benjii

"Play Champions League", or, "join a Champions League club", is meaningless. The only club who can more or less guarantee that year-on-year is Man City. Maybe Man U will be like that again. (He would actually be a good signing for Man City IMO). Even Liverpool could slip down a few places. Join Spurs, Chelsea or Arsenal and you can easily end up spending your Thursday evening in Yerevan. So if this is what his guys are leaking, it's just about money. Which is fair enough. We haven't got any and he's our best player, so hardly a surprise. As has been said, there is no way for us to sustain success or make headway with the current ownership. Anyone who excels - including coaches - will typically be here for 2 or 3 years max unless they have a burning desire to play for SFC above all else. That's our reality.

Yeah, but he gave GM a lazy lob-on with his #ballsofsteel so suck it up, libtard.

Anecdotal, I know, but I’m aware of friends of friends who have had both doses of the Pfizer or the Sinopharm vaccine and are still contracting the virus and testing positive afterwards. No bad symptoms though. Again, only anecdotal, but suggests at least one of those two vaccines isn’t stopping transmission, even if it does manage symptoms. This is not in the UK, by the way. I guess this means more chance of mutations over time, if the anecdotes are true etc..., as the virus will still be circulating in large number, just not causing serious symptoms.

People slag off Carillo, but he did get an assist at WBA.

I wonder if Bertrand could play centre back. Seems a shame not to give Vokins a match and also it seems potentially foolish not to include a senior player who can't play in the next match. As others have said, a team comprised largely of youth and reserve players could well slip up, considering we don't currently have many fit senior reserve players, so I think it makes sense to include Bertrand. I guess he could even play in a more advanced position and they could both play.

We've scored one goal in our last 5 league games. Without Ings over any stretch of games we will struggle to get wins. We have been outperforming this season, largely due to set pieces, and without Vestergaard as well, we are not much of a threat from those (aside from direct free kicks). The match last night summed up our situation very concisely. Lots of good play, controlled the match for long periods, promising work by Smallbone and Nlundulu but, ultimately, it never looked like we would win. We did play pretty well and, but for a piece of very weak defending, we would probably have held on for a 0-0.

I'm not sure if it's as bad as it seems. A big chunk of the loss is deferred broadcasting revenue, which will appear in the next accounts due to the delayed season end. Another big chunk appears to be a £10m write-off of player contracts because it is deemed unlikely they will ever play for the first team. I presume that's Carillo. Match day income was only down £3m. I'm not sure why we needed such a big loan. Perhaps we have outstanding transfer payments due soon before we are due to receive any. The interest rate does seem rather high. I don't see a huge cause for concern. The main concern long-term will be if there is transfer fee deflation due to Covid and general economic malaise because we seem to be banking on a couple of decent sales to cover our longer term liabilities.

I live in Tanzania and Matt Oakley is one of the lead pundits here. On Friday night we have "Oaksy and Doddsy" where he goes through the main PL stories of the week with Jason Dodd and previews the weekend fixtures. Most people are out on the mega piss on Friday nights though. Just don't drink anything offered out of a Jerry can!

Traitor! Get behind the Brexit FFS!

A pathetic attempted coup attempted by socially inadequate, thick as mince, losers is still an attempted coup, and when it is backed by a President it's quite disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

Why the hell are we dealing in terms of “guidance”? This is a natural disaster causing death, long term illness and ruining the economy and the longer it drags on, the worse it will be. That’s not hyperbole. This has caused more deaths than any earthquake, flood or storm in modern history and its results are more widespread and wide-reaching. If people shouldn’t travel for exercise, make that a law. If someone isn’t wearing a mask properly, hit them with a material fine. Have checkpoints ensuring people out and about have a reason to be out and about. Pass appropriate laws and enforce them strictly. Pissing around with “guidance”, coupled with the hypocrisy of people like Cummings, is one of the reasons why people still aren’t taking this seriously enough. I’m not generally in favor of big government but this scenario - complex system, large numbers, relatively small immediate personal risk for most people but very large societal risk - is exactly where a government can add tremendous value.

The slightly unnerving thing about this whole Trump episode is the reminder that a nasty, divisive, corrupt, criminal, megalomaniac, psychopath can get elected to President of a powerful country if they play the right tune. Luckily, this time the guy who did it was an absolute fuckwit mess of an individual; a witless, charmless, desperate, incoherent, fool. But cannier nutjobs will have taken note.

Putin must be pissing himself laughing. What a masterstroke. Imagine getting a compromised, financially dependent dementia patient elected as president of your biggest rival and him managing to convince half of his country (and various other useful idiots around the globe) that extremism is the way forwards.

The Bell end. (RIP etc.)

That's a fucking Jan Poortvliet bench.

Yep, this is incompetence on a grand scale and has been since the start. They are afraid to do anything difficult until there's not really any choice, by which time the best time to do the thing in question has long passed. Weak messaging, lax enforcement, contradictions and hypocrisy.

I tend to agree with this. We have Armstrong, Redmond, Walcott and Djenepo who are all fairly similar players who rely on movement and dynamism and I don't think he's any better than any of those. A more creative ball-player / passer "number 10", is something we lack.

Bizarre post. I'm sorry you've had such a shit life though.

You know that review you quoted is a joke, right? Just some armless fun.

Long and Ings is a very different proposition from Long and Adams so I don't think Long coming in would be too catastrophic if Ings is fit.

The Arsenal shout is a nonsense, I'm afraid. Never a foul, just sloppy desperate play by Djenepo, and Bednarek committed more of a foul in our box in the first half which wasn't given, so we weren't hard done by there at all. The West Ham offside, I agree, looked tight with respect to their right back so I'm not sure why the lines didn't appear, but he was probably off. The Adams kick in the head was a complete accident and wasn't a high foot so I can see why no action was taken. The Fulham penalty shout would 100% have been given as a penalty in the first couple of months of the season. They seem to be trying to row back on giving handball now, which is silly because changing the rules mid-competition doesn't make much sense. However, again Bednarek also handled in our box so we could also have conceded a penalty. I have no idea how the ref didn't give the free kick on KWP. The Man City one did really annoy me. I don't know why we didn't get a penalty for Sterling's handball. It came up off his leg but I don't think that means it cannot be a penalty; they still need to consider arm position, reaction time etc. We've been fairly lucky too. The penalty we got at Brighton was a little farcical with the officials clearly having no real idea where the foul occurred. If there was no VAR and only replays, no one (apart from our biggest weirdos) would have seriously been claiming we should have had a penalty for that, and it won us two extra points we barely deserved.

Are you having a laugh? It was an excellent tackle.

This is similar to the City match. Plenty of neat football and long periods of control but no quality in the final third.

Does anyone apart from me quite like the idea of Djenepo up front with Adams for this one? Means we can leave Walcott playing where he has been and Djenepo should be less likely to pick up a yellow card in the first half.