leffe186

That’s the Strasbourg owned by Chelsea, too. You can’t argue both ways though. If English clubs are too financially dominant then whoever gets in should piss it, no? Forest, or West Ham, or Chelsea, or whoever. That’s the acid test next year. That said, the whole thing is so obviously broken, and the presence of Strasbourg/Chelsea is just the shitty icing on a shitty cake. If they’re not going to change the Champions league then they have to at least change the Conference to exclude the bigger leagues.

As if there was any soul left to sell.

TBF we got cheated out of winning the European Cup in 1962.

Don’t make me dig up the post where I realize how you qualified for it.

Was gonna say - guaranteed Villa trophy now, no?

Why not? They won ages ago, you’ve got to do something to pass the time.

Oh Jesus, genuinely just remembered that my brother-in-law is a Blade. My sis is Spurs (of course). No football talk there for a while.

Was gonna say. Isn’t it worth them going up so you can put 9 past them next year?

This. Everything flows from the CL expansion.

Someone talked about this in one of the podcasts yesterday (The Fighting Cock?). We lost an absolute shit fest at Palace and Ange said something like the game was poor, bitty and bad-tempered and we didn’t cope with it. They were suggesting Amorim could say the same thing after Wednesday. We didn’t go full shithouse, but we played to the strengths of the team we had.

All our proper creative players were dead, so Ange discovered pragmatism

The meme potential after Wednesday is enormous. Somebody post the one with the managers and their trophies…

Yeah, like I say, I was working backwards, I didn’t see the specifics of the contemplation Just to clarify the nuances about not caring about the league, I only got to that point when the players were dropping like flies, the ones left were out on their feet and we clearly didn’t have enough of a squad left to compete on all fronts. There’s certainly an argument to be made that Ange could have done a better job managing the squad up to that point, but it wasn’t happening. Can’t remember if I’d ditched the league before or after we went out of the domestic cups tbh. I’d love us to have made a fist of the league and the cups, but we just didn’t seem capable of doing so. As far as the dropout changes I didn’t realize that they had come from the ESL guys. What was their reasoning? I would have thought they’d have been to their benefit in giving them extra revenue, as they would be most likely to be the ones in the CL in the first place?

Not sure if serious Been protecting those scars (see above) and not posting too much about football - as a result when I pop the cork you get verbal diarrhoea. Also there is an absolute ton of shit going on in life and this is a welcome safety valve. And other mixed metaphors.

Cheers! Hard to say what the season feels like now tbh. That needs a bit more distance. I feel like this is more of a question about long-term v short term football goals but I’ve got a couple of thoughts so apologies for the dribbling essay about to follow. I feel weird because I’ve been keeping a bit of emotional distance from Spurs despite moving back to North London. Danny Kelly said something in his post-game podcast about the scars you accumulate as a fan and how you protect them. Some of mine are about the game in general, some are about the weird stresses inherent in the way we play, some are about the insidious and traumatic nature about being a dyed-in-the-wool fan (of any team) that is viscerally affected by the game despite recognizing its absurdity . My next-door neighbor is a season-ticket holder. He texted me after work to see if I wanted to go down the pub with him to watch it. My response - verbatim, just checked - was “thank you but I am absolutely terrified”. He said simply “me too”. Of course, I did have other stuff to do (like moving a piano) but I watched the last trophy we won in a pub in Sutton Coldfield and the one before in a pub in Stratford (the East London one). Now I’m old and fragile and tired, and I have to try to seem like a normal person around my kids and my wife. It’s easier to hold things together trying to distract myself from the TV with chores that I’m inventing out of thin air. Is football really trophies over everything? Most local opposition fans - Arsenal, Chelsea, even the odd West Ham fan - have been telling me that for a while. They’ll move those goalposts now - actually some already have done. For me it was always community and family over everything, but really community and family and trophies and good football and progress in a sort of mulch. More satisfying to be good in the league though? - well if you’re old enough, you tell me how satisfied you were with the Keegan years. I’m going to guess broadly incredibly happy and proud but with this weird underlying sense of ultimate unfulfillment. I fucking loved us under Poch for a million reasons, but can‘t deny that the fact he didn’t get to lift a trophy gnaws on me sometimes. I got a call from my eldest today (15F). She was ecstatic because her school day tomorrow is cancelled…because of Spurs’ trophy parade down the High Rd. There you go - community and family and trophies . My Mum’s in North Middlesex Hospital at the moment and she’ll probably be able to hear the parade (she won’t know what the fuck it is, but if she hears Ange’s voice she might think it’s her Dad). That’s part of why it can be more satisfying than an extremely good league campaign. I’ll always want us to get better every year and ultimately win everything all the time and force Arsenal back to South London etc etc. It’s almost self-evident that a good league performance this year would have suggested we were on the right track for progress to world domination, and a Cup win - while promoting self-belief and togetherness - doesn’t necessarily do that at all, certainly not when combined with the shambles in the PL. But I’m happy. There are signs for optimism in the squad, some players have got a long overdue reward, we have got access to the CL gravy train even though we are likely to spill it all down our fronts. And the memes will be fucking glorious for a few months.