Manny

Then he's going to the afterparty on a bronze moped, I heard.

Must say them collapsing from 2-0 with two own goals has rather cheered me up. In this dismal season you've gotta take the small wins where you can. This, though, is presumably how the bitters started out?

Thought that was Sigurdsson on the top row fourth from the right.

I thought it was decent. Better than late GoT when it was at its worst, most definitely - but not as good as early GoT when it was at its best.

Fucks me right off when they call it that. So fucking contrived.

Can't wait for this one either. No doubt it'll again be completely unworkable and ineffective on every level, but they'll be able to cram loads of dog-whistle language into the wording which will stoke the divisions in the interest of short-term power. I'll give you evens on something like "for too long the left have ignored..." being the opening gambit. An attacking soundbite dressed up as policy.

The migrant policy is, to my mind, an absolute first in British political history so to a certain extent I have to congratulate the Tories on that. Most policies are mostly window dressing and theatre anyway, but there's usually a semblance of "this is what we want to do" at the heart of it. The migrant policy is 100% theatre though, absolutely none of it is serious in any way. It'll get a load of immigrant-bashers rubbing their thighs - which helps the Tories portray themselves as the party that's tough on the foreigns. It'll also get challenged in the courts and by the opposition because it's an awful policy (both morally and operationally - not that it matters though, it's not meant to be delivered) - which helps the Tories portray themselves (ridiculously) as the disruptor party that's constantly challenging the establishment, and help them wage their true war on accountability in the process. It's the obvious end-point of the path we've been on in the past decade or so. Stick a complete fabrication of a policy up for debate in the chamber and in the country more widely, and in the meantime: HEADS BACK IN THE FUCKING TROUGH WHILE THEY'RE LOOKING THE OTHER WAY, LADS!

Fair fucks to you. I did RED January a few years ago - running every day, 5k minimum, for a month. It wasn't as awful as I first feared but I still took a week off once the 1st Feb rolled around! Dropped out of running quite a bit when we had our little'un (and I started working from home a lot more) in 2020, so I've lost a lot of pace (and gained a lot of weight) and I've found it hard to get back into it as I'm so far off what I used to be capable of that I just find it dispiriting. Managed a half marathon at the weekend and was seconds away from getting under 2hrs though so I'm not as far off as I think, just need to keep the fitness I've built up now!

My ceiling has translated from Halmstad to Malmo to Orebo to Neuchatel Xamax to the Swiss national team. So I find the question insulting. To suggest that, because I have moved from one club to another, that the ceiling which has stood me in good stead for 35 years and made me one of the most respected coaches in Europe isn’t suddenly high enough, is very hard to believe.

Yeah, Nagelsmann seems a decent manager but there's an assumption that he's decent already in his early thirties so he'll just improve and therefore be frighteningly good by the time he's 40. He might just be at his ceiling and as good as he'll ever be, largely. It's kind of a bit like some young players who break through and look great when they're young - but the question is whether they're very good young but still well below their ceiling and will therefore improve like other players do as they get older (but from a very high base), or if they're basically as good as they'll ever be at the age of 18.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/mar/23/manchester-united-bid-chaos-leads-to-growing-fears-glazers-may-not-sell Talk that the Glazers have just been using the selling process to get an inflated valuation figure so they can refinance with better rates. Like over inflating the value of your house to get a better mortgage product as your loan to value is lower.

We just moved so we applied for a mortgage in May last year - which was lucky as interest rates had started creeping up but they hadn't quite gone mental as they did after the TrussTeng budget. If we didn't have the offer sitting on the kitchen table we wouldn't have been able to afford the move, quite frankly, so we're glad to be on a 5 year fixed rate. Fuck knows what we'll do when the wife goes off on maternity leave in the autumn. My salary barely covers the mortgage, council tax and energy bills. Fully conscious though that I'm comparatively very lucky, so I'm not complaining. The country is utterly broken, whatever the tory cunts say about the economy, none of it is felt by the ordinary working person. I watched that Panorama with Ros Atkins about the complete fall in real terms pay over the past 15 years and there was a family in Cornwall on there who couldn't even afford to change the lightbulb before next payday. The mum's pay was swallowed entirely by bills, the daughter pitched in with her pay to cover what she could of the rest and the son went to school to get fed. I know it's not news to most of us on here and I'm preaching to the choir, but fucking hell, this is what we are now. A whole swathe of people in the country who are just existing - no joy, no colour to their lives. Just work and struggle. It's not society. It's the return of feudalism by another name.

Just seen Palace’s remaining fixtures. They’ve played all the good sides twice now, so most tough fixtures are out of the way. Just mid table and bottom half sides left mostly so they were probably always going to see results improve and stay up - but as usual the Owl will do fuck all and regress to the mean and take all the credit. Fuck him, the fucking cunt.

I take your point but there are also English players with long associations to their former clubs who've done well when they've moved, even after pretty acrimonious transfers. Ashley Cole and Sol Campbell spring to mind; you could make a case for Raheem Sterling as well. I quite like Mount, although I'm not sure whether he really stands out to me as I think we need athleticism in midfield. He's neat and tidy, he's quite progressive with his passing and his attacking stats for a midfielder are really good, but I just feel we need lungs and physicality in the middle, allied to solid possession skills. Not sure 5'8 Mount fits the bill for that, even if he's nippy rather than quick. Apparently his off the ball work is phenomenal so we'll see.

Yeah it's weird isn't it. Just a complete limbo and waste of everyone's time: they're taking up a place in the squad but never used, we know they're going, Jurgen knows they're going, they know they're going. We're just counting down the minutes til they go, the salaries are stopped and we get the squad numbers back. Ox's appearance last night felt more like 10 mins at the end of the last home game of the season to wave goodbye to the fans than an attempt to change the game. Frustrating as fuck.

Yeah. I don't think an 18 year old getting injured for 6-8 weeks is particularly a "rip the medical department up" type of issue - the "Diaz doesn't need an operation he just needs 3 months of rehab, oh wait fuck 3 months is up and yeah he does lol" is a much more glaring indictment of them in itself. It does highlight the negligence of heading into the season effectively with 2 old men, Fabinho, and a load of kids though, because kids get injured more. Bajcetic has an excuse and it's worth persevering with his injuries due to his young age, but Ox and Keita have been crocks for most of their careers.

This. Trent is probably the finiest tuniest part of the finely tuned machine that was Klopp's team: a playmaking fullback. If the team functions as it should, we'll be on the front foot, constantly moving the ball around, winning it back up the pitch or getting on the second ball if not, and as such Trent is the man in space and he has the skillset to take advantage. He'll look great when that happens, he fits that team like a glove. None of that is happening now though, we lose the ball cheaply, get passed through up the field and frequently lose duels and second balls when we do, and so the fullbacks are having to do a bit of everything as they push up to join attacks (as we still have a lot of the ball) but also turn around and defend huge amounts of space as we're turned around super quick. Robbo has a different skillset, he's more of an allrounder and so you could argue he didn't shine as brightly when we were good, but he looks much, much better when we're struggling. As an aside that's why I was never arsed about the furore over Southgate not picking him. Reece James is like a right footed Robbo in many ways, so I can see why he picked him rather than made Trent his creative fulcrum, as England play completely differently. Whether we can rebuild with a spine that's capable of dominating in the same way as the VVD/Matip/Fabinho/Hendo/Gini one is the main question for me, followed by how to solve the fact that there's obviously some hunger that's gone from him mixed with a bit of an existential crisis now he's won everything there is to win by the age of 23, but be in a rut of form and under severe, prolonged and deserved criticism for the first time in his career so far.

That forum is absolute eye aids. But kudos to whoever has the username homerjfong.

32. He's fucking 32. Blows my mind that.

I reckon we're shit with them, no doubt about it. That doesn't mean they're the sole reason for our wank away form this season, but our shitness at 12.30 pre-dates this season's more general shitness, because we've all moaned about it before. It seems to me that for whatever reason we're more likely to lose when we KO at 12.30, but other factors exacerbate it: Away games (because of travel, and because they're generally harder - and we're shit away from home at the moment) Coming off the back of a midweek game - particularly midweek aways (because of rest and training schedules, and even more complicated travel bollocks) Coming off the back of international fuckery (because our players are scattered to the four winds until about 18 hours before kick off) Apply a couple of those and we look even worse, I mean who didn't see that coming yesterday to a certain extent? Doesn't excuse it but I'd be surprised if it wasn't a little bit similar for all teams. I'd be really interested to see the data on it, actually - 12.30 kick offs tend to feature David v Goliath battles (one big team to keep BT happy, but rarely big team vs big team as Sky nab most of those with their first dibs) so they're likely to be a bit skewed, but I'd be willing to bet that the big team performance is worse than in equivalent games that don't fall on Saturday lunchtimes. Found this which I thought was a decent read, seems to suggest that Saturday lunchtime games have a lot more goals in them than I was expecting, but that the 4.30 game on a Sunday is the likely goalfest: https://theanalyst.com/eu/2022/03/how-kick-off-time-affects-premier-league-games/

Agree with this - similar but a bit different. My dad died 5 years ago almost. It was a long time coming - he was in a hospice and went into a coma-like sleep which we thought would last for a day or two, but which ended up going on for the best part of two weeks. I’d tried to stay there all the time but just couldn’t face it, horrible to watch him basically just waste away in front of me so I went in every day for a couple of hours and then went home in between while my sister and stepmum stayed with him. Anyway I get the phone call from my sister in the middle of the night saying he’d just went - and I went straight there. I’d only seen him at 7pm and he’d only been gone about 20 minutes but when I went in it just wasn’t him. Looked like him but just, wasn’t. Like you say, hard to explain.

Shameful. Modern slavery laws won’t apply to people who’ve entered the country ‘illegally’ - so in effect the government has just effectively legalised certain cases of slavery. Also, if anything it probably also encourages traffickers as much as it will deter migrants. I really want this to be the drain that’s being circled before this ideology is booted right in the cunt and fucked off into the bin, but there’s probably new depths to plumb isn’t there? Fucking hell, parliament today was like a scene out of the pre-Kristallnacht Reichstag.

Still can't get my head around the mancs baulking at an assumed quoted price of £35m for Gakpo (32/76 between 2020/21 and 2021/22), but then looking to the next club in the Netherlands, seeing an overrated show-pony of a footballer (23/79 over the same period), being quoted a fee nearly 3x that amount and going "yeah fine." Either they're stupid enough to do that, or the price PSV quoted the mancs was higher, because they know they're mugs. Either way it's lovely.

It's mad because my first instincts are to go "those games against Brentford and Fulham are massive" but then I remember that both of those two teams are above Everton - miles above them in fact - for a reason: because they're far superior. Weirdly I think they're most likely to get joy against Tottenham. Hope Toney puts on a show for his swansong before he's hauled off to the cooler to bounce a baseball against the wall. Anyone know when he'll be getting his ban in the post?