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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.

All of a sudden we have decent bench for the first time in good long while. What happened to Shola? Did he manage to get injured again?

Goalless wonder? He's scored somwehere around 40 league goals in his entire European career. Which has spanned about 8 seasons. He got 15 one season with Pompey and has barely scored other than that. Failed to score for his first twenty or so matches at Pompey as well.

Rafa's made some very good purchases at Liverpool. It's just that every year he creates new ways to waste vast amounts of money on rubbish. Like this year when he sold Arbeloa for 4 million pounds and bought Johnson for 20. Is Glen Johnson really five times better than Arbeloa? Mehdi Mahdavikia has left Frankfurt to return to Iran.

Wait? Benjani the goalless wonder?...to Liverpool?!

7 to 8 million pounds for this lad: http://www.maidstoneunited.co.uk/squad/images/0708season/chrissmalling.jpg I hope he turns out to be good (well after Man U sell him at a loss), but the price for young English talent is insane.

Brilliant news to wake up to. Decent player, and potentially a very good one at this level. Really I am very happy with this, but we still must get in one or two more in on loan.

If it was racist then I should be banned for life from this board plane & simple. Mods & Admins please read the thread & if you deem it racist ban me. I said the host nation helped but Ghana did not win on home soil in West Africa & Egypt last title was not on home soil. I think we all believe the hype about West African football because of the big name players in Europe & squads packed with European based players. Where as the likes of Algeria, Egypt & Tunisia have a large portion of there squads from there domestic leagues so they don't get the hype & have the unknown factor about them for most of us but them players have dominated in recent seasons the CAF Champions League. Black Power thread: http://www.newcastle-online.org/nufcforum/index.php/topic,59501.msg1657031.html#msg1657031 Unlike Susan Boyle I am big fan of diversity (JOKE) Fair enough if that stuff was a joke, man. just caught as really inappropiate at the time. I don't think we are overrating the Black African teams, spence. At 2006 World Cup, Black Africa qualified 4 of out Africa's five teams and in 2010, they have qualified four again. As I said, Egypt is very very good, but the others really haven't done much lately. Since winining ACN in 2004, Tunisia has struggled. Algeria had done nothing for years before their surprise qualification this time around. Morroco similarly haven't done anything for years and didn't even qualify for the Nations Cup. Teams like Nigeria, CIV, Ghana, Cameroon and even occasionally Senegal and Mali have consistently been among Africa's elite teams and in the knockout stages of the ACN. Egypt might be the best team on the continent right now, but the next four or five would be West african, imo.

At least he doesn't have to play for Sunderland. Good Lord, man.

If you're done with the racist stuff (or it was a joke) than I'll respond. Arab teams have done well of late but this was assisted by the host nation winning in 2004 and 2006. Egypt is very good, but the other ones aren't as good as the West African teams, imo. They play a different, more European style, and really right now the best teams in Africa are in West Africa, except for Egypt. Still, Algeria and Tunisia are talented and organized and you need to be wary of them.

Yeah he has, VI. Funny enough, he's much in the same situation as last time. In 2002, he qualified us for the WC, but it was very uninspiring so he was sacked. Fast forward to 2010 and he's once again qualified us for the World Cup, but no one is impressed by his team. Rumour was he would get sacked if he didn't make the semi-finals. After that horrible performance, he might still be in the firing line anyway. Penalty shootouts are amazing, btw. Still buzzing.

Phew! Lucky punt! [see what I did there? ] It's a rhyming joke I know Yak didn't play very well, but Nigeria were crying to go 4-4-2 when Martins came on. Yak is 2 or 3 strikers by himself, though. Honestly though, our coach is an inflexible idiot. How does he not understand that a team needs an attack minded player from the fullbacks or the midfielders?

Eneyama is a hero of Nigerian football. Just like in 2006, he slots home a massive penalty and makes the winning save. The guys makes the occasional error, but makes many big saves and is a great servant for his country.

Christ, man. That's ridiculous. 3 African nation titles on the bounce for the Arab nations says its not. Will it be 4? The idea that black Africans depend only on athletics and that Arabs are somehow smarter is racist, stupid, and ignorant.

Lokomotiv Mosocw. He from USSR originally, so I think he's comfortable there.