ffs

Carrick with literally Steve Bruce levels of analysis and insight. Love to see it

every single thing that Beardsley does in those highlights is brilliant. every single touch

ashley-us + mackems are typical of clubs that don't go deep in the cups. chelsea have been a bit lucky, although even then it's patchy e.g. 2022/23 they got man city away as their first tie in both the fa cup and carabao cup and lost both. don't get me wrong, i do totally think that the system is corruptly skewed as a result of regulatory capture by the cartel - I just think the way they do it is much more blatant and open, via psr etc. if we're not allowed to pay players as much as the cartel are then who we all draw in the cups fades into insignificance.

If you do this for Man City, say, the numbers are 31 cup draws, 18 are all PL ties and 8 of those 18 against the Sky 6 (well the Sky 5 excl Man City). Our numbers are just what any team gets when they repeatedly go deep in the cups. Maybe very slightly tougher than one might expect statistically, but no more than that.

Yep I was totally wrong on the Emery thing and that was a nice crisp clarification from TRon 🙏 Wrt the other stuff, a lot of these bits of conventional wisdom ("most managers have a shelf life", "managers who are successful for extended periods of time are the exception") are self-perpetuating. Yes, almost every club fires a manager if the results and performances are bad enough. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the manager could never have turned things around. It feels like more of a truth about how it feels to be a club owner or director when things aren't going well and you feel tons of pressure and that you have to do *something*. It's definitely super hard to manage people at the top level for an extended period of time. I couldn't even begin to do it. But there are lots of examples, in football and elsewhere, of great managers being given time to work their way through mistakes, problems, stress, fatigue, and coming out the other side as good or better than they were before. From Alex Ferguson's first three seasons (I know the man u board came very close to the end of their rope) to e.g. Sundar Pichai at Alphabet getting badly blindsided on AI and being given time, space and support to correct that mistake. Your point that "it currently doesn't feel like he's going to [turn it around]" is exactly right. And it feels fucking *terrible* to watch the team (who in some way are an extension of each of us and part of our own identity and self-worth) not fight, seem clueless, seem tactically naïve, seem tired. It feels awful and that feeling persists. When we're winning and playing well, or even just outshithousing other teams, my whole life is intangibly better in every aspect. When we're limp and losing, and particularly when we lack resilience, can't hold a lead, are jittery and nervous in the late stages of most games, I feel in some way personally diminished by that. But those powerful feelings are sometimes a bad basis for making decisions. Because we just want those feelings to stop, and it almost doesn't matter what happens to make them stop, we just *need* them to stop. And that can push anyone into prioritising that short-term pain relief at the expense of longer-term cool head thinking. Maybe particularly football club directors who are often vain and brittle. So I guess I'm saying that if none of us thinks Howe is, or has become, a shite manager, then we should behave like that and grudgingly accept that this season has felt generally bad (although far from catastrophic, really - and for me a lot of the bad feeling has just been that we've seemed so *weak*, nervy, not up for it) but that we've got lucky with Eddie and given that he's not a shite manager, with time and space he'll figure it out. (Don't worry about the micropenis stuff that's a dogwhistle for the Howe Out Now crowd. If you didn't hear it you're safe 😎)

That's very well put. The last sentence sums up exactly our predicament. The whole orthodoxy that a team has a bad run, or a bad season, and the manager gets fired, has always seemed kinda nuts to me. In any of our jobs any of us can have better and worse periods, and (most of the time) not get sacked for the bad stuff. Instead we get feedback, learn and improve. If Howe stays then over a long enough time period he'll obviously do better. Right now he and the team are exhausted and it isn't working. It might not improve for a while given the games we've got lined up. But, eventually, it will. He'll figure it out, some of the players who are out of form will improve, it'll be OK. I might feel differently if relegation was a realistic possibility, but it isn't. Sometimes another team has a manager who's an obvious dud. From our perspective we want the other team to keep them for as long as possible. I would always be happy for another prem team to have Ange, for example, or Ten Hag. But Howe's clearly - clearly - not a dud. He has limitations (who doesn't) but is, at least, always trying to address them. He'll be as aware as anyone that he hasn't cracked the two games a week thing yet. All of the supposedly "elite" managers have become that by managing clubs with way more resources than we're currently permitted to deploy. If they came to manage us they'd struggle to keep their elite rep - because as above we aren't allowed to pay the very best players the wages they command. (Which is an outrage, and I hope will change) Why did Emery turn us down? Surely because he was able to see that PSR restricted both clubs but on reflection the stranglehold was looser at Villa because they had a much more valuable existing squad. And he's been proved right. I feel like we'll limp to the end of this season, get knocked out of the FA Cup at Villa, finish mid-table, probably not win the CL (although I have ££ backing us to). And then take stock, do way better next season with no Europe. And then 2027/28 we have a season in which Eddie tries to get the 2 games a week balance right, or righter. That all feels absolutely fine tbh. Yes the football has been a tough watch this season, but we're all big boys, aren't we? To all the Howe Out Now crew (if you're even real), I'm not even saying "who have you got in mind who's better?" (although ..), I'm saying rather "why are you freaking out so hard about this? you don't have to be like every other micropenis yapper out there. you're not aura farming (i hope). just accept that things are sometimes disappointing and that the optimal response to that isn't always to smash the place up. Unless you think that Howe is, or has become, an Ange or a Ten Hag. But the truth is that if Eddie left, fans of other clubs/our hated rivals would be really pleased.

the guardian agrees:

i feel like this must already have been done, and apols if so, but is the right song for woltemade based on "barcelona", the old freddie mercury number? "woltemade, such a beautiful big jorman" etc i mean you can conjure with it, rewrite it but is there something there? well i think maybe there is.

some wild takes in there, almost an inversion of the true table. could debate some of these all day but finland bottom is surely trolling. finland = world's hardest bastards.

getting an odd donald trump vibe from slot in this interview

of course, the greatest anagram remains the legendary Wayne Oasis might i suggest that the thread is renamed to reflect this?

it's starting to look like that. also, seems high risk to sign a player who's name is an anagram of "away noises". prone to agitate for another move? we can't say we weren't warned

it's been a cruel summer

then i'm sorry to say that we are never ever ever getting back together

Well I mean it's not a no go in that you could just use his ticket and take the (very small?) risk that anyone checks anything at the ground. For USG I got undone by two different types of strictness: (1) The club. Whereas for away prem games they've loosened up a bit and ST holders (which I'm not) can transfer their away tix to others perhaps twice a season but most likely more than that (they have informally said that they'll prob allow more than twice towards the end of the season), for Champs League it's a strict no transfer policy. My ST holding pal who was going to transfer me a ticket got worried because of that given that the club now seems to be a bit more prepared to cancel STs for transgressions. In the event it was academic because it sold out at >200 points and they are nowhere near that. (2) Livefootballtickets. The desperate fan's last resort. They had some USG home tickets available (expensive, but I'd already booked the nonrefundable hotel room so just absolutely binfiring cash at this point). They were home tickets but down the sides not behind the goal and USG are a chill st Pauli style progressive anarchovegan bunch so I thought prob no worries (bit of subconscious worry about anderlecht nasties, but...). Anyway, I bought the tickets but then livefootballtickets emailed me asking for a written declaration that I wasn't a Newcastle fan. I gave some kind of mealy-mouthed I like both clubs type thing (never lie in writing, right?) (and maybe even not in writing? but certainly not in writing) as a reply. And they immediately cancelled the sale. I think the simple fact that by my response I was obviously English was prob enough to cancel the sale. They said that for CL matches UEFA insists that they are superstrict about this in a way they don't have to be for domestic matches. So I watched it on the telly, nobody wanted the hotel room, and there endeth my lame lament.

it's been cool having you here this afternoon but i have to say i don't think you've brought many people round to your way of thinking. i get it though - sometimes something somebody posts just needs a response, the urge cannot be denied. and that happened to you today when someone said they hoped man city won something or other rather than liverpool winning it. and I'm here chatting now so who's the real winner? i don't think it's too strong to say that i pretty much love liverpool as a city. i don't love liverpool fc, but you wouldn't expect me to. you don't love newcastle united, and that is your perfect right. i did kinda love shankly, absolutely loved bob paisley (who didn't?), adore keegan but of course for what he did for us, being honest never loved kenny (no disrespect intended to your username) - i think he's probably a decent man but he was such an uninspiring manager for us. i remember watching us away at psv under him and just seeing no way we could conceivably score. i could see why a liverpool fan would like souness but he was such a bust for us. and all that macho upper body strength stuff was pretty ugh. i went through the same arc with klopp as everyone else - like him and then thought oooof actually don't like him quite as much. too soon to say with slot. i don't like the way the whole isak thing happened but then if i'm honest the wissa thing, which is similar in some ways, doesn't bother me very much. i do think you'll find that isak fades out of games much more than you're probably expecting. and i hope he fails - but of course i do. i don't like the saudis owning my club much, but i can't switch it off. it's in me, just like liverpool is in you. that's the diabolical genius of sports washing, it works because you can't walk away. you may be right that liverpool fans simply would walk away under the same circumstances, although my guess is that they'd end up making roughly the same compromises and squaring the same circles. i think that because for all we might like to think we're really different, the sets of fans are really pretty similar. not just liverpool and newcastle fans, but all fans. i do think that psr is a deliberate attempt by incumbent larger clubs to make it harder for smaller clubs to dislodge them. i mean, of course it is. and they're smart to do it. it's a shame that regulators have been so easily captured, but that happens all the time and everywhere. if newcastle were preventing other clubs from being competitive then i'd probably quietly like that, and also start to think it was fair and that the alternative was unfair. but it's a big ask to want fans of the clubs who are being prevented from competing to agree that it's fair. if the roles were reversed i think a fan of a big spending club would struggle to convince you of that. and really, i think that's why you've struggled to win people round to your stance today.

no takers yet for this free hotel room in Brussels for Weds night, so reprising it in here: "I booked a hotel room in Brussels (at the Pullman Brussels Centre Midi, the one right by the Eurostar terminal) for the night of Oct 1, fully expecting to be able to rustle up a ticket (in the home areas if need be). But the CL strictness on transfers has defeated me and I'm not going. Because I'm a genius, i went for the low price non-refundable hotel option. So I can't get a refund, but the hotel just told me that I can transfer it into another name. So if any of you beauties wants a hotel room in Brussels for Oct 1 you can have mine for nowt (no need to get into splitting the cost or whatever, I'm a good karma head). First come first served. I've never used DM in here but prob best to try me on that? If that doesn't work shout at me in the thread and we'll figure out another way 🙂" also, and i don't know why i feel compelled to write this (but i do) - even tho this season has started pretty badly, the isak stuff was disgusting (and sortof at some deep psychological level disgusting, because of it being such a throwback to when we couldn't keep great players, but this time it's simply because there's been such regulatory capture by americans who are good at regulatory capture (see big tech) that we literally are not allowed to pay top players wages that we could easily afford to (and that fact being mentioned nowhere in the media)), and wissa out + then bleedin afcon, and maybe tino + even hall out, and why does elanga look so unthreatening for us when he seemed so terrifying playing against us, and jacob ramsey as potential new permacrock, and anderson + minteh both now looking pretty great, and our having looked so toothless, and on and on and on and there are probably many negative things that i've forgotten, too - despite all of that, somehow, *i still have a good feeling about this season*.

I don't think there's a USG thread yet so putting this in here. I booked a hotel room in Brussels (at the Pullman Brussels Centre Midi, the one right by the Eurostar terminal) for the night of Oct 1, fully expecting to be able to rustle up a ticket (in the home areas if need be). But the CL strictness on transfers has defeated me and I'm not going. Because I'm a genius, i went for the low price non-refundable hotel option. So I can't get a refund, but the hotel just told me that I can transfer it into another name. So if any of you beauties wants a hotel room in Brussels for Oct 1 you can have mine for nowt (no need to get into splitting the cost or whatever, I'm a good karma head). First come first served. I've never used DM in here but prob best to try me on that? If that doesn't work shout at me in the thread and we'll figure out another way 🙂

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2025/may/14/matt-ritchie-my-dream-is-coming-to-an-end-you-have-to-reinvent-yourself

'Lose' doesn't sound like Lewes. Lewes sounds like Lewis.