Vincent Vega

David McDonnell in The Mirror described the 2 and a half hour journey by coach as an arduous journey in his report the other day, the brown nosing twat. Flying to games in this country is a fairly recent phenomenon is it not? I can maybe understand it after a midweek game that involves a six hour plus drive home like Bournemouth to Newcastle or something, but anything under 4 hours doesn’t seem that much of a chore to me given how luxurious these modern coaches are. I remember reading that the Mancs had flown to Leicester last season, how fucking ridiculous I’d that?

West Ham knocked them out on penalties the year we won it in 2022.

@dave u Seeing as you’re ignoring me in the Pickems thread I’ll see if I can get your attention here. Any chance you can get this weekend's games up for the Pickems? The fixtures for the first weekend of October are up, but this weekend's have been missed off. Cheers

Spirit Of Shankly responds: https://x.com/spiritofshankly/status/1706774060506488875?s=61&t=BGbb73uvqmXk3ziEY9g0bw

Coughs @dave u

@dave u Dave, any chance you can get this weekend's games up? The fixtures for the first weekend of October are up, but this weekend's have been missed off. Cheers

Disgraceful but sadly not surprising.

They’ll probably get the Sheikh to appeal to the British government.

This one tickled me.

It’s like Swap Shop or Tiswas isn’t it?

There’s speculation that Football Focus might be cancelled due to ever falling viewing figures. I don’t think I’ve watched since Bob Wilson stopped presenting it, so no idea who’s still tuning in now. Anyway, seeing this reported today got me thinking that whist I enjoyed Football Focus growing up, I always preferred Saint & Greavsie. Football Focus always felt really serious whilst Saint & Greavsie was always a good laugh. So which show did everyone else prefer?

Mo’s goal last night was his 48th goal contribution in his last 34 games. He’s operating on another level to everyone else including that Noggie orc at City.

Looks like the Tories are playing into Lib Dems hands big time with all this climate stuff Stronts. Should be a strong showing from your lot next year. Lib Dems are looking like kingmakers again new Of the 91 seats in which the party came second in 2019, 80 are Tory-held — it’s time to start paying attention to Ed Davey Patrick Maguire Thursday September 21 2023, 9.00pm BST, The Times There’s something missing from the debate over Rishi Sunak’s green policies. The argument Downing Street would like to have — indeed, the argument the Labour Party is determined not to have — pits a cartoon version of Ed Miliband against the tradesmen of England. And it is true that the prime minister’s new belligerence on questions of climate is a challenge to Sir Keir Starmer. To complain that the leader of the opposition has not yet explained his vision for the British economy is to ignore the hundreds of hours he and his shadow ministers have spent hymning green industries and net zero. Now the Conservatives are to spend many hundreds more reminding you exactly what it is those shadow ministers said. Almost no attention has been paid to the opportunity Sunak has afforded another knight of the realm: Sir Ed Davey. Let’s not sound too surprised. Such are the occupational hazards of life as leader of the Liberal Democrats. But history tells us that what this week means for the Lib Dems will in time take on an outsized significance. The collapse in the Liberal vote in 1951 saw Attlee fall to Churchill; tactical voting in 1997 quickened Blair’s landslide. Davey’s aides note smugly that a Blair-style swing will deliver Starmer a majority of just one. Davey’s predecessors railed against the brewers and established church. An undergraduate environmentalist, his own animating struggle is the defilement of England’s fields, rivers and beaches by concrete, asphalt and sewage. That is the argument he would like to have with the Tories. Sunak’s MPs in the south of England feared he had already won it even before this week. If so, it is difficult to plot any route to another Tory government that does not run through some unforeseen catastrophe for Labour. All of which, I am sorry to have to tell you, means it is time to start paying attention to everything else that Davey is saying and doing, starting with his party’s conference in Bournemouth this weekend. The last time they held their conference in person, in the hot, hysterical autumn of 2019, the Lib Dems met in the same place. Implausibly, journalists were briefed by the former future Labour leader Chuka Umunna about polling that suggested Jo Swinson would win her party 200 MPs. Delegates voted to fight the next election on a promise to cancel Brexit without recourse to a second referendum. Swinson was sold to voters as: “Your Candidate for Prime Minister.” And look how it ended: £11 million spent on returning 11 MPs, not one of whom was Jo Swinson. Four years on, the Lib Dems return to Bournemouth in rude health. Here one could quote any number of great historians on the tidal fortunes of third parties but only the late Sid Waddell on Big Cliff Lazarenko really speaks to the moment: it’s the greatest comeback since Lazarus. Davey has won nearly 1,000 new councillors, mostly from the Tories, and four MPs in by-elections that a blue-rinsed donkey would once have held in its sleep. Those victories were made possible, or at least comfortable, by a non-aggression pact with Labour — never negotiated directly, sources close to Starmer tell me, but via nods and winks. And don’t Conservative MPs know it. Of the 91 seats in which Lib Dems finished second in 2019, 80 are Tory-held, almost all of them in the south. Even Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, reminds colleagues that he too is at risk. In 2021, the Tory backbenchers with most to fear from a Lib Dem revival convened a WhatsApp group named the Love Bombers after David Cameron’s calculated flattery of centrist voters. Now (wisely) renamed the Local Champions, reports from its 74 members of aggressive Lib Dem activity ring out from their phones like a funeral toll. MPs marooned on the western front of English politics — Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Gloucestershire — offer daily counsels of despair, as do those in Home Counties towns traditionally untroubled by such worries. John Major’s old maids bicycling to Communion through the morning mist are no longer voting Tory. This week their MPs met in the Commons for a crash course in campaigning. The advice? Outwork your opponents. Focus on local issues. Would that they could. Conservative activists, an ageing and unhappy few, are incapacitated by gloom. “Their members are younger, more numerous, and literally more mobile than ours,” sighs a former minister. “Our lot increasingly don’t want to go out.” Nor do MPs. Earlier this month they were invited to join Claire Coutinho, the new energy secretary, on the doors in Mid Bedfordshire, a coveted Lib Dem target. Not one turned up. The fatalism has only intensified since Sunak’s speech on net zero, itself an illustration of their impotence. “Red wall MPs can bully No 10 into any policy position they want,” says one backbencher. “They don’t listen to us.” None of this is wishful spin from Davey. This is the Conservative Party’s assessment of its own standing in middle England. At this point you might reasonably ask what any of these victories are for. In his three years as leader Davey has made no secret that his raison d’être is to unseat Tory MPs. But to what end? Obsessed with pavement politics, the Lib Dems — as Nye Bevan complained of Hugh Gaitskell — can resemble a desiccated calculating machine. Winning elections is one thing, wielding power another. Coalition taught them that lesson the hard way. George Osborne, author of their annihilation in 2015, put it best. “In the end, their ‘all things to all people’ approach caught up with them and then they were no things to no people.” Davey bears the psychological scars of that election, and other disasters since. And so next week he will speak with one person in mind: a middle-aged Conservative voter in rural England. Their disappointments from 13 years of Tory rule will dominate his speech: the NHS, those filthy rivers. But there will be one intriguing exception. In conversations with senior Lib Dems it does not take long to discern a wariness about this Labour leadership and the limits of its appeal. “We can’t be seen to be grabbing onto their coat-tails,” says a source close to Davey. “Not least because there’s nothing there to grab on to.” We will hear this publicly too. I’m told Davey will criticise Starmer for failing to commit to electoral reform, the prize that so humiliatingly eluded Nick Clegg. It may be a swipe in a speech that is soon forgotten. But I suspect it is really the announcement of his party’s price tag in a hung parliament. For now the Labour leadership insist they will ignore it. But for how long?

I think they’re going to kick him into touch. My bet is he’ll be gone by Xmas in a last ditch bid to save as many seats as possible. He’s now a liability, the Tories poll ratings show they’re going to get routed, and his personal ratings are going through the floor. He’s abysmal and everyone has cottoned on.

Aspas always reminded me of ET when he was dying.

Trump jr’s Twitter account hacked.

Unless they can sell thousands of corporate tickets, they won’t make a massive amount more than they currently do from the new stadium. Our club sell thousands of premium tickets to day trippers for £150 to £250 per ticket for every home match, the very same day trippers they obsess over and say makes us a lesser club. There’s hardly anyone outside of a 60 mile radius interested in watching them, and there’s hardly thousands of Merseyside businesses lining up to pay thousands for corporate smoozing, especially with the level of football they serve up.

Listen to him making a complete tit of himself here. https://x.com/theanfieldtalk/status/1703732176833970282?s=61&t=BGbb73uvqmXk3ziEY9g0bw

A brief two minute video of Harry Lambert explaining his tax proposals from that long New Statesman article I posted earlier in the thread. https://x.com/thenewsagents/status/1702694037050757150?s=61&t=BGbb73uvqmXk3ziEY9g0bw There is no reason Labour shouldn’t be looking at policies like the ones suggested here.

https://x.com/optajoe/status/1703080703464706079?s=61&t=BGbb73uvqmXk3ziEY9g0bw