Lighthouse

Selles I’ll give you but wasn’t even a manager. Jones was dreadful, I don’t know if there’s ever been another full time manager in football history who failed to score a point at home throughout his tenure but by golly Jones managed it. Russ is fourth, solidly in the playoffs despite being hampered by (apparently) the worst goalkeeper who’s ever played football. He’s had a decent season, people who are talking about second as being the bare minimum: dream on!

I could forgive people for looking back on someone like Burley or Sturrock with roses tinted glasses but Christ, Jones was barely a year ago. Just a couple of highlights for anyone who has forgotten how utterly dreadful his tenure was:

County Durham in early April wet weather shocker. Who'd have thought.

Finish! I'm going to have to chug a whole bottle of Domestos for this but; come on Utd!

The start of a home triple header. COYR etc.

You can’t just equate a bunch of random stuff which is nothing to do with each other. Deformities like the elephant man had can be recreated with prosthetics and special effects, as clearly there is not going to be a capable actor with his exact, matching disfigurement. An Aussie can play a Scott by putting on a different accent, he can’t become black (well he can but that’s a whole new can of worms). A black African playing Henry V in a Shakespeare production (if that was ever a thing) is clearly because it’s an African production and ALL the local actors are black. Getting a black woman to play Anne Boleyn in 21st century Europe is clearly a choice done for nothing other than cheap shock value. If you’re going to do that, why bother with any pretence of historical accuracy. Just have her walking around Tudor court in a Kappa tracksuit and save on costume budget.

Our system has worked fine for the vast majority of the season, more often than not the games we’ve dropped points have been the result of individual errors in either penalty box than simply being outplayed. Even at Portman Road we were fantastic for 65 minutes. If we’d finished off a couple of chances like Bednarek’s header and the one where Downes didn’t pass to AA and not left them with acres of space in our box three times, we’d have thumped them. Those are individual problems, not systemic problems.

I reckon Miss Teen America should get the former sorted fairly soon. No hope for saints though, dream on.

Any system is crap to watch when it’s not working. When teams found a way to play through Ralph’s press, it didn’t work. Jones’ long, direct football didn’t look good against anyone at all. There’s no universally great system, otherwise every team would be playing it every game and never lose.

We do have a 100% record against them in their 12 year history.

Okey dokey.

Scything away at Leeds and Ipswich, great afternoon lads!

I would

Have we solved peace in the Middle East yet?

I’m sure you will apply that logic evenly and fairly to the upcoming Rosa Parks biopic, starring Vinnie Jones.

That’s fair enough, thanks for clarifying. I don’t have any sympathy to justify, beyond the fact that the whole Middle East has a sorry and enduring history of lost human lives. I don’t sympathise with Israel but there are quite clearly a lot of regional politics which are relevant to this issue. You’re conflating understanding with sympathy, they’re two different things.

If a Hamas sympathiser set off a bomb in a British Synagogue today, would you be saying Israel’s actions in Gaza were irrelevant?

TBH I’m fine with that. If the striker we signed last summer had been fit for more than 20 minutes of this season, I think we’d have gone up automatically. I don’t particularly mind us using Man City as a blueprint for our tactics either, would you prefer we were trying to emulate Big Sam’s Bolton?

I’m guessing Wheal or Holland, probably Wheal.

Israel have been quite content living between an Egyptian, Lebanese, Syrian and Jordanian state for several decades. It's hard to guage what would happen in the region if, by some miracle, all of the groups I mentioned stopped wanting to exterminate an entire nation. My best guess is that they'd have left the Gaza strip alone and continue to illegally clear settlements in the West Bank. That's just a guess, nobody knows and it's never going to happen.

I haven't seen anybody on here defending Israel's behaviour in the West Bank or in the war since 7/10. The most regularly repeated simplistic and naive opinion which does keep popping up on here is the people who still fail to realise that Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian government and countless other supporters DO NOT WANT ISRAEL TO EXIST AT ALL. It's nothing to do with the freedom of Palestinians or settlements in the west bank. They're a Jewish state on Arab land and that cannot be allowed, that's the 'wider picture'. The grim reality is that it doesn't matter how many settlements Israel bulldoze or how many war crimes they commit going after Hamas militants, the conflict is going to continue anyway.

And Hamas have a very strict, 'do not send armed forces over the border into Israel' policy.

Oh, well in that case they should definitely do it. Imagine how stupid they’d make the IDF look if they were all just sat out in the empty desert, having a BBQ, whilst the IDF were blowing up hospitals. They would make Israel look ridiculous in the eyes of the world AND have the added bonus of not dying.

Drive out into the desert, away from any civilian areas, at any point in the last six months. Aid workers and civilians would be ten miles away from the nearest fight and no innocents need get hurt.

That’s a very angry reaction to the suggestion that perhaps Hamas might also be able to do something to reduce the civilian casualties you’re so concerned about. What’s worse than wanting death for every Jewish man, woman and child living in any sort of Jewish state in that region?