Chris_R

STM with Pope up front and Wilson in goal. Bold.

Wilsosn Willock Livramento Joelinton Longstaff Bruno Hall Schar Lascelles Trippier Pope

Unless the team sheet is going for SHENANIGANS then it's highly indicative of it being Hall left back, Tino on the wing. And that feels right to me, otherwise we end up with Trippier at left back when he's far more effective creatively on the right.

100% agree, he seems a lovely bloke and I reckon I'd love to sit down with him for a chat, but I'm somewhat traumatised by watching him plod about the pitch fucking up chance after chance for FORTEEN YEARS, and I'd be very happy if his role with the club was basically limited to this, ie being our equivalent of an ASDA greeter.

Fuck em. UEFA can get in the bin. Barcelona count it, so I'm certainly counting it.

My bad. It's late and I thought they'd been in the UEFA for some reason.

That's missing our 12 matches in the Intertoto Cup. Sure, the Intertoto is shit, but it's competitive European football and counts.

Tomorrow will of course be our 4th European match this season. It'll be our 100th UEFA Cup / Champions League match (Ie equal to or better than the level Sunderland played their 4 matches in), and our 138th European match overall. We've won 75 games in Europe so far. Sunderland have scored a total of 5 goals in Europe in their history. Alan Shearer, Shola Ameobi, Craig Bellamy, Wyn Davies, Pop Robson, Tino Asprilla, Nobby Solano, Obafemi Martins, Keiron Dyer, Patrick Kluivert, Laurent Robert, Jim Scott and Gary Speed have all scored at least that many for us as. Shola Ameobi has scored 3 times as many goals in Europe for us as Sunderland have in their history.

I can help with that. It's because both of them have sustained stress fractures of their lower back.

The noise around our goal is stupid, Arteta basically thinking that since there were three checks, surely one of them must be given? But it doesn't work like that. It wasn't offside. Gordon was behind Joelinton. That's the end of that one. The ball cannot be conclusively said to be out. That's the end of that one too. That just leaves the push, that's all Arteta or anyone else has personally I think that was a foul, but it was soft and VC AR have decided there wasn't enough to overrule the on field decision. But the other two checks simply could not be used to disallow the goal. So there was only one check that can really even be open to debate. Just because they check three things doesn't mean they have to give one to each side, this isn't like distributing sweets to your kids FFS.

Why risk any players ever? We should just forfeit every game to keep everyone fit.

Dummet DC, Joelinton SC, Trippier LB, Schar DM and Ameobi LW please.

Really? I mean he was exciting to watch, but I'm sure that I remember he was a lazy person and that's why Keegan peddled him. He thought Cole had peaked, that he didn't train properly, that he was a bit disinterested in improving. And whilst obviously Cole had a stellar career still, his peak in terms of goals/game was indeed with us and he never got better than that. He went to a better team but performed worse, so maybe Keegan was right? In other words, what he's like on camera is probably just a reflection of him as a person - Very laid back. Exactly like he allegedly was as a player. I doubt he has an axe to grind with us.

My only worry was whether he was fully recovered from his ACL injury, but that run for the assist seems to comfortably put that to bed.

So there was a 21% chance of a draw being this bad or worse? Hardly proof of a fix.

Sorry, beat you by seconds here. Waaaaay too busy with work for WW this week, just joined for the numbers. Quite happy to be out now tbh!

If that's a booking, how the fuck is Hannibal still on?

Wrong!

Was it my imagination or was he limping slightly after that run at the end there?

Reading is not Newcastle. The aspirations of the two fanbases are a long way apart, and success for one would be failure for the other. What he did with us can't really be used as a yardstick for whether he'll similarly fail at a far smaller club. I say this as I think when he took over us he really did have the best of intentions. He wanted to be a success. He then realised he didn't have the means (or at least the will to commit such a high percentage of his means) to making it happen, so switched to just bleeding us dry. Reading is a different proposition and if he goes in with far smaller commitments needed to improve them, he could easily get them to a higher level than they're at now, a level which I think is basically a low ebb for them in recent history. We were a club at (or close to) our peak when he bought us, with big bills that he couldn't (or again, didn't want to) afford. Reading are massively underperforming and anything would feel like success to their fans right now.

Neither side of an argument can have any evidence about any future outcome of any topic without building a time machine. Everything is, by necessity, speculation.

That's not really what I was saying though. I wasn't talking about him turning Reading into what we were, more turning them into an upper Championship club who might have a pop at promotion occasionally, maybe even successfully. They'd go down again, for all the reasons you stated, but he could get them into a position to occasionally challenge promotion in the Championship, I'm sure of that. And for Reading fans, right now that's a dream scenario. Not every club's barometer of success or failure is the same. Suggesting Ashley would make Reading worse than they currently are is hubris and wishful thinking on our part, when he could sort out many of their problems with what is to him effectively pocket money. We were nothing but a cash cow for him. Reading could never be that in their current state, so he won't be buying them as such.

I've said before and stand by that Ashley won't make every team worse. He could take a team heading down from L1 and get them to the Championship easily just by throwing a bit of spare change at them, and he'd probably be willing to do that because he wants what's best for Mike Ashley and that would clearly tie in with keeping them up which could be done for what amounts to pocket change for him. The problem is he cannot improve a club the size of ours or indeed any established PL side, so he again does what's best for Mike Ashley and just drains all the money into his account whilst using us as an advertising hoarding. That won't work with Reading because in L1 there's nobody to advertise to. I despise him as much as anyone for what he did to us, but I think this notion that he'll automatically be terrible for whoever he owns is possibly a bit misconstrued/hopeful. He can basically at will turn any team he takes over into a lower PL / upper Championship side, you've just got to factor in that team's starting point to decide if that's a good thing or not. For some it'll be a dream and they'd rightly let him rename the stadium and plaster his tat all over the place if he provided that for them. If he ever took over a side like Everton or Villa I'd not stop lauging for a week mind.

I've thought about this a lot, and I actually think it's the opposite. He's been so desperate for an edge, he's been willing to gamble on his own team, presumably using inside information like knowing when players are fit etc despite knowing the consequences of this are massively greater than being found to have stuck £10 on the 3:30 at Goodwood. That's not the actions of a casual gambler, that's the actions of an addict or a desperate man. IMO, at least.