't so bad SoG...unless your missus bought a 9kg turkey like mine did!

What stats would be relevant when not watching a player? xG is made up by someone or some algorithm. Goals depend on service and/or the level of the opposition. Assists depends on the ability of someone else to finish. Lots of other stuff around passing etc depends on the way manager sets you up, the quality of your team mates and opposition. Stats don't show how a player moves between the lines, how he offers up for the ball, the quality of his runs, his ability to spot a run, his timing, etc etc. Duckie is correct. Stats are completely unnecessary for spotting a player, and will undoubtedly mean that some good players don't get the recognition they deserve.

As it's Christmas SoG I won't give the first sentence the response it deserves. Merry Christmas mate, I hope you have a good day.

They fucked up the last window by not finishing it. Leaving us without a striker, and no DM cover, was negligent. If we go down, it's on them at least as much the management.

Leave

What does the PM "getting a grip" look like? Giving in to demands for 19% raises, and in doing so raising the expectation of similar for other public sector workers? Funding it by borrowing more money and sending the markets into a tailspin, and pushing inflation even higher? Or Raising taxes making things even harder for people? Or perhaps it's standing firm and saying don't be so fucking stupid?

Who's "all"? Most of us who watch football don't need graphs or spreadsheets to see that Adam Armstrong will never be Mo Salah.

It looks like a cheap Turkish knock off.

Yep - the simple explanation is that xG is bollox.

It suggests to me that the xG is unreliable guesswork. People/teams don't "overperform" or "underperform" against their xG, it's just that some statto guessed wrong, and that on the pitch, football doesn't go the way that it does on a spreadsheet.

I'd not heard that, but there was a recent directive that female judges are no longer to be called madam or ma'am, and males no longer called sir. A nice gender neutral "judge" instead.

Test

I haven't commented on the stuff you post about each other. I've commented that it's weird that you apparently block the bloke, and then reply to him. If I want to ignore someone, I would actually do that. I wouldn't get chippy with them and whinge about them all over the place.

Football was available to my girls when they were kids, but they were hardly welcomed. They didn't see Beckham as a role model in the way that they would have seen Jill Scott as one. My granddaughter wants to play football "like the ladies on TV" and "win trophies like them". That's because her mother has an interest in seeing women play football so they watch it together. I don't enjoy women's football personally, but I respect the positive influence it has on girls that mens football doesn't have.

Not sure you've read the room on that one Duckie. Nowt wrong with Jill Scott wanting girls to be as keen on football as boys.

Soda

The water thing is crazy. I've been told to go 12 miles away to Winchester for bottled water. Not much good when I need to flush the loo and wash my hands. Not sure those without transport are supposed to get on - no offer to deliver.

Jesus wept. I couldn't give a monkeys what you and Turkish say about each other. If you want to tangle with him, crack on, but perhaps stop whining about it.

It's variable. I haven't seen number for the total cost but it'll be vast. On a linked ish theme, when discussing public sector pay rises, people never consider the consequential pension cost linked to that pay, especially in schemes that will revert to final salary post McCloud.

Defined benefits are where the pension benefits are defined. That could be linked to final salary, or something else, ie a career average salary. The NHS 1995 scheme was final. The later schemes aren't. I've touched upon values in my previous post. Yes the cev is arbitrary, but that's not the true value, or the cost to the public purse. What happens in the private sector isn't really relevant to the discussion and very few private employers have pensions that match the state schemes. ExxonMobil, BAT, NATS, the uni scheme, and a few others, are superb though.

When I talk about values, I refer to the actuarial fav not the artificially low cev issued by the prpa. it's the fav that more accurately represents the cost of that pension to the taxpayer, or what it cost to buy a replacement or equivalent. The fav (and to a lesser extent the cev) of a huge number of public sector schemes is north of a million. I've got PODE reports sat on my desk for a variety of public sector schemes at that level (service personnel, doctors, police officers) and lots for more junior employees (nurses, pc's, lower level service personnel) at £650k or more.

Reservoir

Bazunu in goal for me, and Salisu rather than ABK who looked unfit last night. Otherwise your team. Although there's a case for Edozie over Aribo, I'd have him off the bench.

As I said, I'm not convinced that Tella offers enough. I think he offers more than Armstrong though and if I had to have one, it'd be Tella.

Any worse than Armstrong? For me Tella offers more. Probably not enough, but more.