leffe186

Everyone's fit, but five players could quite easily be rotated. I could be looking at six players actually playing this week .

2010 We've actually won more knockout CL ties than them since 2010 .

My first mediocre week in a while. Getting Clichy in was a masterstroke of Carver proportions.

Most of our recent West Ham games have been like this. We piss all over them, fail to score, then they pick us off. It's a mixture of things. Obviously we have a bigger and deeper squad, but it's also very young. Look at the starting XI today - Lloris 28, Walker 24, Dier 21, Vertonghen 27, Rose 24, Mason 23, Bentaleb 20, Lamela 22, Dembele 27, Townsend 23, Kane 21. Eight players under 25 years old, and an average age of 23.6. Compare with yours - Krul 26, Janmaat 25, Wiliamson 31, Coloccini 33, Haidara 22, Colback 25, Anita 25, Gouffran 28, Sissoko 25, Perez 21, Cisse 29. Two players under-25, and an average of 26.3. I do think that conditioning, training and facilities are a factor though. I mean, you're top of the injury league table with 8, we're bottom with zero, yet we've played far more games than you this season. Signing permacrocks doesn't help (although Raylor is not injured for once), but your player with the most appearances is Janmaat (28 apps) while we have eight players who've played more than that. I think there's something wrong with your conditioning, and it won't be helped by the general malaise around the club. We've regularly been near the top of that table up to this year, and the things that have changed have been the age of the players and the training/coach.

Quite a week for Jack Flash .

Absolutely, after the "tackle" the guy made on him. I love that the other guy flinches as if expecting a punch .

Good, fuck them. If only they'd start booking them for berating the officials too.

Villa score again at home. What is this witchcraft?

Not really. Didn't it get a bit Messi?

Poll, surely? I think you'll get 42.

You're rather skirting round the single thing that most sucks about the Europa League format. "Pressure of cash-clubs" indeed.

Champions League teams are also not halfway through, tbf. The only difference is the round of 32. It's insane to think that pretty soon we're going to be crowbarring a World Cup into the middle, too. God only knows what that season will look like.

Didn't realize this, but apparently we're not even halfway through the Europa Cup, in theory. Eight games played, but a team getting to the Final would play nine more. God, I hate that UEFA have fucked this competition up so much.

Not sure I'm keep on Jak Alnwick's new look there. I've been watching football for 35+ years, and thought I'd seen every possible kind of goal. Seems I was wrong!

Odds on Man U, Arsenal and Liverpool being kept apart in the quarters? Hope you didn't put a bet on.

Dammit. Slipped from 3rd to 6th in the H2H and just noticed that out of all 68 teams last week only three scored more than me. Of course, I was up against one of the three.

It's all so very strange. Before his appointment as Manager/Head Coach/whatever at Spurs, he'd been quietly building his power base for a while. Nobody was really sure what he actually did, but he clearly had the ear of the chairman and was supposedly part of the panel making transfer decisions (him, Levy, AVB and Baldini, off the top of my head). He seemed to be almost unaccountable, yet powerful - almost poisonously so. Then for some reason, he decided to throw this position of power away to pretend to be a manager for half a season. The only thing I can think is that he's breathtakingly arrogant exceedingly confident in his own abilities. FWIW, I thought he did a pretty good job, given his complete lack of experience and coaching badges. He took the opportunity to throw some kids in and got good results for the most part. I thought his interviews were refreshingly blunt and honest too. I do think that there's something of a Pardew element, in that he's a bit of a chancer who isn't really a coach, more an old-school manager. I think he's blagging it, but that could still be just enough to keep them up. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see Sir Les and a couple more familiar faces down there before long. I think Sherwood fancies himself as a sort of new wave Harry Redknapp.

I'm not sure it's arrogance, he might just want a job he feels comfortable with and not jumping into something he feels isn't for him. In some ways it makes a change from some of the pricks who chase every job going just to get another pay cheque for failing. I'm pretty sure arrogance at least plays a part .

I'd like to think a threat to win the league. That's why we're all here, isn't it ? I know, I know.

The problem is that the occasional seasons where teams like Swansea and Southampton threaten only camouflage the underlying discrepancies. As long as a handful of teams can pay even squad players nearly six figures per week, agents and players near the top echelon will want a piece. The 2012-13 figures are here: http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/may/01/premier-league-club-accounts-debt-wages Man C 233M Man U 181M Chelsea 179M Arse 154M Liverpool 132M ---------------- Spurs 96M ---------------- QPR 78M Villa 72M Fulham 67M Everton 63M Everton's total wage bill was a third of the club that Lukaku left. Without magic money, the only way to build a consistent threat is to produce loads of kids and pray that you can create an environment that they want to stay in. Spurs have a solid commercial base and high ticket prices, Newcastle have the potential for the commercial base and matchday revenue, but outside of that there's little hope. Picking up cheap players from abroad can be an important supplement, but such players are very, very unlikely to develop the deep connection to a club that someone who's been there since the age of 15 will have. You need to do both, as Southampton have shown. I mean, this is all very Captain Obvious, but every once in a while it is laid bare again. The discrepancy in player wages is the bottom line.

The biggest problem would be the remit of "do it without spending any money". Rafa does not do parsimony, as Brummie will attest.

MLS kits are always Adidas.

Yep, worst leak ever though, because it's pretty much identical every year.

What's your team name? I'm on a bit of a roll here. Turns out I was joint top scorer in the N-O League in January, and having started the year in the 205,000s I'm now at 32,864. 15th in the N-O League, and close to the top 1000 in the US. Watch this bubble burst.