Panto_Villan

Fair play to him. I don’t want him back here but I’m happy to see any talented youngster discarded by a top club get their career back on track - it must be really disheartening to know you’re probably done at the very highest level, so I think it needs a certain mental strength (or love for the game) to not end up in a career spiral.

Nah. If he wanted money he’d just have run down his contract and left. I was amazed he didn’t do that given he had admirers among the top 4.

His children look sad. It’s probably because he pointed at them earlier. The monster.

He’s an absolute bellend on the pitch and I’m fine with that. I’d hate him if he played for another team, but he doesn’t. I do think he maybe takes the off-pitch celebrations / trolling a bit far sometimes too, but I still wouldn’t take any other PL keeper over him.

Hilarious overreaction from the Brentford fans (at least the ones on their forums). Bunch of whiny crybabies. I even saw one poster claiming Brentford have a “no dickheads” policy - how they square that with having Mee and Maupay in their team I don’t know. Anyway, should just emphasise to Ollie that he should stay where he’s loved. Here.

Unfortunately I can’t easily bold text on my phone, but the post was just a joke about you getting the date wrong - pretty sure we weren’t top in Oct 2021, and if we were then it wasn’t under Gregory!

Blimey - thought I’d have remembered us being top of the table just a couple of years ago!

Being top of the table on Friday would be absolutely mind-blowing, even if only for 24 hours.

Yeah, exactly this.

Yeah, but as others have already said - it’s about keeping our current players. I don’t think we’re at risk of losing them this season if we miss out on CL because of the clear progress we’ve made, but if we miss out again next season and a club with realistic ambitions of winning the CL comes in for them? That’s when things start getting dicey imo.

Anyway, I’m sure Diaby will come good again. Players sometimes blow hot and cold and he’s already shown enough in his time here that we know he can perform at the highest level. We just need to be patient.

Of course, but the point is that we don’t actually need to go to a full war economy. Our collective GDP absolutely dwarfs Russia and we don’t have the same level of corruption and incompetence as they do. If the collective West (or even just the UK and EU) decided to commit 0.5% of GDP to funding the Ukraine war then we’d easily outproduce Russia’s war economy. And most of that money would be spent locally too. One thing I’ll say for the UK is we’ve signed a big deal with BAE for 155m artillery ammo that is allowing us to to increase our domestic shell production by 800%, so we’re actually pulling our weight in that respect. I think next year we’ll be producing well over a million shells a year. If the other large countries did the same then Russia could never compete.

Nah. Zaniolo’s attitude and manner is under the microscope all the time. Chambers copped a load of flak in our last game for looking lazy and uninterested. Olsen is continually being lambasted for looking nervous. Grealish was accused of being moody and petulant, etc. Its not just black players. Also, the lazy / moody / disinterested accusation is usually aimed at attacking players, and almost all of our current attacking players are black. That probably skews the numbers more than anything else.

Ah, smart. So AVFC gets the revenue from the stadium but another unconnected company pays the money to improve it.

Fair enough - makes sense!

That’s not really true - unless you define pushing Russia out of all the occupied territories as not being a victory, because it’s just reclaiming land they already owned 10 years ago. If Ukraine had cast iron support from Europe and the US in terms of arms and munitions, then that’s a plausible scenario. Ultimately Russia cares less about that territory than Ukraine does, and eventually there comes a point where one side will decide it’s not worth the bloodshed. The problem is there’s a very obvious path to victory on the table for Russia right now - just wait for the Western coalition to fall apart. But that’s something the West could take away. Even Europe could do it alone if it really wanted to - Russia has the GDP of Italy. If that was taken away Ukraine becomes far more likely to win the war than Russia imo.

Indeed. And it’s particularly frustrating because we don’t even need to do any fighting to achieve our goals - just build enough gear for the people who are willing to do it. We’re literally never going to have a better opportunity.

Yeah. The unfortunate truth is that Russia has slowly and inefficiently set up a war economy, whereas the West hasn’t bothered. If the West (and Europe in particular) doesn’t get serious about manufacturing munitions then Ukraine is going to lose eventually.

Dyche is doing a great job there. Exactly what they need. Don’t think there’s any danger of them going down now, even with the deduction.

Claiming you’re a “big club” is just loser talk for me. It’s only ever used to try and explain why it’s actually fine that someone else has done / is doing better than you. It’s like Man City claiming they were the “real” Manchester club in the era of United dominance, or the bluenoses claiming they’re the proper club round here literally any time ever. We should do our talking on the pitch. We’ve not yet matched Leicester’s recent success and once we have, we won’t have to worry about whether people think we’re a big club or not.

I did exactly the same about 15 years ago and the recovery time was 9-12 months. So I’m expecting him back at the start of next season (hopefully getting a full preseason in first). I don’t think the cartilage damage is much of a problem beyond some extra pain / swelling for the first couple of weeks.

Clearly Emery made the right decision sticking with Leon all last season, but I wonder what it was that made him do that. Was it the form he showed in Germany? Was he doing great things in training? Was he just willing to learn? Or was he just the best option from a bad bunch, and eventually managed to play his way into form? Either way the transformation has been incredible. He’s gone from one of our biggest disappointments in recent memory to one of the first names on the teamsheet.

It’s funny really - I wonder how much Emery is being paid? Even if it’s a huge number for a coach, it’s basically nothing compared to the fees / wages for a player. And if we end up having to sell a player like Luiz or McGinn or Watkins in summer we’d probably get double or triple what we’d have got for them previously (to say nothing of Bailey). He’ll have paid for himself ten times over. It throws the last twenty years into sharp focus - there’s been times where we’ve ended up with players that were carrying the rest of the team and clearly too good for us (e.g. Benteke / Grealish) but they’ve never been transformative like having a truly top class manager has been. Clearly we should have been throwing our money at managers instead of players!

Given the other results this weekend it’s extra frustrating that we didn’t win (although I appreciate we were lucky to even get a draw).

Just the weekly injection of admantium into his skeleton.