Taylor Swift

That spurs highlight where Sunderland cleared the ball off the line twice was insane

Ben Arfa is fucking insane

And1. I remember when I was desperate for them basketball shoes.

How is he gambling? These bonuses don't have to be paid! That's what a bonus is! He's offering something that he doesn't have to offer! How is he not a man of the people when he's offering his lowest paid employees more money? Your dislike of the man has seriously clouded your judgment of this one issue. Just because he fucked up last summer and with Pardew so far doesn't mean that all his good actions don't deserve credit.

Motives matter. I call bullshit. The money he's giving out is real money, not fake money. The staff that will be receiving this money are most likely people who are in the median income bracket, which is in the tens of thousands of pounds. If they're £4,000 better off today at 5, that'll be ten percent or more of their yearly salary. That is huge. They won't be giving a damn why he's giving this because he didn't have to. He could clearly not give this. Maybe he's giving it to provide extra motivation to the players, so fuck if he is. He doesn't have to. They're paid to play and win. Now they'll have to put some effort in to be able to look at the staff that serves them on a day to day basis in the eye. It doesn't matter that he's covered if we win because of the increased prize money in the league. He's smart and potentially many people will benefit from this when previously the only one affected was him.

Yup. Summer can't come soon enough.

Mancini. He's hugely underrated in England. Winning the league with 89 points is a great achievement. He's conservative so he gets a bad rap but tactically he's very good - consistently schools Ferguson, for what it's worth - and his CV is exceptional. He's on par with Rafa for me. Both excellent managers who are tactically good but conservative by nature and lacking in man management. Both are far better than other British manager out there, too.

That Juve kit is insane. I'm getting both home and away, thinking Del Piero on the home and Nedved on the away. Any other ideas?

Start him on Sunday.

Our long term chance of success seems to have evaded you. It's currently at nil domestic trophies in 58 years, the majority of which we have spent in the top flight. How so? I think our long term chances of success have been very clear over the past 20 years. We've made 2 domestic cup finals, one European cup semifinal where we were still in the tie with half an hour to go and we've had control of 3 other QFs ties only to crumble in typical fashion. All of that was only possible because we've been in the top division. A greater chance is not a guarantee. We've certainly had a greater chance of success over the long run due to the league that we've been in and the benefits that we have derived. What I'm saying is I'd rather enter each season confident that we're at worst the tenth most likely side to win both domestic cups rather than have to hope that we're a one in a once in a generation team that can win a cup while not being in the top division.

More chance of us signing Rooney than Hatem playing more than 25 league games for us. Strange thing is his fitness record before joining us was very good. I still think we can't read too much into most of his injuries here; only the latest one is of a muscular nature. The other two were freak injuries.

HBA is my reason for positivity. If he's fit, we'll be fine. I guarantee we'll have a much better season if he plays more than 25 league games.

There's not much of a level of confirmation there at all, though, given the relative absence of any context. True, what else can we add to it? Chez, you know full well that HP would fail a statistics course if he presented his information like he's done in this thread. You need to do proper regressions, have big sample sizes etc. This look at minutes and goals conceded or % of shots taken inside the area to points is such a fundamentally flawed analysis that i just don't know where to start. If you can't even give confidence levels to your conclusion then it's even worse. What he's done in this thread is just confused anyone who doesn't have a background in Maths and used statistics in the worse way to 'back up' his point, by which he means that he's cherry picked stats to prove his points. Here, I'm going to do something similar: List of players in order of appearances: Cisse (34), Jonas (33).... Goals conceded: 67 (third worst in the league) Jonas is shit. I fully agree with that analysis I would add that stats follow known distributions, you need sample sizes and regressions if you want to test that a statistical difference exist between samples from different teams or periods. That's not needed here. When the 'ranking' of the team in terms of shots on target is used to describe our creativity, i've got no problem with it. What i do have a problem with is people saying that 'thats not a good statistic, as it doesnt tell you how many were pathetic grass-cutter shots from outside the box'. That where people are abusing stats because statistical science tells you that the 'shot statistics' for other teams will also include these types of shots and that these factors will be uniformly distributed, perhaps even normally. Hence you could strongly hypothesise that removing these 'shit shots' would preserve the ranking. If you were able to identify and remove the 'shit shots' and then wanted to then test whether the rankings were different, you could in this case use a non-parametric test like the Wilcoxon and therefore not rely on large sample sizes. The data is valid and conclusions can be drawn. You cant assume in anomalies to make your argument work though, you have to assume distributions follow standard patterns. For the record, i'm not a statistician. Yeah, you're a trained economist, which just means you get paid well to do statistics then talk about them.

Survival because it leads to greater long term chance of success. How many non-Premiership teams have won the FA Cup or the League Cup in the past 20 years? Can't be more than two or three. Stay in the league and you can always have a good run and with the good players that you have, you can win cups. If you're out of the Premierleague then sooner or later you'll run into a team that is just so much better than you that there's not even the chance of doing a giant killing (see: Carling Cup final this year).

If HP was serious about wanting to find out what's the most important factor in getting points, then he'd look back at the last five years of statistics in the league, giving a healthy 190 game sample size, very much big enough to form conclusions that have a high degree of confidence. He'd then do a regression of points to things like possession, chances inside the box, chances inside 6 yards, % of shots from outside etc etc. He'd get a proper R^2 and a 'formula' for getting points in the premier league. Right now, for a guy who has background in statistics, he's just being disingenuous and in many cases is purposely conflating things.

Survival.

There's not much of a level of confirmation there at all, though, given the relative absence of any context. True, what else can we add to it? Chez, you know full well that HP would fail a statistics course if he presented his information like he's done in this thread. You need to do proper regressions, have big sample sizes etc. This look at minutes and goals conceded or % of shots taken inside the area to points is such a fundamentally flawed analysis that i just don't know where to start. If you can't even give confidence levels to your conclusion then it's even worse. What he's done in this thread is just confused anyone who doesn't have a background in Maths and used statistics in the worse way to 'back up' his point, by which he means that he's cherry picked stats to prove his points. Here, I'm going to do something similar: List of players in order of appearances: Cisse (34), Jonas (33).... Goals conceded: 67 (third worst in the league) Jonas is shit.

The silver lining of this is that they will back him in the summer window. He's been moaning for ages on transfers etc, so if they're planning to let him stay then surely they won't want to hear the same excuses again next year. I still don't think it's a given that he'll be here. I reckon we'll have put out some feelers for managers and not liked what we got back, so we've assured Pardew. But let's say Rafa drops his demands for money for himself and transfers, Ashley isn't the type of guy that will pass up an opportunity like that because he's given his word to a subordinate.

What the fuck was Williamson doing that far up the pitche

I don't understand this hoofing shit

He is a god

I'm fucking drunk. Just saw the score. You must be fucking kidding me I give up on football. Fuck this.

I honestly don't mind us playing for a point. It'll be enough after Tuesday's result. This is now a can't lose game rather than must win for me.

Appalling refereeing.

At least the grammar is much better than it was before.