desensitized43

Because the banter that cuts the deepest is always the one with the ring of truth to it.

Amazingly they’re being allowed the negotiate down their own punishment because the EFL want to avoid a lengthy and costly court battle. If they stay up by a couple of points or goal difference someone will kick off big time.

Genuinely reminded me of this incident

For the right player it's worth doing something like that no question. Is Lingard the right player to elevate to that kind of level? Based on his 4 months at West Ham, I'd say probably. Based on the 4 years or more before that? Definitely not. Lingard would be a huge gamble/leap of faith for me.

Problem with alot of the players at these clubs are the wages he'll be on. To move to a West Ham or a Villa we'd have to make him one of, if not the top earner. Is he worth that? What does that do to the squad harmony if he turns out to be a Stephen Ireland or Micah Richards stealing a living?

Let me guess Didn't see that one coming from a mile away

For me it was getting past the way they were all speaking - the Baltimore slang along with all the street talking. I had to have subtitles on for the first few episodes to make sure I didn't miss anything. I think I've described it before as like going to watch a shakespeare play at the RSC. For the first few minutes you don't have a clue what's going on but then your ear adjusts to their manner of speaking and you're generally fine. Part of it is that by it's nature you're listening to wire tap conversations with people who have Baltimore street accents, but they're also talking in code because they know they might be being listened to. That makes it much worse. You do just have to appreciate the authenticity that went into The Wire, including using genuine Baltimore gang members in pretty major roles (I think Snoop?). It's a show that really never talked down to it's audience with massive exposition dumps and really committed to what it was trying to achieve. Definitely my favourite of all time.

Well that just makes this worse, doesn't it? We've got a proven liar asking for people to pay more and promising it'll go to fix a certain problem. What could possibly go wrong?

Is that really the case though? I'd always thought it was entirely different. Happy to be wrong though. https://www.which.co.uk/money/tax/national-insurance/what-is-national-insurance-a01s79v8uxrp

1) Income tax is not National Insurance. They're completely different. NI is for access to benefits, state pension and NHS/Social care. It's not for paying for schools and other infrastructure services. 2) Agreed society is too divided but that doesn't mean those "it's just people" haven't played their part. The cost of living has gone up markedly and it's primarily due to a generation that decided to **** us all. Those people will be the primary beneficiaries of this NI increase, that all of working age are now paying for while they've been asked to shoulder no more of the burden. I don't begrudge them getting more money, they didn't make the policy. They did vote in large numbers to put the lying filth in office that did though. 3) Come on, man. We've had years of stagnant wages and austerity due to something very few of us were responsible for. We're all old enough to know the value of money and this characterisation that we're all thinking money grows on trees is just lazy. It's not unreasonable for them to close the tax loopholes that allow large (mainly american) multi nationals to pay **** all in tax or to stop very wealthy (largely) tory donors to avoid paying their fair share by burying their wealth in offshore tax havens before coming after the working man/woman?

I'm a bit conflicted in this. I don't see it as a wealthy vs poor thing. On the one hand, the whole idea of NI is one that I think pretty much anyone who's not a complete rocket polisher can get behind. We'll all need some kind of medical care at some point in time, some need more, some barely need any. NI as a concept is at it's base about spreading the risk of society so that everyone takes a share of the burden. The result is you don't have people dying in the gutter for lack of care or in this case, people having to sell everything they own when they're infirm. On the other hand, in this case they're asking a lot of young people who won't need access to this service for (hopefully) many many years/decades to pay for a bunch of older people (and I know I'm generalising people in care as old people, when I know there are younger disabled people too) who might be sat on a sizable pension/estate/investments who could legitimately afford to pay at least a good portion of their bills. It doesn't sit right. Especially since this older demographic just voted in majority to make everyone poorer - but that's a discussion for another thread. Don't get me wrong, the system clearly needed an overhaul, I just think it would have been better to have some kind of sliding scale of age for NI. As you get older, and thus more likely to use the services the more you pay into them. The obvious problem with that would be that it would mean the Tories implementing something that would disproportionately affect their base of wealthy, old, Daily Mail reading folks - Or is that too cynical an analysis?

You gotta love point 3 of that article He won't be damaged by lying because no one expects him to tell the truth. We definitely deserve what he get as a society.

Ok this one stings. RIP Michael K Wiliams

They're people, not assets. It's their right to play for their country when called upon. Representing your country should be the pinnacle of any footballer worth his salts career and the club was right to accommodate their desire to play.

It won’t matter because it’s Andorra at the end of the day but it’s the principle of the thing isn’t it? I’m going to shoehorn this square peg because I can’t bare not to have these 3 right backs all playing. Baffling. Just accept that he’s got some stiff competition and see if the kid can use it as motivation to get to the level required to play. It’s like handing out a medal to the fat kid who finished last on sports day.

Exactly this. All walking off does is show then that they've won. They've upset us so much that we've had to stop the game. Not to mention it spoils it for the Hungarians that actually want to watch football and not act like total words removed. No one likes to be mocked and laughed at. Let's take the piss out of the gimps. Embarrass them on their own turf and rise above them.

It's a really fine line. I think there's a difference between non-violently celebrating your goal in front of a bunch of people who've been racially abusing you all game and actually throwing their stuff back at them - which you could argue is in itself an act of retaliatory violence toward the crowd. Any decent human being would have some reaction to that level of provocation but I think they did as much as they could do to "give some back" without crossing the line.

**** these racists. They 100% did the right thing to properly rub it in their faces. You know they're just going to get a pathetic fine and at worst a game or 2 behind closed doors then we start again. They need to start kicking some of these countries out of competitions for repeat offending.

Definitely won't be too harsh on Sanson as like you say it's early days for him. It's about perception though that if a player can't learn the language he can't fully connect to the fans and you would assume to his team mates too. Like I said, I don't want to get at them, it's just my observation based on their social media output.

There appears to be a few like that in our squad. I follow all the players socials and it's extremely rare to see Guilbert, Sanson or Luiz post in English. It's not anything to "get" at them. Football is a universal language but it does make you question how much they've committed to playing in England, especially in the case of Luiz who'd been on the books of Man City (although loaned out abroad) for a couple of years before coming here. Maybe I read too much into it, Aguero's English was horrible even after a decade in England...and have you ever heard John McGinn speak? Can't understand a word of it

I agree there’s always a degree of hindsight. We don’t know if we’ve done enough yet or not. My (admittedly crude) grading is more of a reflection of how I feel we’ve done without that benefit of hindsight. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling just a little bit disappointed we’re going into the season with Nakamba, luiz, McGinn and sanson as our first team central midfield options. That’s not to be disrespectful to any of them. I think they’re solid mid to lower half premier league players which is why this will (IMO) be a consolidation season. Try and match what we did last year, but as we all know in this league if you aren’t moving forward you’re moving backward. I’d love nothing more than to be underestimating our business though.

Can’t help but feel the window really fizzled out for us. Started really well getting Buendia and Bailey. The Ings signing was completely out of left field and surprising in more ways than that. Didn’t feel he fit the profile of players we were supposed to be looking at but can’t argue with his quality. I feel like there was a real opportunity with the grealish money to go and spend another 30-40m and go get some real midfield quality we’ve been lacking. We know the money was there with the ESR and JWP bids. Did the club spend too long chasing them? Were we tunnel visioned? Got to feel there’s legitimate questions to be asked about why we didn’t kick on after that early success and go and get what the majority on here can see we needed. Even so, with the players we’ve signed we should be excited and confident of at least matching last seasons position but I wouldn’t be surprised if smith wasn’t here at the end of the season either. It’s a fine like between success and failure and there’s a real danger that for the first time under NSWE we’ll go backwards (a little, I don’t think there’s any danger we go down). Final score - 6/10 decent, not spectacular.

I think if you've got Taleban and IS shooting at each other rather than us I'd consider that a pretty good result tbf. My worry is that instability on the border with Pakistan might spill over into that country. You think people upset about a few humvee's and black hawk helicopters? Can you imagine if they managed to get their hands on what the Pakistani's have got?

We've done no better apparently. I heard a radio interview on LBC this morning where the defence secretary basically confirmed that when we packed up the British embassy in Kabul we left documents with lists of afghan informants, workers and job applicants, complete with their names and addresses just lying around. Rookie mistakes. This whole thing is a **** shambles from start to finish but the people who'll suffer the most are a bit on the brown side so you know Boris and his supporters for the most part don't give a ****.

https://www.premierleague.com/stats/player-comparison Check it out. Last 2 seasons. ElGhazi has 15 goals to Adama's 6. Adama has way more assists.