Lighthouse

It raises an interesting question on to what extent it's acceptable to practice your beliefs, if it's to the detriment of your employer. Supposing you follow religion X and you spend a month drinking wine until 2am every night to celebrate the life of your prophet; should your boss simply accept you coming to work hungover every morning as exercising your beliefs.

It amazes me how keen some people are to hand out new contracts off the back of such small crumbs of form. Walcott is 34, has had many fitness problems and I believe that was his first goal for two years at the weekend. I’m not buying the, "good in the changing room/with the younger players," line either. I’m sure he’s a great bloke but our team looks mentally frail and pretty much all of our young attacking players have looked useless in the last few years. We had the same with Shane Long a year ago, scoring a goal in a sub appearance against Everton and suddenly he was, "a useful option… give him a new contract," etc. Whatever special talent these guys have, we can live without it. They’re just a sad avatar for how low our expectations are.

Why is that specific to ‘our moron fans’? That’s pretty bog standard for the majority of players returning to play against any former clubs and the reception they receive.

Even with all those dreadful results under Jones, all we had to do was not throw away a 1-0 lead at home to a crap, ten man Wolves team and we’d be 15th.

Nothing relating to Jones would have been justification for appointing Dyche. Sure, the latter is a better manager than the former but so is pretty much any other option we had available, including not sacking Ralph at all, or sacking him and just having Selles in charge.

Everton will stay up because their squad is not and should never have been relegation material. Dyche will keep them up by being mediocre where Lampard was dreadful. Next season expectant Everton fans will demand progress towards their rightful place in the Champions League; Dyche will provide further mediocrity with turgid football, uninspiring results and a forgettable, bottom half league position. Around Christmas the board will decide he has taken them as far as he can and sack him. Selles has 8 points from his 6 league games in charge, exactly the same as Dyche in his last 6. I doubt we’d be any better off with him here.

TBH we’ve just been incredibly lucky recently IMO. Leicester missed enough chances to win 4-1, Man United had arguably their best player sent off after half an hour and as flakey as Spurs defence is, that penalty was as soft as loft insulation. True we’ve shown a bit of bottle in chunks, here and there, but overall I don’t think we have anywhere near enough to get out of it.

I really wish we had the only keeper to concede three against Southampton for 15 months.

That's contradictory, Moi himslef has 70 PL appearances and two years playing against Arbroath and St Mirren to boost his confidence. He's still useless. No amount of confidence is going to suddenly turn Tella into a PL player.

He’s the anti Michael Owen.

Fair enough, that’s a bad example but the original point still stands; he was offside when a Newcastle player played the ball.

Irrelevant, he was offside when the ball was played by a Newcastle player. Using your interpretation of the rule we can just stick a striker two yards from the keeper at all times and get other players to slam shots at him from 25 yards. Anything he saves, the striker can just tap in the rebound even if he’s ten yards offside because, in your view, an opponent played the ball.

He was a yard offside when the ball was first played forward by another Newcastle player (Isak). If he’d been onside for that but had then moved off by the time a Forest player had played it, the goal would have stood. He was initially passive but became active when he touched the ball.

I don’t know which game you guys are watching but that was clearly offside.

He’s never played domestic football outside of Croatia, a couple of decent Europeans and international games here and there don’t really count for much. Moi ran the show against Man City in Europe once, El Hadj Diouf was one of the stars of WC 2002. I was sceptical before we signed him that there didn’t appear to be much in his career to indicate a top league player and he’s looked completely out of his depth here.

Because he makes Moi look like Rivaldo. We’ve spent £6m on another Filip Djuricic.

Sh*t, I hope he wasn't injured.

Thanks to Jones, that kind of thinking is irrelevant. To have any chance of staying up we’re going to need regular points from games like Man Utd and Spurs, regardless of how ‘winnable’ they are. Picking one winnable game out of three simply isn’t good enough, when you’re bottom of the league in March.

For the reason of three games in seven days, I’d imagine.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-64957792 Oops.

The irony of this is that it’s an absolutely textbook example of exactly what I’m talking about. I said absolute nothing racist or in any way supportive of anyone else who said something racist, yet you chose to post the bit in bold. Why, because you’ve given yourself a small hit of endorphins, by reaffirming that you’re slightly better morally than someone else. People get addicted to that kind of thinking and there is an endless supply of trolls all too eager to provide the morally inferior viewpoint in exchange for some attention. The media of course are all too happy to be the middle man and profit from this with likes, clicks, adverts, etc. That’s not unpopular at all. In fact it’s hugely popular with the governments of Russia, China, Turkmenistan, Burma, Afghanistan, Syria and North Korea. They would absolutely love to know the identities of everyone posting everything online. The very few people who dare to speak up against them usually do so anonymously, in fear of their lives. So no, it will never happen and a good thing that is too. In principle your right to post online is no different to your right to speak verbally face to face. Imagine if the government announced tomorrow that every time you went out in public, you were required to carry an I.d. microchip so that every word you said in public could be recorded and cross-referenced with your identity. There’d be riots. Even if, by some absolute miracle, you managed to convince every country in the world to agree to this I.d. database AND agree a moral code which every country in the worlds agrees upon, for what is and isn’t acceptable to post online, AND get every country to police it seriously when countries like Somalia, Yemen and Haiti barely have a functioning government at all… people will still find ways around it. People will photoshop fake I.D.s, they will hack other peoples accounts, they will leave their accounts logged in on public devices and even if these things don’t happen people will claim they did if they get caught.

By person you mean the free, anonymous, easy to set up social media account. You can delete as many of them as you like, people will just set them up in less than a minute. Not only do racists have a place in modern society, they’re in huge demand, whether you like it or not. To say something which is front page news has no place in society is quite clearly a massive contradiction.

The reason this will never go away is that racist posts on social media are a three way symbiotic (symtriotic?) relationship. People with sad lives who don’t get much attention get infamy, in many cases on the national news. Media outlets get a shocking and outrageous story they can overhype. People on the internet get to be offended and tell everyone else how shocked and disgusted they are. So everyone’s a winner and is getting what they want, except people like KWP obviously, but none of the other three actually cares about his feelings.

Even the admin who runs Man Utd’s Facebook page went with a screenshot which looks like an even, 50:50 challenge, rather than the much clearer angle of him jumping in both feet off the ground and going studs first over the top of the ball. Even taking my Saints glasses off, I can’t see how anyone could defend a challenge like that.

I’d have thought you’d want to utilise space and movement more, TBH.