brummie

To be fair, Milan has two airports. One is Malpensa, which tends to handle inter continental flights and is a long way outside the city, but Linate, which handles European flights, is very close to the city centre.

There is pretty much no better place in the world to live if you are a twenty something multi millionaire with a lot of spare time on your hands. There is imo. I've got you covered with "pretty much"

There is pretty much no better place in the world to live if you are a twenty something multi millionaire with a lot of spare time on your hands.

We have quite clearly copied his modus operandi this summer

That's the thing. Defoe will score goals, yes, but not as many as he used to, and investing that much money (think of the salary cost over the contract length) in a player who will be so old at the end of it was absolutely nuts. It reminded me of a MON style transfer. Ill-researched, over expensive and desperate.

That is the worst celebration the football world has ever seen.

Selling Defoe would actually be a wise move. That contract he is on is fucking absurd at his age. If they can get someone to drag them out of that particular fire by buying him, they should snap their hands off.

I wonder if what Sunderland are going through money-wise with Ellis Short mirrors what we went through when Randy Lerner lost interest. Say what you like about Abrahmovich - and there are lots of unpleasant things to be said on that score, on issues way more important than football - but he has at least remained committed both mentally and financially. Lerner found something more interesting to do and just totally dropped interest. I wonder if Short is doing the same?

Called himself "Tinkerman" yesterday. Much nicer bloke than Pearson. Let's be honest, though, Pearson was an absolute fucking psychopath.

That is more or less what I was talking to a friend about last night. It used to be us, you, Everton, that type of club, had enough extra cash plus a tradition of bothering the correct end of the table to make moves like that a no-brainer. What has happened now is that *everyone* in the top flight has got the cash, which sort of nullifies that side of things, plus the likes of us and you, being badly run, find ourselves at the wrong end of the table too often, making the likes of Southampton as (or more) appealing.

I think a centre half. Especially now Senderos is apparently off to some Turkish side. I can't see Fonte leaving Southampton, to be honest.

Although, then again, Cleverley did revert to being dog shit for the last few games of the season. I am starting to wonder whether we've actually agreed a takeover, which they're going to report at the end of the season or something, with the money we've spent. I know we got good wedge for Benteke and Delph, but even so ...

Not too sure about that. We've signed 10 players, and they all look more than promising, but they're going to take a fair while to gel, I think. Really enjoyed this window, though. This time last year it was Joe Cole, Senderos and Kieran Fucking Richardson.

From the wikipedia page, re former students:

That's the one! Summerhill. The documentary was 1980s, I think. There was a more recent one, too, I think, but the one I saw was the original one.

Anyone in their 40s will remember this, but in the 70s or 80s there was a tv documentary about a private school which basically had no rules, they just let the kids run things. Summer-something I think it was called. So, basically, it was like a post-apocalyptic / Lord of the Flies situation with posh but feral 13 year olds bullying the staff and laying down the law, running around the place throwing shit up the walls and pissing on teachers. That is *exactly* what RTG reminds me of, except the kids aren't posh, they're just feral.

The thing that amazes me is you look at it sometimes - and this was the case for me the other day - and the first page consists of 20 threads, all of which have been started in the last 10 minutes. I have no reason to dislike Sunderland, but I poke around a few forums for other clubs and that one is without a doubt the most embarrassing one. I am not even a Sunderland fan and I feel embarrassed reading it, it is so utterly puerile. It reads like pretty much every poster stopped going to school aged 11 and just spends every night smoking 100 tabs and shouting at the internet. Remarkable.

I'm in danger of feeling optimistic for the start of the season. Especially if we sign Traore tomorrow. This wasn't supposed to happen. To provide context to this, last summer we bought Philip Senderos, Joe Cole and Kieran Richardson. Imagine that.

They very rarely break transfer stories, they don't really have a good network for that. If they do have a source for this I'm inclined to believe them, though. They don't do much transfer clickbait unlike Marca or the Barcelona rags. Traoré is a beast, all pace and power. His glaring weakness is that he plays with the blinders on. It looks like we have given up on coaching some awareness on him, but it seems to me that he should fit well in the premier league. Nice one. Costing £4.2m apparently as he has a release clause.

One for Village Idiot. How accurate are AS with their transfer stories? http://futbol.as.com/futbol/2015/08/11/primera/1439285875_964302.html?ref=rss&format=simple&link=link&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed Saying Adama Traore is going to sign for us.

I see Liverpool don't really know what to do with Benteke. Rodgers is such a shyster.

I dunno about that, seven league goals in five years. Take it back then, he's just plain s*** How about, he got a few games at Man Utd so he must be OK ? The infuriating thing with Cleverly is that he seems to have two settings - brilliant and awful - with nothing in between. If he could show the brilliant side more often, he'd be such a good player.

I dunno about that, seven league goals in five years.

Taken about 3 years for the "Everton, hard to break down" garbage to finally be disproven. We are incredibly easy to score against. Not under Moyes you weren't. Garbage as usual. We were consistently susceptible to any sort of shot from 20 yards, a total lack of closing down. We are persistently easy to attack against, and indeed score against. No surprise a poor team had fun doing that. What is your lot's take on Cleverley, Neil? He was weird for us. Until about March, he was genuinely one of the worst, most anonymous players I've ever seen play for us. Then for about six games, he was absolutely brilliant. Then he went back to being rubbish the last few games of the season.

Nah, so many new players, barely played together. It's 45 minutes of football. Not really much to draw from that, and not much to draw from the second half, either, I'm just glad it isn't going to be like it was last year. FWIW I think it would have been tricky for whoever had got drawn to play there today. Agree that it was a tough opening game. But I'd be worried because I thought you guys were pathetic for a long time today. We were much the better side in the second half, but you can't draw anything from 45 minutes, especially not the first day of the season, good or bad. Although having watched Sunderland's highlights this evening, maybe you can.