Panto_Villan

I don’t think anyone is saying he’s in his honeymoon period. We’re just saying you’re not comparing like for like.

True. But almost every manager’s stint at any given club ends with a run of bad form (unless they retire or get poached, which tends to be rare). That run of bad form is baked into everyone else’s numbers already.

They’ll probably buy a few extra managers to make sure there’s enough competition in that position.

I think it’d be fine for us tbh. It’d net out to essentially being a loan where we paid some of the wages. I’m sure we’d be able to sell him again if we wanted to. He won’t suddenly become crap even if he has a bad season in the PL.

Good to see they’re still a banter club.

It’s horses for courses. If I was in charge of one of the massive clubs, like say Real, I’d probably be more interested in Klopp or Pep because they’ve got more experience at the absolute top end of the CL and are probably better placed to deal with big ego players. I don’t think either could do for us what Emery has done though. It’s a different set of skills.

Benteke was still the better player for me (while he was here at least). But Watkins has already been a better servant of the club and by the time he leaves I think he’ll be a club legend.

I can’t believe we’ve got a keeper that good, and fully deserve to keep him.

Needs a pay rise.

It’s somewhat insane this is actually a major complement to pay a manager, rather than being a standard thing everyone does - but it’s really great to see Emery change the system specifically to play to Tielemans’ strengths. Rather than, y’know, just playing people out of position or ignoring them if they don’t fit into the system. Must do wonders for the player’s confidence too.

Other users have covered most of it, but one of the big points I’ve not seen raised is that Iran are a predominantly Shia Muslim country whereas most of the Middle East is Sunni (including the Palestinians), which is why they’re generally quite isolated in the region beyond their own proxies.

Fair enough. Then I agree with you on that.

I’ve quoted the post I was talking about. For this not to be a misleading statement it’s necessary to mention that Hamas made an offer Israel was never realistically going to accept - otherwise it absolutely does read like you’re saying Hamas tried to give the hostages back, but Israel refused to take them back so they could instead kill them and use it as an excuse to prolong the war. If that wasn’t what you actually meant then fine, just clarify it - but that’s pretty clearly what you’ve written there (which is why the post set several people off). Also, I’m aware of the situation around the families of the hostages vs the Israeli government, and I think you’re going way too far claiming the government actively want the hostages dead - I think they’re just more interested in continuing the war than rescuing them, but they’d happily accept them home if the cost was low. But I guess that’s a separate point.

Hmm. Saying “Hamas offered to release the hostages and Israel said no” without mentioning the preconditions is technically true, but I’d say it was still framed in a misleading way. You made it sound like they were just willing to let them go. Obviously, you can debate whether it’s reasonable to expect Israel to trade 200 hostages for what was effectively an end to the war shortly after Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis (the offer was made quite early in the war), but imo you definitely need to mention it either way.

To be fair, that’s not the whole story in the first case - the UN accused Hamas of stealing fuel and medical supplies from them about a week back, so I can see why Israel might be reluctant to allow them more. Of course, the UN agency did then walk that accusation back afterwards. But they’re clearly incentivised to do so given that they probably wouldn’t get any more supplies if they didn’t. So I’m not sure what actually happened but I don’t think it’s as clear cut as you make out. The second story is more positive. Doesn’t sound like she was treated well during the initial capture but it’s good to hear things have been better since then!

It’s the specific instance where human shields are involved that I think the blame gets murky. If it’s necessary to kill someone because of the threat they pose, but they’ve deliberately put a civilian in danger to try to give themselves an advantage, I think in that situation they are more responsible for the death of the civilian than the person doing the actual killing.

In your view, is “the fair share of the blame” less than what Israel would take?

I’m really pleased he’s starting to look like the player we thought we were getting when we signed him. In my head I had pretty much written him off as a mediocre signing at best. I hope he’s able to maintain this form, but if he’s not then it should ensure we recover more of his value once we part ways.

They were talking about the current bombing campaign though. Most of the discussion at the moment is about that. As the recent court cases are showing, certain members of UK special forces deliberately targeted unarmed children in Afghanistan. It would be misleading (or “sleight of hand”) to then claim that the UK bombing and drone strikes in the Afghanistan campaign were targeted at civilians as a result of that.

I wasn’t trying to engage with your post so it’s quite difficult for me to have missed the point. I’d have quoted you directly if I was talking to you. It was a general comment triggered by Awol using the word “targeted” using the traditional military definition, which not everyone here (or indeed outside these boards) does. Some people literally think Israel is going out of its way to kill civilians, and some people just use the word “targeted” to mean something different. The distinction is important given the way Hamas deliberately uses civilians as human shields.

You’re exaggerating a bit though. You claimed we’d played that way since Woodward but at the last World Cup we looked pretty dangerous in attack and even blew away the All Blacks in the semis with multiple tries. South Africa then absolutely humiliated us in the finals.

I’d agree with you except maybe Marler and Cole, for the reasons you outlined in the second paragraph. Nobody has a good time if you can’t at least compete at the scrums.

I dunno. I don’t think it’s necessarily good to clear out older players en-masse because if it means we have a couple of years of disastrous performances it’s arguably worse for young players’ development than being introduced into a winning team that performs well on the pitch. I think there needs to be recognition we need to move on from our older players, but in the form of an organised phase-out (perhaps over a year or two) rather than mass cull.

The word “targeted” means different things to different people. We all know Hamas deliberately place military targets in and among civilian targets, and use Palestinians as human shields. If Hamas has based themselves in a building full of civilians, and Israel drops a bomb on it, Israel would say they’re not targeting the civilians - Hamas are the targets and they’d be dropping the bomb whether or not the civilians are present. Their opponents would say Israel deliberately aimed the bomb at a building known to contain civilians - therefore civilians were targeted. As I’ve mentioned before I’m broadly anti-Israel but I tend to subscribe to the first viewpoint. I think it’s a more accurate use of the word. Ultimately the acceptability of a given action comes down to the proportionality, but it’s important to acknowledge that the way Hamas fight makes it impossible to fight them without causing civilian casualties and it’s not only Israel that bears the blame for that.

I honestly think the All Blacks are an easier game for England than South Africa. There’s something about the way the Boks play that England just can’t deal with, and the All Blacks just aren’t quite as good as they used to be. It’s so frustrating when you’re losing all your scrums, even your own ones. You can’t win if you lose 30+ metres of territory any time someone knocks the ball on. It’s not really something that’s easy to fix either.