gkmacca

Bob Paisley's first words to the squad as their new manager were: 'I didn't really want this job'. The collective downer after Shankly left the building lasted quite a while. I can't see any way of avoiding something similar this time around, although, with this group of players, the right kind of results could help everyone to move on.

Yes, that was quite interesting. Apparently his keeper is about 36 and stays stuck on his line at all times, so hopefully with Alisson in goal he'll be a bit more ambitious.

Of course., they could always just look impartial. Just a thought.

When did he stop being Basque?

There was one attack in the area when he got the ball and shaped up as if to have a shot on his right foot - I mean, you really have to have a genuine threat of doing that in order for it to work! For a player of his dedication to somehow avoid working on his right foot, well, it's astonishing.

Usual biased Sky commentary - he even tried to make out McAllister had cost some kind of sensational fee, instead of being pretty much a bargain. Quite ludicrous. Decent performance against a deeply irritating side and a ref who lost it very early on.

Well, they're not playing that well. A few good movements out of defence but that's far outweighed by the ridiculous diving/simulation that's going on, combined with blatant time-wasting and awful refereeing. With a team that's as micro-managed as much as Brighton are, I think anyone who dares to run at them is going to cause plenty of chaos. Matip was great at that, but Bradley can do it, Diaz can do it - that's what we need. They're set up for predictable passing against them. It needs something cuter to shake them up.

I certainly don't regard one as more of an issue than the other. I wasn't looking forward to either versions of it coming here. I don't mind it for certain situations, but I just can't see why, with the players we've got, anyone would be that rigid.

I doubt we even needed to re-hire Edwards. We probably only needed that Josh bloke who pops up on YouTube. Tap-tap-tap...stare...Think...Tap-tap-tap...Ding: The solution. The Enlightenment has been going for about five centuries, and still hasn't delivered. Football has worked it all out in about ten years.

"Randomness is our Rohypnol". "Ambivalence is our algorithm". "Rashness is our rationality".

Alonso's past decisions show he has absolutely zero romanticism when it comes to making career decisions. A huge amount of emotional nonsense has been projected on to him by fans but it's never been convincing. Move on.

I'm not keen on three at the back, but perhaps good old Ruby (whose career I've followed carefully for, oh, at least a fortnight) will embrace the different range of defenders we have.

Southgate is also - and has always been - a massive Manchester United fan. So let's put all this talk in a poop bag and dispose of it promptly.

Perfect description!

Looking at the coverage yesterday, it was quite interesting to be reminded that Torres was fairly pleasant as an interviewee while Agger never pretended he didn't hate it all, then I remembered that Agger stuck his elbow out and flattened Torres in that Chelski game and my good sense returned. (All the same, christ, Agger must be a nightmare to interview at the best of times - 'What do you think our of our current centre backs?' 'Not bad'. Fank yew!')

Yes. Something to do with 'Love Island' as far as I could tell. I wouldn't watch a show like that and god knows there's enough LFC fans in the media to have them found someone less sleazy.

Could you imagine Chelsea or Man City doing something like this? It's one of the special things I love about the club. (Not so much whoever thought to hire the dick from that 'realty show' to co-commentate.).

The only thing that bothers me, mainly because it appears to have been entirely ignored, is that Edwards is now in a role at the club where he simply cannot continue to indulge his Barthesian love of being a shadowy figure. He's now in a role where, whether he likes it or not, there will be times when he will need to be a spokesperson for the club, and he will need to do it really well. All the articles about his second coming happily ignore that fact and simply repeat the childishly indulgent myth about his slippery non-presence. That's not about simple promotion. That's about taking on new responsibilities. It ought to be part of the chatter around him.

...Nuffink we can do, man, except medicate ourselves. The Tories, VAR, global capitalism, Putin, Trump - we all make mistakes, man, they're just like us, man, it's all relative anyhow, just let it all go and medicate.

We've reached a new stage in the process now. Some of the officials have grown so passive they're not actually doing the basics any more. In last Sunday's game, for example, one of the manc players went to take a corner, and placed the ball more blatantly outside the corner area than I've ever seen, and the linesman didn't even look. That might seem trivial but it's a sign of how careless these idiots have become. Same with throw-ins - most refs and linesmen don't mind these days how much further up/deeper players take them. Goalkeepers carrying the ball just outside the area before kicking - happens most games. In contrast to this routine sloppiness, the obsessive-compulsive measuring of potentially offside toe-tips and fingernails gets worse. So essentially we have a game that's never been so sloppily-managed, disguised by occasional hi-tech interventions. It's like some old corner grocery shop sometimes firing up a desk top pc to compare a price with ASDA.

The whole thing just defied reason. Time and again this weird Mr Egg Head fake villain escapee from some second rate comic strip gets to be portrayed as some kind of evil genius without actually doing anything at all. They're shite and yet, once again, we contrived to hand them a victory. Do many of our players even know that much about the mancs? I doubt it. So why do they start these games with such a sense of anxiety? We had more than enough chances to destroy them and all of them wasted.

Well, we came back, but jeez, what a ghastly start. Play the game, not the occasion, and all of that - it's not as if these players haven't played in far bigger games before, so why they seemed that heavy-legged and dim-witted is a mystery. Some of the passing was atrocious, we were way too narrow, thanks in part to one of Diaz's snoozes, and the awful way we tried to play out from the back was just painful. And on top of that - this ref will give us absolutely nothing. Hopefully we come out in the second half with a proper attitude, use our pace and pull them apart.

We're being made to look less clever and confident by a team that gives each other high fives for conceding corners. It's exasperating.

The times of Dyche's press conferences all come with the added words, 'roughly speaking'. It's the worms that are to blame.

Absolutely atrocious TV direction to almost miss Clarke's first goal, and all of the build-up, because of a replay. And of course no apology at all. I've said it before, these days the ball can go from one end to another in about seven seconds - if the director has to show a replay, he should be looking at the action ready to cut back to real time. Frustrating we took our foot off the pedal - I get them taking it easy but you can do that and still keep the passing pacy. Get the goal-hungry kids on second half.