Lighthouse

We must be the only team to have scored and conceded 8 goals in a match, I'd have thought.

That, "75% of suicides are men," chain mail that’s going around Facebook.

That could well be true. I still won’t be going though.

So would I. Their 'official' death toll from all of this is just over 3,300, which is laughable really.

Something to pass the time. Every day we’ll see if we can come up with the strongest ever Saints XI, based on a certain criteria. Standard 4-4-2 formation. First topic - Only made one appearance for Saints. I’ll start the ball rolling with: LB - Stephen O’Halloran CB - Iain Pearce LM - Iago Falque

Agreed. Personally I think anyone earning over £20kpw should volunteer to take a 50% pay cut and it should have been done weeks ago. They'd still be getting paid an utterly obscene amount of money to sit at home playing X-Box, it's really not that much of a tragedy. Instead they're more worried that the clubs might actually make a bit more money than them out of this, which I highly doubt. Gate receipts are gone, ST renewals will be way down and I'm sure Sky/BT will have tightened up like a duck's arse, since thousands of customers cancelled their subscriptions. They're both as bad as each other - nauseating levels of greed. The rest of the country and the economy is on its knees and they're most worried that the other side will make a slightly more obscene profit than they do.

I'm not saying we do but we might. I don't normally do internet dramatics but the rate of death is still going up and we haven't peaked yet. Anything that slows the spread of infection in the short term may have to be implemented to stop the NHS and its staff from being crippled. Exercise and dogs may have to take a back seat and I say this as someone who is fairly young, fairly active and owns a mad, inexhaustible husky. The government certainly aren't doing this for the sake of it. I've seen plenty of conspiracy nutters on social media saying, 'ooh I wonder how many of our freedoms we'll be allowed back when this is over!?' The answer is all of them.

Everything we’ve seen so far suggests we can’t afford to relax measures yet and that we need the same if not tighter restrictions to help keep deaths down. The problem with lifting restrictions in certain places is that people, some with the virus, will flock there in large crowds in order to enjoy the freedom and then we’ll just have large, regional outbreaks. Yes it’s a trade off but I don’t think not exercising outdoors for 2 months (as an example) is really much of a sacrifice in the short term. Long term, of course none of this is sustainable and we need to use the time we’ve bought to come up with an effective exit strategy. The cost of drugs is a different issue as that will effect the NHS budget and yes, a trade off has to be met. We can’t afford to pay for all drugs we’d like but we can put our park run best times on hold for a few weeks.

If they wouldn’t mind refunding me for the ones I have been to for the last four years, that’d be nice too.

I see your point but the actual act of being in your home isn’t going to kill or even harm you. If you chose to do something dangerous whilst you’re there, that’s on you really. It sucks and I’m not saying this is what I want but if it saves lives, so be it.

You wont catch me at many games if they do.

Not relevant. None of those people were killed because they weren't allowed to leave the house. It's usually people thinking, "I don't need a qualified gas engineer to do that," etc.

Edit: Actually, thinking about it, heart disease is fair enough. I'd let anyone who has been diagnosed as such out to exercise on the premise that they've got a doctors note confirming it. Only for those who have actually been diagnosed though, not just any Tom, Richard or Harry saying, 'oh well I might get it if I don't go out.'

Of course there’s an increase. They can’t go to the gym, the swimming pool or literally engage in any other sport. We’re not talking about long term fitness here. Two months is really not a long time in this context. Unless you’re Jason Statham in the film Crank, or you have a unique medical situation which will kill you if you don’t go for a jog for a few weeks, you are going to be fine. If that genuinely is the case I’m sure a note from a doctor can be arranged. I don’t mean diabetes or high cholesterol, I mean you’re weeks away from death if you don’t go for a run.

I’m not doubting the science, merely the time period. I know skinny and overweight guys in their twenties who don’t exercise and eat/drink sh*te. I doubt they will have any noticeable health problems until they’re in their thirties, probably even longer. Health problems due to lack of exercise are long term, chronic issues, built up by years, sometimes decades of poor lifestyle. If you were told to stay inside for two months and ate healthily, I doubt the effect on your body would be much worse than a pretty good Christmas. I doubt most women do any running in the last two months of a pregnancy, which they then follow with the mother of all cardio work outs. If they can survive that, we can survive this.

For two months? Nope. I disagree entirely.

You’re not going to develop heart disease just because you don’t exercise for two months.

Given two months without exercise a normally fit person will likely put on a small amount of weight and lose some muscle mass/fitness. That's about it. You wont even get close to the thousands of morbidly obese people I see waddling around the streets of Britain. I know a guy who shattered his pelvis skiing a few years ago and couldn't even walk around his house for six months. If two months without exercise could kill you, two thirds of the population would have died years ago.

For a couple of months?

PFA statement. https://www.thepfa.com/news/2020/4/4/pfa-statement-on-behalf-of-premier-league-players

I don't think it would be that hard for the players to simply say, "take the staff wages out of our wages," on the proviso that the club don't then ask the taxpayer for money.

There would have been hundreds of thousands of people stranded abroad who needed to get home. The services running at the moment are extremely limited and nearly empty.

Not even that, they just need to TAKE a slightly less obscene wedge of cash, whilst they're sat at home playing X-Box.

I don't think any of them are covering themselves in glory. It wouldn't take a half decent accountant ten minutes to work out what pay cut is needed for each player to cover the non-playing staff for £2500pm. Why this wasn't done and then put the the player I have no idea.

There're loads of gems in there. "Essentially, if the players take a wage cut, the beneficiaries are the clubs. Their main concern is what is happening to this money. They are happy to put money into a pot, rather than it just vanishing. They want to have an influence as to where this money is going" Nowhere Danny! The money isn't GOING anywhere there is just less to give you, that's the point. The clubs aren't benefiting, they've taken a massive hit in income and they're trying to cut costs.