The Guest

How fucking horrendous is Gary Neville's commentary? It's painful listening to him.

I would love to see us line up with Gerrard and Adam in the middle with Downing and Bellamy either side and Carroll and Suarez up front for at least one game. I know it's ridiculously gung ho but it would be nice to see us set up as with a really attacking line up going out to steamroll someone.

Ye I hate the way Van der Sar's career at Utd is being rewritten. He was a fucking cock up merchant. Every couple of weeks he would make a blunder and it just gets ignored.

I think Paul Scholes is massively overrated. He was good at drifting into the box and scored some great goals in the days of keane and beckham etc but when he moved back to playing as a proper midfielder he was mediocre. He lived off the success of all the great players he had round him. He doesn't come near the level of Gerrard.

I didn't mind Steve Claridge as a player but my god what an utter gobshite he is on the football league show after MOTD. I don't mind the banter between Lineker and Hansen. I like that it's just three former footballers. They put the matches on they talk for a bit and move on. No fit birds distracting you talking out of their arse, no fancy sky shit and generally no fucking mancs. The only thing they need to sort out is the order of the matches. If it's the evening or early kick off then put it down the order.

This had me in stitches.

The way Kenny has been talking I don't think Gerrard will be starting. I think we may line up 442 with Kuyt instead of Gerrard. Bellamy really has to start tomorrow in some capacity either up front or on the right. If we go with Henderson again out wide we are asking for trouble.

I'm mystified at the point you are trying to make. We signed Berger who turned out to be a decent player. They signed Poborsky who turned out to quite shit and they fucked him off sharpish. Unfortunately for us they had a better side and went on to have success. Just because they won the league, it doesn't necessarily mean all their players are better than everyone else's. This whole argument is completely ludicrous.

Ridiculous comparison. It wasn't Berger's fault we didn't win the league while he was here and Poborsky certainly wasn't the reason United did.

Can you name any game when he played as a centre mid of 2 or 3 when he had a good defensive performance? Any one at all? I genuinely can't think of any. Don't get me wrong I hate midfielders being pigeon holed into DM and AM and I think usually it's a load of bollocks as if you are playing in midfield you need to do both to play well and have a good game as a centre mid. Otherwise you are just another defender or forward like we used to see with Mascherano and Lucas. It's been a long time since we played with proper centre mids I think everyone has forgotten that.

Meireles' positional sense is fucking woeful. We barely seen him in the centre mid position we are seeing Adam for us anyway. There was a hole host of incidents in the man u Chelsea game yesterday where you could have single handedly blamed Meireles for Man U scoring or coming close. For the Rooney goal he went charging into the area Jones was in where there was already about 4 Chelsea players, if he had any positional sense he might have spotted Rooney and another player queueing up for the ball to spill. When Utd broke for the pen he went charging back in behind his own centre halves then when he did come out to pressure Nani he let Nani turn inside and put some half arsed tackle in. Nani's goal in the first half came because Meireles was too busy marking nobody in the middle and put Nani under no pressure. That part of your post is absolute nonsense.

Wasnt there rumours flying round of andy van de meyde loving the gary's. That could be the everton player mentioned although he's obviously not current.

That was horrendous I thought it was Enrique. It wasn't even a 50/50. He could have clearly took that ball a few strides ahead of the other player.

If you watch the impossible job and not grow a liking to Taylor you have a heart of stone. Good old school british manager that was unlucky with England and got hounded by all the southern journalists. The best bit of the documentary is when he abuses rob shepherd in the press conference

He's pretty much pulled out of one tackle and that's it, he pulls out of tackles full stop. He's been good but not superb. Considering its his first season he's handled it well. The fact that he's been played in a couple of positions and not really given a consistent run at any of them hasn't helped but he handled being put on the wing okay, had some good games and some bad. The reason I think some people like him is that he looks the part. He's two footed, mobile and confident on the ball. For me it's only a matter of time before he starts to weigh in with goals and assists and starts to take some headlines.

University is just one big con. There aren't enough jobs to go round. That's why they want 40/50/60 per cent of school leavers going. It's so they haven't got all these leavers sitting on the dole or getting jobs and pushing out the people who didn't go to uni on to the dole. They give them a shit loads of money in student loans so it keeps the economy ticking over. They think they are being clever doing this and that it's not the government in debt so that's fine. The problem is though that in my opinion a large majority of University leavers are never going to pay it all back. So what happens in 40/50 years time and these people haven't paid their debt back and they all start retiring? The country is going to be fucked.

Roy Evans

Sorry I didn't have the time to respond properly before. This post is a complete mess. Did you not watch any of last season? Literally any of it? The defence getting pushed back against garbage opposition. Lone striker getting isolated. Shite wingers not being able to produce any chances for the lone forward (their jobs made harder because of only one player to aim at. Long ball after long ball to the lone forward who tried to bring it down and hold it up but didn't have anyone within 40 yards of him. The 4231 with two heavily defensive midfielders pretty much creates fuck all. It relies on no game plan other than hoping you have a world class player to score a world class individual goal in every game or luck. The only positive is that you restrict the opposition and have a lot more of the ball which is only in your own half. Playing 442 doesn't force the opposition to play long ball football whatsoever. If anything it gives them more time on the ball in the middle of the pitch to pass it. You even say this yourself. The reason we are conceding so much at the moment is because neither Skrtel or Carragher are very good in the air and this has been massively exploited because our full backs just haven't coped this season at all whoever they have been. You could play 6 defensive midfielders and this would still happen. The formation this season has not been the problem at the back. The problem at the other end is creativity. Kuyt has been absolutely dreadful and Jova hasn't settled yet. Along with that Hodgson has largely stuck with Rafa's formation. The one time he was forced to drop it was against City which was the exact game he couldn't start playing with it. He needs to fuck Kuyt off now. He needs to move Johnson to the wing and play Kelly at full back. Put Gerrard and Meireles in centre mid with Ngog and Torres up front and stick with it. The defence will push up naturally. We need to start to remember how to create chances again and get the wingers getting to the byline regularly.

Strange I thought he did

No 442 doesnt have to be a more attacking formation but generally it is as you have two players by their goal rather than one. When you are comparing to 451 with two players being permanently positioned 10 yards away from the centre havlves it becomes even more laughable. I am not saying Hodgson is Wenger. I am saying he was seen as more offensive than Rafa when he was at Fulham. Time after time last season when Benitez was playing Lucas and Masch even playing Fabio Aurelio in centre mid away from home to Fiorentina we were crying out for Gerrard to play there and Rafa chose the negative option even when we were desperate for victories. He needed to go because he was flawed as the Liverpool manager. Yes he has proved he can be a very good manager, one of the best. Tactically brilliant sometimes. We all witnessed it. But in the end he was massively flawed and it was damaging the team. He was making absurd decisions game in game out. Decisions which the same people ignored are now demanding that Hodgson be sacked for. I am not happy with Hodgson he's made some terrible errors and his substitutions/tactics have been shocking. If things carry on then he should be shown the door. But that doesn't mean we should never have sacked Benitez either.

I was fucking stupidly lucky. I was up at about quarter to 9 and just loaded five tabs on the queue link and hammered f5 for an hour. Next minute it loaded and I got mine then the other four tabs loaded. I must have got about 25 tickets in the end throughout the day as that happened about 6 times.

So Fulham were never positive at all ever? Seems like a pretty ridiculous view to me. I wonder if you have ever watched them. Duff is quite a good winger and they have quite a few other offensive midfielders as well. He generally played two up front which whether you like it or not is more of attacking formation than we played in any game last season. What the fuck has how many games Atletico won got to do with with the sort of football Hodgson plays?

It's a "high pitched whine" about Lucas Kuyt and Insua but fair game when it's Poulsen? I didn't suggest anything other than Benitez deserved to be sacked because over the course of last season he was diabolical as a manager. You seem to read what you want to read and not actually what is there. We needed to sack Benitez to move forward. Nothing that has happened this season would have surprised me if it had happened if Benitez was still in charge. We had some pretty shocking defeats 5 years into his reign never mind the ones in his first season. Hodgson got to the final of the UEFA cup with a very inferior side to what Benitez had only last season.

You do realise that Glasto is basically a charity.