MessiWillSignForVilla

My guess would be that it was a handshake agreement that they'd agree to any offer above £40m rather than a contractual one, so when Arsenal took the piss by offering £1 over, Liverpool didn't have any obligation to say yes.

So... Anybody got a spare ticket?

When I checked earlier there were 5500 tickets left, and I was just in the queue hoping against hope that buying multiple tickets for one game might count (it obviously didn't) and there were even more tickets available than when I checked earlier, so they're definitely holding tickets back. Also, I'm guessing a fair few in that queue are just trying their luck to get a ticket like myself without meeting the criteria.

Hmm, I swear I read that through a few times, dunno how I missed that.

Do Semi-Final tickets count towards the 5 game criteria? I know it keeps getting repeated that it doesn't but is there any official confirmation of this or just rumours?

This is glorious!

He runs up the pitch a lot. Nevermind that he's never arsed to get back afterward though.

Prime example of why Hutton should be nowhere near our team, a massive liability in defence.

I absolutely agree it does depend on the player and the situation, and I can see why it might be prudent to hold on to Clark given our current lack of options at full back, but I can't see him being anything more than a 3rd/4th choice backup.I'd rather us focus on trying to upgrade on Taylor or Elmo and just have them as backups if we want to improve that area, and I don't think we'd need to break the bank to do so, which makes keeping him as a cheap option less of a big deal. If it was a season ago, I would absolutely be questioning letting him go when on the verge of a financial meltdown. It's not that I don't want these players to break through or get the opportunities here, it's just I don't get why there's always these questions of why don't we hold on to x, y or z player when it's not like they have obvious star potential, like for example Grealish.

(This isn't aimed at you eddiemunster, just had to get something off my chest about these types of social media posts I've seen loads of today.) Realistically, how many players have actually done this to us? And how many players have we released that we should have realistically held on to? The only players I can think of that we let go in the last 15 years that we maybe shouldn't have are Cahill and Albrighton. All the others that get brought up are players we released or allowed to leave whilst a Premier League team, it would've been planning for failure to keep hold of the likes of Bannan, Stevens, Robinson, et al., just because they might get in our team now. They weren't good enough for us then and they're not good enough for where we were, now. Clark seems to be the only one out of that lot to have actually done anything with a good spell at Port Vale (except Lyden, but he seems permanently injured and is 23, only a couple months younger than Grealish for example), and I'm sure he'll have a good career on the boundary between Championship/League 1 level like many of the other players we've released, but I don't see why we should be keeping hold of him if we are aiming to go back to the Premier League, it's planning for failure if he's never going to realistically be at that level. Maybe some of these players will make me eat my words, but I just don't see it, it's much more likely they join the likes of Kinsella, Donacien, Burke, Williams, Lichaj etc. It's not that I wish these guys bad luck or anything, quite the opposite, but I just don't get why we get these yearly threads about how we're so stupid for letting go youth players x, y and z, and then everyone forgets about them about a year or two later as they go on to play at much worse levels than us.

Not sure where I saw it now, I'll have a look. Edit: Found it It even shows the one with the best case for a dive twice to push up the counter.

Anyone else seen the video a Leeds fan made of all his "dives" yesterday? It even has a little dive and fouled counter. Oh, and of course a "fair tackle" counter that goes up to 1, I imagine you can guess which tackle that is. The thing is though, almost every "dive" is an obvious foul, to the point that even some of the Leeds players aren't really arguing, yet when a Leeds defender scythes him down after the ball had gone it's counted as a dive. There's an argument that there's 1 dive in there, but it was still a foul, it was the one from Phillips really early on when Phillips was pulling him back for about ten yards. It genuinely amazes me how blinkered fans get when it comes to Grealish, I guarantee if any of his "dives" were from McGinn, most people wouldn't bat an eye at it being a foul.

It's funny, I've seen this photo shown to quite a few Leeds fans who suddenly go quiet about the "diving" all game.

A perfectly good tackle apparently. It's staggering how often people equate "winning the ball" with "not a foul".

**** me, looks like he's obliterated his boot in that tackle.

Bielsa and his assistant are better at English than I thought, though I'm surprised Sky got them to commentate.

We need to calm down a bit I think, everything's a bit frantic at the minute.

Tyrone Messi!

Playoffs now sealed!

To be fair to Bruce, hes securing us a playoff place as it stands, with Jedinak starting at CB too!

In our last 5 games we have played 4 direct playoff rivals, with one of those rivals being derailed by losing to us, the other three are all directly competing with us still. If that's just "outplaying weaker teams" that you can't really judge him on, then you're basically saying the only games he can be judged on are his losses and our last two games of the season.

I can't handle another 5-5...

I think if McGinn had started there would've been a good chance we'd have been down to 10 men after the Grealish incident. I like McGinn, but he'd just come back from his second yellow card suspension this season, a Derby game isn't the type of game to throw someone of his temperament straight back into the team, especially after the midfield played so well last week.

That's what you said yesterday, so which is it? We just have to win, or the scoreline doesn't matter? Just give it up, it's getting boring now.

Imagine being the officer who gets to walk into that pricks cell and tell him who scored