Kid Icarus

I can't wait for this Liverpool team to get found out like, they're really not very good and it's absolutely mad that they're in this position.

Forest 1 v 2 Man City Brighton 2 v 1 Fulham Palace 2 v 0 Ipswich Liverpool 3 v 0 Southamtpon Brentford 2 v 2 Villa Wolves 1 v 1 Everton Chelsea 3 v 1 Leicester Spurs 2 v 1 Bournemouth Man United 1 v 2 Arsenal West Ham 2 v 0 Newcastle

I don't think so, but I do think there's an element of right player wrong time about him. Ideally you want a player like Barnes to come in as more of a finishing touch when you need an impact sub to complement what you already have - like Liverpool got with Jota and Arsenal got with Trossard. £40m on that type of player when you still need a starting RW and RCB and back up CF might not have been the best allocation of resources with the huge benefit of hindsight.

I usually go for the 'N-O search test' and it's not good reading like. He's a homer ref to the absolute extreme from what I remember. No idea what that looks like at a neutral venue.

It's a neutral venue anyway so not away, but even then we've had plenty of away performances this season that fly in the face of this perception of it being poor. If anything I think we've been arguably better away than at home. Arsenal, Man United, Spurs, Forest, Ipswich, Southampton. Everton where we should have got all 3 points too. Then matches where we've ground out results despite not playing well, like Wolves, Palace, Bournemouth, and matches where we should have done better. The away matches where we really, really let ourselves down isn't that long, it's basically Fulham, Brentford, Man City, Liverpool.

Grow several pairs man you absolute flannels. Jesus wept.

MOTM performance against Liverpool's only truly huge threat as well. At least we're firmly underdogs now, albeit I'm not at the stage of willingly giving up in a fucking cup final that others seem to be.

It'll have to be Krafth and Livramento, with Joelinton and Willock doing their dovetailing. Trippier on towards the end if we're dominating possession/need to attack.

TBG has a lot to answer for.

Same applies from when we did this a few months ago. In situations like this D is actually higher than C imo. Barnes is a specialist player that works best as an impact sub (D) but can potentially do that at a higher level (B) than he would play as a starter (C). C seems fair but I don't think it suits the type of player he is at all.

Bodes well. Still, at least there'll be no home team so can't do his usual.

Good move for everyone. The club, the player, his agent, those who like seeing people who write players off ending up with egg on their face again. Everyone wins.

Let me put this in a format that I think will make things clearer.

Very easy one to clarify. I was talking about the previous experience of goals being taken away from your team by VAR, not before VAR.

Those odds might be fine from a pure perspective, but from an applied perspective they're demonstrably perceived differently and ignore a few key things like. Whatever way you want to slice it, the end result is that human fan behaviour has changed as a result of VAR. You can look at the goals scored, look at those disallowed by VAR and reverse engineer how people should act based on the percentage of goals disallowed goals vs total goals, but you're doing that with hindsight, ignoring the regularity that it happens per match, and ignoring the human, emotional element. You can easily flatten the creases and present the odds by average in a way that I think gives you a better (albeit still rough) indication of why people act in the way that they do. Last season there were 110 decisions overturned by VAR, 33 of which lead to goals and 50 of which lead to overturned goals. 83 goal decisions over 38 weeks comes to just over 2 a week on average. 10 games per week so the perception of roughly a 1 in 5 chance it happens at some point in your match. Pretty decent odds that it'll happen in your match and by extension, to the team you support. All of that is not even including the goal decisions that get checked and not changed, with everyone in the stadium and often at home, being in the dark about what the decision will be and what they're even checking for Add in the hope, worry, paranoia, and pessemism that comes baked-in to being a football fan, along with the previous experience of goals being taken away from your team and you're basically at the point of inevitable human behaviour. In fact I think you'd be better off looking at this from an anthropology POV rather than stats one.

Pfff, yeah, come back when you're 16th in the predictions league and then maybe I'll listen.

Personally think we'll go on another daft run after the final and that this one is about as comfortable a 2 nil West Ham win as you can think of.

The cautious celebration thing is definitely real. I do it and I've spoken to many people on here and irl who do it. I'm pro-VAR on the scale despite its obvious existing flaws, but I'm not sure why some of those flaws are being talked about like they don't exist and/or are just individual personal failings that need correction, despite them being known and having a wide impact.

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Jesus Christ, so the supporter to consumer pipeline has crossed the rubicon into N-O.

Very straight down the line B, albeit an out of form B.

The elite managers I imagine you're alluding to simply don't thrive when they can't spend. The best examples you'll ever get of obviously good managers getting the maximum out of a limited squad are few and far between, presumably because the best managers don't go to clubs that don't spend, or when they do they don't overachieve. You're talking Ancelotti at Everton, imo Howe here, Rafa here post-promotion and then after that no one you can hang your hat on.

Just had a cursory glance at week-by-week points difference and by this point last season it was already 20 points...with us in 10th.

@TBG

This is it for me mind, the lack of signings and especially the whole Guehi debacle put us on the back foot from the off because the vibes were fucked and haven't really recovered.