Checko

Who'da thunk that nearly 3 years after the takeover Krafthy would still be chipping in with solid contributions. He's definitely worth his squad place as emergency CB & FB

My man!

Knew he's a good athlete and comfortable on the ball but thought his 1v1 defending looked excellent. Winger kept doing step overs & feints & he wasn't fooled by any of it. Just waited it out until the winger gave up.

Few notes: Our press doesn't seem work as well against 3 at the back. In fact in general I think teams are better against a press than a couple of years ago. For the most part Soton dealt with it impressively well. A number of players don't look on it. We were poor for a lot of that. Similar issue to last year for me in that in the 433 set up when trying to build out from the back everyone's so far apart. Bruno never has anyone near him to pass to and Isak is always very isolated. Would rather switch to a 4231 in those situations. Schar is an idiot for putting his head against that guy. As negligable as the contact was, anyone thinking Gordon isn't doing the exact same think as Brereton Diaz is deluding themselves. Team was getting frustrated with not playing well before the red card. Need more composure. Burn's meant to be one of our experienced players and leaders but he's losing it more than anyone. Big Joe is a legend.

All these bids is probably quite typical for a transfer tbh. Here's a report on Celtic turning down Atalanta's 5th bid for Matt O'Riley yesterday, for example. https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11787/13197428/matt-oriley-celtic-reject-fifth-atalanta-bid-for-midfielder

Most of that's already the case tbh. Players already don't have to have arms behind their back. They do it to be extra super safe. Handball rule as it was really isn't complicated. It's only penalised if: 1. Deliberate handball If accidental, only penalised if: 2. Ball goes in directly off arm 3. Player scores immediately after it hits his arm (eg wilson vs Brentford 2023) [note player can pass to someone else to score] 4. Hits ball when arm is making body unaturally bigger - i.e. when position of arm can't be justified by player's movement. Really not a complicated rule. Most of the controversial handballs come down to that subjective 'is the position of the arm justifiable?' (eg Tino vs PSG) situation, which is still going to be a judgement call . Main issue seems to be training refs to know that players arms move up and down when they run and sometimes come out sideways for balance when they jump or turn.

Man U may not have won 4 in a row, but between 92/3 and 00/01 they won 7 out of 9 and the two they didn't win they came 2nd by 1 point. They then came 3rd 3 times, 2nd 3 times and won another 6 in the next 12 years!

I'd imagine bench. He tends to give the incumberent first dibs and the pretender needs to take his opportunity when given.

He can but he always gets caught trailing the striker.

No idea to be honest. I'd had a few drinks and fancied shouting epicly into the void!

WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW @Shadow Puppets?

They've already lost one top player this window, can see why they'd be keen not to lose another without damn good compensation. Plus if they're losing 20% to Chelsea it makes any deal less appealing to them. Guehi's an excellent players from what I've seen but I certainly wouldn't say generational talent, not that I've seen him much. Time to channel full Brexit Eddie and get a proper right winger.

No idea who the bloke at the station was. Sounds like a Spurs fan and I'm assuming if he was an ex-player he'd have joined the train. Love that the station he was on was called 'Broondale' though.

Shoutout to the 'Pavel is a Geordie' banner in the ad.

Whenever I hear 'Brajan Gruder' I always imagine Arda Güler but in a false moutashe and plumber disguise for some reason.

I'm not on Twitter, but could someone who is grab the user name William1892 just in case?

I'n assuming this is done and the silence now is just getting the contract and promo stuff sorted for the announcement. If it's not done then Will1892's publically stated he's leaving the ITK game (not that I believe he'll stop tweeting shit for a second, but he'll still look a fool), so win-win.

I reckon he's got approx £3.5 million amoritisation still left on the books, but totally not a nerd so can't say I've worked it out too precisely .

Or possibly it's us saying this is take it or leave time, we're not going higher. It's been a week or so since it was announced we were negotiating. Plenty of time for other clubs to get involved if they wanted to. Sounds like they've had offers for guehi and anderson so time for them to weight up what's the better deal.

Really the team's almost there, we just need to add real long-term quality now in CB and RW. We probably don't have the budget to do both without sales his window, and we can't offer European football or wages in line with the biggest CL clubs, so getting those top guys in will be hard (Olise would have been perfect). But, if by the end of the window we've kept all our top players, added a top guy in one of those two positions, got our 3rd choice development striker and a classy looking CB/LB hybrid who can hopefully allow Burn to focus on CB, with a healthier squad, and maybe one or more backups off the book it'll be a pretty solid window. Last year's window was mainly for this year: Hall, Tino, Tonali [I know he was bought as a CL ready player, but given he probably didn't actually want to leave Milan always felt like he might struggle a bit, gambling issue notwithstanding]. Hopefully we can benefit from that this year. Also, worst case, suppose we can't get our top guy in now, perhaps then we have a little money in the kitty at the end of the year and can take advantage of the PSR panic. Hopefully with some decent European football to offer.

Don't forget Nick Pope back from injury will be like a new signing as well.

Yeah? Well, you know, that's just like, uh, your opinion, man.