Lighthouse

Woke isn’t a word I’d normally use in conversation or use to describe someone as it seems to have become a right wing buzzword thrown haphazardly at any liberal opinion they disagree with. However I don’t like people who describe themselves as woke and try to justify it as a positive. The whole self-verification of your own opinions aspect of it is just arrogant. People talk as if their opinion is more valid than someone else’s because they’re ‘woke’ and therefore must be more informed and compassionate. F*ck knows what Space Karen is drivelling on about though. The bloke seems to have lost the plot completely.

Without checking, Huddersfield Derby and Reading must be well down there. Probably a few others too.

TBF the people of Cardiff have been eating pet food for decades.

There’s something vaguely familiar about this Bangladeshi football club but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

There is no tangible evidence for that at all, we buy and sell our players no different from any other club. In fact in summer we got quiet a few signings done relatively early. This was an exceptional case as the transfer had already been dragging on since the summer and Liverpool had been caught out with that Blackpool incident. Virgil was clearly not happy and had burned his bridges, so we agreed to sell him in January for a world record fee for a defender.

I’d rather have him than a man who’s only previous managerial credentials were taking over a club in the UEFA Cup final and guiding them to 12th, 13th and then relegation in three years.

The flip side of that being, imagine a Semmens press conference where he said, "our priority in January is to sell ABK as soon as possible, before any other deals happen and we’ve got a replacement sorted." There would be absolute outrage and yet that’s what people expect another club to do. There is a reason most deals tend to drag on towards the end of any transfer window and it’s not through lack of trying.

If you have a month to prepare and can't get the team to start playing your way in half a season, you aren't a good manager full stop. Hopefully the World Cup has been a good oportunity to get his ideas across to this squad and we can hit the ground running when the league restarts. Whether that will be enough to stay up with this group of players remains to be seen but the answer is not Dyche on a short term contract.

But that can be a couple of seconds before the kick is taken. Usually there’s a good solid minute of arguing and time wasting before that.

I reckon we should have five potential penalty takers lined up on the edge of the box. Once the ref is happy and the 'keeper has finished all of his time wasting b*llocks, then the captain picks someone at random from those five to step forward and take it, immediately. Having less time to overthink things and with the keeper not knowing who to psyche out might give us an advantage.

A bit of a classless time to throw in a dig at the manager. Whatever the case, this looks like an awful injury and every time I've seen someone go down with an ACL they've been screaming in agony. Wish the guy well, an awful time in your career to have it happen.

No, you can’t. For all the complaints about the ref and VAR, we did get two penalties and couldn’t find the net any other way. France scored two decent goals which we failed to keep out, they deserved to win.

Morocco have just won a group containing Belgium and Croatia, before knocking out Spain and Portugal in succesive games. We may have the best collection of players but we were not the best team in the tournament.

TBF most Pompey fans can’t spell ‘FA Cup’.

Because I’m not awe-inspired by a manager who managed to beat Iran, Wales and Senegal (without Mané) and was down to the bare bones of only having Kane, Saka, Foden, Rashford, Grealish, Maddison, Bellingham, Rice, Phillips, TAA, and Walker to build a team around? He’s done the same as the last two tournaments, win the bog standard games when we’re clear favourites and lose to a team of comparable talent which played better.

TBF that applies to all but eight or nine of the 110 plus English FL teams and 200 plus nations out there.

He’s been blessed by incredibly fortunate fixtures and wasted by far our best two chances to win a major tournament for several decades. I don’t think he’s a good manager.

No, this has been my opinion of him pretty much since he was appointed. No manager since Sven in 2002-06 has had this much talent available, the difference being he had to get past Ronaldinho, R9, CR7 and Deco to get to a tournament final, rather than Hojbjerg, Vestergaard and Mykolenko.

I can’t say I’m in any way surprised, Southgate has never done anything other than beat vastly inferior teams with far worse players at major tournaments. As soon as we come up against a team of similar talent, we come unstuck.

It was a foul but that doesn’t make them cheats. I think T-Rex arms should have got to that, personally.

Have we been replaced by someone else, like Italy, for this game?

Proper blizzard up at Ewood.

Like most teenage boys, we’re really struggling to deal with Abrar.

It says something that Perisic’s eight year old son has more class and respect that a team full of Argentine adults.

I’m going to say France will beat Argentina in the final and see how that ages.