TheBrownBottle

The Twitter idiots aren’t the ones who put that up to be fair

Just checked because I never look at the DDs - it’s up to £6 now. Bastards!

The ‘it’s all down to PSR’ argument definitely works better when you’re not worse than Brentford, Fulham and the Mackems …

I pay £5 per month to watch all the matches perfectly legally in Australia with Optus. Sounds like they’re getting ripped off in the UAE to me.

Don’t know why we’re working in USD, but if we are it’s considerably more than that

He does look like the kind of bloke who irons his socks like

The only way to do this with handballs to make any time the ball hits a hand a FK /pen. Players will spend their time trying to hit the opposition’s hands. Otherwise it is going to have a degree of subjectivity.

Gridiron is a stop-start sport with no pyramid structure - video replays are perfectly fine for it. Football should never have went anywhere near it - but if it is, I’m not keen on challenges.

I agree, I was referring to Villa spending more than a season down there

They’re all a bunch of oddballs. I think the actual Irish folks I know have more taste than this - it looks made for the ‘my great-great-great-granduncle came from Cork’ crowd.

It’s a very different world now - I think a year in the second tier isn’t necessarily all that fun, and it would do significant damage to the club’s ‘brand’. Villa should stand as proof that there’s no guarantee of a big club bouncing straight back, either.

You can see me and my dad in the East Stand (one of the only times I’ve ever been in) just as Quinn is put through for his fourth - we didn’t spot ourselves until my uncle lent us the Season Review video after the end of the season. I loved SJP on sunny days like that - I was a kid but it’s burned into the memory banks

Shop window time for some of our players - I fancy us to win here

I don’t think buying ‘squad players’ at first team prices would’ve let him off the hook - and I also don’t think buying ‘squad players’ is a good strategy in any case.

I do pity any poor sod at Wor Flags who suggests that they make a Gordon tifo - I reckon @Heron would gan proper radge

Fair enough, but we know why we had shit windows during that period - this time isn’t the result of miserly ownership. Based on our current PL form it’s probably lucky we did get some points in the bag at home earlier in the season because at present we don’t look any better than we did in 15/16 - we are toothless up front and leaking goals at an insane rate. Our form against top half sides tells us where we are - and we don’t have a cheap squad nor a low wage bill. I don’t buy that matches against some of the shittest sides I can remember us playing against in Europe has that much of an impact. We’ve looked poor this season in pretty much every match we’ve played. It’s nowhere near good enough.

We could’ve given him an extra £100k pw with zero PSR impact - it wasn’t PSR. Top players want to play for clubs trying to win the European Cup, not clubs who celebrate qualifying for it. All footballers want to play for the best possible side.

Tbf Yorkie it’s no more reductive than comparing a couple of shit Ashley windows to what transpired last year - and you’re correct, net spend has far less meaning at this point. I’d have a lot more sympathy on the ‘competing on three fronts’ if the manager wasn’t playing Tonali for 90 mins in the second leg vs Carrier Bag, or picking pretty much his first XI at home vs Bradford. If he can’t manage a squad effectively then he’s in the wrong job - he’s not ‘elite’, he’s just a good coach. We looked shit before the fixture pile-up btw - this isn’t the result of fatigue. This is the second time this has occurred, and it’s worse than last time out - lessons haven’t been learned.

They should replace that lion from the PL coat of arms and stick Icarus in there instead

Joey don't live by "’The Rules’ you know, and if there's one person who has influenced him in that way of thinking, someone who is a maverick, someone who does 🖕to the system, then it's Ian Botham.

Frankly, I don’t know why they bother putting that much effort in - it’s more than our scouting team does. Just dust off the transfer targets we’ve bid on from the past four years and I reckon you’d be on the money.

Because no-one talks about calendar years in football unless they’re being wilfully selective

I think last summer is up there with ‘88, ‘97, ‘03 and ‘12 tbh. A quarter of a billion to go backwards. Again, the Ashley era is not a benchmark - being better tha an idiot and his goons willingly sinking the club is not deserving of the least bit of praise. Last summer was a cock up from start to finish.

Yet he did lose Anderson - because he valued him less than other players in the squad. Yes, I don’t doubt he would’ve preferred to keep him - but when push came to shove, he’s the one he sacrificed.

Elanga was signed in May, with Howe having tried to sign him the summer before. A full Eddie pre-season - and a player Howe clearly wanted - hasn’t done him much good. I think there is a bit of a myth being built up around what Howe (or any other coach / manager) can do for a player. The likes of Elanga and Woltemade aren’t a bit raw but needing tweaking - they’re miles away from being PL performers. Elanga barely looks like a top flight winger.