Lighthouse

He’s achieved absolutely nothing other than undermining Ukraine’s defence of their own existence by throwing his toys out the pram and withdrawing military support

The great man has managed to negotiate Putin into promising he’ll only bomb schools and hospitals for the next month. What a shrewd dealer he really is.

Why should they?

I have sympathy for them because they’ve been thrown into a situation in which they’re hopelessly out of their depth and it can’t be good for your self-esteem to be getting embarrassed like this every week. Most of them are trying their best. They’re just crap.

I was starting to think we’d run out of ways this season could possibly get worse, but I think throwing kids to the slaughter and watching them ship double figures every game would probably do it.

Leicester’s last 7 home games 0-3 Wolves 0-2 City 0-2 Palace 0-2 Fulham 0-2 Arsenal 0-4 Brentford 0-3 United I mean… at least we’ve seen a couple of goals since Christmas.

Quite happy Newcastle won, personally. Don’t particularly like them or the PIF but at the end of the day they’re just another part of another soulless sports conglomerate. I’d rather them win the least fashionable of the big four trophies and make Liverpool’s season a bit less special. Plus everyone can now STFU about 70 years etc. In tonight’s game, Vardy on his way to another defeat, which is always nice.

At least my sh*te is consistent, so I must be getting plenty of fibre. Five games ago, everyone was saying I was ‘beyond help’ if I couldn’t see how Juric was a ‘night and day improvement on Martin’.

1-4, 0-5, 0-7, 1-8… take your pick. People got everything they wanted in games like Brentford. Tall Paul up front, a big physical presence leading the line, Les and Sully finally being given a chance in their favoured positions, Lallana coming on late with all his experience to help see out the game. What happened, we lost 0-5 to a team who had something like 2.0 points away all season. Sure Juric is trying weird stuff and it’s not getting us anywhere but he did the obvious conventional stuff when he first came in and it was no less of a disaster. Stockport County’s manager from the National League isn’t going to be an improvement.

The Bazunu thread would be three pages longer tonight if he’d conceded them, let’s put it that way.

I don’t disagree but that’s nothing to do with bringing on Stephens for Aribo in the 92nd minute and lumping him up to, which was the point I was responding to. By that point both strikers on the bench had already been brought on, so it’s not like there was a better option.

I don’t know what clauses he has in his contract and neither do you. Maybe we get to chop him for less/free in the summer if we go down but if we sack him now we have to pay off the rest of his contract, who knows. We had the whole farce of not appointing Martin until a month into the summer window because of the whole PL/Championship compensation clauses in his contract, I don’t know what we’ve agreed with Juric. One thing’s for sure, we aren’t going to save money sacking yet another manager with 9 games to go. It’s not going to make any difference on the pitch and I can’t see Rusk/Lallana being anything other than a downgrade. So in short, there’s no point.

He brought on a 6’1" player to stick up front in the 92nd minute when we were already losing, is that really that bad? What was the really obvious alternative I’m missing here? Not make a sub and just carry on with the team losing 2-1, would that really have been better?

I don’t know what the compensation clauses are in Juric’s contract and neither does anyone else on this board. Of course there’s something to lose, we could lose every game 7-0. It’s amazing how often people say, "sack the manager it literally can’t get any worse," and then the manager gets sacked and it’s literally worse. There’s little point in changing anything until summer, just let the season peter out and see what August brings.

Do you think sacking managers every six to eight games is a good way to run a football club?

Juric has managed other clubs our size with a reasonable degree of success. Neither Rusk nor Lallana has anything on their CV above National League level. This is just people wanting change for the sake of change with no idea of how or why there’d be any improvement. It’d be a pointless waste of money.

Why would you think those two would be in any way an improvement?

Putin is a tyre kicker. He has no interest in a lasting, peaceful ceasefire and will manipulate the situation as best he can to further his military ambitions. Trump is nothing but an extremely useful idiot who may force Ukraine into concessions which benefit Russia.

It proves nothing other than the fact that a system can be played either well or poorly and that some players are better than others. It’s far too simplistic to say that any given system is a ‘disaster waiting to happen’ based on cherry picked teams and results. Our players are so bad that there’s no real point yearning for any particular system, it’s not going to work. Since we ditched that style we’ve seen no improvement in results whatsoever.

Leeds have the highest average possession in the Championship this season and are top of the league.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cx2gprz84rlt I’d be absolutely devastated if we responded with tariffs on Coors Light and Budweiser. Devastated.

We were miles off 6th place. In terms of points we were closer to getting relegated than finishing 7th.

This was us at home after we lost Fonte and Virgil. It was sh*t. I watched it, it was sh*t to watch and so were the results. I remember being at the Palace game and even that was a fairly turgid experience.

Koeman followed Adkins and Poch. Poch followed Pardew and Adkins. Neither of their reputations seem to have suffered from the popularity of their predecessor, if you’re doing a decent job in all likelihood you’ll be popular regardless. Losing Fonte and VvD is tough but they weren’t coming back. If Puel couldn’t do anything other than sit everyone back and hope for a 0-0 without them, he wasn’t the man to take us into the next season.

It was, however that’s not the reason people wanted him sacked. That was the football.