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I fixed your post for you. Not directed specifically at you, but more to all the stupid internet battles going on in the football section.

People forget how good Jonas looked at times last yearm when he had fully fit Oba and Owen running in front of him. If we surround him with other dangerous mobile players, he will suddenly become a much more effective player.

How do you figure? They consistently sell players at a profit and supposedly have a rather strict wage structure in place. I'd be more worried about the likes of Villa, tbh.

We did it for the large portions (our best portions actually) of last season.

I'm pretty Hughton already rubbished this.

Beckford Ranger Age: 26 Age: 18 CC/PL goals: 0 CC/PL goals: 2 I prefer Ranger.

Wow!! Ashley and co. have been bloody impressive these last few days. Would love if we could pull this off.

Why are the penalties for cocaine so high in football? You'd think the idea would be to help players with their life-altering addictions rather than just throwing them out of the sport for years. It should be up to the club in my opinion, anyway.

They must be giving him mega-wages or something. That is a terrible move.

David James?

You really think that man. Football is the country is broken top to bottom. You saw the match against Zambia, right? It was telling. That is our level. We are a below average African side. Maybe we should realise that and lower expectations.

I suspect that Donovan will stay so long as he is successful and plays regularly. The minute things turn south, he'll be heading back to LA. Shame that Brian McBride wasted his career in MLS--he's the one that might of really done well. You realise that McBride played in Fulham for years, right?

It's depressing. They got ONE chance for God's sake. It's breaking my heart seeing Kanu in his last Nations Cup watching this bunch of frauds and losers shrivel up and die against weak opposition. Fitting that our best chance rebounded off Yakubu's fat arse and flew into the gallery. I'm really not enjoying football anymore.

The thing with Nolan is that he's been our most productive player in the team this season. The concerning thing is that he's yet to score a goal in the new year. Couple that with his poor display of energy in the middle and you have a problem.

The same as last year against Portsmouth, then. It was immediately obvious that time as well.

I know we are winning, but it feels like we are losing with all the bad things going on right now.

Is Jonas injured, too? Goodness.

We should have put Jonas at Left back, imo. Pancrate and Guthrie are both bad fits.

We can't afford to lose Enrique.

1-0, United.

So Kadar is playing right back? Or is it Colo? He seems a decent tool to have, tbh. Can fill in throughout the back four?

Both sides have missed sitters so far apparently, seems an open game.

Referees Are Gunning for Tall Guys, Study Asserts The German defender Philipp Lahm, a diminutive 5 foot 7, is often described as skillful, heady and tenacious. A veritable frantic smurf on the back line for his national team (63 caps) and club team, Bayern Munich (more than 120 games since 2005), who often encounters taller and stronger opponents. “Lahm hardly has a foul called against him,” Dr. Steffan Giessner said in a telephone interview. “He plays tough. People pick up on small players and say they are really tough guys.” But Giessner, 35, and Dr. Niels van Quaquebeke, 32, two German scientists and researchers at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University in the Netherlands, assert in a paper entitled “Height-Related Bias in Foul Calls,” published on the Web on Tuesday (and in the February edition of the subscription-only Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology) that soccer’s tall people usually got the short end of the stick in ambiguous situations when a referee calls a foul. Their research indicates that taller people are more likely to be perceived by referees (and fans) as foul perpetrators and their smaller opponents as the victims. “I’m pretty short, and when I play basketball I tended to get away with a lot of fouling,” van Quaquebeke said in a telephone interview from the Netherlands. “Humans are not objective. We assume that humans are rational beings in a social world. But we would argue that we all have information processing machines in our heads that cannot attend to all the information we receive. We have rule of thumbs that guide us through life, which leads us to make sometimes a wrong decision. In evolutionary terms, we associate size with aggression, dominance and power. Now we can show, via data, that this is still in our thinking — including a referee in soccer. “There are usually two discussions: to provide technical assistance for refs in the form of video and slow-mo replays or, like FIFA, taking a very conservative stance and say that it is a human sport that with the intrusion of technology would take away from the flow and make it not as exciting. By training refs in new and different ways you could train against bias.” The study is based on data compiled by Impire AG, a German company that catalogs statistics on major European sports, including seven soccer seasons of the Bundesliga (85,262 fouls) and Champions League (32,142), and three World Cups (6,440), a tally of more than 100,000 fouls. “We chose football because the sport often yields ambiguous foul situations in which it is difficult to determine the perpetrator,” van Quaquebeke said. “In such situations, people must rely on their instincts to make a call, which should increase the use and the detectability of a player’s height as an additional decision cue. By providing scientific insights on potential biases in refereeing, our work might help officials weigh the options. It is not our call on how on findings should be used. Perhaps in better training for refs.” Beyond the data, which van Quaquebeke and Giessner assert show that taller players are called for more fouls, they conducted experiments with fans in which they were shown photographs of a smaller and a taller player running side by side, pictures in which no actual fouls had been committed. Generally, the results show that participants are more inclined to anticipate the taller player to foul the smaller. The subjects anticipated a foul by the taller player, and, told that the taller player was on the ground in subsequent photos, believed that he had taken a dive, but when the smaller player was shown on the ground the subjects assumed he had been fouled by the bigger player. In conclusion the authors wrote: “We have shown that refereeing in football has, to quote Joseph S. Blatter, a very ‘human face.’ Indeed, referees are not objective and perfect information processors, but human and thus also subject to socially learned and evolutionarily formed cognitive associations which sometimes bias their judgment.” Giessner and van Quaquebeke both acknowledged that their recent study of fouls in soccer liberated them from the more mundane management topics they are used to dealing with. Delving into the realm of sports has actually made their work fun. “We’ve talked with our colleagues about the opportunities to use sports data to illuminate management concepts,” Giessner said. “And suddenly all management researchers have at least one sports paper in the C.V. Yeah, we too do our management stuff. But we’re fans, too.” ----------------- I've been saying this for years! Referees have a bias against us larger players! Short, slight players can get away with almost anything on the pitch. The prime example is Claude Makelele, who constantly fouled but was rarely booked for his constant violence.

the two thugs at wba in cb battered his shoulder Was it that Tamas? He's a dirty player.

Shoulder injury in the cup, nothing serious. Good to hear he's alright, then. Very comfortable with Carrol, Ranger, and Loven as options right now, though.