Ne Moe Imya

You said we should "face facts, it's time to stop more innocents losing their lives." From Putin's perspective, there are only two reasons he would stop killing innocent people: 1)he can't any more, because his army is defeated, or 2)he got what he wanted. So unless you had changed your mind radically in a way that contradicted everything you've ever posted on this topic, I assumed you meant the second option. I think that was a reasonable inference.

How, precisely, do you propose that we 'stop more innocents losing their lives?' Maybe you missed this, but the world tried the "give Putin the portion of Ukraine he's already conquered in order to make peace" thing in Minsk in 2014. The deal was this - Putin, you (and your proxies) get to keep Crimea and a portion of the Donbass. In exchange, both parties agree to stop shelling each other. Sounds like they "faced facts to stop more innocents from losing their lives," right? It lasted 7 months. Just enough time for Putin to reconstitute his army and launch another offensive in January 2015. Putin captured some more territory and Ukraine, desperate to "stop more innocents losing their lives," agreed to peace AGAIN. This was known as "Minsk 2," and was ratified by both parties in February 2015. Putin's proxies then declared that "the peace agreement doesn't apply to this particular piece of the frontline" and went on an assault again. Ukraine responded, not with military action but by passing a law that gave the Donbass special political status with more independence, as Putin claimed he had wanted. So Russia responded by moving in more heavy artillery and killing 430 Ukrainian soldiers. And then in March 2016 the Russian Foreign Minister announced that Russia was "not a party to the Minsk 2 agreement" and then a few years later, after a massive Russian campaign to build loyalty in Ukraine and a huge military buildup, they carried out the full-scale invasion of Feb 2022. I am utterly mystified by anyone whose response to the above facts (which no one, including the Russians, dispute) is "you know what we should do? Give Putin what he wants to 'stop innocents losing their lives.'" Giving Putin what he wants (a negotiated settlement that allows him to keep control of the Ukrainian territory he has invaded) is precisely what will lead to more innocents losing their lives, you absolute cretin.

If Ukraine loses, or is forced into a negotiation where they give up a huge chunk of their territory and sovereignty to Russia, then the inevitable result over the long term is nuclear proliferation and probably a world war. In the early 1990s, Ukraine gave up a nuclear arsenal in exchange for security guarantees from the UK, the US and Russia. Any budding nuclear nation is going to look at what's happened in Ukraine and think "NATO/the Western powers are fickle, they might honor their promises to defend me, they might not. I need to get nuclear weapons in order to definitively prevent attack from a larger power." The only way to prevent this from being the takeaway message from this whole Ukraine mess is to honor our agreements and supply them with the arms to defend their country. Ukraine can easily win this war with mostly just the leftover weapons that the US is paying to dismantle (plus some artillery ammo and air defence missiles), but Trump and Johnson are preventing that from happening. It's going to end up costing all of us far, far more than we currently understand.

I think if we win all 6 of the remaining games we'd probably be about 50-60% to win the title. So that's all we can do at this point. One more game with dropped points and you'd need City to pretty much collapse. Possible, but definitely not likely.

No serious stats person takes "big chances" or its derivatives seriously. As noted above, it's basically purely subjective. A few years ago there was a paper out there that showed that, when measured objectively by defenders' positions, a chance was far more likely to be scored as a "big chance" when it actually went in (since the reviewers who are making the determination have seen the result before they determine whether a chance was "big" or not). Since then, I haven't seen it referenced by anyone in a serious fashion.

To be fair, Vitinha has been brilliant, which is probably more than anything what's keeping Ugarte out of the team. Different players, but only space for so many in that midfield. Zaire-Emery has been pretty good as well.

Maybe "entirely" was too strong, but I think what I'm referring to has more or less already happened, to be honest. Russia had the huge advantage of owning thousands of old, Soviet-built tanks and APCs that they could use for a land war. They have now seen well over half, probably 70% of the usable pre-1990 tanks destroyed, captured, or heavily damaged. They still have a sizable stockpile of them for parts, and obviously they are working triple shifts to build more, but their conventional offensive capacity compared to Jan 2022 is halved, at the very least. That means that we basically only have to worry about them taking a few more cities/districts in Ukraine. There is zero chance they can offer any meaningful non-nuclear threat to a NATO country any more. Maybe the Baltics, but Poland or any of the others are off the table for at least a decade, probably longer. They simply don't have the firepower. And if the US were willing to support Ukraine again with military aid in the form of old tanks/APCs and artillery ammunition, they could reduce that even further.

We had this situation once before when there seemed little to be gained from going strong in a European match and the manager put out a weakened team to focus on the league. Thankfully Klopp isn't Rodgers. Resting Gerrard for that match against Real Madrid was pretty much an unforgiveable offense as far as I'm concerned.

Not sure about this. I actually think the best way to help with China is to deter them, very forcibly, from taking the decision to go for Taiwan. That decision would make everyone in the world poorer. And the best way to deter the CCP from going through with their plans is to show them how capable the West is at coming together to stop a war of genocidal conquest, to show them that the rules-based order says that you can't do that any more and come out ahead. In other words, the best way to show the Chinese leadership what will happen to them if they make a move for Taiwan is to ensure that Ukraine wins the war quickly. Plus it ensures that you can focus almost 100% of your manufacturing and war-making capabilities in defense of Taiwan. I think it's 5% of the US arms budget that Ukraine is asking for. If you can give them that and then knock out your #2 enemy's capabilities entirely, it's a bargain. It allows you to spend the other 95% totally focused on the Chinese theater.

I don't think NATO stockpiles are empty, at least if we include the US stockpiles. The issue is that Trump and the Republican congress who are so scared to cross him have decided not to give any more of it to Ukraine. It boggles the mind how foolish the US is being here. If Johnson manages to hang on to power long enough to block a vote on further aid, the Russians might actually be able to squeak out something that they can sell to their people as a win. And then in 5 years they'll be back for more.

Totally agree on selling Salah, sad as it may seem. We would definitely miss him but it's better to sell too soon than too late and with players like that when their legs go they can really fall off a cliff very quickly in terms of production. Not sure we'd get £100m but we should get close to it, you'd think. And that would go a long ways towards replacing him! The great thing is that for once we don't have a huge hole in our team that obviously needs filling, even if we sold Salah. You'd want a centre back and another forward to add some goals in with Mo gone, but apart from that you could just look around and buy a few young-ish prospects that could then bed in over time.

As a fellow 6'4" person, I find that what I like to do in this situation is to put my forearm on a mate's shoulder, like he's just something to lean on. Nothing overt about it but it's massively disrespectful somehow.

"Extremely unlikely?" I think you'll find the bookies will disagree, mate. The odds that Arsenal win every game from now to the end of the season have to be around 15% max.

It's football, sometimes the better team doesn't win. We were MILES better than United today, but finishing is more of a random number generator thing than a mentality or narrative thing, no matter how much we want to pretend otherwise. The disappointing this is that an unlucky day of finishing has put a massive dent in our title chances, but then, you can think of about 5 games this season where you didn't think we were winning them on 80 minutes, and we did. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see us now go on to win all 7 remaining games, to be honest, and pip City to the title.

Just the 18 goals and 14 assists so far this season. He's the shittest Andy Carroll that ever lived.

Sometimes you see a really good midfield pair and it can be tricky to tell if it's both of them or if one is making the other one look good. Monaco had it with Fabinho making Bakayoko look like a 40m player, Leicester had it with Kante making Drinkwater look like a 35m player, and now it seems Brighton may have had it with MacAllister making Caicedo look like a 110m player. I think the lesson here is that Chelsea need to take a hard look at their recruitment and maybe ask if they're buying the wrong one the next time their scouting department recommends a big-money midfielder.

It is utterly baffling to me that anyone "patriotic" could like Donald Trump. He is a complete dream American president for Russia, North Korea, Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, etc. How on earth can you look at him and think "yeah, this guy puts America first"?

If anything Trump is the best argument out there against the Illuminati-style conspiracy theories. If you were a globalist elite cabal controlling the world media and politics, you certainly wouldn't be allowing someone like that near a job where he could start WW3 just by accident.

One would imagine that the issue, for a bond insurer, is that he is likely to never pay you if & when he eventually loses the case. If you'd seen the number of times he has openly welched on a debt, you wouldn't trust him to get his round in at the pub, much less pay back the $400-odd million he's going to owe after this is done. Even at an extortionate interest rate, if you're worried he won't pay at all, it has to make it a pretty scary deal to do for them.

Seeing as the main conflict between Klopp and Edwards last time was over giving long-term contracts to older players, I seriously doubt that Edwards is going to make a 29+ player on huge wages his big signing this summer. In other words, Kimmich ain't happening. It's a bit interesting to think of the kind of moves we made when Edwards was really running the show (so the last half of Brendan's time here and the first half of Klopp's) and wonder what we might do in that sort of vein this summer. I still think there's a decent chance Salah goes, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a player or two in there as well that we wouldn't expect (Gakpo?). Edwards always did his best work on the sales side, good as he was at buying players.

It is with great regret that I visit this thread once more to see Gnasher pounding the "both sides are bad (but I'm only going to mention the Ukrainians being bad as a way of balancing everything)" drum and people engaging with him as if he's saying any of it in good faith. Russian economic figures are an absolute joke. I lived there for many years, I would estimate that the actual unemployment number in our area was probably close to 50%, but the official tally was never over 12%. As for the GDP figures, those come from the statistics bureau. They used to call me once a quarter and ask how many people I employed and what my business' revenue was for the quarter. No verification at all, and there would frequently be questions about "could I say I employed 15 people instead of 12?" and the like. Ukraine is no paradise, but after many years of struggle, they have installed a genuine democracy as their system of government. They have been ruthlessly and horrifically attacked by one of the most corrupt and brutal governments on the planet. Anyone who doesn't acknowledge these facts before entering into the conversation should just be ignored.

You are correct to say that Virgil is back to his best. Or he's close, at least (his best was RIDICULOUSLY good, perhaps the best in league history), but the numbers strongly suggest that he will drop off significantly over the next two years. He could be playing at a high level still 3-4 years from now, but it will not be as high as his level is right now. The question will be whether he will accept that and be OK with a pay cut, or whether he will think that he deserves to be one of the highest wage earners in the squad out until he's 36 or so. I agree with you that we will definitely offer him a new deal, even under Edwards, probably heavily incentive-based and with a reduced base wage. The question is whether he will be inclined to accept it when he can likely earn more from another club elsewhere.

This won't be popular but I think one of the things that will infuriate our fans is going to be the fact that this is the exact kind of deal Edwards will NOT sanction. I actually think one of the main falling out points with Klopp that led to him leaving was re-signing Henderson, wasn't it? It would have been hugely unpopular to let him walk that summer, but Edwards was ready to do so and then Klopp insisted on giving him an extension. I would contend that history has borne out Edwards' instincts to be correct, but it's arguable. At any rate, I think we'll see VVD and Salah let go (not necessarily this summer) earlier than we would have under Klopp. "Let their legs go on someone else's pitch" and all that.

I've been amazed at just how good the academy lads have been this season. Normally you're lucky to have one big hit, and then a few here and there who can do spot duty and be third choice and do OK in 5-10 games a season. This season has been remarkable, to have Bradley and Quansah come through together, just as we needed them with the injuries. It took me 5 games or so to really see Quansah as the quality player that he is, you just keep thinking "he's doing OK" over and over, and then by the end of the game you realise he was actually consistently brilliant.

Nah, not having that. City are very good, as are we. Arsenal are good, but definitely a level below either of us. I think they will require quite a bit of bounces going their way to win it. They got one yesterday with our draw but I doubt they'll get enough of them over the next couple of months. I think it'll be City over us by a point or two in the end.