benjii

He was two years into a four year contract so his value would have started falling after the summer when we sold him. He would have ended up going cheaply like Wanyama if we didn't sell him then. If no-one apart from Liverpool was seriously interested and Mane was determined to move on then the deal is fine. It may be disappointing not to have got more but there isn't an equivalence between that feeling and the deal being necessarily bad. You can't just say, "there are worse players who cost more", and criticise SFC accordingly because there is more to any deal than the pure footballing ability of the player involved.

He's the difference between a top four Liverpool and a crappy, easy to defend against Liverpool. Whilst that makes the fee look cheap in hindsight it wasn't a nailed on certainty that he would do so well there and it's only a bad fee if someone else would have paid more.

And Mawson at Swansea looks decent whenever I've watched them.

Wouldn't be surprised to see Bertrand and Tadic go. At their age their value is probably not going to increase. Of course, this assumes no new strategic approach following a takeover.

Marco Almeida replaced by Florin Gardos....

Please, just stop.

St Will was funny. So it can't have been Glasgow/Bournemouth.

Although he's a scouser and therefore inherently painful to listen to for any length of time, I actually thought Carragher did a good job of being as impartial as possible. Much fairer than a dumb-ass **** like Niall Quinn or some of the morons you used to get on ITV, for example.

One of the most entertaining refs IMO.

A hard match to predict. Welbeck murdered Stephens in the cup match so that's a bit of a concern but it will be interesting to see if Stephens takes that lesson on board. You never know which Arsenal team will turn up. Sometimes they are lightweight, lethargic and lack leadership; sometimes they are fluent, creative and very dangerous. We are similar! I think Puel will get us to have a go and take the game to them. We're safe, we can't qualify for Europe, we just got a decent away draw but we failed to score in our last home game and people got the hump. It's not like he set us up defensively against Hull, rather the players on the pitch let him down somewhat. I can't see him asking us to play like yesterday again because he knows the crowd won't like it in a home match and he hasn't really got anything to lose. I would bring Redmond in for Tadic and go back to more of a 4-2-3-1 with JWP wide right, rather than yesterday's 4-3-2-1. Boufal behind Gabbi, Redmond on the left and give all three more licence to roam and have a go at Arsenal. .

It wasn't a red card offence. There was a defender there as well and Tadic was running away from goal towards the corner of the pitch.

Indeed. And we should have scored with the attack where Redmond hit a raking ball to Tadic to square it for Long. That was the best attack of the whole match!

If they fail the test then maybe Ali Al-Faraj can do another short-term stint at the helm of a football club.

Just seen the latest Dianne Abbott clip. My goodness. Why on Earth are Labour letting her do media appearances? I know the shadow front bench is a bunch of no-hopers but literally doing nothing would be better than having her visible.

Well?

I think the word you're looking for is "popular", rather than necessarily "amateur" (although I'll save you the trouble of pointing out that the two are not mutually exclusive). I suspect he, quite rightly, thinks that only a small group of weirdos would be remotely interested in the mathematical theory behind everything postulated in the article.

You can still get 1/20 on a Tory win. 5% tax-free guaranteed return in a month's time. Attractive.

This is the key lesson for some of our contributors to take on board: "while 38 games on the face of it sounds like a massive number, it’s still a small enough sample size to have variance run amok"

Yeah, but there's nothing bent about it. I know they're a bunch of ****s but there's more than enough to mock without inventing bentness!

In fairness, whatever you think of Royal "work", he did fight in WWII.

No, that's not right. 75% of the shareholder votes are needed to approve the sale but the trust votes with one voice based on the simple majority voting of its members (who are not shareholders themselves). The trust owns just under half the shares so if the trust votes "no" it can block the deal. If trust votes yes then the trust shareholding plus about half the "Presidential" shareholding will reach the 75% mark and approve the deal. That seems quite sensible and there's nothing bent about that.

In fairness, he makes a valid point and that's the Disney in him coming out. The first rule of IP is not to **** with Disney.

I wasn't, pal. I said we should have got out of the group. I mean "should" in the sense that it was an underachievement not to. Do you disagree? The Prague game is, whilst a sample of one and therefore not at all statistically significant, at least some evidence that even when we played ****, the opposition had very little to offer. I think that reinforces the suggestion that we "should" have got out of the group because if we had played a bit nearer a reasonable standard, for us, we would have beaten them. With the attacking players we have, we "should" have been able to manage a goal in one of our away games. I don't think you disagree. I think you're just being a supercilious ****, pal.

Christ, you're weird.

Exactly. We clearly had better players, in general, than our opponents. Which is why we clearly should have made it out of the group and it's nonsense to say otherwise. The Europa League campaign was a failure in what was a very poor group. No away goals FFS.