Village Idiot

A certain Argie shortarse leads the balls lost stat in La Liga. If you try to make stuff happen, you're bound to lose the ball more often.

Nice, it definitely looks like the protests are getting to them. I wasn't expecting them to so much as blink until the end of the season.

What does my head in is the whole "Ronaldo is more complete" argument, just because he can score from headers or something. There's no way Ronaldo could drop to midfield and do the things Messi does there, for example.

Rayo don't have a pot to piss on, even Ashley's brand of football (non)spending can produce a squad better than theirs. All the quality players in their squad are either loans (Baptistao, Kakuta) or old (Amaya, Trashorras).

It's a massive achievement what he's done there, imho. I really want to see what he can do with better players.

He's been linked with a job to England, to be honest. I doubt it's gonna be you since he's not servile enough to work under the current regime, but one can dream. Maybe I can jinx it if I promise to drink my own pee if you sign Jémez. It's worked in the past in this forum.

On not taking shit from above, best if Ashley doesn't see those. "One thing has to be clear, if I am to manage this team, I'm the one setting the terms. It's not going to be the president, the director of football, or the administrator. Absolutely nobody but me." "Maybe they don't mind losing their manager. Even if that's not the case, they have been working hard to lose him."

"We have to believe we can beat Real Madrid. Myself, I dreamt that we gave them a pasting, and I hope that the dream becomes reality. There are things that are possible, it doesn't matter if you're dreaming or awake." "In football, craziness and disruption. Our leftbacks uptop, our midfielders playing as strikers, being a little crazy has made us different and has won us games." "Some teams may win games playing with their backs to the goal, Rayo doesn't." Could do this all day, really. I probably will.

It's Sunday morning and I'm slightly hungover, so I'm going to go on a Jémez quote-a-thon. "The essence of it all is that you have to give people a spectacle. This happens in theater, opera and football. What happens is that in football since there's a scoreboard it feels like it doesn't matter how you play. I know it's silly for a manager to say that - I live by my results, if those aren't good I lose my job. But you have to empower the player to do what he's there to do: to play good football." "I don't want to see my team playing with their backs to the goal. I suffer when that happens. As a manager I want to enjoy seeing my team play. I have enough of a bad time sitting on the bench to also see that my team doesn't play the ball. And I want to see people having a good time. Winning 1-0, through a pen, I don't want that. I don't want to win at any price. I know it's a risky way to see things." "We do put a lot of importance on defending. But there's lots of ways to do that. You can defend in your box or in midfield, which comes with some risks. When we sat down and decided what we wanted to do with Rayo, we thought that if we shat our pants, we would have no chance. If we played with our backs to goal, waiting for a corner or a free kick to come our way, we would have gone straight to the second division. So we decided to try and go the distance with our rivals, and try to hit them so hard that they couldn't get back up."

You'd love him; honestly. Talks the talk and walks the walk; he'd make NUFC a team to be proud of being a fan, again. I guess the fact that he's kept Rayo up comfortably with zero money makes it a decent shout as an Ashley appointment. He has a very strong personality though, he's not as servile as Pardew or Carver.

OH YES, PLEASE.

I don't know about the CM scouting bit, but it's true that Rangers sought to loan Messi when he was still a Barça B player. We had a bit of a relationship with them at the time, having sold Arteta to them.

I'm aware of that; it's still an impressive performance coming from 0-2 down.

Fair play to Sherwood; I didn't rate him that much, but he seems to have turned Villa around, and with positive football to boot.

He's in amazing form at the moment. Puzzling how Simeone took him off in the CL with 30 minutes to play. He's carrying all the team's attacking threat at the moment.

Wheels coming off at the Pardew wonderland, it seems.

Espanyol were hopeless today. Even with 10 men we were more likely to score another goal than them. Anyway, Monday's gonna be a good day at work.

Alba, that is.

Idiot.

Oh FFS.

Espanyol manager said yesterday that defeating us today would erase their failure to qualify for the Copa final. It wouldn't. That's Espanyol in a nutshell.

Granada look like they are going to get relegated from La Liga; if they manage to survive the Pozzos will have a team in 3 of the top 4 leagues in Europe.

We could have used Delima's expert opinion on the issue.

Sevilla have just lost Pareja to an ACL. He *is* Sevilla's defence, so this might edge it for Fiorentina imho.