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Homemade fish finger sandwich.

Fuck that, fuck him, the dark chocolate and strawberry beer drinking twat.

Well that's my match thread career in tatters. Small consolation - on the Sunday morning of a bank holiday weekend - is a "faux Croque Madame" Ham, Cheese and Tomato flatbread toastie with dried chilli flakes and spicy red capsicum sauce. Then back to bed. Not the end of the world after all, perhaps....

I hope this is the catalyst for the rest of the league to wake up and get these cheats held to account. Its bloody ridiculous, all the plaudits and back slapping from the media to ex pros- all ignoring the elephant that takes up the entire room

The first signing of the summer has been made as World Cup winner Alexis Mac Allister has arrived from Brighton for what appears to be a bargain fee. TLW Editor Dave Usher is joined by Paul Natton and Ian Brown to talk about the new man, where he will fit in, how his arrival might impact on the current squad and what it might mean in terms of other signings. View full article

This could well be the shortest thread in TLW history. Notwithstanding, one of the minuscule joys of a thoroughly unenjoyable season - which thankfully screams to a fucking halt on Saturday evening - would be to see those one-step-forward-two-steps back Nerazzuri shithouses indeed shithouse their way to withholding Big Ears from the Iberian baldy badger of Etihad.... Again. I'm invoking the spirit of the bent ref from our loss to Inter in 65... The spirit of decent players like the great Sandro Mazzolo... The mean-spirited, cynical genius of Helenio Herrera and his Grande Inter catenaccio killjoys... And I would even trade a hand job from Sophia Loren in her pomp - perhaps, maybe, or not - to ensure bitter defeat for this club, which is now a giant, horrible shadow of its tolerable pub team past. One can only hope. Discuss. Or not.

Cunt oil.

Lukaku is a fucking disgraceful footballer. Inter would have won that 3-1 with fucking Rickie Lambert playing the minutes Lukaku did.

I missed about 3 games home and away in 2001. I don't see how any fan could say it was anything but the time of our lives, which is what I'm in it for. It's in my top 3 seasons of 45 years of going the match. I agree anelka is a prick, but solution to that isn't bring in one of the few footballers who would make him look like an angel. There's never been any player less suited to LFC than diouf. And he didn't even have the decency to be good at football.

Disturbing lack of Loren over the last couple pages.

Houllier's decision making post his surgery was awful. I've no issue with trying to build a squad, he just didn't buy good players and the weirdest of all was getting rid of anelka because he might be a bad apple and signing that piece of shit diouf instead. But in the whole, houllier shook us out of our rut, brought some much needed modernisation and professionalism, 2001 was a season I'll never forget and I'm convinced he'd have won the league for us had he not had his health issues.

Outstanding

I refuse to pay a bean. All streamed or not watched. Not really missed anything.

Ahhh well, bought the little one a Nintendo switch today. Got a few kiddy games but saw mortal kombat as well. Gonna rip a few spines out of people and then have a cheeky wank.

Like watching Lance Armstrong winning the Tour de France

Hate them fucking cheating rat cunts. "Greatest story in club history has been written" hahahahahahah fuck off

Of course it is..inter are fucking shit.

Sickening - the greatest trophy in the game violated by having the name of these cheating bastards engraved on it.

This referee is beyond hopeless. He’s absolutely rubbish. Giving inter nothing

And fuck me, Tone... I didn't even know Dennis Tueart played for Sunderland. It was the very first Cup Final my Dad (RIP) let me stay up for.

Was lucky enough to work with Haydos and some of them (Hussey, Symonds, Clark) for a week (below) - and some of Hayden's stories and banter were class. Even had a beer with them one night - Hussey bought me a beer and casually introduced me to Adam Gilchrist ! (You could have pinched me with a pair of industrial-sized bolt cutters!) These below are a couple of the ads we made (for Ford's cricket sponsorship). Hayden said he'd give me $1000 if I could script a joke about Clarke's hair/preening in one of the ads. He never paid up, but the fact it happened, alone, was worth a million to me:

When you look back on 2005, although aging, that Milan side was the equivalent of todays City side. Dida, Cafu, Stam, Nesta, Maldini, Pirlo, Gattuso, Seedorf, Kaka, Shevchenko, Crespo. You could argue Cafu, Maldini & Pirlo, are, in their own positions, the greatest players to have ever played the game. They are certainly in the conversation. Shevchenko was in the conversation for best player in the world at the time and had recently won the Balon D’or. And the rest of them were great players as well! And then there was a ragamuffin bunch of Dudek, Trarore, Smicer, Kewell, Ciise etc. Hopefully something similar happens, where the side full of world class players succumb to a bunch of misfits, tonight.

Out with a mate tomorrow in Hackney. I'll only be seeing it if I'm in a boozer showing it, which is unlikely as Hackney is so fucking hipster that electricity is gauche in some bars. If I see it and they're winning I'll shrug with indiference, if I look up and Inter are winning I'll give a wry smile and go back to imagining the life me and the barmaid are going to live once I give up my wife and kids for her. I'll see the score in the morning and have forgotten about it before lunch.

I'm sure it's nothing to worry about. Incredibly wealthy people have a long history of being loving caring salt of the earth type socialists.

Good luck with that. They managed to completely ruin the game with VAR without so much as a whimper from supporters up & down the country. People are fucking spineless.

This is the culmination of the heart of football being completely eroded. I'll still watch us but the days of winning by merit or being a well run club that has success are gone. CHEAT MODE in full swing.

They have done well enough against a vastly superior side .

Could be worse could be United. These don't count.

Imagine being the manager in a CL final and feeling like you need to pump your crowd up.

looks good - I love a pea, chicken and green bean combo. Are you eating that in the post office?

And I agree to an extent. I significant portion of me thinks “fuck them”. It’s also the biggest day of some people’s lives. When I die, my proudest days will be the birth of my daughter, Istanbul and Madrid (and hopefully a couple more CL wins). My wedding day is well down that list. Its 2023. This should be a seamless process. People shouldn’t be treated like cattle.

Reckon Man City will win by three or four goals. Can't say I'm particularly bothered by them winning it. I'd rather they didn't, but the game is close to being destroyed by billionaires, sheiks, hedge funds and vulture capitalists.

City are clearly well supported and have been down the years when playing in lower leagues, I think the issue with them is that they don't really know how to conduct themselves at the top table. A lot of the bile they aim at us is due to this. They're watching fans who've basically grown up travelling the world and seeing great matches and great players and they feel they somehow have to compete with that, but can't. They simply don't have the history or the fan culture. That's nothing in itself to be ashamed of, but they (and the club, actively has tried to encourage this) have reacted to it by trying to conjure up some kind of fake rivalry, and again - because they've only grown up watching this type of top tier rivalry on the telly, they don't know how to do it. So they do it by doling out abuse, or disrupting minutes' silences. Obviously, this gives me and many other pause. It's strictly one way though from what I can see. I've never met a liverpool fan who's arsed about them one way or the other the way we are about the mancs and shite. They simply don't register for me at all, I don’t think they do with the other major clubs in Europe either in all honesty. Just look at the Madrid fans singing you'll never walk alone when they played us. Some things just can't be bought.

Negged for ignoring the narrative.

He doesn't get where he is because he's a scheming genius, he gets where he is because the structures of our society are utterly diseased. Anybody with a pulse could and can see what he's about, but people enable him anyway because he feeds them chum. The media is fucked, the police are fucked, parliament is fucked, the class system is a cancer. All of these things combine to empower human effluent like him. Johnson is a mirror to all that's wrong about Britain. A bit like Trump in sense that he's just made the corruption more obvious.

When Dizzy Gillespie is your weak point you won't have many problems. A young Michael Clarke was hanging about, Symonds as well in the shoeter form. Many world class cricketer's had to play state and missed out on greater international career's than what they had. Mac Gill, Love and Bichel for sure, I was glad Mike Hussey had his chance in the final 3rd of his career.

Nature cheddar and corned beef with rye bread; English mustard in one, Nandos spicy perionnaise in the other.

I get where you’re coming from and I think that’s fair enough. Whatever we can say about City, Guardiola is a phenomenal coach who is constantly evolving, they play incredibly intricate & precise football and have some wonderfully talented footballers. I don’t think any of that is up for debate. I think / hope that more football fans start to put 2 + 2 together for the other stuff. How can they have the most revenue more than Real Madrid, Barcelona, Man Utd etc on the back of 10-12 years success? How can they collect millions in sponsorship from a Abu Dhabi based betting company that has <50 Twitter followers? How can they have the most revenue when they can’t fill their ground most weeks and they give a % away to anybody who asks? Etc etc etc. If this type of off field stuff now is questionable, what more have they done when they were actually charged, found guilty & fined in 2014?

Hahahahaha “Micky sniffs” and Danny Dyers “twat” fucking superb

It might just be me / us but I think there is a general apathy around the game full stop. Everybody thinks they are going to win, likely reasonably comfortably. More and more are coming to the realisation (or at least the possibility) that their Mancini / Pellegríni success is on the back on cheating (I don’t think any of the charges are against Guardiola’s tenure…). Nobody believes they are the club in the world with biggest revenue. Everybody can see the Ethiad isn’t close to being full every week. Everybody knows they basically give tickets away to make up the numbers. Everybody can see they don’t sell out FA Cup Semi Finals against their biggest on-pitch rivals etc etc etc. They don’t even play exciting football anymore. There isn’t the emotional blood and thunder we play with. It’s all very cold, almost mathematical / scientific in its meticulously execution - death by a thousand cuts (or in this cases, passes). Looking through social media, which could be down to whole I follow, apart from journalists at the game, you’d barely know it’s being played tonight. West Ham winning on Wednesday will end up being a bigger story than City winning tonight.

Stock up on all things English. Bacon, sausage, butter, cheese, pork chops, black pudding, Gammon, plus tea bags, tins of ham, flavoured rice, and many different bars of chocolate.

Ooooft... https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/09/modern-football-manchester-city-champions-league

Claudua Cardinale. Inter cannot lose now

This season has been one long repeated seemingly endless series of kicks in the bollocks.....surely, surely - fucking surely, it can end with at least some sort of glimmer of light. Forza Internazionale!

I think it's Deschamps