Lighthouse

What are you on about? I was disagreeing with somebody who was literally saying our squad is good. It isn’t. As to the rest of your post, teams with no fight about them don’t lead Arsenal and Liverpool with an hour on the clock, they’re usually 3-0 down by half time. The team is clearly trying, they just lack talent.

What’s your point? You’ve just named two clubs who were either relegated or are also in the relegation zone. Are squad is not a good one. Any side who gets promoted and gives contracts to Wood, McCarthy, Fraser and Brereton Diaz is not aiming high.

So no medical diagnosis of terminal illness then, a made up scare story which conveniently skips the massive safeguard of a judge having to sign off on two independent doctors diagnosis.

No, a ‘greedy sod’ is someone who takes three slices of cake when it’s someone’s birthday in the office. If your mother gets told she has terminal cancer and has 4 months to live, if your reaction to that is, "no mum, you need to die right now!" You’re not a greedy sod, you’re literally a soulless psychopath. The situations you’re talking about basically involve someone’s entire family being cold blooded killers and the doctors being completely oblivious. You’re deliberately trivialising the issue to make a very specific and unlikely set of circumstances seem like a mundane occurrence which will happen every week. The argument doesn’t miss the point at all, if you’re talking about the kind of coercion that risks a lengthy prison sentence, there really is no motivation to kill someone who’s terminally ill anyway.

The squad is not good. Five, maybe six players are good enough to play in his league. The rest are Championship players.

This social media post aged like a prawn sandwich.

Basically you would need someone who is medically diagnosed as terminally ill AND all their living relatives are literal psychopaths AND they are collectively able to mislead all medical authorities AND the patient involved has to be completely complicit and not raise any flags during consultation with their doctors. It's a very rare set of circumstances which would be very hard to orchestrate for a family who, as you pointed out, is going to get all the money in a few months anyway. That risk doesn’t come close to outweighing the suffering of thousands which will be eased by this bill.

Phil Taylor getting drunk and a bit lairy again.

I've no idea if this device would be legally approved in the UK if the bill passes but it seems decent in principle to me. Hypoxia is probably about the most painless and humane way to go, with the least associated risk of side effects or complications. Certainly most of the aviation accidents attributed to hypoxia have basically involved everyone onboard falling asleep and never waking up, like the Helios accident and the one which killed Payne Stewart.

There’s no reason at all to think that sacking a manager in December is in any way relevant to the following season. That’s just nonsense that you keep bringing up for no apparent reason. I’ve no idea why you keep coming up with these weird scenarios and asking me if they’re true, as if they’re somehow my opinions, but it’s getting boring now.

I’m not trying to make any kind of connection between replacing a manager in December any form the following season. Sheaf claimed that we’d struggle at the start of next season if we still had the same manager who’d achieved very poor results this season. That isn’t necessarily true, Sheff U are a very good current example of why not.

Probably the same cuckoo land as the over 31,000 fans who’ve attended every game at St Mary’s this season, despite RM being here and losing every week. If we go back to winning most weeks in the Championship, the crowds will remain pretty healthy, regardless of what happens this season.

If we go down with Martin we will be amongst the favourites to get promoted. If you can arrange a ‘definitely guaranteed to get us promoted’ manager, that’d be wonderful too but ultimately the squad we’re likely to have left, with Martin will be one of the favourites. We might win the Championship, we might not. We don’t even know which other teams are doing up or down with us yet. I can’t get my head around the mental gymnastics you’re trying to do with Wilder. His team was utterly abysmal for the latter 2/3 of the season but now they’re top of the league. The difference between them and Luton is nothing to do with that. After Wilder was appointed, Luton outscored Sheff U 17 points to 11 in the remainder of the season, so how does that work?

A wonderfully constructed argument, I know when I’m beaten. Goodnight.

Sheafs original point was that if we continue to be as poor as we’ve been, get relegated and keep Martin that we’re going to struggle next season because of a hangover. That’s not necessarily the case as The Blades are currently showing. Nothing is guaranteed but I’d say Russ is as likely to take us up as anyone else. Wilder was the manager for the latter 2/3 of last season, they were absolutely dreadful and went down with the awful form that I posted above. The kept Wilder, now they’re top of the Championship. What happened under Heckingbottom prior to that isn’t relevant.

Chris Wilder is just coming up on his first anniversary there, these are his results from the second half of last season.

It’s an argument for a very poor PL season having little bearing on next year in the championship. Last year Sheff Utd were abysmal, well adrift on 16 points, right now they’re top of the Championship. The best of the three promoted sides was Luton, who are now 17th.

Taylor is a LB we signed on a free from relegated Burnley. He may well have tons of PL experience but so does Jack Stephens. TP has never scored a goal in England, he held the ball up well on Sunday but if we’re holding him up as an avatar of our squads ability we are in trouble. Fernandes looks decent, THB is steadily improving, Downes looks generally alright but has had two absolute clangers leading to goals so far. Ramsdale, Fernandes and KWP are solid PL players. Not world beaters and when we go down they’ll probably be looking at West Ham and Fulham, rather than City and Liverpool, but they’re decent for a club like us. THB and Dibling will probably go to bigger clubs because of their age and potential. In short, you’re going to need more than five players (one of whom is an 18 year old and needs to be carefully managed) who are good enough to play in the PL in order to stay in it. If we can’t recruit better than that in two years time, hypothetically, then we’ll go straight back down again regardless of who’s at the helm.

Martin got us promoted last time, Fraser was a solid Championship option and BBD has averaged 15 goals across his last three Championship seasons, roughly watch Che managed last time. We’re jumping about ten steps ahead here. Let’s actually see if we do get promoted again first, then try and sign some decent PL players for a change, then see how Martin gets on with them.

We've got 4 points from 12 games. Last season we got promoted off the back of 3 points from our final 12 PL games. If we keep a reasonable chunk of the massive Championship squad we've assembled and the manager who took us up last time, there's no reason we can't get promoted again. What 'it'll be like' in August is a new season against far weaker opposition. If we've still got Martin, BBD, Archer, Armstrong, Bednarek, Fraser and co. we should hit the ground running.

Cool story. Let me know when he does.

Why is this season relevant but not last season, if we’re talking about the Championship? It won’t be another season of ‘this garbage’, we’ll be playing teams like Stoke and Millwall instead of Brighton and Liverpool. Russ and the players who are likely to stay next season are more than capable of another promotion.

I don't remember prime Maradona's first touch taking the ball about 7 yards in the wrong direction but okay.

You have no idea what’s going on with ABK. Gardening leave is very little different in real world terms, you’ll still have to pay the rest of his contract not to be our manager. They can do it, it’s just whether or not we have someone else lined up who’s worth the cost.

Gordon Bennett, let’s keep some attachment to reality shall we. Russ’ contract will stipulate which duties he is responsible for and what authority he has. You can’t just reassign him to being the tea lady and say, "do as you’re told!" No self respecting manager in the world is going to come in and work as a ‘manager above’ our current manager in that kind of bullsh*t set up. If we did try something like that, no half decent manager would touch us with a ten foot pole for years afterwards, knowing that’s how they’d be treated. If the club wants rid of Russ, they have to sack him and pay him compensation accordingly.