Ne Moe Imya

No chance. If that's Konate I'd be raging at him for putting his hands on the attacker and pulling him back, I'd have no problem with the ref giving it at all.

As a reminder, this is what the Russians are hearing every day, all day from their televisions. You can just watch 30 seconds to get the flavour of it all, but it's basically "we are fighting against Satanism, against evil itself, there can be no compromise."

Anyone thinking that Zelensky and Ukraine are to blame for there not being peace right now are delusional. Put yourself in the place of the Ukrainians. Imagine, say, France had invaded England, annexed Sussex, Surrey, and Kent. Then the British army pushed them out of Brighton, and it was starting to look like hopefully in the next year or two could beat them all the way back off Britain. Would you, at that point, want the PM to sit down with the French and offer them any kind of settlement where they got to keep a small piece of the Kent coast to stop the bloodshed and bombing today? Of course not! The problem is Putin. "Offering him a route to squirm out of" sounds eminently sensible, but what, exactly, is that meant to be? The only option on the table, for the Ukrainians, is going to be retreat to Russia's borders, and that doesn't offer him a route to squirm out of! I suppose maybe Ukraine could compromise on one thing, and that is their demand for reparations. It would be just and fair to demand that Russia pay for all the damage they have done, but I suppose if they just said "go back to Russia, leave us the Donbas and Crimea, and we'll call it even" then that would be at least a compromise of a sort. It's hard to imagine how Putin would sell that to the Russian people as a victory, but you can already see in the Russian propaganda that they've started a narrative of "we're not fighting Ukraine, but NATO/the West, that's why we're losing." So maybe he could just say "once it was clear we were fighting against NATO, this is the best we could do" and get all of his propagandists to parrot it, but it's a 50-50 proposition he loses control of the country at that point IMO.

You can already see the Klopp crafting taking effect, actually. A couple of times today (and against Spurs as well) we've seen him pick out a pass when a teammate is in a better position instead of having a wild shot. That might take his shot numbers down to 4 or 4.5/game instead of 5.5/game where he is now, but if it means he adds 6 assists/season to his tally, it'll be completely worth it for the team. He has already improved in this so much in just a few months, I'm very optimistic that it will continue. Some of the posts early on in this thread are going to look pretty foolish, for sure. A lot of people were writing him off as a waste after 5 games!

A bunch of those videos coming out this morning, had to be quite a feeling to be a Ukrainian soldier this morning in Kherson! It really makes the Russian referendum look even more ridiculous in retrospect. What was the percentage of people there who supposedly voted to join Russia? 95% or something like that? Surprised they just didn't claim 110%.

No chance. Any Ukrainian president offering any terms to Russia that involves them keeping control of any Ukrainian territory, demilitarised or not, would be drummed out of office in a heartbeat. The Ukrainians feel like they are winning (and they are!) - I don't think they would stand for anything like that.

It actually comes down to a huge amount of luck, as you'd imagine. He co-founded a city mapping service that was sold, then he used the money from that to co-found an early internet bank that was eventually bought by/turned into Paypal. Since then he's basically used huge government subsidies in solar energy and electric cars to make otherwise questionably profitable enterprises into huge moneymakers, although to be fair to him he did get private space exploration to make money, a feat many entrepreneurs had failed at before him. But it is good to watch him flailing around at Twitter making some shockingly obvious bad decisions and letting us all think "yeah, the billionaires aren't actually any smarter than the rest of us, are they?"

Depends on where they were from. If it's Lviv or Kyiv, then they're probably OK - a missile now and again, maybe electricity outages, but for the most part survivable. If it's Zaporizhzhia or Mykolaiv or something, then ... yeah, it can be pretty bad.

I watch a fair amount of the youth teams and Doak stands out, but ... I have to say I disagree with Dave on this one. Sterling was light years ahead of everyone else, it was like he was playing a different game, especially in the U18s. Doak is more in the category of best player on the pitch, but he's still playing the same game as everyone else. Which is fine - Trent wasn't as much of a standout as Doak is at Academy level, to take one example. But there have been plenty of other examples of players who were regularly the best player on the pitch in the youth games who haven't gone onto be anything special. Have to wait and see on Doak, but early signs are promising. I'm not at all meaning to imply he's not good, just that he's not a can't-miss in the way Sterling was.

I mean, it's true that they've made a lot of money, but surely the fact that they've been more or less the best owners in the English league (I don't count the sportswashing clubs because I don't care how many trophies we'd win, I'd never want Liverpool to go down that route) has to come into play here, no? Sure, once or twice they've failed to invest when they should have, but in comparison to just about every other owner in the pyramid I'd say they've been very good. We are in the top 5 clubs in world football for how well the club is actually run (especially in the recruitment of players since they arrived), they brought in Klopp and we've been one of the best teams in the world for the past 5 years or so. And that's coming from when they took over when we were on the verge of bankruptcy and we were running out the likes of Spearing and Jovanovic for key games.

Yeah, I have a very different perspective from Gnasher about this whole war but one thing he's not wrong about is that all the evil Russia has done to Ukraine should never be used as an excuse by Western companies to raise prices and increase their own profits on the backs of the poor.

That is one of the stupidest things I've ever read. The one thing that will make Putin prolong the war (and yes, the only one prolonging the war is Putin) is if he thinks there is a chance he can get the West to stop providing Ukraine with weapons. If we stick together, by next summer the Russian collapse will be visible to even the most jaded Russian observers and they will have to give up. If he thinks there's even a chance that the coalition's will is fading, he'll throw another 20 thousand Russian boys' lives on the bonfire on the off-chance he can negotiate from a position of strength. Why on earth you'd publicly come out and write something like that right now, right at the moment where Russians themselves are starting to see that this is going to end badly for them, is insane. Especially when you consider all the conditions that they list for peace are things that Russia could do immediately but won't. That letter alone could probably extend the war for a few months.

I know I keep coming on here posting the things that are being said on Russian television, but that is because I think it is so important for people in the West to understand what is happening in Russia today. This is not a government fighting for its rights against Western imperialist expansion - it is a cultural genocide of Ukraine, pure and simple. They openly admit this every day on the national news!

Declan Rice is a great player but he'd cost a bajillion pounds and there would be other teams offering him 400k/week wages which we'd never match, so it's a total pipe dream.

This is what is happening in the Ukrainian territories Russia is occupying: 10 Torture Sites in 1 Town: Russia Sowed Pain, Fear in Izium Anyone who thinks that we should let Russia win or keep some of the territory they have taken is saying that you think we should just condemn the Ukrainians there to mass rape/torture. Hammers to knees, electric shock torture, burning, gunshots to the hands/feet - the documented evil that the Russian army is doing is shocking.

Woah. I wish I hadn't clicked on that thread. That is seriously disturbing. That poor, poor child.

Presented without comment:

I agree, the important thing is the team's expected goals, but to put it in an old-school way, sometimes one player is so good at putting the ball in the goal that you can overlook any other weaknesses he has. If a player scores you 25+ goals in all competitions per season, then he gets in the team, simple as. Would you prefer him to be a brilliant passer and also get 12 assists and press like mad? Yes, of course. But even if he doesn't, unless he utterly destroys the way the rest of the team plays, if he scores that many goals, he's an extremely valuable player and you're going to have him in the team. Now, obviously he hasn't scored that many so far for us, but the xG thing shows us that he's getting into the right kinds of positions and creating the right kinds of shots, and finishing is variable and will inevitably regress to the mean. Remember that first Suarez season where he hit the bar 10 times or so? That's what's happening to Nunez right now - a finishing slump that is statistically unlikely to repeat itself. When he starts to score 7 or 8 goals in every 10 games, no one is going to say that he's the problem in our squad.

This is basically it. He's at 0.8 xG/90 in the toughest league in the world with like 6 shots/game! No, he's not a great passer but he's going to score 25 a season so who cares.

For anyone wondering how it's going over in Russia the last few days:

This is already probably 12-24 hours old, but a great visualisation of the Ukrainian advance. If Kupyansk is liberated, then the Russian army will have no choice but to retreat from Izyum.

Ah, yes, noted "fount of wisdom" Richard Dannatt, a Tory member of the House of Lords, who when asked about Ukraine just before the invasion proposed on GB News that unlike Latvia and Lithuania, "there is no question about Ukraine and Belarus being anything other than in the Russian sphere." Yeah, sounds like he really has his finger on the pulse of where Ukraine is these days.

Yes, I care for them! That's why I support the only solution that has any chance of benefiting them, the complete and total destruction of the Russian army's ability to make war on innocent people.

Yeah. Who cares about the Ukrainians? Probably deserved to be raped and pillaged by the Russian army, really, after all there are a couple of hundred Nazis in the Azov battalion.

Maybe I'm missing the sarcasm here, but no one seriously thinks we aren't finishing top 4, do they? Our midfield is a bit of a mess but we're still pretty clearly the second best team in the league, third at the absolute worst. Thiago comes back and we're right back to being a 85-90 point team (until he goes down again, granted).