leffe186

Yeah. I find it really hard to choose a defender as captain but I’m getting sorely tempted with those two.

Very happy to cheer for Sweden, Croatia and Serbia tbh.

Agreed in the main. That said, as somebody who started to drift away from football with the arrival of Abramovich, I have issues. Clearly many people are just resentful that you won this latest installment of the lottery (it’s not always blood, of course). But there are people like me who will always support club X at heart but have made the - frankly - difficult decision to say “enough”. As you say, people only need to justify their support to themselves. It’s just been interesting to see them do so publicly. The fact that it’s been such a public and contentious issue is partly due to media scrutiny but also partly because ownership of any club by an actual regime is clearly problematic. As you’ve pointed out in the past, “Support the team, not the regime” has become something of your own petard. I’ve said it before, there’s always some hypocrisy involved in being a supporter. I just think it’s worth acknowledging that just walking away actually is an option.

What time in the game was the Ben Arfa goal? Edit: Nvm just checked!

Don’t think I’ll ever tire of seeing those Yeboah goals.

…they played Arsenal.

no.

Took that hit for Son and Rudiger. Half worked.

Oh I know, just the not-captaining-Salah bit

Didn’t make that mistake twice.

Vardy in I guess.

So much depends upon getting the captain right. Went for Lukaku instead of Salah

I did. And as (I think) the last remaining Spurs fan on here that means 100% of Spurs fans polled on here boycott all Premier League games

One thing I hate about these games is that the smaller side tends to get away with all kinds of shit. The fact that England have more players booked than Andorra is ludicrous.

You have the choice to walk away though. There’s never been a moral purity in being a football fan, though some Liverpool fans like to pretebd otherwise. It’s just that sometimes there are moral questions that are worth considering.

It’s hard, man. There’s the added complication of having to sort out “football banter” from proper criticism. We all carry some views that are contradictory or at least morally ambiguous. The old chestnut - we all detest gloryhunters but we mostly love people who chose to follow our team from another country, or whatever. I wouldn’t say I’m jealous of those people, but I might say I’m a bit scared of them. Moral certainty in a large number of people can be dangerous. There’s a doc at work who’s a big Barca fan (pretty much the only other football “fan” at work). I had great fun bantering with him. When I decided to fuck football off my heart went out of it . I genuinely miss doing that, and I know I could properly slip back into it, but I also know that wouldn’t be honest.

I don’t know if I resent it. I always felt I had to justify it to an extent. Maybe it’s a little different if you grow up in an area with several big clubs, or with none. Seems to me that Froggy gets asked to justify it all the time .

I mean, you either feel the need or you don’t. You don’t HAVE to. Supporting the club to me was (and deep down, is) about family, community, and tribalism. That has good and bad points. There were always other aspects of the club itself and football that were problematic. Those other aspects just became more and more prominent until they reached a tipping point for me.

Sure. You shouldn’t feel guilty in relation to those guys. But what about the fans of other clubs who ALWAYS cared about the human rights stuff and still do? Supporting a football club means different things to different people, and can be incredibly complex. I’m not going to try to tell anybody to not support a specific team because of their owners, or because the manager is a cunt, or whatever. There have always been inherent hypocrisies involved in supporting big clubs. It’s just…it’s ok to point them out I guess. Deuce posted a nice Twitter thread about boycotts in Chat. Boycotts need to have a specific goal, to occur if people think that goal is attainable and to cause personal and general inconvenience. Some people feel like they SHOULD participate, but don’t want to make the sacrifices needed, and feel the need to justify it because they resent the guilt they feel. They post bullshit like “I have a condition that means I have to eat Rice Krispies so I can’t boycott Kellogg’s” or whatever. There IS guilt involved in buying a season ticket for a club run by Mike Ashley, just as there’s a different guilt involved in buying a season ticket for a club run by Saudi Arabia. It’s just up to the individual to decide. I guess I don’t really have a point, other than maybe to observe that people who hurled quite reasonable vitriol at those who refused to boycott Ashley should understand why some others might be a bit miffed that they embrace the Saudis. We all know the differences. Football IS broken. It’s just so bloody hard to walk away from it.

Good luck arguing that Ronaldo is not a whiny little bitch

For the rest of my days I will remind Trump voters that they voted for the guy who made “spacca” motions to make fun of a journalist. By an enormous distance it’s not the worst thing he’s ever done, but it’s one of the the more openly revealing and pathetic.

How much did people actually score? I’m used to the “bad week, just the 132pts with three to play” posts. The average score for this week is 20 . I feel like I had an OK week after getting in Captain Salah, but I’m still only on 37pts. With three to play.

Salah missed penalty coming up.