Manny

Fucking good stuff last night - not arsed one bit about the loss of the potentially damaging semi final either. Lunin bouncing the ball after catching the rat's penalty, like he'd just been handling the ball in the warmup, was a beautiful touch. Didn't want Arsenal anywhere near the semis to be honest. As much as it would be extra games for them, they look like they're a real momentum team and hopefully the disappointing home draw led to the flat performance and defeat to Villa which led to last night, and that's their wheels coming off now. We'll see. Interesting to see their April record above - maybe the shouts of "bottlers" that are heading in our direction - when we're coping with far more injuries and bullshit than Arsenal are - will have a look at that. Given their financially doped squad and playing style, the mancs would cope with the extra games so I don't think them being in the semis makes much of a difference to their league chances. I just don't want that fucking freak project anywhere near the European Cup, last year was genuinely awful so I'm just glad they're out. And one more thing - I can fucking enjoy the semis and final of the Champions League now. No desperately hoping for one particular outcome, just watch and hopefully enjoy the games (like I did with the Barcelona/PSG and Dortmund/Atleti ties).

A really sobering night. Totally agreed with Dave on the pod - I genuinely didn't think this group of players had it in them to be this poor in a game. Yeah they'll get beaten here and there, all (non-financially doped) teams do, but the way we just seemed absolutely off it all over the place? The wife was watching that Scoop film on Netflix the other day and this was like that Prince Andrew interview: ill-prepared, complacent, naive, incompetent, self-destructive and utterly damaging. But the worst thing about it, weirdly, was watching people leaving 10 minutes before the end, like they knew it was up. I'm not having a pop per se; I know it's their right and the team hadn't exactly done anything to make them feel differently, but it felt like both the ghosts of Christmas past and, perhaps, Christmas yet to come. A shoddy, error-strewn and limp performance at home with fans watching on with apathy or acrimony, and with so little belief that they're out before the end. It takes me back to the pre "doubters to believers" phase, and makes me fear more than anything that this whole thing is held together with Jurgen-shaped string. And once that goes? For fucks sake.

That Ashley Williams isn't the most obnoxious fucking cunt in the room shows up what a massive pile of banterwank that podcast is.

Not like the mancs found a flaw in our gameplan or approach. They stayed in the game through our profligacy, then capitalised on a simple error from a 21 year old centre back. You can criticise Klopp for potentially not leveraging the defeat in the cup to its fullest and allowing a similar mindset in this game, or for not dealing with the weird mental block we have at old toilet in general, but I don't think yesterday's failures were tactical.

Yeah. Arsenal's form since the new year has been seriously impressive, absolutely no doubt about it. Looking at it like that, it's theirs to lose. However, you can easily spin that another way and say Arsenal's form since the hiatus from European competition has been seriously impressive. And that's about to change - and as @Carra_is_legend says, their record post-CL games (and easier ties at that) is less so. I've piped down since last night. Old Trafford is just a fucking graveyard for us, we frequently go there and get less than we might deserve. It's out the way now, just focus on the last 7. Win all of them and we finish above Man City - I'd take that at this stage of the season. And if we win them all and come second, then I'd (very begrudgingly) tip my hat to Arsenal because if you go through half the season dropping points once - at the Etihad - then you deserve it. I'd just feel a lot more sanguine about it if it wasn't for the fact that the other two cunts are keeping their management structure for next year and can probably go again. For us? Who the fuck knows. To miss out like this and drift into the wilderness while we watch Arsenal clean up at the fag end of Guardiola's reign will stick in my fucking craw like, the lucky timing bastards.

Having the best non-Gerrard LFC midfield season since who and when? I feel like his recent form is taking him higher than Alonso 2008/09 but that might be recency bias, and I might be doing Xabi a disservice over a season by focusing more on Alexis' form since he returned from injury. Either way though - what a fucking signing. £35m, I can scarcely believe it.

Laughable decision. No wait the other thing. Infuriating.

3 tier premier league, well done lads. At the bottom, teams who can't afford even a one-off luxury tax, and for whom points deductions are potentially financially fatal. In the middle, teams who can sort of afford a luxury tax, and could potentially weather points deductions, but who want to be run sustainably - and likely couldn't afford regular application of a luxury tax. At the top, teams who have limitless resources to pay repeated luxury taxes and can therefore spend with utter impunity. What the fuck do they think the outcome of this is? One fucking window of moderate sanity and there aren't enough beaks getting wet. We need the state wealth sugar daddies to come back in and spread some of that lovely dough around the sport - and if the competition gets fucked then who cares. As long as the right people get paid. What a fucking shitshow.

Cheers, mate.

I think they’d get good money for Onana and Branthwaite - but the former is less promising for them as he was a big money signing only recently. Transfermarkt has a market valuation for him at £50m. If that’s true, he’ll still have £21m book value left (signed for £35m in 2022 on a 5yr contract) so they’d stand to only make £29m back. Branthwaite is their crown jewel, he’s almost certainly off this summer. The same site value him at £30m and that’s pure profit (or less loss in Everton’s case) Beyond that? Pickford is a decent keeper, but he’s 30 and most of the big spenders are sorted in that position, a position which doesn’t need multiple options in squads. Calvert-Lewin is a decent striker, but he’s got a lot of question marks on fitness and consistency (not to mention application - and not long left on his current deal). I guess Garner and McNeil, plus Mykolenko are pretty young and have some proven premier league experience so they might go for £10/£15m apiece. But the rest of their first XI are pretty old, or complete nonentity’s. Or both.

Never ceases to amaze me how subservient we are to a supposed ally when it comes to stuff like this. I think it was during the 2006 Lebanon war, when the British government sent a naval vessel to Beirut to evacuate British civilians before an impending ground invasion, and the IDF gave the Royal Navy a 'window' of something like 48 hours to get them out, like they were doing us a fucking favour. The government response was pathetically deferential; it should have been a case of "fuck off, the ship stays there until we say every single civilian gets out - and woe betide you if a single one of them or the ship they're leaving on suffer so much as a scratch." Should be the same here. The IDF have assassinated three civilians - this is quite frankly barely different to the Russians with the Skripal poisonings, or their bungled shootdown of MH17. The demand for a response should be significantly higher than "have a look lads, see what you reckon" - it needs to be leveraged to more of a "you went too far months ago, but this is the final straw. Ceasefire, now, and we need to have a hard think about our diplomatic relations." Won't fucking happen though.

He’s thrown a dig at a pub. What have you done?

I make it a point of principle not to take holiday for Xmas Eve, it's an utter waste of a day's holiday. You use 8hrs of leave to avoid ~5hrs of non-work; why the fuck would you take that deal? Not feeling well-disposed towards work at all at the moment after finding out on Monday that the cost-cutting restructure that's going on is going to cut our team by 60% (5 of us down to 2), whilst a load of other much bigger teams, most of whom are getting less work as there are fewer customers, are protected. A possibility of generous voluntary severance is hanging about but our HR manager has fucked off on leave for a week and just said to raise a service desk query in their absence, so I've got no idea whether I might be eligible. Wife on maternity leave currently, and we've a 6 month old and a 3.5 year old to fucking support. Useless cunts.