Vincent Vega

Well this sounds like a load of shite. https://x.com/martynziegler/status/1729174944590840208?s=46&t=qV1qKn65kgx3vq9eN8GEGw

I like to think that Spurs injury crisis is karma for the outrageous luck they had when they played us.

Burnley need to sack Kompany. You can’t play Man City style football with Championship players in the Premier League. I hope he stays in place until we play them in December as I think we could get a record score against them.

Addressed to: S Mansour Abu Dhabi Palace UAE

This was a cracker.

@dave u Any chance of updating the Pickems so we can put in this weekend’s games Dave? Cheers

Not sure why you would think that, his past comments have always been about staying at Liverpool and going on to get the captaincy. Liverpool right back Trent Alexander-Arnold has already played in two Champions League finals and is set to make his 100th appearance for the club on Saturday and the 21-year-old now has his sights set on the captain's armband. "I am not shy in saying that (being Liverpool captain) is a dream for me," he said in an interview with the BBC here. "Whether it comes true or not is not up to me. I don't pick who is captain. "But that is something I would love to do one day. Captaining Liverpool is something I have always dreamed of and it is something that motivates me." Alexander-Arnold grew up in the city and entered the club's academy at the age of six. He has no thoughts about playing anywhere else. "I've always been a Liverpool player, Liverpool has always been my home," he added. "I have never thought about changing clubs. "When I grew up, the dream was always to play for Liverpool. Now I am living the dream and I can't see that changing."

In the replies…….

Just listening to The Rest Is Football podcast with Linekar and Shearer talking about Everton's points deduction. They've got Nick Harris on with them who as any Twitter users will know spends a lot of his time calling out Man City for their cheating. Anyway he's been very interesting on Everton and hasn't sugar-coated what they've done at all. You can tell Linekar and Shearer want to give Everton the benefit of the doubt, but Nick Harris is methodically explaining how the PL did their best to help Everton out, but they couldn't stop taking themselves taking the piss. Well worth a listen: Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-rest-is-football/id1701022490 Spotify -

If I was heading over then I would probably look at staying in Bray which is not too far south of Dublin, and then travel into the city on the day of the final. Bray is lovely and would be far less busy.

They really do need to shut the fuck up and take their medicine. They should be thanking their lucky stars that the punishment has arrived in a season where it looks extremely likely that it won’t have serious repercussions.

Looks like Jonathan Northcross will be joining their list of sworn enemies after his piece today in the Sunday Times. FOOTBALL | JONATHAN NORTHCROFT ‘Reckless’ Everton pay price of trying to live the dream Club ignored multiple warnings and splurged money under Lampard in bid to gatecrash Premier League elite We should start with the goal that kept Everton in the Premier League. The ball was with Idrissa Gueye, who played a diagonal into the box towards Amadou Onana whose jump pressured Bournemouth’s Matías Viña into a poor clearance. Abdoulaye Doucouré gathered and from 20 yards screamed home a shot. It secured Everton the 1-0 win, on the final day of last season, that kept them above relegated Leicester City. Start with that goal, because reaction to an independent commission’s decision to dock Everton ten points for breaching the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules (PSR) has very quickly descended into the dry fiscal argument and ripe whataboutery that tends to derail conversations around financial fair play. When, really, the nub of it is the actual football. Should Gueye, Onana and Doucouré have been on the pitch for Everton that day? Effectively, it is Everton’s decision to spend money they didn’t have (by PSR calculations) to put them there that has incurred an unprecedented punishment. Gueye, Onana, Doucouré, the goal — survive. Instead of VAR, we will go to the appeals courts to discover if it should have stood. Everton’s penalty is for losses totalling £124.5 million from 2019 to 2022, which is £19.5 million above the £105 million limit for any three-season period set out by PSR. The commission’s 41-page judgment details the many ways in which Everton sought to justify the breach. Some were remarkable, and the way the club tested the patience of the commission — which had to wade through 40,000 documents — is seen in the judgment’s rather peeved and non-legal language in places. Words like “recklessness” are used; the phrase “less than frank”. Important to the case is interest payable on loans taken by Everton to build their new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock — which the Premier League allowed to be factored into the club’s accounts in 2021 but not 2022. Also involved are disputes over the extent to which Covid affected Everton’s losses, and whether certain exceptional circumstances should be factored in such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (which stopped Everton accessing a £200 million naming rights sponsorship, the bulk up front, from sanctioned oligarch Alisher Usmanov), and a star footballer (“Player X”) being dismissed for breach of contract. But the bigger picture is the football. The reason Everton were sailing close to the wind in the first place lay in the extraordinary investment that Moshiri made in chasing success at the start of his ownership. He has spent £750 million since taking control in February 2016, with by far the biggest chunk going on transfers, wages, coaching changes, and associated fees. By the end of his first five years, Everton’s net transfer spend was £230 million (the sixth-highest in the Premier League during the period) and they had one of the world’s best-paid managers, Carlo Ancelotti, on £14 million per year, having already spent £37 million hiring and paying off coaches under Moshiri. “What we’re ultimately guilty of is that we dared to dream and rolled the dice,” said a source at Goodison. “The football club took itself to the line.” However, the source pointed out that in this period, Everton were also close to making Moshiri’s strategy work. The aim was, through a big initial outlay, to become a top-five club, access Uefa money, grow commercially and have a squad rich in value from which losses could be recouped through player sales. It’s forgotten that under Ancelotti, just after Christmas in 2020, Everton were second in the Premier League. Doucouré was one of the expensive transfers of the Ancelotti era but if such signings — and decisions such as hiring James Rodríguez for £250,000 per week — seem foolhardy now, the rationale was that having employed one of the game’s greatest managers “you don’t buy a Ferrari then be unwilling to put petrol in it”. It’s that age old football story of living the dream before the living nightmare comes. From early 2019, long before Ancelotti’s appointment in December that year, Everton were concerned about PSR and began petitioning the Premier League for leeway in how costs related to its new stadium could be capitalised. They decided to work with the league rather than obfuscate, and perhaps this led to the Premier League striking a deal with Everton in August 2021 that is now the cause of disquiet among other clubs. Essentially, the league agreed to let Everton off from its “forecast non-compliance” on condition it adhered to certain disciplines. Other clubs are unhappy because on hearing rumours of this deal the Premier League’s executive “went quiet” when asked why no prosecution was taking place. The league’s conditions included Everton tightly controlling transfer spending. Rafa Benítez was Everton’s recently appointed manager and having been sold the job as a “project” was told within days of arriving there would be virtually zero spending on players. Needing wingers to supply Dominic Calvert-Lewin, he had Luis Díaz and Dwight McNeil lined up but instead could only sign Andros Townsend and Demarai Gray for a combined £1.5 million. The only striker he could recruit was a free transfer, Salomón Rondón. It is what happened next that appears to have stung the Premier League to prosecute. Just before Benítez was sacked in January 2022, Everton sold Lucas Digne for £25 million. Rather than bank the money and make inroads into the PSR shortfall, Everton spent it — and more — on recruiting Nathan Patterson and Vitaliy Mykolenko for a combined £30 million. No sooner had Frank Lampard taken over, Everton signed Dele Alli — the deal involved no transfer fee but high wages and significant additional costs. Then, in the summer, with Lampard pressuring Moshiri to allow a revamp, Everton bought Onana for £34 million, McNeil for £20 million, Neal Maupay for £15 million, James Garner for £9 million and Gueye for £8 million while recruiting James Tarkowski and loanee Conor Coady without transfer fees, but with sizeable wages and associated costs. In the commission’s judgment, under the heading, “Overspend despite repeated warnings” there is a damning passage. Everton had reached a position where they had to ask the Premier League for permission to make transfers. Each time the Premier League approved a signing it warned the club about PSR. The judgment says “that for Everton to have persisted in player purchase in the face of such plain warnings was recklessness that constitutes an aggravating factor”. An observer with close knowledge of how Everton were operating during that period suggests this summer 2022 splurge under Lampard — after they had bent over backwards to help Everton comply — “is what really pissed off the Premier League”. However, Everton could point to the fact they only spent around £10 million net in summer 2022 (having recouped £60 million by selling Richarlison) and that across the past three seasons they have made a transfer profit. This shows, they might argue, they have taken PSR on board — and that under a new executive, new manager (Sean Dyche) and new director of football (Kevin Thelwell) prudency is a priority in deals. It is hard not to feel this is a club paying for decisions made by those no longer there, such as the former director of football Marcel Brands, the former chief executive Denise Barrett-Baxendale, and the chief finance and strategy officer Grant Ingles who, during the disputed period, liaised with the Premier League on behalf of the club. Did they misread the warnings the league was issuing about PSR, underestimate the points deduction threat and overestimate their ability to talk Everton out of trouble? We might never know. Both declined to appear before the commission to give evidence that might have helped their former employer. Within Everton’s proud and fiery fan base there is understandable consternation that their club, their littler and less-litigious club, is the first and only club to be punished this way — and for a single breach, when Manchester City — into whom investigations began in 2019 — have been charged with 115 breaches and yet are said to be at least two years away from facing judgment. But if this situation is “unfair on Everton fans” is it fair on fans of clubs relegated while Everton were putting players on the pitch whose recruitment challenged PSR? On Leicester fans? Leicester, after all, are a club who since their 2015-16 title win put PSR at the heart of their strategy, ensuring growth was paid for through the sales of a star player every year. It led them to sell N’Golo Kanté, Riyad Mahrez, Harry Maguire, Ben Chilwell and Wesley Fofana. It caused Brendan Rodgers to be disillusioned after being told he could not make significant signings in 2022, and his regime to go into reverse, ending with relegation. Someone in Leicester’s camp said, “what sticks in the craw, when you’ve done your best to comply, is looking at another club not bothering”. Maybe PSR is exactly like VAR: not working for anyone at the moment and only taking us into a world of unsatisfying arguments and minutiae.

Even if Haaland is missing, that Alvarez would probably score against us anyway. Not looking forward to that match, our recent record at their place is awful. I might go and watch Napoleon in the cinema instead of putting myself through that.

If you came across Howard Webb whilst playing Grand Theft Auto, what way would you choose to kill him?

The only good thing about this final is that I can take joy in whoever gets beaten.

I think that was the moment I knew the league was done, about three weeks before we played the Mancs.

That game and Leicester at Anfield about a month before when Milner scored a last minute penalty, and then beating City 3-1 at Anfield in the November to go about 11 points ahead seemed to sap their belief that season. Their own iffy form never recovered from that gap. This is also another highlight from that time.

That one is bound to be in my top five disappointing things under Klopp. Fucking China virus.

Not a moment as such, but an incredible achievement. This 44 game unbeaten run from a loss at City on 3 January 2019 until a loss at Watford on 29 February 2020. Before that Watford match the league table showed we had played 27, won 26, drawn 1 and lost 0.

The timing of Jurgen’s contract extension. The day after that utter cunt Johnson won a big majority in the election. It was almost as if he knew we all needed a lift.

The Barcelona 4-0 in the semis was an even bigger high than the final for me. After undeservedly being beaten 3-0 in the first leg when everything went Barcelona’s way, we go and produce a world class performance against a still very strong Barcelona and do what everyone thought was impossible. Incredible night.

Doing that “Boom” thing in an interview with tv and then laughing at Bayern Munich for getting beaten.