OutByEaster?

With the five at the back, I think the absence of Grealish means that it's most likely be Kodjia on the left and Adomah on the right - I guess the only other thing he could do is drop Adomah, put Hourihane in behind the front two and bring in Bjarnason in a diamond with Jedinak behind Leadbury and Bjarnason with Hourihane in front of them - I'm not sure that mightn't get a bit congested though. Despite his idiocy, it's a pity Grealish is suspended, we're playing a formation that suits him perfectly and looks a little unbalanced without him.

I think he could probably be classed that way, but I don't think that's the point of what he's doing - he's deliberately undermining the idea of the way in which government works in order to shrink its role. I think the aim is to have a population that wants to severely limit its own democracy both now and in the future, to deconstruct the state in order to control an idiot.

Whereabouts on that chart does the nation sit as a voting entity?

No massive surprise there.

Libertarian has become probably the most confusing of all of the labels we put onto politics. It sounds good right? It's got the word liberal in it - it's about allowing things, being understanding and that sort of stuff - however, as with a lot of these labels it's changed a lot depending on who it's being applied to. You have to consider a lot of these naming conventions against both set of constituents that influence modern politics - people and markets. For People. Libertarian sort of (to me anyway) represents a set of ideals where people are free to be who they want to be within a framework of law that's not restrictive of behaviours that don't harm others, it's inclusive, it's protective it's all nicey nicey. For Corporations on the other hand and for Markets, Libertarian means the abolition of rules and laws that might control corporate behaviour - now, given that corporate entities and markets are essentially totailitarian organisations, when you give them the liberty to follow their natures and their desires, they produce the opposite, a dictatorship based around profit, with no care for those things that give people freedom, it's all nasty nasty. So Libertarian means in favour of the freedom of people to live according to their own rules and in favour of companies being able to impose their rules on people. Opposites. At the same time. Being a Liberal is a largely left wing idea, being a Libertarian is a fundamentally right wing idea. Or the other way around. Or something. Globalisation is another one - for People it means the freedom to move and share and bring a sort of global standard, it's about people becoming a whole body with protections, rights and a more equal system for all. For Corporations it's about the removal of national interference, national banks, protections, rights and anything that might benefit an 'all' when it could instead produce profit for a market. Globalisation is two opposites with the same word, it's a left wing ideal and a right wing utopia. I hear often that the Left have become anti globalisation and I guess it's true, but I think it's very important to understand which globalisation you're talking about. At some point power left politics and moved upstairs to these huge corporate and market structures that don't exist within the influence of national bodies, don't respect or encourage democracy and have huge influence on political power - we haven't really invented a language to counter that, or indeed a political system and instead we try to use the old ones and end up confused.

It has now won that entanglement - and it's starting to run out of things to eat.

The main difficulty in resisting the dangers facing our world is that we still approach them with the language of politics, whereas the theatre of struggle has moved to economics. He's a caricature of a ridiculous, pompous dictator - he might sneak some things through, he might help the market's tendrils reach new parts of the US social structure - but what he'll definitely do is enrich the notion that government is hopeless, that it's clumsy and outdated and that it should be encouraged wherever possible not to interfere with our lives - a notion put forward by those who would profit from them.

I believe it has now been contracted out.

There's a meeting of the Fans Consultancy Group prior to Tuesday's game with Barnsley and VT have been invited. If there's anything you want to raise about the club, the matchday experience, ticketing, hospitality, merchandise, the club website or anything at all that isn't player performance, please let us know in this thread and we'll raise anything that people want raised at the meeting. Thank you!

Is he away with Iceland at the moment? They have a friendly with Mexico in the early hours of Friday morning.

That's brilliant, and shows just how much Citizens United changed the world we live in. I think it also says something about how outmoded the labels we use ti describe politics are - left, right, liberal, fascist, these things aren't effective in describing a world that's actually a battleground between profit and humanity.

Talk of Eubank Jr vs DeGale today - I'd watch that for nothing. I thought Eubanks opponent over the weekend nailed Juniors problem completely - he said that he never felt that Eubank was going to knock him out, that there's not enough power, but that the volume of punches he was hitting him with was having a cumulative effect. Eubank is someone who throws huge uppercuts and hooks, but has to throw a hundred of them to win the fight, float like a butterfly, sting like a really enthusiastic butterfly.

I know what you mean, I think he is what he is - he's a goalscorer, he's quick, powerful, greedy and he can score from all sorts of places on the pitch - the rough we take with that is that he's not a great team player, he's not terrible at it, but it's a weakness - I think there's a degree of improvement with good coaching and a big chunk of just enjoying the good stuff and letting him get on with it.

DDiD, sorry if I've got the wrong end of the stick here - is 'the lad' in this sentence Kodjia? If it is, there were maybe half a dozen times against Forest where we picked up the ball through midfield with Grealish, had Kodjia and Hogan breaking and looking dangerous, Kodjia was making himself available for the ball early but when he received it, rather than looking to his partner or to continue the break, play was breaking down while he either looked to beat too many defenders on his own or get himself into a shooting position too far out. He made some very poor decisions on the counter. I think if they work on that with him, then those three on the break are capable of really hurting teams.

Other than a handful of people here, I've heard no real pressure on him in the press - he has the backing of the Chairman and he seems reasonably content with the task at hand. He's only been here 119 days, he's just started in normal terms - I know we've not been a normal team over recent years, but I think that's an adjustment we need to make, both in terms of realising that the club is stabilising and as part of helping it to stabilise. If we were to lose the next three, then I think he'd feel pressure, that's natural, but as things are; he's been here less than four months, he's got a bundle of players that have been here a fortnight and a staff that have been together three months. In my mind, he's still our 'new' manager - a bloke starting out, on that basis I'm happy to give him more time, the opposite makes me smile, it seems odd to me. Now, you can point out the hypocrisy that I felt differently about Di Matteo and indeed about Sherwood, but I think in both of those cases you can make a genuine case that neither are really football managers, that they were to some extent chancers who'd talked their way into jobs they were unsuited to - Bruce is an experienced, 'normal' manager, I think that gives him a little more grace. In Sherwood's case, we're also now a different club to the one that Lerner left. So, yeah, for now, let's play out the season under the new manager, then have a look in the summer and see what he wants to do - unless it's been a disaster then he should be carrying on into next season - at which point he will have pressure on him by the very nature of the job at hand. We're in a crucial two year period that decides whether we'll be a Premier league club with a blip on its record or a Championship club with faint ambitions to one day hit the big time again - I think in context, changing the manager again during that period means that the job for any new candidate will be harder, they'll have less time to change it or bring in their own players and ideas, less time to turn it around - for better or worse, I think we have to commit to trying it with this manager first, and I think that's true for almost any manager that we'd have currently in place, whether that be Bruce or A N Other - I'm not prepared to suffer a clown, but I don't think we have one, I think we have a manager, hopefully we have a good one, but we won't know until he's had a go at it.

I think Root is the obvious candidate - Cook has been a very good captain in my opinion and this now leaves him free to concentrate on his batting and on going on to becoming England's best ever batsman - Root has some good characteristics for Captaincy, but I think it's inevitable that his batting will suffer which is a pity.

In a lot of cases though isn't that where they've hoovered them up almost by accident rather than by design - where they've taken fights with a guy who has this belt and one other and ended up with this belt rather than occasions where they've gone out of their way to fight an IBO champion?

The problem is how do you get rid of him? I'm not sure what you have to do to get impeached nowadays - the last President got caught bugging the German chancellor, and not even for political reasons, he got caught bugging her in order to give US corporations a competitive advantage - the one before that got caught lying through his teeth in order to "reform" the economy of Iraq and killed a million people in the process; nothing. It seems it's almost impossible to impeach a President for anything in the political sphere and I don't think he's dumb enough to get into a personal position that'll see him off. So, unless his heart packs up, I think he's here for four years.

I love games that end in chaos. That was marvellous.

Oh and by the way, someone at ITV is utterly off their biscuit. I'd love to see the PPV numbers for that bill - I bet it's not much bigger than the audience that were present.

....and faith in democratically elected independence weakens - we can't trust these mad haired nutcase politicians, lets give more power to those nice sensible corporate lobbyists and lawyers.

Eubanks Jr fought a good fight, but if he's to be anything more he needs to step up - seeing as how no one particularly seems to want to fight Billy Joe Saunders, I'd like to see that one again.

We've been freakishly bad at this for years - it's just odd.

I'm astonished that Hourihane has almost 20% of the man of the match vote - he was a passenger for most of the game.

If he's not good enough he needs dropping. If he's good enough, he needs dropping - we've got a young keeper in poor form who has made a couple of mistakes and isn't going to get any slack from the fans at Villa Park - he needs resting. We need two keepers in the summer - I'm not convinced this boy is one of them.