ponsaelius

Everything I heard about him was he was equally good at both left back and CB. I think that's the problem. Sometimes these kind of players are specialists in neither.

Think we tried quite a lot of them tbh, usually wastefully.

West Ham are a poorly coached side lacking confidence but have lots of good players and are dangerous on the break. Literally worst thing we could do is hand them a cheap opening goal from a set piece. Extremely frustrating.

Scored away at Spurs didn't he? Edit: no that was Huntingdon

Muto

I've only just clicked that Dibling is the lad who scored that hattrick of identical goals against our youth a few years ago. Went to Chelsea and got homesick so went back to Southampton.

As long as Inter don't pull away at some point, which is always a possibility, it should be a really open race. I think Atalanta might actually have a decent shout this year.

It definitely makes a massive difference to crowds at Northern League level. Less so the further you go up the pyramid.

I knew City were on a shit run but 5 losses in a row is something like

I made this point a few pages back but that's a completely unworkable location in terms of transport. The roads around there are already at capacity due to the sheer volume of car centric housing built. Trying to get 70k people there on a matchday, at the same time, with no metro/rail, is totally unfeasible. Would be a good training ground location.

Pav

Faye

I don't think there is even a viable location anywhere on the periphery of the city due to the transport infrastructure that would be needed to support it. You'd not get it past planning. The city centre location is ideal for transport because all existing public transport infrastructure already goes to the centre anyway. And because it's in the centre, with various other uses, people filter in/out naturally throughout the day anyway. SJP is remarkably easy to get out of at full time. Anybody who has tried to get to and from Brighton's Amex on a matchday knows the level of bottleneck that an out of town stadium creates. And that's half the size with regular trains. The only options if they're looking at a brand new stadium I can see are Castle Leazes and the Arena, because they require no additional infrastructure.

An extra 20k people in the city centre is far, far easier in respect to transport infrastructure than trying to put 70k somewhere on the outskirts.

He's potentially back in the squad for Parma this weekend but will obviously be eased back very slowly. I certainly don't think he will be moving this season.

I think they'd sell in January at the right price. If Riad is back and playing, they will have a decent pool of CBs, but a desire to improve in attacking areas. It will make sense to cash in and re-invest IMO if it's clear he won't sign a new deal.

A first for me at Jarrow Vs Washington, was seeing the Jarrow keeper very clearly have a piss up against his post during the second half. Don't think Washington had a shot all game, so he wasn't very troubled, but im sure he could have waited until FT like.

Amazing

We paid £60 million (70m euros) for him ffs Even accepting PSR deflation (case in point being the Osimhen situation), you don't let him go for anything less than £100 million. I'm surprised the contract thing is such a big deal given he'll still have three years left even at the end of the season. Obviously ideally you get him tied down longer term but for now I think we still clearly hold all the cards.

He played all through youth level as a CM and LM.

I genuinely do not believe that he did that in 90 seconds and without something to directly copy off. It's remarkably good

I'm honestly not sure I agree, the model is universal, even in areas with similar economic situation to the north east (IE Liverpool/Everton). It's depreciating returns once you get past a certain capacity size. They'll be more minded from a revenue point of view to increase corporate opportunities or to build a stadium that can host other events all year round. The latter would be the one thing that I think would push them towards another site given the construction constraints on the existing one.

Exactly. Clubs don't want to have demand that far exceeds supply, but they also really don't really want supply meeting the demand. They want to be able to charge as much as possible and by doing that you need to retain relative scarcity. Shit for fans, but I think people expecting them to deliver a mega stadium with capacity for all at comfortable ease are missing the economics of how every club is operating. It's why so many clubs are striking on that 60-65k sweet spot rather than going bigger. I think if they can achieve that on the current site that's what they'll do. But it'll basically be a new stadium rather than an expansion as such, done in stages. Gallowgate/East Stand new build, followed eventually by the rest being re-done to match up. Still think that or a new build on Castle Leazes are the only actual options.

Those little three minute clips on YouTube are perfect for most games, I don't need longer highlights or analysis. If it's a big game chances are I watched it live anyway. Sad in a way but like with many things the consumption model has changed so dramatically. For me MOTD was at its best pre-smartphone when it was reasonably possible you'd actually avoid all results and watch it without knowing the scores. Almost unthinkable/impossible now. I still remember sticking the TV on during highlights of our Carling Cup penalty shoot out win against Watford in 2006, having completely forgotten we had played, and effectively watched it 'as live'. I kind of wish I could be that unplugged these days.

Not sure I've watched a full episode of MOTD in years. I binge all the other highlights straight after on YouTube and then will only watch MOTD if we've won, skipping straight to our game.