Lighthouse

Come on, five more second half.

What the f**k is this!?

Honestly, I’m surprised the Ukrainians haven’t announced something like that already. Get Zelenskiy and the four regional leaders to host a mock ceremony announcing the annexation back to Ukraine, holding up bits of scrap paper with, "referendum: Yes - 94% and No - 17%" written in crayon.

No, not in the slightest. They've been awful and I've no doubt at all that there are better managers out there, just like there are better strikers than Che Adams, better 'keepers than Baz and better midfielders than AMN. If we've lined up a better manager then I'm fine with that but all this talk of him being an obvious lead weight, holding back players capable of far higher achievements is erroneous IMO. I've just been reading the match thread where you yourself said it might be worth trying a 41 year old 'keeper who was basically retired a year ago.

I'm more than happy to focus on this season, it's everyone else saying things like: If you want to talk about the last 60 points, then you have to look at who was available for 36 of the last 60 points. Otherwise it's 7 from 24. Where does wisdom come into it? All the money we've spent this summer would cover the transfer fees of Wood and Bruno, that's not even taking into account the fact that they'd both sneer at our pathetic wage offer.

Because people keep referencing last season in their assessment of how we're playing. If you're going to do that, you have to look at those players objectively. I'd say they all played as well as they ever have under Ralph. Not one player has left and proven him wrong by being a breath of fresh air at a new club, like Tadic. They've all either signed for clubs well below our level, or signed for clubs around our level and under-performed.

Who said solely? Newcastle spent over £100m on transfer fees in January and Howe is a much better manager than Bruce, what's your point?

I live in hope, rather than expectation, that some of these players, given time, will be an improvement on what’s come before. To put it bluntly, I wouldn’t have expected anything more from the players we’ve had up until now. If you don’t believe me, look at where our ex. Players have ended up. Bertrand and Vest - Can’t get a game for bottom of the table Leicester Long - Can’t buy a goal in the Championship Redmond - Ends up in the graveyard of talent that is Turkish football. Stephens - Unused sub for Bournemouth Romeu - Signs for a team which finished 6th in the Spanish 2nd Div. Valery - Signs for FC Angers Ings - Comfortably Ralph’s best striker, averaging 13 goals a season. We’re forced to sell him, immediately drops his scoring rate to half that and gets dropped. Bednarek - Let’s see how that goes. If it’s Ralph’s fault, why have some of the better players we’ve sold under him gone on to be much worse elsewhere?

Last week dropping Moi was the answer and he should have started AMN instead of Diallo. Before that it was starting Aribo, or Mara, or Adams, or Perraud, or Stu, or ABK. Before that the five at the back was the problem. Before that it was the 4-2-2-2. Before that he was obviously going to start the season with McCarthy. There is no quick fix to any of this. Today AMN looked like he was playing on a different nebula to the rest of the team. No manager can account for the fact that he had the best pass completion of any Everton player. It’s going to take time, whoever’s in charge.

Other than the fact that we can’t go out and spend £95m on three players? Because he went with substandard familiarity in Armstrong, Moi and Diallo, as opposed to starting a bunch of new players, like he did today. Plus Perraud wasn’t fully fit.

That’s spurious logic; you could have Pep in charge of Poortvliet’s team, he could change half the team every game and they’d still have gone down. To me it says that there’s no magic fix no matter which team we put out. Three players were making their first start today, it’s going to take time whoever’s in charge. Seven out of todays starting XI weren’t here last season, I.e. eight games ago. You can’t just throw together a team like that and expect cohesion from the get go, just look at Forest who’ve spent pretty much double what we did. Nobody is doubting we’re pretty poor at the moment but this is a long term project which is going to take time.

Right… I’m off to support Stenhousemuir.

We’ve been through this, he literally got Burnley relegated.

This is sh*te.

I still feel that we could use a Baron or a Marquis in there somehow. A somebody the third of somewhere.

When the Bank of England said interest rates were going up, I didn’t realise this is what they meant.

The BBC should probably just fold on this hand.

When you’re selling something online, you put in a very clear, separate paragraph saying, "collection only from XYZ," and you get a message saying, "hi can you deliver to ABC (half an hour’s drive away)?"

Sticking to the theme of motorways, I was out driving early this morning and the fog light brigade were out in force.

Not really an error though, when the alternative was an anti-NATO, nuclear disarmament pacifist. I’ll happily vote to get rid of the Tories now but it was never an error.

It really is like an inverted Barbarossa, all over again.

I don’t know how many times it needs to be said, he can’t just ‘launch the nukes’ on a whim, no matter how unstable he is. He needs the military to actually do it. Baring in mind he has waited until the situation was desperate to mobilise civilians for a conventional war and he’s pushing his luck back home just doing that. Why you think China or Syria would want to get dragged into Putin’s nuclear obliteration, I’ve no idea. China is looking out for China, nobody else. They’re using this to score some discount hydrocarbons and anything else they want.

Damn, I had autoerotic asphyxiation in our group sweepstake.

There is a lot of nauseating, pretentious virtue signalling I can accept being called ‘woke’ but objecting to modern day corruption and slavery isn’t in that category.

An Arabian Gulf WC would have been a bit more palatable IMO. There’s still a lot to object to but you could have eight stadiums in Qatar, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Jeddah, Muscat, Rihyad and Kuwait City, for example. It would spread things around a bit more, taking the load off such a small area and making accommodation less ridiculously expensive and hard to find. Building eight stadiums bigger than Goodison Park, in a country with a smaller population that Rome is just ludicrous.