Lighthouse

Overtaking a lorry at 58mph about half a mile from your exit off a dual-carriageway and you're stuck behind somebody doing 59mph in the right hand lane. 'Annoy' might be an understatement, it's a special kind of hatred like no other.

If you’re every struggling to figure out your opinion on an issue, just check out what Beverly Turner has to say and go with the opposite of that, you won’t go far wrong.

Well, we’ve got Aussie all rounder Jack Edward’s for the first couple of months. Looks like he won’t be around for the Blast though.

The problem with that though is that United did give us room, because they’re sh*t. Everyone is winning at OT apart from them and Saints and it’s easy to see why. You can’t really bank on a strategy which is dependent on the opponent playing very badly. It’d be like saying we need to replicate what we did at Portman Road, if the keeper spills a couple of easy shots.

Don’t forget him being brought on in the 87th minute against Brentford, where his calming influence and leadership helped us to concede only two more goals in injury time.

Since we haven’t got a decent central midfield anyway, let’s just play the doughnut formation. Ramsdale Benarek THB Bree Wood KWP Welington Dibling Fernandes TP Sully

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, some prat goes and unleashes an ancient curse upon all civilisation. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5ym30v356po

Mad as a March hare.

Impoverished 😆 Russia is going cap in hand to Iran and North Korea and Iran for weapons. They have a combined GDP of less than half a trillion dollars. Britain alone has an economic output nearly seven times that. Look, I know some of you want to pretend that we’re all a bunch of rabbits running from the great Russian bear but it’s not 1965 any more.

A chance to lose at home on three consecutive Saturdays, which should be a first but knowing us probably not. Another bog standard 1-3 incoming.

All of our players, bar four, would have difficulty securing a place in any other PL team, so that’s a much broader statement than you were perhaps intending.

There’s very little motivation to do any kind of deal on the terms being discussed at the moment. They won’t cede land without security guarantees from NATO and Lavrov says that’s out of the question. Europe won’t struggle to support them, if there is a concerted effort towards it from all countries involved. Russia is dependent on countries like Iran and North Korea for military support, if we wanted to we could easily out supply them in terms of quality and quantity of hardware.

I thought of that exact same comparison yesterday. Essentially you have a useless buffoon thinking he’s negotiating his way to the Nobel peace prize by giving a brutal dictator everything he wants, in exchange for a piece of paper saying, “I promise to stop being naughty.” We’re at the, “let them have the Sudetenland, we don’t want a war,” phase of proceedings.

If it was that simple that you could just ‘gear your economy’ for war indefinitely and not suffer any consequences, then everyone would do it all the time. I’m not an economist, so I couldn’t begin to tell you the ins and outs of all these sanctions, their long terms effects and the sustainability of Russian countermeasures but a war of this scale is not something that either they or Ukraine can keep up forever.

Alcaraz has one game where he scored and got an assist, that doesn’t necessarily mean he played a blinder and the jury is still very much out. If we couldn’t get a tune out of him, neither could Juve and they know a thing or two about decent footballers. Brooks came to us to try and rebuild match fitness after 18 months out being treated for lukemia, so hardly a surprise he’s showing improvement a year later. Rothwell scored a handful of decent enough goals for us and was generally okay, whereas I’ve yet to hear pundits raving about him at Leeds. Charles is the best player at a midtable team, last year he struggled to make an impact at one chasing promotion, seems logical enough to me. Sully has done very little for three different managers now (four if you include Jones), it’ll take more than his first league goal in 18 months to change my mind. Archer scored four goals for United last season, which is pretty much on par with his record this year. So overall, no I don’t agree that it’s our fault for not playing to the players strengths. I think they’re generally speaking playing as well for us as they have at any other club in their careers. That being said, I don’t think the scouting is the issue either, it’s more the recruitment strategy. It’d be a hell of a coincidence if all the players our scouts identify just happen to be cheap bargains who fall into our very low target price range. I think it’s more likely that they’re identifying far better talent but are being left frustrated by the actual decision makers looking at their work and saying, "yeah we’ll get that £7m bloke who just went down with Sheff Utd."

I’d say most military analysts would disagree with that, Russia has nothing that can compete in air to air combat with any NATO Typhoon or F35 for example. Even many of the older F16s and FA18s have more advanced avionics than their Russian counterparts, many of which are far from airworthy condition. It’s a similar story when you start comparing the WW2 era tanks Russia has been dragging out of storage to modern Leopards and Challengers. We’ve been complacent for too long in terms of troop numbers and defence spending but collectively Europe has the stronger military. It’s just a question of will power.

Their demands/aims are the same as they’ve always been, the total subjugation of Ukraine under the control of Moscow. It’s quite clear from what the Russians have said so far they haven’t deviated from this at all. In short the want to keep everything they occupy right now and keep Ukraine isolated and defenceless ready for their next assault when they’ve amassed sufficient forces along the new border. It’s quite clear from Lavrov’s stance on the free part of Ukraine that he has absolutely no intention of allowing any kind of security guarantees. Other than a load of hot air from Trump and his cronies, absolutely nothing has changed. The only card they can really play of any consequence is some sort of crippling economic blackmail which would force Kyiv into total surrender and would be one of the most disgusting manoeuvres of any US government in history.

It’s so weird that Lavrov won’t accept any NATO peacekeeping troops in Ukraine as part of a ceasefire deal. If Russia gets to keep the parts of Ukraine they occupy, why on Earth would that matter?! Russia definitely isn’t going to attack the rest of Ukraine again in the future. Definitely not.

Pulling the fluff off the filter in the tumble dryer.

Rusk was in charge for two games. The first half against Liverpool in the cup was as bad as anything we’ve played this season. Fulham we got a backs to the wall 0-0 in a game where they wasted enough chances to beat us three or four - nil. No manager who would ever realistically come here is going to do anything other than lose pretty much every game with our squad. Even the unrealistic names thrown around, like Moyes and Potter, wouldn’t do much better than we’ve done with RM and IJ.

They could have bought him for much less than €50m. They chose not to.

I certainly don't disagree that Ramsdale hasn't exactly been amazing but I don't think Alcaraz is what we're missing.

Fernandes is, by a long way, our player of the season. Alcaraz's assist came from a Palace throw in to nobody, which he squared to Beto. The goal was a rebound which fell to him eight yards out. He'll have to do a fair bit more for me to wish we had him in the team instead of MF.

So you’d prefer to have Alcaraz in this team, with McCarthy in goal?

I'm not sure I'm reading this correctly, are you saying Fernandes wouldn't have been much of a loss to this team?