ponsaelius

It's absolute nonsense man. You can't just correct 'game-changing' decisions. Every single action and motion in a football match is potentially gamechanging. If you start correcting 'big' decisions it just creates a new unfairness at the numerous small, cumulative decisions in a game. Each and every one of them that could directly or indirectly lead to a team scoring a goal or winning a game. The whole idea is completely and utterly flawed at a fundamental level due to the flowing nature of the sport. And in enforcing it you force the game to be stopped endlessly contributing to the destruction of the aspect of the game that makes it 10 times more exciting than every other shite sport that nobody watches.

Turning the best sport in the world into rugby. What a joke.

Everyone who doesn't watch Serie A this season finally realising what a load of shit VAR is.

I don't care what anybody says, spending £75 million on a CB is a load of pish. Defending is mostly organisation. Top money should be spent on attacking talent.

Absolute pish is VAR.

Another day with Alan Pardew breathing this earth's beautiful oxygen. Life is cruel.

lolwot I'd guess a loan to Girona but I'm pretty sure he's not good enough for that level either. Probably Melbourne.

The strength of the English 2nd tier has an impact on that too, admittedly. If a big Italian or Spanish team gets sucked into relegation there's a pretty good chance they can re-adjust and bounce back in a thinly spread second tier. If an English club goes down, they're thrown into a bear pit. This exacerbates the financial fallout that PL relegation causes.

The sheer amount of money that is at stake if a club is relegated now is having an inverse effect on the quality at the bottom end of the table IMO. There is huge sums being thrown at players, and the quality (or at least raw financial value) of squads is way higher than any other league, but the standard of play is seeing diminishing returns as a result of what's at stake. The kind of people who are getting involved in buying clubs (Ashley is of course one example) are so often predatory, with zero emotional connection to the clubs, where the reason they're getting involved is because of the TV money gravy train. This encourages a safety at all costs mentality that spreads down to boardroom decision making, to the coaching level, and to the playing staff. Now I don't think this terror in the face of relegation is a particularly unique thing about the English game. I've followed Italian football long enough to know that managerial turnover for struggling teams there borders on insanity. However I think there is a particular intensity that the current finances of the PL are having on the way club's operate and the way teams play. Teams in Spain, Germany and Italy aren't quite as terrified of relegation because the impact of it isn't quite so disastrous and many of them are set up structurally in a way that transition to the 2nd tier is manageable. It means the lower and mid-table teams have (IMO) a bit more freedom about the way they play, the trust they place in implementing a style of play, and also a trust they have in throwing in young players at the deep end.

Embarrassing cunts.

Why? Have you ever seen him play, or that just conjecture? His stats are pretty decent this season, 7 clean sheets in 15 games while only conceding 12, last season conceding 38 in 37 and keeping 14 clean sheets for Slovan Liberec. 29 year old Slovakian #2 who's spent his career in Slovakia, Denmark and Czech Republic. Forgive me for being skeptical. Seems more likely to me that it's a means to allow Woodman out on loan.

Can't imagine him being any good.

More likely to get a fee from some Turks. Only really useful if we're bringing in a midfielder to replace him.

He's talented, but he's ridiculously rough around the edges. Saw somebody on Twitter describe him as the kid on the playground who plays without taking his bag off

I mean any normal club would just unregister knackers like Colback etc, but it's clearly being used as one of the many excuses to stop Rafa signing people. He spent the whole summer saying we needed to shift players out the door.

Saivet. Sterry possibly going out on loan. Yeah fair enough Sterry is definitely further down the list. Saivet's been more useful this season, remarkably.

When he was coming through as a youth player he played further forward. Think it was 2009 when their U17 won the World Cup. Feels a bit like the Mikel situation that he has become pigeonholed as a deeper player because he's robust and aggressive.

It's not even just about the money. We have a full 25 man squad so somebody needs to go. It might as well be a player who can't even make the matchday squad and Rafa clearly doesn't fancy. Right now other than Colback he's the most expendable of the whole 25.

He's not like. But he's not a player for a top club.

He's suspended.

The idea of signing a 6ft3 lumpy striker from the Eredivisie gives me anxiety

It's not happening. It's all a load of shite to keep you occupied and distracted.

Fair observation.