Stottie

As mentioned, Souness might be a good shout for that list. That Boumsong deal was as suspicious as they come.

Ha ha, just desserts for fatso. I hope he's ruined. As for his media mates, the idiot pundits defending him, nice try but the public isn't that stupid. The biggest salary in international football (!), 3M a year (!!) for the cushiest job going, and he still can't wait for his first game before cashing in more from anyone with a wad. Twenty minutes in with perfect strangers and he's telling them to circumvent FA rules. What a clown. Can't wait to see what the Telegraph has on the others. This is long overdue.

ITV reporting that MPs are saying he should be sacked. http://www.itv.com/news/update/2016-09-27/mps-allardyce-must-go-if-claims-are-true/ I think it's ludicrous for the people defending him to call this a "non-footballing" matter. Buying player A by circumventing the rules is a footballing matter.

Laughing my tits off at this. He should have been sacked for the "who am I to tell Wayne Rooney where to play?" comment, but this way, it'll be misconduct and he won't get a payoff (his contract can't be that juicy?).

Cheers. Cool! Selfish reasons, but I'm in Japan and it's great to have televised early or 3pm games, especially before the clocks go back. 5:30 kick offs start at 1:30 or 2:30 am here.

From the "Sam Allardyce appointed as England Manager" thread. It was stating the obvious, so I'm not claiming foresight. I didn't know the "Succulent Chinese Meal" meme, so thanks lads. Absolutely creasing myself here.

Nearly a fifth of the season gone, second top in goals scored and fewest conceded, and easily best goal difference. That's having played three of the top four, which will be all of them after our next game. Best away form in the league too, which is much harder to get right than home form. We're not walking it as the hype was, but things still bode well. In the past tables above, Hull got automatic promotion in 2012 despite losing 15 games, virtually one in three.

And again. Three undefended corners!

Leicester even more statuesque than the first corner!

I've just remembered, but in one of those games they were 4-2 up against Everton and then managed to ship two goals. They lost to City 1-0 without troubling the keeper and the other was a defeat to that resurgent Wigan team who beat everybody playing 3-4-3.

Yes, they did, because it was right at the end of the season. The one the media never mention is that Man Utd under Ferguson (!) managed to lose the league from this position. Six to play, eight points up and two ahead on goal difference, the reason they were ultimately overtaken. http://s12.postimg.org/7bvsj33r1/league_2012.jpg City were struggling with massive expectations and repeatedly failing in the CL at the time, so it was a huge boost and no doubt relief to them to get the thing won. No win here and who knows what chain of events would have come about.

More about us at that time than the actual game, but a great take all the same! The one I don't like to hear is "twelve-point lead", because Man Utd had two games in hand and won them both.

Little Vurn off!

Don't want to say it too loud but I do too.

Gotcha! Thanks for the corrections. As for the other point, Rafa Benitez massively overachieved at Liverpool given the ownership of the club at that time. I don't see how that is even remotely debatable. He also got the best out of Steven Gerrard, a player with fantastic talent and great energy yet far from the greatest when it came to football intelligence.

It's clear alot of work has gone into set pieces, but at the same time it looks to me like much of it has simply been down to Ritchie (and now Shelvey) delivering decent-to-good balls into the right areas at the right time consistently. They're not whipping the ball in particularly well at pace, but just getting enough bend into the right areas (without floating it too much) to give our big lads a chance. Makes such a big difference when the rest of the team know that 7 or 8 times out of 10 they'll have a chance of attacking the ball, when previously our corner takers were hitting the ball terribly with no timing the vast majority of the time. In fact, we've gone for quite a long time since we last had players capable of putting e.g. decent corners in consistently (probably back to Nobby/Robert). Even Cabaye oddly enough was more "miss" than "hit" when it came to them. We've also now got the lads in the air for it. For a long time we had: Colo, Mbemba/Willo, Cisse, Haidara in the box. We can now choose from: Lascelles, Clark, Hanley, Dummett & Mitro We are simply much stronger in the air as well. Pardew evidently knows nothing about set-pieces. But Palace are a danger from them simply because they've got the right type of lads in the box. convinced palace lived off the tony pulis set piece coaching for a while under pardew. Sorry for the long quoting but interesting points for sure. While we definitely are better in the air now, a lot of our set piece goals haven't been headers from crosses. I suspect the total may even include breakdowns and second balls, like the Hayden goal and the Gayle header after the missed pen. Against Brighton, the two goals from set pieces were the Gouff volley and the opportunist "err, let's not play for the corner flag" cross and pull back to Yedlin. Both Gayle and Shelvey have scored from direct free kicks. So it's not just headers. But for a Sergio Ramos header from a corner in the dying minutes, Athleti won have won the CL, so they matter in the biggest games and for the best teams.

Amazing stat! On the subject of stats, the stats articles I've read suggest that set-pieces are generally underutilized and are easiest way to turn around an underperforming team. We obviously been scoring a lot of them recently, and have just shut out QPR who at kickoff had been the second or third most successful team from them. I wouldn't be surprised if this has been an early focus for Rafa, and that the team will score a higher percentage from open play in the coming months due to the longer time taken for any work there to bear fruit. One context in which I saw the "profit from set-pieces" idea was mentioned was a partial justification for Allardyce as England manager. Personally I think he is a joke and the epitome of the "proper footballing man" dullard mentality that blights English football, but his teams do have a historic record of doing well from set plays. I don't like it, but getting a bunch of players who don't play together that often to score from more corners is probably going to be a more achievable objective than getting them to be more incisive and open teams up. England are a "quarter-finals if we are lucky" level team, so the bar is not very high.

The Championship has the same goal-line technology as the Premiership I would assume. It doesn't have any, only currently in the prem. No goal-line technology in WC qualifiers either, which looks like it cost Japan a goal in a recent game.

I normally associate Moyes with decent defending but their CHs were statuesque in the highlights. Lukaku was in miles of space.

Potential Gouff vs. Perchinho battle down the left.

The goals from set pieces is a huge turnaround. As it happens, we are third in goals scored from the third least shots per game in the league, which to me suggests we have a better class of players than other teams. Normally few shots isn't a good sign, but we've spend a lot of time ahead and in control in games, so it's not a concern. Rafa is closing in on a 50% win percentage in league games. McClaren was 22%, Carver 15%.

Two away wins in a row, that's more like it! I only saw the first half but we looked in control and were knocking it about quite nicely. Fantastic hit for the goal. Good confidence booster for Yedlin at the end there. Best GD and joint fewest conceded in the league so far. This all bodes very well.

An unguarded net, but Zlatan knocks it in with aplomb, a bit like that forty yarder overhead kick against England. Otherwise a footballing lesson from City.

KDB wow!

Former Arsenal and England midfielder Stuart Robson goes way back in his criticism of Pardew. Maybe he had a word. The culture around Arsenal is to over-rate and over-protect their players from criticism, and probably Wenger too, so Wilshere will have a lot of people looking out for him.