If Jarrod Bowen could knock someone up every week, for a little while, that'd be great.
If Jarrod Bowen could knock someone up every week, for a little while, that'd be great.
Looks like Super Frank is gone. Surely they must have Dyche lined up because I can't see anyone else saving them and even he is unlikely to.
This Everton side look like gallacticos compared to his Burnley side, sure they lack a serious goalscorer but they're not that much worse than Brentford/Brighton/Fulham let alone the other shite in the bottom half.
They have a decent enough squad on paper, they're just seemingly playing without any clue what they're doing. Someone with a basic grasp of tactics / a system should be able to get a tune out of them.
Big Sam or bust.
Sean Dyce Steve Austin will do a job.
Big Dunc Permanent Manager.
Lampard really doesn’t like January’s anymore.
Aberdeen have just been knocked out by a team that’s basically a junior club
Used to work with a bloke who lived in Darvel.
Makes you think, really.
Get a load of the highlights on the BBC and the offside decision against Aberdeen. The linesman's got it straight out of the Sunday League cheating playbook
They were on the end of one of the worst offside decisions I've ever seen to rule out an equaliser.
Ball has just been played by the player on the far right as we look. The guy who is flagged offside is the slightly stooped white-shirted player in the middle of the three nearest camera.
That was amazing. Although the defenders did stop trying to defend by the time a cross went in so not sure it would have been an absolute guarantee of a goal.
Darvel actually were playing some decent stuff. Rarely lumped the ball up and were hardly playing backs to the wall stuff
Was just reading about this white card initiative they have in Portugal.
Dear lord.
Probably end up being seen as sign of institutional racism.
Bielsa to Everton seems a pretty high risk way of getting yourself out of danger.
The worst fit since I tried on a medium jacket in M&S.
If Bielsa is available and Conte is fannying about surely Spurs should get him in.
I don't see how bringing Bielsa in mid-season would work anywhere, at least in this country. Already knackered players, little training ground time, no time to implement any of the stuff he did at Leeds and has presumably done at his other clubs.
This is very cool. I've used Wyscout a lot and noticed a while back that the only coverage they have of sub-Saharan Africa is South Africa and, very oddly, a single season of the Burundian top flight.
The RB lot have clearly cottoned onto it but I reckon over the next decade we're going to see a lot more talent making it to Europe. If you're the Rwandan FA or whoever you've got to be scrambling to get your league onto European spreadsheets.
I've said for a long time that once someone works out how to normalise sub-Saharan domestic football (much easier said than done as there are massive infrastructure deficiencies and existing match fixing interests which will need to be got rid of) their players will basically take over the European leagues. I haven't got a PC way to phrase this, but try this for size: black lads are the best at running, and football is mainly about running. You only need to look at English and French academies.
You'll probably start to see it first in the more Europeanised places like Senegal.
I can already see the 2050 Champions League final lineups having 10 africans and a white goalkeeper on each side.
Why is it do you think that nations like Nigeria fail to convert their dominance at u17 level? Is that a separate thing?
Because they're a complete basket case on every conceivable level and the players (almost all of whom come from abject poverty) are understandably more interested in going to get paid than in going back to play Malawi in qualifiers.
If you're talking national team football, you need to have all your players already having secure European lives (like Senegal's) before you're looking at a chance of sustained success. Talent is one thing, ability to organise a successful national team is another.
Last edited by Jimmy Floyd; 24-01-2023 at 01:07 PM.
https://www.theguardian.com/football...l-offside-rule
It's me and the Guardian's cartoonist versus you going around calling my posts absolute nonsense without having had a scintilla of an original thought yourself in the last five years.
Isn't the actual problem with this brilliant line of deduction that the proportionate advantage of physicality diminishes as you go up the pyramid, so the hyper athletic unit is much more effective at lower levels, but as you reach the higher echelons of the game actual ability are still of vital importance. Anyone can have technical ability, whereas not everyone can have west African twitch fibres, but the sort of explosive physicality that sees racial profiling as a major thing doesn't exist in football in the same way that it does in other sports. Maybe that will change, but I doubt it. I'm sure the spectre was raised by the Wenger matra of show me an athlete and I'll teach him to play football, but 25 years on that doesn't seem to have become a thing.
I remember that Mexican team that won the U-17 world cup. Seems like the best player to come out of that was fucking Hector Moreno. I guess what I am trying to say is that U-17 success and senior-level success are, at best, extremely weakly correlated.
Let’s be honest if you’re good enough to make it as a professional footballer you can basically stop trying at 21 and still live a fairly comfortable lifestyle for the rest of your life.
I'm a twit
Where this does run into dodgy territory is that the argument can be read as people saying that African or African-descended players are ONLY good at running. This of course isn't true at all. It's just that if you have a hypothetical pool of ten players with the same ball skills, the same anticipation skills, the same decision-making skills, then who is going to be the best footballer of the ten? It'll be the best athlete, and observed reality is that people of that ethnicity are (even if it's 2%, that's massive in population terms) more likely to be the best athletes.
If there's another explanation for players of West African descent being over-represented vs the population in every professional football structure in the world (to my knowledge), I'm open to hearing it.
'The French', in the conventional sense of the term, don't like football though, so are a bit of an outlier for me. Representation is obviously going to diverge from demographics, but not in a conscious way, any more than Paul Pogba's appearance has (wrongly) given rise to a generation of critics who think he should be Patrick Vieira.
97 English players have played 10+ games in the PL this year, 39 of them black or mixed race. So over 40% versus a population of 5% or maybe even less. Now you can say it's a self-fulfilling prophecy if indeed there is a greater bias towards these attributes at youth level - and if youth level recruitment determines who ends up playing 10 games in the PL - but that's a huge discrepancy, and the English do like football.
Leo Messi and Haaland of course famous for their African roots
I fear we may have reached peak black now. A decade ago I was a racist for bowing to the ebonies but now even the softest whitest TTH buns recognise and you have clubs like Bournemouth, Palace, Watford, etc taking it to some extreme level whereby they probably haven't seen their latest record signing kick a ball prior to splurging. It used to hold up back in the day but it's all got a bit too tactical at the top level so they'll resent their policies when the only success it leads them to is Isaac.
Let's not forget that Argentina - the reigning world champions - was an empty country before immigration started in 1945.
The Crystal Palace academy is wall-to-wall rejected civil service fast streamers.
We're rotten in front of goal.