"never managed an adult team..."
"never managed an adult team..."
That is proper cringe.
In proper footy, we got dicked in the FA Cup semi last night, 5-1 against fucking Hanoi. Cunts. We were missing our first choice centre-halves, but were still shit. Our 2 new Costa Rican's looked fairly overweight, which bodes well for the rest of the season.
Fergal Time.
Didn’t take long.
Shamrock Rovers champions and Cork City relegated (3 years after a double).
Cork City supporters trust approved the sale of the club to Preston NE’s owners for €1. Not sure how much debt there is though.
What's his boner with Ireland about? They've shipped over a few of your boys to play for them.
Probably just sees some value in it because the players are so cheap.
Too fucking right, the pool is a goldmine waiting to be exploited.
You’ll probably get one championship level player in 20 or so prospects, but when all 20 would combine for under £200,000 then there’s some rewards to be had.
Imagine the rewards if you lock in a Grealish, aided by rise of future % clauses and brexit/COVID.
not a great example. A Coleman or Keane would do.
Athlone did us 4-1 in the quarter final too
Another infiltration job like Drew Harris.
Feels like the season just ended, and we are starting our pre-season this Saturday, at home to our city-rivals, Saigon FC. Season proper starts on 16th January.
We have 3 foreigner slots, Pape Diakite will stay from last season (still on holiday in Senegal, has to fly back and do 2 weeks quarantine), Costa Rican striker Jose Ortiz will also stay from last season - hopefully sans 10 kgs.
We have one spot left, with João Paulo expected to sign the next few days. His Wikipedia suggests I need not get too excited.
We also have a new manager in Mano Pölking (who looks like some stressed-out British comedian), who was previously in Thailand with Army Utd, Suphanburi and Bangkok Utd - picked up a few runners-up positions in the Thai League.
The Preston lot have pulled out of buying Cork City which will mean a fair bit of pain for them in the coming years. Amateur for a while for sure, if they survive.
Kevin Sheedy and Mike Newell have rocked up at Waterford.
The first division here is a club short next year after the owner of one bought another and merged them
Is that the Top Ireland version of moving teams across the country like they do in the USA?
Ah bless you're squeezing every drop out of that one. And you know what, I wouldn't blame you at all champ.
Soccer is back
After Chinese club teams once again sent U23's teams to the Asian Champions League and got battered, it is now seriously affecting their coefficients
I am now watching more Welsh Premier League than I probably should. Turns out they just chuck games out live on youtube in English and Welsh. Airbus UK are one of the worst teams I've seen in a long while, although the standard is pretty bollocks across the board. Rock bottom with 1 point after 9 games and currently being thumped 5-0 by Bala Town.
Make that 6-0.
Also, I'd take Welsh over English commentary any day of the week. Specifically for those moments where Welsh has no equivalent.
"lllwlwffdfdlllwwwd ..The daaerk arts."
Last edited by Shindig; 30-09-2022 at 08:48 PM.
We (Ho Chi Minh City FC) got beat 0-6 at home last night, against our rivals, Hanoi. That leaves them top, and us bottom, with 5 games to go.
We were in the Asian Champions League 2 years ago....
Sorry to see the mediocrity of Hoang Anh Gia Lai (big sp), who lit up the weird Football Asia magazine show on Sky back in the early to mid 2000s by getting consistently rodded by the likes of Jubilo Iwata, Al-Nasr and Suwon Bluewings in the Asian CL group stages.
Jackpot.
Those cunts Hanoi did Tue double last night winning the cup final, including this beaut...
V.League season starts this week.
So far my club have not released new jerseys, sold any season tickets, or even bothered announcing the fixtures.
At the end of last season, we released 80% of our first team players, and have since replaced them with players from the second division.
We are getting relegated.
Looking forward to @Ian's preview in the Feb football thread.
As predicted we, Ho Chi Minh City FC, have been fucking awful this season. Last two games saw us concede a 97th minute goal to lose 4-3 and lose the game prior to that at home 5-3. Currently bottom, and hosting Danang tonight - even though we still have 11 games left (4 in the normal league, then another 7 in the split) defeat tonight and we are truly in the shit.
23 goals conceded in 9 games is quite some effort
And where was the tip on that? Odds must have been obscene.
The fuck?
It's looking all but nailed on that Southend will be wound up tomorrow. The court ruled previously that all debts must be cleared and as of today:
The staff haven't been paid for 4 months now and half the squad have left this summer. We currently have 14 players, half of which are midfielders.
We've been here many times before, but it's never been this bad. 14 hours to go and we can't even afford the waterbill. This feels terminal.
Your confidence would be shattered if nobody else picked you up and you went down with the club.
Where are Jimmy and Jamie when you really need them?
At a time of great crisis, the writer still had to get a pun in. What a cunt.
Rovers losing at home to some Icelandic farmers
That's way too fucked to have been an accident.
A few interesting updates from Serie A over the last few days:
1. Sassuolo, the most consistently entertaining for the neutral team in the league over the last decade, were relegated at the weekend.
2. Cagliari, meanwhile, have been kept up by Claudio Ranieri, who has promptly announced he’s leaving.
3. Inter’s owner has been kicked out after failing to pay back a three-year loan to an asset management company, who have seized his share of the club.
Brief summary of Ranieri's final match:
- Dominate Fiorentina in the first half, miss a load of chance & have a penalty turned down, then concede the first time Fiorentina do something
- Miss some more chances, have a goal ruled out for offside, finally equalise then throw on a young lad who scored in the 85th minute to put them 2-1 up
- Immediately concede an equaliser, then go back up the other end & score to make it 3-2, only to have it ruled out for offside
- Make some injury time subs to bring on an old lad & the third choice GK (also old)
- Get VAR'd with a typical awful European penalty in the 10th minute of 5 added on
- Watch Liverpool failure Arthur roll it past the 38 year old goalie that was just subbed on to win Fiorentina the game
Pretty typical Serie A stuff, really.
A few global bits, largely courtesy of The Sweeper podcast, as well as some more Serie A:
- Watched the A-League Grand Final earlier, which was won by Central Coast Mariners to complete the first ever continental treble as they won the regular season & the AFC Cup as well, despite losing their manager to Hibs at the end of last season & then losing all of their first 4 league games at the start of this campaign. They travelled over 100,000km over the course of their AFC Cup campaign, and came from 1-0 down against Melbourne Victory in the grand final, levelling with a goal in stoppage time then scoring twice in extra time to win 3-1.
- Sturm Graz have finally broken RB Salzburg's dominance, winning the Austrian Bundesliga after 10 years in a row from Salzburg. They also defended the Austrian Cup that they'd won the year before to complete a domestic double.
- Ludogorets, on the other hand, have continued their domination by winning their 13th Bulgarian league title in a row. They were promoted in 2011 & have won the league every year since. Proper FM stuff.
- Brondby bottled the Danish Superligaen on the final day, losing to AGF to hand the title to Midtjylland
- Empoli went into the final round of Serie A games needing to beat Roma to stay up. They went 1-0 up, but gave up an equaliser in first half stoppage time, and struggled their way through the second half, only for former FM wonderkid M'Baye Niang to score in the 93rd minute to save them & relegate Frosinone, who lost to Udinese in what had then become a straight up relegation playoff.
I hear Inter are now owned by debt collectors. I'm sure this will have no consequences whatsoever for them.
Seems like it probably won’t. They’ve kept most/all of the executives & when it happened to Milan a few years ago they went & won the league the following season.
They’re also way better than everyone else so as long as they don’t flog half the squad & fire Inzaghi they’ll probably be favourites again next year.
Just on the Serie A relegation battle, turns out Villa reject Keinan Davis scored the critical goal for Udinese. Totally forgot we'd even managed to ship him off there!
Add Bochum from Germany onto the list of things that happened. They have a relegation play off for the Bundesliga, in which 16th place plays 3rd from the league below over two legs. Winner goes up, loser goes down.
Bochum lost their home leg 3-0 but turned up to the 2nd leg all out attack. They managed to make it 3-0 to them on the night and took it to extra time. They only just held on with two big off the line clearances at the death and won the penalty shootout in sudden death too.
I don’t think the 2.Bundesliga team has won the playoff since Union Berlin did it a few years ago, so Fortuna throwing a 3-0 lead away is even more galling.
At least we’ve got St Pauli coming up again next season. A look at the 2.Bundesliga table is very surreal with the likes of Schalke, Hamburg & Hertha Berlin all now seemingly trapped down there.
Speaking of teams coming up, and returning to Italy, we’ve got Parma back next season, along with Como, who are an interesting story. They’re owned by an Indonesian cigarette billionaire, have Thierry Henry as a director & Cesc Fabregas as a former player turned AssMan who will probably be the coach next season, but their stadium by the lake is so small they probably won’t be able to play there. Also Dennis Wise is there for some reason.
I think it’s Venezia/Cremonese in the playoff final, so hopefully we get Venezia & their nice shirts there.
I went to Lake Como in 2009 and yeah their stadium looked very small.
I'm a twit