Kid Icarus

If the target is Olise then selling him obviously makes sense, no matter how unlikely getting Olise might be.

Only concern is the injury record, especially considering our own. That aside, which tbh is hard to put aside, he looks absolute quality. Fast, good on the ball, and my favourite thing for a defender to be, calm.

Oh we'd pull it off alright

Will take some convincing if that's who we're up against

If he was 20 years older I would be, he's said before it's his ultimate job. Right now it seems unlikely though, he's a workaholic and wouldn't be able to handle not training players every day.

If you mean that the press was so poor that it was mostly unrecognisable as a press (at least compared to Arsenal, Man City, even us) then I take the point, but I watched a ton of Man United matches last season (obv not as much as you) and in your worst performances I can't say kamikaze pressing stood out to me as a root cause of your problems. Definitely not as much as lack of possession, sloppiness in possession, and conceding space and chances.

We're about to witness pure loads of Freud here like

Aye, that's the "What are your faults?" "Well maybe I'm too much of perfectionist" answer in an interview where the camera zooms out and they've turned up in shorts and a t-shirt.

@OpenCat it again

I can see why you need that Wenger offside rule now

Is that meant to show that it's out?

I've decided that the "Scholes, Gerrard or Lampard?" question that it seems podcasters and Rio Ferdinand are going to ask everyone until the day they die is now the football version of 'does pineapple belong on pizza?' 'Is Die Hard a Christmas film' and in fact even worse than them. So sick of it

It definitely did, albeit it did sound like it was all but done before we found out Isak was a goer.

Very likely. If he says it's close or done, it still has more credibility than most though. Think the tap in thing is overdone as well, even now I see him as the first to say something is done before others.

Everyone seems to hate him, but regardless of whether it's a tap in or an exclusive, Romano still is imo.

Yeah, don't really disagree with any of that.

Personally think that it's more or just as much that a lot of people want to have their cake and eat it. Ironically with a bit of virtue signalling driving it imo. So rather than having a thick enough skin to accept that the club is owned by a murderous state and that you still support the club you've supported your whole life regardless of that - an 'it is what it is scenario' of accepting and living with all of the baggage and hypocrisy that comes with the deal we've made with our consciences - there's a reflexive need to bat off any criticism of KSA and our ownership and instead focus on how the criticism itself is bad faith, hypocrisy, whataboutery, double standards and virtue signalling, so not only wanting all of the positives from that deal, but none of the negatives either. Imo that's driven by virtue signalling and people being too thin-skinned about what they think making that deal with their conscience says about their moral character, hypocrisy, and selfishness that they don't want people to think about them, when in fact it says nothing about any of those things and only shows that they're human beings with all the same internal conflictions as everyone else. Ironically it's then that defensive reflex, that there isn't any need for, that makes people look inhumane imo. Going as far with some people to criticise Khoshoggi's wife and Amnesty International and showing how weak and insecure their character is by trying to come across as hard-line and tough.

That's 2 years in a row Chelsea have overpaid for a Villa fringe player for no reason you can point to beyond Chelsea's hateful oniomania.

The same people will be shrugging about KSA going far beyond Ashley's working practices. Journalists reported on Ashley and Sports Direct's practices a lot, it was in the news loads. Imo the only difference you'll see is the slither of people who pretended to care about Mike Ashley's working practices as a means to remove him from a football club he wasn't investing in, who don't mind that (and more) so much when an entity infinitely more evil does invest in that football club.

Providing we pretend this is something they hadn't learned beforehand, you want the club that's majority owned by KSA to teach itself about the ethics of good working practices? Companies only ever pretend to learn one way as well, when it affects their bottom line.

Why?

We're not going to pretend our hatred for Ashley had anything to do with his working practices - in the context of then reflexively jumping to deflect for Saudi Arabia - are we.

If the measure for Man United's relative success is now to do better than a Newcastle United who haven't won anything in 50 odd years and therefore our pisstaking is strange, then please be our guest like.

Yous don't need to do any mental gymnastics and whataboutery you know? We're in bed with some of the worst cunts on the planet and their allies, there's no need to dance around it.