enthusiast

middle-east top dogs

got to be honest, i absolutely hate the multi-club ownership model. must be shite being a fan of, say, palermo, and waking up to find out that your football club with it's entire 100-odd year history is now manchester city's little brother. or being a udinese fan and realizing any decent players you have are going to end up huffing and puffing about the championship for watford.

highly considerate of them to pick matt lucas, a man with a longer and worse history of blackface than baddiel. they'll be dancing in the streets of jason lee..

bet nobody even sings "why's the corner full of shit?" any more..

interesting chat about some possible decline in the atmosphere at the ground - my peak matchgoing years will have been ~1994-2002 (gallowgate end seat 1, so a short hop over a wall from the corner), and it definitely went downhill over that time. probably not the cause, but i always associated it with the expansion of the milburn/leazes (too many people too far away from the pitch, too much room for the atmosphere to disappear up into the air instead of being channelled towards the pitch). i mean, ideally you want a stadium to be a seething cauldron of hatred, and that's just not something you really get these days. deep down it's probably all a change in my perception as i change into an awld cunt tbh.

also he took a liverpool f.c. that had been winning everything for twenty years and drove them off a cliff

seeing harry palmer on spotify is doing somert properly weird to my perception of time like whatever happened to the bloke?

oh. ah. anyway, nice to see the england fans take a wholehearted stand against racism!!

tarred and feathered, and ran out of town on a rail? thinking of it, get that cunt in the stocks by grey's monument for an hour, quid a pop for charity, and you'd solve world hunger.

i was joking, it's all actually a huge, expensive bag-of-wank solution in search of a problem.

still looking forward to reading it.

massimo oddo

it's probably feasible to name a chronically underrated xi consisting solely of mid-90s players from the former yugoslavia, and it's hard not to think that the breakup of the country robbed the world of a mint team (there's a documentary about that squad, the last yugoslavian football team, that i've been wanting to see for a time. probably not the most underrated (or rated, for that matter) by a long stretch, but always had a proper soft spot for prosinecki. doubtless somebody with a functioning memory will pop up to tell me i'm wrong, but his performance against us at st. james' park in 97/98 champion's league is pinned in my mind as one of the best individual performances i've seen in the flesh: already fucked by injuries and on his way down career-wise, in the vivid world of my imagination he ran the game while neither breaking a sweat nor leaving the centre circle.

respectfully said, but i can't agree with this! us building the ultimate 21st century galactico club would feel an incomplete experience without this lot to smash about all the time. in my ideal world they'd be back in the prem, going through three managers a season all to scrape 17th on the last day of every season... solely to ensure *at least* two absolute pastings, every season for the rest of time.

rolls-royce

saw a pristine-looking 96/97 training sweater being worn by some lass walking down the spuistraat who was almost definitely too young to have been there at the time. felt tempted to collar her and give it if you're such a big paul kitson fan, name your three favourite goals. between that and the absolute madness prices on here, i'll admit to getting tempted to flog off me 95/96 away shirt..

he will be missed

old-school name. just checked and he should be due his testimonial some time this year. be a shame if he didn't stick around to get due recognition of his three league appearances.

heard a lot of this, and i'm afraid i'm going to have to ask you to show your working.

i've honestly thought about this (to be completely open, i am at best ambivalent about PIF/the takeover). me local club these days is ajax (not bad like ) and i've got a shot there and it's not took, and i've tried watching amateur football and it's not took and the problem is.. i'm a newcastle fan. always will be. i can't force a love or even an interest in another club, and there's fuck all i can do about it. i'm chained to the buggers for the rest of me life.

anyway now i've got the serious stuff out me system, time for some jokes

full doc, if anyone cares to peruse:

quietly hoping that the population of yemen aren't magically transformed overnight into white, christian europeans. it's an apposite moment for the game as a whole to reconsider ownership models and the cost/benefit of oligarchs/nation states buying up clubs, NUFC included. meanwhile, i'm not going to make a pious hypocrite of myself, there's a decent-sized part of me having a sly laugh about this. i'm sure there's some decent chelsea fans out there who don't deserve to have this happen to the club they support... but i've never fucking met them.

joining the chorus of praise for yer site @Toontimes, first i've heard of it from this thread but absolutely cracking work. hat's off to yer.