Super Duper Branko Strupar

I don't think Ole wants his defenders to turn into absolute idiots for no reason. When your best CB is Harry Maguire, you're giving yourselves that problem.

Obviously yes. By Western multicultural standards it isn't great at all. But living in Korea I experienced 'the white guy' and 'the foreigner'. 'The black guy' would certainly be used commonly too I have no doubt. In a post-communist country with probably less than 0.1% of the population being black there are different standards in terms of use of language and what counts as acceptable. It's churlish to ignore cultural relativism when incidents like this happen. UEFA however should surely be vetting their officials on stuff like this to make sure every one of them are singing from the same hymn sheet if they're going to ref on the biggest stage. Romanians don't have a great track record with regard to racial sensitivity, like. Not to tarnish an individual with the same brush as others without hearing them out, but as much as it may be a language thing, it's also potentially an attitude thing. And that guy should be better than that in his position, like you said. It's the old Suarez, South American language/culture thing, isn't it. Where are the lines drawn with regard to language and intent? I know Romania is a different country to South American countries, but I have a few South American mates and every one of them fiercely defended Suarez in the Evra incident. And I'm sure would if you brought it up with them now. Explaining it in a similar way as you have about your experiences in Korea.

I'd be surprised if he isn't out for the season, like. That kind of injury has ended other players' careers.

:lol:

Correct.

Contact was outside, initially. His momentum and arching of his body took it over the line.

It wasn't, like.

I know it'll have been done to death over the past couple of days, But Giroud, man. Such a classy footballer. He's never not been. I think there's bit of a quandary though, because you can think if you put Giroud in a really great team, he can top the scoring charts across Europe. Of course, if you put any striker in a really great team they are going to score more goals. But in theory he has so much ability in the box he should outscore most in the same position. If you do more of the work before it get's to him, he needs to do less, and he's so capable, he should just do it over and over. But... You can never really escape the fact he seems to perform better when he has to do more. Which would work against the theory. He's such an enigma in a footballing sense Sill think he's great, though.

52 with 6 to play. Needed this.

Took Grealish out for KDB and plumped for him as captain over DCL. Finally.

If we didnt let a few twat managers of certain clubs dictate the rules of the game with their endless fucking whining about pissy little things we wouldnt be in this situation. We're all aware marginal decisions before VAR were equally shared amongst teams and would even out over the course of a season and weren't really anything to get so het up about. But no, we pander to the idiot, angry, woe is us victims and end up with this ridiculous extreme. All this madness with fucking lines being drawn from someone's armpit. All it needs is the referee to go to the monitor and check the footage and make a call. If it's not visibly offside to the naked eye in a simple slow mo, it's not fucking offside.

Amazon could bring the delay down if they wanted to. Like you said, it's not like they dont have the infrastructure at their disposal at little cost to them.

You know what he said? Edit: Nevermind, seen it. My Colombian mate is ferociously insistent that South Americans use that term in an entirely different context than we'd expect it to be used in. Spoke about this kind of thing before after the Suarez incident. Very interesting to listen to. Makes you think about how it is received though, despite the defence of the context and intent. In South America and beyond.

Idiot.

Very sad news.

Project Big 5.

For all his quality was poor, playing him in that position benefits us, imo. Bruce missed a trick by not also going with wingers to support Joelinton in a 10 and Wilson ahead. The link up he was able to provide just in front of the striker was screaming out for willing wingers to attack the edge of the box and posts. I honestly think there's a very intelligent footballer in there, but he has zero ability to carry us. If we had 4 up top today instead of 3 we'd have killed them. Just a shame Bruce is manager.

Wasnt going to bother with any changes this weekend but ended up taking Fernandes out for Jota. Gives me enough money to bring Salah back in when he's back. Good decision to take Lewis off the bench too.

Lift it with your back. Ohhh wait you're in hospital with a broken spine, how'd that happen? *Don't.

Maradona's former agent on Newsnight has just said the best deal he ever got for Maradona was special dispensation for the Naples police to run red lights in his Ferrari to stop fans jumping on it and damaging it as they'd damaged his cars so badly. Mint.

Hot fuck. Grim.

It's people with nowt better to do that fill twitter with garbage. Just dont read it and wait to hear from someone worth fucking listening to. "Look at NCSL's likes" Get a fucking life, man. (Not you)

I'm ostensibly for this but I'm not sure the board is held together by anything more than hope and twine at this point Quality > Quantity.