Everton, the ‘born not manufactured’ realest club in football reduced to handing out free plastic flags.

regmcfly wrote:

afgavinstan wrote:

Knight wrote:

If it happened. No I wouldn’t care as much. I wouldn’t write 3 paragraphs hoping Liverpool were banned from the champions league. I’d enjoy it. But I suspect my enjoyment would be slightly hollowed out. I hope I wouldn’t ‘turn a blind eye and revel in it’. I hope I’d be able to face up to the problems inherent in the whole project. Also, right now, I don’t want City’s owners in charge of Liverpool. I’m glad they’re not.

Fair play. I wouldn't trade any of our EBT years for anything, fwiw.

This post is going to age like a fine wine when 9/10 in a row are hit.

It's aged well enough for you looking at your wage bill over the last 5yr. You're still drunk off it.

We should have won that. Chelsea look like a team without any sort of midfield unless it’s about attacking and looking sexy.

Leicester looked tasty there. I'd tip them to pip one of Utd, arsenal or Chelsea to 6th this season.

Season is a write off for Chelsea really.
They havent had a top notch out and out striker since Costa and with Hazard gone they will lack threat.

If they are serious about him they should give Lampard the season to get a good idea what and who exactly are needed then go ham on it next summer.
Also cool down the dressing room a bit which has been rubbing against managers since the Mourinho physio incident.


Alternatively they brought him in cheap knowing full well he would fail and will be cheaper to ditch than a more established manager.

Alternatively alternatively. Roman doesnt give a shit about it anymore.

VAR is fine, they just want some controversy in place of bad decisions.

VAR is fine. I mean, it's shit, but it's fine. The biggest problem with VAR is that, imo, too many people think it was supposed to "solve" disputes about decisions and create definitive right / wrong results. But what the fuck is VAR? It's a fucking slow-mo replay! 

Well, we had slow-mo replays on TV for years and years, and people still can't agree about whether a penalty was really a penalty. So what makes them think it'll be so different now? All VAR does is protect Referees from the 20-20 Hindsight Easy-To-Spot-With-Multiple-Camera-Angles Sky-Watching Motherfuckers, and I'm ok with that. The breaks in the game so far have been nowhere near American Football-esque, so my original fears have not come to pass. The world spins.

The fact that a passage of play has been analysed before the pundits have a crack at studying it adds an extra layer of nonsense to the studio sections for me, at least at this stage.  A noteworthy incident has been highlighted for them, so obviously their job is to discuss it, but listening to them give a 'ruining it' or 'well those are the rules' hot take followed by a sometimes lengthy 'is it ruining it or is it fine that these are the rules?' chinwag is tiresome by default.  Ref's opinion, VAR ruling, commentator and co-commentator having a go, possibly Howard Webb's view getting in first...it doesn't leave Danny Mills a lot to play with once he gets hold of it, yet of course he's got to try.  It's almost unfair, and benefits no-one.

They started that last night.
Tim Cahill started explaining shifting centre backs, but they stopped, said they hoped to explain what that was later in the season and moved on to VAR crap.

Paul the sparky wrote:

Why don't they use the time to do a tactical analysis instead? You know, use their extensive professional knowledge of the game to provide some insightful explanation as to why the game is playing out as it is, what changes the losing side need to make etc.?

As it is we tend to get Gary Neville pointing out obvious stuff like a player being caught out of position when a goal is scored and being lauded for it.

Years ago when ITV had the highlight rights. Terry Venables wanted to do some more deep and detailed analysis but got told no and to dumb it down for viewers at home. Granted footy analysis has changed over the years and is still changing (joe cole talking about low defensive block the other day) but it's still not at the level you can find on zonalmarking.net or other sites on the internet.

I remember during one of the previous World Cups, Gordon Strachan was giving some insight into someone's position on the park and how when he gets pushed forward it allows someone else to move inside and went on to describe the knock on effect it can have to move someone (or something along those lines).  It was genuinely interesting to hear and I remember being quite surprised to see someone go into that kind of detail at half time.

While he was talking. Alan Hansen, like a drunk at a wedding, literally butted in while he was speaking to say, "At the end of the day, if you score more goals than the opposition, you win".  It was both hilarious and kinda tragic.

Not bothering with much of a midfield away at Wolves is an odd decision from Solskjaer. James starts.

Pogba is so fucking thick sometimes.

Martial's had one.

Has Utd's badge always been that big? It looks huge on their shirt.