Taylor Swift

-11 now. Not looking good. We're expected to get 4 points from our next four matches. Half the season will have gone, we'll be on 21 points and needing a title winning run (around 42 points for the second half of the season) to give ourselves a chance at getting a CL place.

Best central midfield performance from one of ours this season.

We've needed a Bellamy type, in attributes and attitude, for eight god damn years.

It's going to become very frustrating seeing him start every match. It's like seeing Smith and Butt start every god damn match, or Shola. Fuck me Shola is still playing these days. We have better options and Pardew needs to use them. I don't give a fuck what happens on the training ground because on the pitch, Jonas is useless and Marveaux is better than him. He needs a good break, see whether he can recover from this legginess that has affected his game for about a year now. Sometimes it happens. It's very rare for a player to lose his physicality at 30, especially these days, and especially not when the guy hasn't had significant muscle or ligament injuries. Just chill out, do some yoga and try to regain some of his pace because if he manages to regain his ability to get past one or two players then he's still effective. As it is, Santon is our LB and LW at this rate, which reflects really badly on Jonas.

Our guys are done.

I get why he took Ben Arfa off. Ben Arfa looks like he's not fully fit yet and wasn't as fast as normal but seriously, you bring on Shola? Why not Marveaux? Why not Sammy? Why not someone with a fucking brain?

Deflected but ill take it

Hatemmmmmmmm

Eleven.

Nah, by then Tiote will be off to the ANC so Pardew won't have to make a decision. I think he'll drop him eventually. Everyone can see it.

What's the point in starting with a formation which hasn't worked for the whole god damn season? And then switches to another formation which hasn't worked. God damn infuriating.

Anita has been our best player.

Fucking useless, Jonas. Why shoot when it's 4 v 3?

Krul hoof to Williamson. The perfect way to sum up our season so far.

Jonas is fucking useless. Take a break and get back in the gym because you're shite.

Why is Jonas even asking for the ball when the first thing he does with it is put someone else under pressure? Just fuck off you useless cunt.

Another formation change before HT. Why don't you just start with this formation, Alan?

http://alltheragefaces.com/img/faces/large/sad-i-know-that-feel-clean-l.png And I didn't wake up last week. They suckered me in.

Their one touch play is so much better than ours. How is this possible? They've been playing the same game their whole lives.

I can't believe I woke up for this shit.

It is completely contradictory.

In general the level of football today is higher than it was forty years ago for a variety of reasons. Since players have improved mainly due to science and medicine, it leads us to believe that it will become harder and harder for players to continue improving, because science and medicine can only help so much. So since we are almost plateauing in terms of scientific achievement, differences between players are now only in terms of skill and technique, relative to before. Given this conclusion, for someone like Messi to be so dominant and so otherworldly today, has to mean that he is so many standard deviations better than the average player. Pele didn't need to be so many standard deviations better because there weren't that many players meaning there weren't that many great players (in counting terms). If you catch my drift.

Scoring has declined about 10-20%, in general, over the past forty years. I think it's declined by even more in the Brazilian league, meaning Pele played in a time which was far easier to rack up goals. Why has scoring declined? Probably lots of reasons: advance in technology has eroded the difference in athleticism between the most athletic and the average, meaning most players are strong and fast, leading to a higher average level than before. Also, the population of footballers has increased exponentially. This again means that the best teams will now have multiple players who are sublime whereas before, simply due to a lack of players, teams had lesser good players, therefore there was a greater difference in quality between teams in general. I'm not sure this is true, you'd have to look at goals difference of the best and worst teams and do a regression. I'd say that since money exploded in football, there has been a reversal in this trend to a point but we are still seeing more parity today than before, although that's now restricted to the foremost tier of teams. There are also more teams today, so the population argument only goes so far.

HTT just thinks it was harder to score then, damn the facts and evidence, man. His arguments are as cloudy as yours though tbf. Arguing that CRonaldo would be among the absolute best ever. Oh god. I talk about statistics and I back what I say with facts. This Ronaldo is insanely good, there's no doubt about it. No team in the world can stop him from doing his thing, it's just that his thing isn't as effective as Messi's thing, but it's more effective than anyone else's in the past twenty years, when you take into account how long he has done it for.

Mentality man. Back then teams and players were sent out to win and to score goals. Today teams are sent out not to lose. See our own Newcastle. Players were more individualistic too. Ben Arfa in Pele's day would be a world great, allowed to express his talents freely. Not today he has to defend etc. There is too much money in the modern game to allow players and teams to wilfully express themselves freely which in a way makes the likes if Messi all the more remarkable. So it was easier to score back then, then, given that teams were more offensive.