gkmacca

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.

2 hours ago, Ron B said:

Igor Biscan looking like a middle-aged warrior-poet who ended up at the negotiating table at the Versailles Conference… 

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!') 

1 hour ago, Anubis said:

Is that the Scottish bloke.

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.

58 minutes ago, Mook said:

 

People keep saying it's the clowns running it who are the problem, but we're all fucking clowns really, we make mistakes, are open to influence, we're inconsistent & we're human.

...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.

Everything about TV pundits these days looks as if a 12 year old organised it. Take the obsession they have with bringing out a little table and doing the post-match chat by the pitch, often with umbrellas up to shield them from torrential downpours while the sound of the grass mower keeps drowning them out. Studios were introduced, amongst many other reasons, to make that kind of TV chat easier to conduct, and what do these twats do? They think that 'progress' is to go back outside again. They'll probably try going without microphones next, maybe cameras, too. That actually WOULD be an improvement.

Everything about his approach in recent years has been bloated. He employs the most ridiculously large private 'team' of analysts and assistants, whom he keeps on the payroll throughout his periods between jobs. What he doesn't have is someone like Pako who will question him, challenge him and keep him focused on the essential part of management. He's grown so many trees around himself he can't see the wood. 

The coverage of the likely partnership of Edwards and Hughes has been very entertaining, in the sense of watching some hacks (and fans) straining to retain the 'Edwards was a genius for selling shite players to Hughes for inflated sums' idea, whilst adding the new notion that 'Hughes was a genius for buying players from Edwards who eventually came good, even if we only mean one of them'. It's a dream ticket, no doubt about it.

12 minutes ago, Bob said:

 

There's no empirical evidence of people getting promoted to do a job higher up the organisational tree than the one they have previously excelled at? It's practiacll6 every person in a senior role.ij business.

 

Doesn't mean hull excel again, but there's plenty of prior.

There's no empirical evidence of HIM, Michael Edwards, being suited to excelling at this particular new role, rather than the particular old role, to which he has now been appointed, given the fact that, since leaving his old role, his consultancy work has been much the same. How you can possibly, honestly, apply your hermeneutic skills to my post and arrive at that ridiculous generalisation, without wishing to score some deluded cheap point, is utterly beyond me, and, I dare say, everyone else on this fucking planet. ("ii6, .ij")

Edwards did well in a certain role. He's now been brought back in another role. Hopefully it will work, but there's no empirical evidence it will. His speciality is precisely what the person he'll hire to be sporting director will now do. If he's not repeatedly overruling whoever gets that role, I'm not sure what he'll be up to that's based on his expertise. 

1 hour ago, Anubis said:

Ha ha. Forest bench having a go at Van Dijk. What about Danilo’s rugby tackle on Danns, you pricks.

That was an outrageous foul on Danns, I simply cannot understand how that is allowed to go - both hands around him, hauling him to the floor.

Take that, doubting feckers.

That's our dream, they're having. It's delightful seeing them live it.

Absolutely thrilled for the lad. (By the way: If we had a goal chalked off on Sunday, we should have had had a pen for that.) But great for the lad, that's joyful.

1 minute ago, ZonkoVille77 said:

"First shot on target, its a goal"

 

Ye drunken fucking blind cunt,  McCoist. Elliot literally had a shot saved

 

ITV are desperate to drive home their narrative. And Matterface is a self-confessed Chelsea fan.

12 minutes ago, Ashberry said:

The end of contract injury. Happens often, I only remember Emre Can who was ever honest about it. Get injured at this stage and he'll struggle to find another club come summer. He won't be playing for us again.

The bloke was in tears when he missed the final a couple of  years ago. He's a top pro as well as a great player. I cannot understand the idea that such a player sits there happy that his body has packed up. It's probably soul destroying for him.

3 hours ago, JustTosh said:

It may be unpopular but I agree with you.

 

Endo offside? Check!

Did he interfer with the play? Check!

 

People seem to compare the block from Endo with other incidets after corners etc. They're missing the point. The goal wasn't overruled because of Endo's block alone, it was disallowed because he was offside and interferred with the play.

 

 

No, the offside was not the reason. Peter Walton, for example, said:

"Wataru Endo was standing in an offside position but he does not commit an offence because of that. The Liverpool midfielder goes on to commit an offence — interfering with play by stopping Levi Colwill from getting a clear run at the ball to try to stop Van Dijk. The law is quite clear on that aspect and so Van Dijk’s header was correctly disallowed.

If the offence had only been offside, that would not have been a subjective call and there would have been no need for Chris Kavanagh, the referee, to go to the monitor".

What Walton and other refs fail to explain, however, is how the fact that many players, many times in many games, in the same or similar situations in the box, do what this player did and they don't get penalised. Inconsistency, once again, is the issue.