Lighthouse

You’d have to be off your tits to want that. For all their mistakes, they have spent a lot of money on the club and signed some quality players for this league. Would you want to be in League 1, with owners not spending a penny and a team built around McCarthy, Stephens, Manning, Smallbone and Archer? It’s a trait of football fans at every club to think that they have it as bad as it gets. I genuinely had friends who support Arsenal asking, "what have we done to deserve this, why does God need us to suffer?!" When they were finishing sixth at the end of Wenger’d reign.

Yes but I’m not sure how taking 1/8 inch off the wood furnishings is going to improve the situation.

And that f**king goal at Derby...

When I've got one tab showing the Saints game on some dodgy, illegal stream and another showing some slapper fiddling her bean, I'm going to spend more time browsing the latter from now on. Take that SR!!

Yes basically. We lost to Millwall when he was still 'auditioning' then won the next two after he was permanently appointed, so that doesn't correlate. Other teams have done their homework on him and he has failed to improvise and adapt. I was kind of hoping that there might be a bit more to him that what we've seen but apparently not.

If you replaced Bazunu with an average League 1 keeper, then since Tonda took over we'd have: Beaten Millwall 2-1, as he'd have saved the first and third Beaten Norwich 1-0, as he'd have saved the first at his near post and come out and caught the second Drawn 1-1 at Oxford as their winner was nowhere near the keeper Beaten Birmingham 1-0, as he wouldn't have flapped at that looping header. Lost 1-0 today but that's our only defeat and the GD would be much better than after a 4-0. That gives us a record of P13 W9 D3 L1. 30 points from 13 games, which is easily promotion form. We've got just under two weeks to get the Peretz deal ironed out, then things are going to start looking a lot better.

What's wrong with the defense? An average Championship keeper would have saved all but three or four of the goals we've conceded in twelve games under Tonda. Seems okay enough to me. We've scored in ten of those games too. I doubt TE will still be here in any case but we aren't going to be in a relegation fight.

We're having a sh*t season but this is getting a bit hysterical. It's only two years since we did get promoted, without Martin or Bazunu next season we'll comfortably be in the hunt for the top six.

There’s a vacancy for president of Venezuela if he fancies it.

You could try PornHub. I doubt they’ll be streaming the match but they’ve probably got something more interesting to watch.

He scared the sh*t out of me when his head floated out of that fishing boat.

Well... good luck Greenland, Canada, Iran and basically everyone except Putin.

Fireworks are probably the most absurd (non-lethal) use of smart phones I can think of. The entire point of them is to stand and marvel at the huge spectacle of light, colour and sound being played out across the night sky. When has anybody ever wanted to sit and rewatch fireworks on a four inch screen on their phone?!

Not necessarily true, I still go to the park to play with the children, thirty years later. None of them are actually mine and some of the other adults shout some very hurty things, but still it’s good exercise.

Seeing some of the videos on the BBC, words honnestly fail me. Literally dozens of people stood inside a burning with their smartphones out videoing the whole thing going on around them and not moving. It seems like it was only when the heat became unbearable that many of them were forced into a mad crush for the exits. It's genuinely scary what smartphones and socially media have actually done to the collective psyche of society. Teenagers passively burning to death for likes on their Instagram reel.

I will say with absolute certainty that our recent goalscoring struggles have absolutely nothing to do with our strikers being complacent, because they're banging them in against hapless goalkeepers in training. If you are going to try and argue that then two years ago we were the leagues third top scorers, so presumably you're going to insist that we were training against the leagues third best goalkeepers, to achieve such a high standard? No, thought not.

In other words we had a pressing need for a striker, we spent £7m and the one we got turned out to be worse than Archer. It’s really not as straight forward as some would like to believe. If it was, everyone would be doing it.

Look on the bright side, if we lose this and Brum beat Coventry at home, Lampard will properly sh*t the bed.

Clearly such a player wasn’t available at the time for the right price.

I can’t for the life of me understand what people’s problem with Long is. It’s like complaining that your space-saver spare wheel is useless because it can’t run as fast as a regular wheel. McC leaving would make sense. Out of contract in summer and (thankfully) unlikely to get first team football here, even less so with this new bloke.

I think a lot of people, myself included, were generally supportive and cautiously optimistic when he was appointed. It’s very easy to say that we should have gone for a more experienced option but Tonda had experience of this squad and got some cracking results out of them. The momentum was very much with him and we don’t know how any of the other possible candidates would have done. We could be sat here now, no better off and saying, "why didn’t we give the bloke who won four out of five a proper go FFS!"

At some point people might have to stop using the guy who got us promoted in fourth, with 87 points and as many goals scored, as an insult. It does look a little bit silly when you're in the bottom half.

Didn’t we basically do that with Jaidi?

I knew the points deduction was looking unlikely but I didn’t realise they were adding 11 points instead.