El Zen

Norwegian league was due to start up in a couple of weeks. Instead, clubs are already having to lay off staff (players included) due to liquidity issues following the inevitable income loss they are now facing. Hardly any Norwegian clubs have any meaningful cash reserves and most rely heavily on gate receipts. You just have to hope no players are poached by other clubs while this is going on.

He’s also apparently in remarkably good shape, according to his doctors, so I’m not sure I’ll take their word for it.

There really, really shouldn’t. Nonchalant in the extreme.

Going ahead with games seems needlessly cavalier, and I’m struggling to see a scenario where it will be possible to complete the season anyway.

Baffling. Should be a no-brainer precaution, if nothing else.

So, yeah, schools in Norway are closed and we’ll move to home-based digital lessons. My students were obviously not too devastated, but f... me this is getting real.

Absolutely he could do it. We’d never be able to replace Jack like for like, but we’d have enough money to build a genuinely balanced squad capable of playing the kind of football we want and of winning promotion. Of course he could do it.

Just pointing out the obvious flaw in saying we won’t be promoted with Smith. We already have.

Yeah, it would never happen. Except for the one time in one attempts.

I think we should keep Deano regardless, really, for the long term benefit of the club. If we go down, I have confidence in his ability to get us back up, hopefully with a more balanced squad, better prepared for another go.

I don’t think for a second they don’t care. They’ll be hurting after this. The problem is far more likely to be a lack of belief, a sense of doom and a total absence of courage. They need to grow a pair and step up, but it’s not because they don’t care.

I’ve remained cautiously optimistic up to now. This «performance» has me thinking we’re going down. Utterly depressing. Pathetic. No courage, no belief, no hint of pride. The players are probably hurting, but they’ll find little sympathy from me right now. This just isn’t good enough.

Yep. Should have Drinky and whatshisname on instead.

They really, really hate Jack for some reason.

Pathetic. No belief, no courage.

I have no idea how that’s a penalty, but I might be an idiot.

Biden’s not the most eloquent of speakers, but what he said there was perfectly fine. To paraphrase: ‘Getting bogged down in a negative primary campaign only serves to reelect Trump’. Nothing wrong with that.

The older I get, the more important the ritual of football is for me. There literally isn’t a single live music act I can think of that I’d miss the most trivial home game for. I don’t mind live music, not at all, but it’s not important. Football, perhaps pathetically, very much is.

That might be true, but I (or you, really) was specifically talking about Mings’ role on defensive corners. I can’t possibly say with any confidence we’d concede fewer goals with Mings did man-to-man (insert Kenneth Williams gif here) instead of zonal. All I said was that it’s too easy to call zonal marking ‘madness’ when there are valid arguments to be made in favour of it.

One could argue it would be madness to limit your best defender to marking one player, when he could be marking the most dangerous zone instead. I’m not saying zonal marking is always better, just to be clear. But let’s not pretend it’s a no-brainer.

A much closer contest than I expected it to be. You have to be a little proud of the fight we showed today, even if I’m not in the business of collecting honourable defeats. I’m gutted for the game to be decided by a goal that should never have been, yet prepared to concede that City deserved to win the game. You can only hope we can reproduce the performance levels and the fight in the league, against teams that are actually from this planet. That should give us the points we need to stay in the league. I think the formation change worked and would stick to it, and hope Jack isn’t carrying anything serious.

Dang it.

Have to be able to get the ball before you can attack. You need midfielders for that.

Good shift, Ally. Time for Keinan to make life uncomfortable for them.