Lighthouse

There’s only one ‘war hawk’ in this game, that’s the man who wants the whole of Ukraine, the country he passionately declared had no right to exist when he launched his three day operation, in his empire. For a negotiated settlement there has to be something both sides will agree to AND more importantly, some way of forcing Russia to comply with it. Any written agreement, in itself, isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. They’ve been there before with the 2015 Minsk agreements look at the peace that lead to. As for Trump being the catalyst for ‘serious’ conversation, this is the man who told people that injecting bleach would cure COVID.

Your proposal is basically just that everything carries on as it is, but Ukraine signs a piece of paper which says that certain bits of it are legal, in effect rewarding Russia for their aggression. It’s straight out of the Neville Chamberlain playbook, one side believes they’ve negotiated a compromise and are working towards a peaceful solution, the other side thinks they’ve just signed a random piece of paper.

Gone for the hair/teeth routine, innit.

Trump can’t force Ukraine to settle anything, those bits are not ‘basically Russian’ and the general public would not be pleased with a brutal tyrant being rewarded for a war of cruelty against innocent civilians.

A far cry from having Terry, Ferdinand, Campbell and Carra to choose from. Pleased for him but this is far more about how underwhelming our CBs are right now IMO.

I’m not asking you to ignore anything. You’ve given one erroneous example against Arsenal, which nobody would be trying to attribute to, "dicking around with it," if it were conceded by a team managed by anyone else. It was a failed counter attack when the team was trying to break forward at pace, we both know it. The only legitimate example you’ve given was on the opening day of the season, committed by a goalkeeper no longer in the team. We’ve only scored seven goals because our attacking players are sh*t. Hope that clears that issue up for you. Armstrong, Archer and BBD are all matching the best top flight scoring rates they’ve ever managed in the rest of their careers. Our creative players, well people were up in arms because rested a teenager who made his debut two months ago, that’s how good that situation is. I’m not the one who’s genuinely convinced that Russ would rather lose and get noshed off by Pep, than actually win a game of football. Nor am I the one posting, "Yes!!! 74% possession, get in!!!" every 5 minutes when we’re losing a match.

So your best example, since the first game of the season, is a misplaced pass out wide near the halfway line, when we were trying to break against Arsenal at pace. Every team is going to give away chances and goals, especially one with players as poor as ours. I’m not claiming we are defensively solid but this idea that we’re shipping goals passing it around our own penalty box trying to keep 80% possession is just a fantasy.

Just because a pass was misplaced, I wouldn’t count that as, "dicking around with it." The whole team was trying to break forward at speed, exactly how you’d want us to play at Arsenal. Downes was trying to play a ball to a wide player, near the halfway line, as the rest of the team was running forward. Hardly a daisy cutter across our own 6 yard box.

When you say ‘often’ which was the last goal you would class as, "dicking about with it"?

We either pass to the opposition quite a lot or we’re obsessed with having 80% possession. We can’t be both.

Plenty of caveats to that though, namely how many troops Kim is prepared to sacrifice for his somewhat tenuous friendship with Mad Vlad. Obviously Kim doesn't give a crap about the men themselves but his dynasty does depend on a cast iron projection of absolute power back home. He wont want to see that corroded by a messy and expensive conflict, thousands of miles from his own borders. The other main issue is that his military could be something of a paper tiger. DPRK haven't had a proper war in living memory (unless you're one of the few citizens to make it into their eighties, despite chronic malnutrition and inadequate healthcare). Despite all their missile tests, their conventional army is likely to be severely malnourished, poorly equipped, very poorly motivated, ravaged by rampant corruption and organised by terrified yes-men. How much of a fight they put up against Ukrainians fighting for their own existence remains to be seen.

The short answer being that Ukraine will suffer from a lack of ongoing US military support and will have to rely on the smaller provisions of other NATO countries. Hopefully Russia has already burned through too much manpower and hardware to mount a meaningful, sustained offensive.

We’ve already got the Nigerian Rasiak and the Stafford Yashin.

People like Jones live in a fantasy whereby because they stick Palestinian flags all over their social media and go on marches against Israel, they must therefore all automatically be together on ‘team woke’. In reality I’d wager a fair number of Middle Eastern Americans would be more enamoured with traditional, conservative family values, a strong leader and a god above all others.

Isn’t he supposed to be sh*t, according to Brazilian fans? I’d add Stewart to the loan list, if someone in the Championship willing to give him a go. I’d imagine we’d still be paying most of his wages.

I don’t think trying to pass it out wide, ten yards from the halfway line can be counted in any way as ‘messing around at the back’. If anything we were left exposed at the back by everyone running forwards trying to catch Arsenal quickly on the counter, leaving big spaces for them to run into. That goal was pretty much the antithesis of what Russ is usually accused of.

Plus Trump being the man who pulled the plug on the Iranian nuclear treaty last time and sabre rattling to the point that a Ukrainian airline got shot down is hardly going to placate Tehran.

I find it amazing that freedom loving Americans can cheer so loudly for a man who so brazenly tried to overthrow democracy itself four years ago and take the Capitol by force. Left or right, it’s mental that people will even go to the polls for a man like that and makes you realise how good we have it, relatively speaking, in the U.K.

TBH I wasn’t even going to mention that bit, I’m just trying to make the point; he’s thirty years old and has done nothing, anywhere, under any manager outside of Denmark (Elyounoussi is awesome), Belgium (Steve De Ridder is awesome) and a brief loan in Turkey (Cenk Tosun is awesome). Nobody - not one of the 19 other PL managers who play fast paced, direct, attacking, goal scoring, get it forward football - seems to be interested in signing him either.

Maybe. Then again you could say that about Rasiak and any number of other target man strikers. All we know for certain is that he’s thirty and apart from us, nobody outside of the Belgian and Danish leagues has ever bothered to sign him.

I’m fairly sure that more than half of all Canadians live South of Seattle.

He did nothing under the man who actually wanted him when he signed, has been unable to displace some pretty mediocre strikers under Selles and Martin and apparently nobody is particularly interested in signing him. He’s done nothing under any manager to make me think he’s actually good.

Mine is actually pi, accurate to five decimal places.

I asked the woman in WH Smith’s if they had the new self help book for men with small willies. She said, "I’m sorry, I’m not sure it’s in yet." I said, "yes, that’s the one."

No but I did once take a girl home, only to find out that she was in fact two midgets in a trench coat.