Lighthouse

If someone wants to pay £50m for JWP I'd sell him, whether it's Man City or Port Vale. I don't buy this, "oh but they're our close rivals in the table," argument. If they're serious about spending that much on one player, they're clearly not going to be our rivals for long, whether they buy JWP or someone else for the same price. That said, I'd be astonished if Villa were planning on any such thing. Going on a massive spending spree these days just puts you in the 7-10th bracket with Arsenal, Spurs, West Ham, Everton. They could spend £200m this summer and not even qualify for the Europa League.

I wouldn’t get too carried away on Maehle personally. Plenty of players have had great tournaments and gone on to be sh*t for their clubs. El Hadj Diouf, Milan Baros, Karel Poborskiy, don’t forget Roque Junior and Stephane Guivarc’h both started in World Cup final winning teams.

It would appear Skittles wanted in on Pride month only for it to backfire rather embarrassingly.

So Finland heading home as one of the worst third placed teams, with 3 points and -2 GD. Candidates to join them are: Ukraine, 3 points and -1 Croatia, 2 points if the don’t beat Scotland Portugal, if they get stuffed by France Slovakia, if they lose by 2 or more against Spain.

This isn’t NFL. We can’t just bring a kicker onto the pitch every time we want to kick for a field goal.

I think you need to send my post back to Bletchley Park and ask them to try again. Anyway, today’s games could be interesting. You’d imagine Austria and Ukraine would both take a draw and go through in second/third with four points. If the Danes beat Russia, there will be a three way tie for second in the other group. As it happens I don’t think they will but it could all come down to GD and last minute goals. Anyone remember the Sweden, Denmark and Italy group from Euro 2004?

I can’t argue with that. Want to meet up behind the bike sheds?

TBH I’ve long since lost interest in anything Collin has to say. This brand of crackpottery isn’t particularly interesting.

The one year of reduced testosterone levels is just an arbitrary line drawn in the sand because the IOC are scared of offending anyone. They don’t want to upset trans people by not letting them compete but they don’t want to upset women by letting them get their arses kicked by biological men.

Agreed. England need a Steven Davis type midfielder to link defence to attack.

I think we’ve jumped the shark on this one. For anyone interested, photos of other women are also available on the internet.

TBH what I meant was what I actually wrote, with the words and structured sentences and all that stuff. Any particular word giving you trouble from that post of mine you highlighted?

Now that is a can of worms. So basically anything involving a crucifix is out. Players making the sign of the cross when they run on the pitch or score.

So yeah, Scholes went to the World Cup…

Good grief, it’s like watching a Puel team.

Scuffed it!

Wow, this is Saints all over. Just pedestrian, passing it around without desire or intensity.

Rickie puts that in.

Never in a million years is that a penalty but it’s Lovren so 🤣🤣🤣

Nearly goal of the tournament there from Isak.

Ironically, I’d agree with that on pretty much every issue other than this one. It’s quite hard to back that up when Long was terrible in basically every appearance last season, was loaned out to the Championship 6 months into a 2 year contract and to top it all even Bournemouth didn’t rate him playing at that level. Anyway, it’s happened and we can’t change the past. I just wish we weren’t wasting money repeating the same mistakes.

He started so many games because we were short in genuine quality up front. If our analysts, coaches and Ralph actually rated him as being worthy of a place in a Premier League squad then I have serious worries about how low we’re aiming.

I can assure you that none of that was said with a modicum of hindsight on my part. No variation in Adams form would have made Long worth keeping. If he hadn’t kicked in later in the season then we’d simply have had two substandard players on the books. This argument is the football equivalent of trying to get out of detention by saying, "yes but the other boy was doing it too!" It was a mistake, which we’ve repeated with Walcott this year and tried to double down on by offering Bertrand a new contract.