Village Idiot

Smallest La Liga ground in recent times has to be Ipurúa with 5250. I struggle to think of one smaller than that.

Decent undercard for Pacman vs Mayweather imho.

http://www.leo-messi.fr/upload/Gallery/14198570.jpg

I'm not being silly at all. He's a far better player than CRonaldo at their best. No doubt that distance isn't that far the moment, but in terms of their class and not form Messi is a much much better players. Ronaldo isn't really at his best to be honest; he's just in a far better team than 2-3 years ago, when he was carrying Real Madrid on a weekly basis. His physical decline is pretty noticeable (he's 30), and to his credit he's adjusted his game well - but again he has the supporting cast that he didn't have before.

World class manager, fucking hell. How does he do it?

One of the things I love SBR for; giving me the privilege of watching prime Ronaldo in our shirt.

Definitely would have been up there with Messi and Cronaldo if his knee hadn't been smashed to pieces.

I assume one of the other two is Messi; who's the third? Just curious, like.

Breaks my heart seeing Bellerín starting for them while we have a hole at RB. We'll sign him back in 2-3 years for 4000000000 million, mind.

Good fishing, froggy

He's been adamant that he wouldn't mind dropping a division if the project is worth it, but I hope he doesn't.

I have seen Cabella have good matches/halves for you; I remember for example the first half against Stoke (a pretty physical team), where he was extremely active. He's just the kind of player that needs movement around him. Whenever I watch you it's pretty damn obvious that the guys upfront are woefully isolated; many times Cabella or Ayoze pull off a decent bit of skill and find themselves completely without options. It's also a mistake to see him as the HBA replacement. He's more of an advanced playmaker; he's Iniesta, not Messi (if we go with the Barça comparisons).

If you guys mean strictly pitch size, almost all La Liga pitches are UEFA competition size (105*68).

Yeah, there's a veritable obsession with handballs over here, like. People being sent off over harmless midfield handballs, pens all over the place, the like.

I assume the dispossessed stat accounts for losing the ball to an opponent while you're on possession. Whether that's due to lack of strength or sloppy technique will vary a lot. Both players have a relatively low stat - in my opinion -, given that they will try to dribble/make runs pretty often during a game, putting them at risk of losing the ball to opponents. Then Messi loses a lot of balls because he tries a lot of killer passes that don't come off, this is indeed another side of the game.

That's not the point, though, Messi's strong on the ball. Cabella's extremely weak on it. He's still dispossessed more often than Cabella (1,9 per game). Granted he probably gets far more on the ball than Cabella. It's just that Cabella's stat doesn't sound that terrible to me.

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."