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I’m doing okay mate am trying my best x

Watched them lose yesterday in a pub in Manchester full of united fans. Very enjoyable watch.

Everting gonna be oorite no

This game is a chance for us to confirm our place in the knockout stages and avoid having to go through the play-off route. A win would also maintain our 100% record and keep us top. Bear in mind it's in the earlier kick-off time. Girona are newcomers to the Champions League after finishing a surprise 3rd in La Liga last season. Lack of European football and an early exit from the Copa Del Rey meant that they and their coach Michel could concentrate on the league, and they did it by finishing on 81 points, 5 points ahead of 4th placed Atletico. They’ve found it much tougher going this time round as their squad has to cope with the European schedule. In La Liga they sit outside the top 6 and have just been demolished 3-0 at home by Real Madrid. A major reason behind their difficulties this season is the loss of several key players from last season, most of whom were loanees. They are part of the City Football Group sportwashing projects so could use their connections to secure some players with a City connection like Savinho (who has signed for City), Yan Couto (now on loan at Dortmund from City) and Eric Garcia (Barcelona signed him from City and loaned him to Girona last season). They also sold Aleix Garcia to Leverkusen in the summer, along with top scorer Artem Dovbyk to Roma. In the summer, they brought in another raft of loanees which include players with Premier League experience such as Arnaut Danjuma, Bryan Gil and Oriol Romeu. In addition to that, they added Czech international Ladislav Krejci from Sparta Prague (from what I’ve seen of him, he’s decent but error-prone), Colombia international Yaser Asprilla from Watford (he is their record signing, and I’ve no idea if he’s related to Faustino), plus Dutchman Donny van de Beek from the Mancs, who had one or two good seasons at Ajax under Ten Hag but has been shit ever since moving to the Mancs for over £35m 4 years ago. In the Champions League, they’ve been propping up the table alongside the Red Bull clubs. I suspect that Slot was going to use this game to rotate his squad a bit, maybe giving a starting place to the likes of Jarrel, Tyler, Endo and Harvey. He would have preferred if we had some of our injured players available to allow the available ones to have their minutes managed a bit more prior to the upcoming festive schedule. The derby postponement is probably a bit of a benefit as it gives a few the chance to rest up a little bit and re-energise. Macca is suspended for the game (he’ll also miss the Fulham game as he would have been suspended for the derby were it not postponed), but maybe Slot will think he can go stronger than expected for this one. Hopefully Ali and Diogo are closer to being in contention for the squad (and thus our upcoming schedule), and maybe Fede will be brought out of cold storage and be involved. Unfortunately thus far his story is similar to that of every other Italian to don a Liverpool jersey, as they’ve either not been all that (Paletta, Padelli, Dossena, Balotelli) and/or have tended to be injury-prone (Aquilani, Borini). We need him to be a viable option and buck the trend of Italians at Liverpool. Lastly I’d say Darwin needs this game badly to show that he can still be a handful as well as take his chances. We haven’t had that game from him at all yet, and he arrived over 2 years ago. He could do with a game where he delivers a conversion rate like the cave troll. How have our previous managers got on in their first game against Girona? Well, this is the first time we’ll have played them so there is literally no history there. I don't ask for much. Maximum motivation, control, application, attitude and concentration from minute one. 3 points please. Get it done!

What a horrible shower arsenal are...Just endless shithousing, fouling, complaining, arguing, niggling. Horrible, horrible shower of cunts.

Arteta asking the ref there if it finishes in a draw, does it go to corners....

Sky are still at it. I heard that dickhead redknapp say the other week he prefers man to man because at least it gives you someone to blame. What type of a fucking approach is that to anything, where the entire aim of a system that will fail, is geared to blaming someone. The Glazers have played an absolute blinder here. They were getting all kinds of shit. Then they sell him 25% of the club, which they can buy back if they get the deal they were looking for, allow him to run the footballing side which they had no interest in anyway, then allowing him to become their lightning rod. And if it turns out he knows what he's doing they benefit from that too.

A friend of hers turned down a £12k promotion with the MOD based at Babcock. The reason? You have to reverse park on site.

Jim'll Brexit is trying to achieve the dream of not being in Europe.

I can't see them getting rid for at least 18 months unless something goes terribly wrong. They shouldn't either, he's a young coach and has a squad full of complete overpaid shite that he needs to clear out. The back 3 he played today cost the best part of 140ml and none are fantastic, though it's far to early to write the French kid off. They are all one paced and easily exposed, de Ligt is on his 3rd big club since Ajax for a reason and Martinez is just crap, far to concerned with playing wannabe hard man to actually defend. As you say no left back,Mad looks good going forward as the RWB but leaves a slow one paced. They keep saying how good Ugarte is, he looks fine when playing Leicester reserves in the cups or Bodo Glimt and completely exposed and slow against anyone good. The forwards are not great either. The only one that's shown anything is the Danish kid but it's all hard work and he looks far from a consistent scorer. Rashford and Garnacho are pace merchants and both think they're something they're not

Chelsea are still being investigated by the PL for financial cheating. A massive points deduction could be in the post. How that Fernandez lad got away with his blatant racism is the summer should be a huge story. Spurs missed Bentancur for what on the face of it, is no where near as bad as the shit Fernandez was singing.

Son looks finished btw.

He’s a fucking genius this guy.

She just chastised me for referring to Croatians as Croats, as it's offensive. She got mixed up with Krauts.

Corners usually

They changed the rule didn't they so all this arm lark can't be off as can't score with it. On another note given the amount of massive cunts in league it really is some feat that arsenal are IMO now the biggest collection of absolute cunts in the league....just an utterly detestable shower.

He spend decades picking splinters out of his arse watching Peter Shilton, it's small surprise there's still a little gas left in the tank.

The Zonal Marking V Man Marking is always such a weirdly one sided nonsense debate, I blame SKy, they had a real bugbear with it years back to the point they'd highlight every goal conceded by teams who use it as a fundamental failing of the system whereas any goal conceded through man marking was just what happens in football.

HAHAHA They paid Newcastle around 10ml for that Dan Ashworth to be the new sporting director in July. They sacked him last night, Nice payoff coming his way

So the Mancs are still shit. Amorim or amirong?

Im on it. Wont be eating it.

Chelsea are not winning the league. This has been a fantastic weekend for us.

have you played the game, Pete? because Robbie has.

Can’t see Tottenham getting anything from this game, unfortunately.

Hang on a sec. Spurs are more than capable of losing this 8-2.

This happens Everytime with Saka. The cunt holds his knee, ankle, cock....you name it. And every single time he gets a foul and 30 secs later he is gingerly limping and 45 secs later, sprinting. It is almost like the fucking refs are blind when it comes to him and Arsenal, they don't spot the fouls for or against.

They have been like this under Arteta for quite sometime. Total cunts, every single one of them. Saka is the leader, the amount of times he gets a free kick compared to Mo is just silly. But yeah refs are not biased at all my arse. The fouls during corners should be punished too, it's ridiculous that they do it every time.

I hear this is the first time in football a team has had 5 players unavailable. Amazing. Source- the internet

Jim Ratcliffe is a massive fucking cunt.

Went to see It's A Wonderful Life at the Plaza last night. The best bit wasn't in the film though, it was the unbridled joy of a ten year old when he won a Liverpool shirt signed by Jurgen Klopp in the raffle that was drawn before the picture started.

Christ, this post gave me flashbacks to GCSE maths questions. How long would Preston Red have to work each day if he was on a six day week with only two days flexi? Show your workings.

I was wandering through to dinner with my missus in our hotel in Tunisia when I heard a fairly broad Manc accent call out 'Onana, you clown!' I hadn't realised there was a TV showing the footy. She's a massive Red too and was disappointed our game was off. We took a seat and just soaked up the almost palpable despair of this one fella. Living through the 90s and 00s with them at the top was horrible. Long may this continue.

What makes you think that? Just because literally everything he’s done up to now has lacked all principle and ethics, treating people as worthless and profit as everything? Very true. I look forward/ hope for the day when the Glazers have a fallout with Ratcliffe. It seems inevitable. Much like with Trump and the space Karen.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/tvs-dirtiest-cops-shield-took-toxic-masculinity-limit/ The question is always this: what’s the greatest American TV series, The Sopranosor The Wire? The answer (the real answer) is The Shield, the thundering, breakneck, perilously dark cop show that began in 2002 and followed the misadventures of corrupt LA detective Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) – or chased, more like, trying desperately to keep up with Mackey and his Strike Team, very much from the “shoot, steal, and crack skulls first, ask questions later” school of Los Angeles policing. Created by Shawn Ryan, The Shield was a different kind of cop show from day one. Walton Goggins – who played detective Shane Vendrell, Vic Mackey’s closest friend and partner in crime-fighting (and crime too) – got a hit of reality on the first day of filming, while goofing around with co-stars Chiklis and Kenny Johnson. “I’ll never forget, we were in Downtown Los Angeles,” Goggins tells me. “We were on the streets, kind of f___ing around and saying, ‘Man, this is so great, look at this badge!’ A police officer came up to us. He said, ‘What the f___ are you doing? This isn’t a game. There’s a hit out on a police officer right now. Put that badge back in your pocket and don’t ever forget the story that you’re telling.’ We realised the responsibility we were facing. It set the tone for that day and every day that came after.” Two decades later, The Shield is alarmingly prescient – toxic masculinity with a badge and a gun. Putting the boots to issues of race, sexual assault and police violence, The Shield would cuff modern sensitives behind the back, give them a good kicking, and plant some heroin in their back pocket for good measure. “It’s just as relevant now as it was then,” says Goggins. “It’s the story about police violence going up and crime going down. What are we willing to accept in the pursuit of our own security in America?” The show was partly inspired by the LAPD’s Rampart scandal – widespread corruption within an anti-gang unit that ranged from planting evidence and perjury to drugs and bank robbery. Shawn Ryan was also inspired by police ride-alongs he did while writing for the lightweight Don Johnson procedural, Nash Bridges. “I was seeing stuff I knew we couldn’t use on that show!” he says. Ryan didn’t expect his pilot script to amount to anything – a writing sample that might land him a staff gig one day, perhaps – until Peter Liguori, then president of the cable channel FX, discovered it in a pile of spec scripts. At the time, Michael Chiklis as Vic Mackey was a leap. “I'd been relegated to playing affable, roly-poly guys,” Chiklis told Entertainment Weekly. He had starred in bumbling comedy-drama The Commish, in the stay-at-home-dad sitcom Daddio, and as Curly in a biopic of The Three Stooges. But Ryan felt obliged to audition Chiklis. The pair had met at a toddler’s Gymboree and their wives were friends since childhood (Cathy Cahlin Ryan ultimately played Mackey’s wife in the series). It would have been awkward to not give Chiklis an audition. By then, Ryan was wondering if he needed to rewrite the script. With other actors reading for Vic Mackey, the character wasn’t clicking. “The writing didn’t mean anything until Michael started saying the words,” says Ryan. “He lent a certain twinkle in the eye that I hadn’t imagined. He understood that even the most evil people don’t spend 100 per cent of their time doing evil s___. He found the humanity.” The Shield was commissioned at the end of August 2001, less than two weeks before the attack of the Twin Towers. Ryan wondered if the show would still have been commissioned in the wake of 9/11. Cops were American heroes. Sonny Grosso, an ex-NYPD officer who was involved in The French Connection case, called Peter Liguori and protested the show. “Pete, please don't put this on,” Grosso said. “Cops are finally getting their due.” “The kind of questions we were asking – ‘What are you willing to accept from your law enforcement to keep you safe?’ – suddenly became ten times more relevant,” says Ryan. “You have to put The Shield in the context of its era. It premiered five or six months after 9/11. The American psyche was very different to what it had been six months earlier. We had what Michael and I called a Rorschach test. We tried not to editorialise too much about Vic Mackey’s actions. I would say to the writers, ‘Let’s just present it and let people make up their own minds.’” Premiering on March 12, 2002, The Shield begins with an unexpected bang: Mackey kills another cop to cover his tracks. Walton Goggins calls it the show’s “original sin” – an incident that haunts them for the next seven seasons. Based at “The Barn” – a station in the fictional district of Farmington – the Strike Team charge around the streets, strong-arming kingpins and gang-bangers with Mackey-style justice – falsifying evidence, battering suspects, dangling dealers from buildings, and skimming plenty off the top. “My thesis,” says Shawn Ryan, “was when you give somebody the leeway to make their own rules and do their own thing, don’t be surprised when they do it to benefit themselves.” At first glance, The Shield looks trashier than it really is – swirling, frenetic, loud. But once you’re locked in, the style is integral to the pace and aura of Vic Mackey. He's surely the busiest man in crime fiction, with stacks of crimes to solve and cover up piling on top of him by the minute. Pilot director Clark Johnson (who starred in ground-breaking procedural Homicide: Life on the Street) was largely responsible for the feel of the show. It’s intended to make you a witness – like you’re on a ride-along or standing in the back of the interrogation room. The camera is always a beat behind the action. Johnson was nominated for an Emmy for the pilot. The Shield came along – armed, dangerous, and spoiling for a rumble – at a time when TV drama was having a much-needed crisis of morality. Tony Soprano, who arrived three years earlier, was a murderous sociopath, bruised therapy patient, and family man all at once; and The Wire, debuting three months after The Shield, made anti-heroes out of its heroin dealers – it felt like a shotgun blast to the gut whenever they were blown away. Mackey and the Strike Team have their own code, dealing in different levels of corruption. Undoubtedly corrupt himself, Mackey won’t stand for anything that crosses the line of his own warped morality: murderers, rapists, and even dirtier cops need taking care of. Mackey is cleaning up the streets – by any means necessary – and anyone who stands in the way is collateral damage. When a paedophile needs a confession beating out of him, the other cops in the Barn – usually disgusted by Mackey’s methods – send him in and turn a blind eye. It’s only when the Strike Team greedily rips off the Armenian mob’s money laundering scam – the money train – that their untouchable swagger begins to unravel. Watched with 20 years’ hindsight, The Shield is hugely, unashamedly macho. Its characters stand on the spectrum of what we’d now recognised as toxic masculinity, each embodying different aspects: Vic Mackey is the alpha of gangland Los Angeles – if he can’t punish his enemy with his fists, he’ll seduce their wife instead; and Shane is a bigot and loudmouth whose relationship with Mackey swings from brotherly admiration to turning violently possessive. There's also Captain David Aceveda (Benito Martinez), who wants to take Mackey down – though mainly to serve his political aspirations; Detective Holland “Dutch” Wagenbach (Jay Karnes), emasculated by the Strike Team but whose ego – needing to be the smartest man in the room – is equally overbearing; and Julien (Michael Jace), a uniform officer who battles with his homosexuality – and homophobic abuse from fellow officers. Even the show’s female cops, Officer Danny Sofer (Catherine Dent) and Claudette Wyms (CCH Pounder) are masculinised – or at least, put to the test and forced to thrive in their macho environment. Claudette was originally written as a man; when CCH Pounder was cast, she insisted on keeping the manly dialogue. The obvious conflict in the Barn is between Mackey and Aceveda, but Claudette is Mackey’s real adversary – the sharpest moral compass in the Barn. “Results don’t excuse bad behaviour,” she tells Mackey early on. By Season 7 she’s been promoted to captain and is trying to take him down. Part of the show’s brilliance is that you root for all the characters, despite them being in active conflict with each other. Away from the Barn, Catherine Dent describes the Shield as being like “guerrilla filming” on the streets of Los Angeles. Walton Goggins recalls one trip to Tijuana, shooting so fast and cheaply that they had to race around and jump in and out of traffic to get their shots. (“We were the cheapest show on television at that time!’) Things got so chaotic during a raucous scene that he punched a stunt guy – or so he thought – for real. “This guy leaned into me, I leaned into him – and I clocked him with everything I had,” says Goggins. “It was like, ‘Oh god, can’t stop the scene!’ Everybody gets in the car and we take off, knowing that I just hit this guy. We came back around and it turns out he wasn’t a stunt guy – he was a detective with the Tijuana police department. It was just this chaos.” The intensity of the show created real bonds. Walton Goggins tells me that he just got off the phone with Michael Chiklis. “He’s like an older brother to me,” says Goggins. Catherine Dent agrees about the intensity of The Shield. “There’s a little bit of PTSD,” she says about the experience. “It was family of origin stuff. There is family trauma, which I think a lot of us experienced. But a great love for the people we worked with and for.” Dent also recalls being alarmed by the storylines when the show began. “When the first episodes came down it scared the s___ out of me,” she says. “I didn’t know what I had signed up for.” By the time Dent gave birth to her son after Season 5, she couldn’t even watch it. Indeed, The Shield is bleak from the very first episode, in which a crack-addict sells his eight-year-old daughter for $200. Following seasons would include babies being cut from wombs, penises severed by rat traps, and a mild-mannered rapist who likes to cuddle old ladies. Det. Wagenbach even turns to murder, strangling a cat just to see how it feels. The writers’ room, says Shawn Ryan, was filled with “crazy pitches”. Catherine Dent remembers one particularly disturbing episode, ‘Cherrypoppers’, about a ring of teenage prostitutes. “A lot of people had to get their brain wrapped around that,” she says. “It was radical – wouldn’t get made today. We were all talking about it, standing around the set saying, ‘Have you seen the script? Holy shit!’ Everybody was afraid of those scripts…” Dent fought against one storyline, in which her character shoots and kills an innocent Muslim man – an of-its-moment storyline that played into post-9/11 Islamophobia. The episode was written by Kurt Sutter, who later created Sons of Anarchy. “Kurt is a really intense guy and a really brilliant writer,” says Dent. “I didn’t want to shoot the Muslim guy. I said, ‘I don’t think Danny would do it.’ And all he said was, ‘Yeah, but you do.’ F___! How do I get my brain around that?” One of the series’ big shock moments sees Captain David Aceveda, played by Benito Martinez, held at gunpoint and sexually assaulted. CCH Pounder and Catherine Dent pointed out that it was the reversal of a well-worn trope – it simply flips the script within the show’s macho context. “Women had been betting raped on television for 30 years,” says Dent. “People were holding therapy sessions for Benito because he was getting raped on TV. No one called me up when I was getting raped on TV.” Shawn Ryan was less concerned with the shock moment than he was the dramatic possibilities. “That’s what made it worth doing,” says Ryan. “All the scenes that came afterwards – that made the assault not gratuitous.” FX executives weren’t afraid of shocking storylines. They challenged Ryan to crank it up by adding more of what they dubbed “Shield moments”. “They wanted something that felt very different from what you saw on network TV,” says Ryan. “They wanted to be able to say, ‘You can’t watch this on ABC!’ They’d give us notes saying they feel we don’t really have any ‘Shield moments’ in this episode. They seemed to be prodding me for more.” The Shield was a hit from the start. The pilot was nominated for three Emmys, with Michael Chiklis winning for Outstanding Lead Actor. Part of the appeal is its ever-changing line-up of supporting characters and villains: Armadillo (Danny Pino), a dealer whom Mackey punishes by searing his face on the hob; Margos Dezerian (Kurt Sutter), an Armenian hitman with a fetish for hacked-off feet; and Antwon Mitchell (Anthony Anderson), a reformed kingpin who’s not all that reformed. After a dip in ratings, producers discussed bringing in big name actors – back when TV was still seen as second rate. It was shows like The Shield that gave TV the prestige it has now. “My attitude,” says Shawn Ryan, “was, if we’re going to do that, do it very big, so people say, ‘Holy s___! I can’t believe this actor is doing the show!’” Glenn Close joined in Season 4 as Monica Rawling, the Barn’s new captain, followed by Forest Whitaker in Season 5 as Jon Kavanaugh, an internal affairs detective who investigates the Strike Team. “I think it was a great thing for Michael Chiklis,” says Shawn Ryan. “He had dominated those first few seasons. We could say, ‘OK, so you think you’re a good actor, Michael? Well, here comes Glenn Close… what can you show us now?’ I think that was an exciting challenge for him.” Forest Whitaker joined The Shield just before he was nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award – which he won – for The Last King of Scotland. Walton Goggins recalls that Whitaker wanted to turn public opinion on the Strike Team. It’s a testament to the murky grey morality of The Shield that you still root for Mackey. “It frustrated him no end,” says Goggins about Forest Whitaker. “People vilified him. He couldn't make sense of that.” Kavanaugh becomes unhinged in trying to bring Mackey down. In truth, everyone in Vic Mackey’s orbit gets sucked in – either corrupted or victimised. That goes for the audience too; as the noose tightens around Mackey in later seasons, and he comes closer to being taken down, it’s gripping, highly addictive stuff. “If you want anxiety in your life, watch the Shield!” laughs Walton Goggins. The cast were similarly gripped. “As soon as the scripts came out,” says Goggins. “We’d disappear into our trailers and read it, then walk back out of the trailers at the same time, looking at each and going, ‘What the f___!? Is this really happening? Are you really going to do this to me? Am I really going to do that to you?’” When Strike Team member Lem (Kenny Johnson) was killed off at the end of Season 5 – blown up by best friend Shane – Goggins and Chiklis’ reaction was “borderline violent anger”. They fought against their team being broken up, but the writers talked them round. “We transitioned from that to a feeling of gratitude,” says Goggins. “Because it was me taking my friend out. I could be there with him and go through that experience.” It's a harrowing scene: Shane drops a grenade into the lap of his friend then sobs and apologises as Lem dies, his guts blown to pieces. Goggins recalls that everyone was assembled behind the camera to watch. He looked into the camera and sent an appropriately heated message to the writers: “I remember saying, ‘F___ you man! This is what you motherf_____s wanted. This is what you wrote. You want to see how painful this is? You get joy out of this?’ I was in so much pain. My buddy was in so much pain. We went right into it. It was horrible, it was cowardly, it was brave. It was unforgivable but understandable. It was a very dark night.” Shane’s downfall is arguably the greatest tragedy of all – the character who’s sucked most deeply, most irretrievably into Mackey’s orbit. “Shane’s moral compass was formed largely by Vic Mackey,” says Goggins. When their friendship turns to a blood feud, Mackey cuts an immunity deal and confesses all – implicating Shane in seven seasons’ worth of murder, robbery, and corruption. Shane poisons his wife and son, and kills himself. Goggins is at peace with Shane’s tragic end. “I don’t think there was any other way for it to go,” he says. “Shane’s ultimate demise – Shane and his family – was a blessing for me. I was able to lay that down. He doesn’t consume my thoughts in the way that other characters I’ve played do. There’s a finality to that experience - a beginning, middle, and an end.” The Sopranos’ finale has been hailed – and criticised – for its ambiguous ending. Tony Soprano is either dead or alive. Vic Mackey, however, is doomed to languish in a hell of his own making: forced into an office job, skull-cracking privileges gone, despised by cops, his friends dead or banged up, and his family in witness protection. Chiklis asked for a suit one size too big for his final scene, giving the appearance of a diminished man. The last moment is about as complex and emotionally ravaging as a man just sitting behind a desk can get. Mackey lingers in the dark before stuffing a gun in his belt and following the sound of police sirens outside. It’s death or purgatory. The question is not only “What’s the greatest American series?” but also “Did Vic Mackey get what he deserved?” Walton Goggins has the only possible answer: “I’ll leave that up to the audience to decide.”

Royben Hodgrim.

Haven't done a full english for ages. Bacon egg and tomato on mini turkish bread is my go too for now. Can't wait to have the full hit in Liverpool at Christmas.

Ale for bitter

He’s not spunked £500m up the wall on average players yet. At least let him do that before they axe him. Some of his comments are very Hodgsonesque though. Not a massive team, we’ll get found out, we will suffer etc. I’m sure all the red mancs love hearing this stuff.

12.30 on New years day. They can be the first Premier League team to lose in 2025.

You can argue all you want about who is the best/your favourite. What i will never understand is those who dismiss Salah. He's been fucking phenomenal for us.

“Martinez has proved everyone wrong who said that he’s too short to be a centre back in the Premier League…”

That’s a legit goal for Arsenal, unfortunately. Robinson’s boot is playing Saliba onside.

It’s great. The MI6 agent who is chasing him is one annoying bitch though. It’s quite unusual in that you’re rooting for the heartless killer as opposed to the person trying to stop him.

ALTERNATE. it’s an anagram of Trent AA. but I’m not sure where the extra LE come from, in the wordplay. Did you work that out @Smell The Glove ?