Nelly-Szoboszlai

We’re rattled here now.

Well, nobody expected that…

The finishing has looked shoddy. But, I’ve been more disappointed by the final ball. Just a half a yard misplaced or behind the player, which has turned a possible brilliant goal scoring opportunity into just a decent one. Diaz did one to Salah when Onana did a camera save. And, right at the end of the half, Szoboszlai played a pass just behind Bradley and onto his weaker left foot.

These two team are levels apart. We’re a well drilled unit, with everyone knowing what they’re doing. Playing with a degree of calmness and composure. United are the complete opposite. Clueless. Struggling to do the basics. Panicked. Just lumping it forward with the sole plan seeming to be to get one of these punts in behind our back line. It’s infuriating that we’re only 1 up. It should be 3 or 4 nil. Got to get an early second to suck any sort of hope out of United. They can’t be any worse than that first half.

C’mon Redmen.

An AI creation of what Bastet might’ve looked like. Quite cool.

I dealt with a fair few non-Arab Sudanese from Darfur (or, at least they were pretending to be) when I did asylum claims in the Home Office. Some harrowing tales back then and one bloke who claimed to have been the victim of a machete attack. It was an old injury and he insisted on showing me his scar. It was on his arm and it looked like a joint of meat when you truss it up with string for roasting. It was quite gruesome. We had loads of people claiming to be from Darfur who weren’t. But, I was chuffed one day when I got an actual Darfurian from the Zaghawa tribe. He had the traditional facial scarification that they had, spoke the Zaghawa dialect and he even knew the traditional tribal story told to kids about the monster that lived in the Jebel Marra mountain range that would eat them if they strayed too far from their village alone. He was built like a brick shithouse too.

I got invited to one a while back but swerved it. Three of my best mates are mates I’ve had since senior school. The reunion was a junior school one. I had a look at the people going and I decided that there was a reason why I hadn’t stayed friends with the vast majority of these people. Pot-heads, one girl had done time for GBH for stabbing someone, a girl who was rumoured to be a local prossie and people who I’d deleted from social media for being bad racists.

Got bad vibes about this. Don't get me wrong, if we play with smart heads and with an element of control to the game, then we can beat these fairly comfortably. But, I’ve a couple of concerns. One is that the crowd is up for it straight away and we repeat our tendency to start slow. Against them at Old Trafford, we could be punished for it more than we were against Sheffield United etc. Another concern is that we play it like the cup game. An end to end, frantic game, in which we fail to really control the midfield and take the sting out of the game when needed. Then, there’s the officials too. I think we’ll probably need to win all our remaining games to take the title. It’s a big ask. Just give it our best and don’t put ourselves in a position where we have any regrets come the end of the season. I’m still not going all in on title talk until there’s 3 or 4 games left. I’ve got a feeling of resignation that those ludicrous decisions at Spurs and against Arsenal and City will come back to haunt us. The points swing that we missed out on if the penalty calls were given against the latter two genuinely make me feel a little bit sick.

Thanks, all.

My uncle is on his way out with oesophageal cancer. I’m not particularly close to him but my mum is really upset. He was struggling to keep food down and lost loads of weight and ended up going for the camera down the throat thing, followed by a biopsy when abnormalities were found. He was then diagnosed with oesophageal cancer, with the specialists fearing that it had spread too. That was about two months ago. They were giving him a stent to help him eat and keep stuff down and we’re then going to discuss chemotherapy/treatment options. But, my mum spoke to him today and he told her that the specialist has told him to think hard about his options as he’s been given a survival prognosis of 3 to 6 months without treatment and 6 to 12 months with. It’s a devastatingly savage disease, the way it just consumes people in such a short space of time. My mum said he sounded really down on the phone and she thinks he’ll probably go down the without treatment route. He’s approaching his 80s so has had a decent innings but still sad news.

I’m on the Don Winslow train too. 300-ish pages into Power of the Dog and enjoying it. Picked up a used version from Amazon for about £3. Had some unused Waterstones vouchers from Christmas so got The Cartel with those. And I signed up for an Audible free trial with 2 book credits, so The Border will be listened to rather than read.

The Israeli military investigation on the murder of WCK aid workers has found that “grave errors” occurred and senior IDF personnel have been dismissed. The dismissed officers - Cpl. Scapegoat, Pvt. Sacrificial-Lamb - are yet to comment.

19 attempts for Chelsea. That Mainoo is another hype job. Any team with a top quality midfielder controlling the engine room ain’t conceding around 20 attempts at goal every game.

Absolutely hilarious. Them just all standing in the box and watching from the corner was astounding.

Yep. Looks like Evans and Varane possibly out against us too. Chelsea are bloody awful though.

And, here’s the antisemitism smear…

Wow! That was super quick.

Shill!

Another excellent contribution. Please come again. Just not inside your mother this time.

Superb contribution to the discussion. Please come again.

To be fair, Jose Andres can go and fuck off. Wasn’t arsed when innocent Palestinian women and children were being slaughtered.

Sir Alan Duncan dropping some precision guided truth bombs. How long before his honours are removed, he’s no longer invited to speak like this on news shows and he’s branded a hateful antisemite?

Quite a lengthy article which I haven’t read in full yet. But, this bit in the introduction shows what sociopathic murdering cunts they really are and puts an end to the claims that we already knew were bullshit anyway - that the IDF try to keep civilian casualties at a minimum. “In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.“ https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

Some quality ones in there! Is one of the real people actually Weird Al Jankovic???