HanoiVillan

'Woman in Big Eyebrows Scandal'? Mmm, not sure it'd work anywhere else, but it's more newsworthy than 90% of stuff in the Sun so let's run it! I'll assign three co-writers to help you, you can splash on it a fortnight next Tuesday.

Or indeed any other night for that matter.

I'm not in any way ITK, but thinking about this issue while driving home from work, I came up with a new theory based on a startling observation that honestly hadn't struck me before. That observation: Everybody associated with the club is a complete **** idiot. Hear me out here. I know some people didn't enjoy King's time at the Bank, but you don't get to be Governor of the Bank of England without a bit of grey matter between the ears. Similarly, Bernstein is spoken of well, plenty of people regard him as smart. Maybe they just looked around at all the dummies at this club and thought, what the hell have we got ourselves in for? I mean look at the owner. Here's a guy who seems like he probably can't tie his own shoelaces. A very large percentage of his adult life has been spent running two sports clubs catastrophically badly, one of them in a sport in which the worst teams can literally pick the best players next season. Despite that considerable advantage, his Browns team had a losing record nearly every season. His time here has been even worse; how many intelligent decisions do we think he's made since, oooh, let's say six months after buying the club? I bet you could count them on one hand. Or consider the players. I don't think we just have the worst team in the league, I think we have the dumbest as well. What to make of Brad Guzan, a grown man in his early thirties who earns an average person's annual salary every week, yet thinks flobbing chewing gum is an appropriate way to behave in public? Or Alan Hutton, who permanently wears the expression of a bewildered sheep? Or Joleon Lescott, who hasn't worked out that 'thank God we're relegated, the pressure's finally off' isn't what anyone wants to hear in a post-match interview, and who hasn't realised that 'my phone tweeted that picture of a car' is humanity's worst excuse since 'I smoked but didn't inhale?' And Gabby. Gabby is like the connoisseur's moron. Here is a man who looks like a dimwit when compared to other footballers! And I don't just mean noted smartarses like Duncan Watmore or Graeme Le Saux - Gabby is so thick he makes Ian Wright look like Cicero. And he's the club captain! Lord have mercy. You can go on as well, through the caretaker manager who is such an idiot he thinks it's sensible to keep starting a player whose contract expires in four games' time and who hasn't put in one single good performance for eleven calendar months. Or Paddy Reilly and his merry band of scouts, turning up rubbish and overpaying for it at every turn. Or the entire coaching staff, who have performed so badly at their jobs, their actual raison d'etre, that I can't think of one single first team player who is one iota better now than he was on his debut. I could carry on, but I'm being boring. It just strikes me that the better question isn't 'why did they leave', but 'why wouldn't anyone with an ounce of common sense?'

They don't care what it looks like later, once people have paid for their season tickets the money is in. That's all that matters.

Can't think of a worse investment than this **** football club.

No point not going for it in 3 weeks' time though, there's only one gameweek afterwards and squads on that day are notoriously unpredictable. Really might as well go balls to the wall in 37.

No worries though guys! We've still got Krulak

It's absolute dribble either way.

Really interesting looking that up, thanks!

While we're talking about misleading falsehoods, I see Boris has been quoted (eg here) recently as saying '77 million Turks could be coming here'. Somebody needs to head into the dictionary and check on 'could' - poor modal verb has been abused to within an inch of its life there.

I know I shouldn't judge, but it honestly pains me to hear of people scrabbling about to raise £5000 for an application of woo. What an incredible waste.

The annoying thing is Lukaku and Lovren will now only be playing in a game where they cancel each other out, instead of having opportunities to score points in games which didn't hurt each other. I shouldn't moan really, unless it goes majorly wrong I've hopefully given myself a real solid chance of winning my mini-league (I'm predicting I'll be about 40 points up). A late charge at the VT league as well, but too little too late I think.

Surely he'll pick them for the midweek game? He can't seriously be planning to rest all their best players for a derby against Everton, surely.

Yes it's nonsense. Every other stadium would be exactly the same.

On 87, which is inside the top 10k for the gameweek, but it could have been so much better if I'd got games from Lovren / Coutinho / Lukaku / Lanzini. The lesson's learned, anyway: I'll never be trusting Klopp again.

David Mitchell off-of-the-telly had what seemed to me like quite a good column about rail privatisation the other week: 'A small good thing happened last week, but in a context of such stupidity and unfairness that it only brought home to me more strongly all that stupidity and unfairness, so I’d almost rather it hadn’t happened at all. The good thing was that the train operator “Great Western Railway”, which is owned by FirstGroup plc, was banned by the Advertising Standards Authority from putting up any more posters implying it’s publicly owned. Specifically, posters that read: “The railway belongs to the region it serves”. [. . .] The root cause of my anger is that the posters’ slogan is factually correct. The railway, on which FirstGroup currently operates services under the name “Great Western Railway”, does indeed belong to the region it serves, if you take “the region” to mean Britain. All of our national railways – the tracks, bridges, cuttings and tunnels – are owned by Network Rail, which is owned by the government. In modern times, private investment hasn’t really taken off in the track-maintaining part of the railway business. Investors prefer to limit their liabilities to the trains, ticket machines and refreshment carts – the bits for which passengers pay money – and leave the bits that cost money to be paid for by the state. It’s an incredibly astute move on the investors’ part and is doubtless further proof to the likes of George Osborne of the genius of the private sector when compared with the doltish bridge-and-tunnel-maintaining public one, which just burns money on boring infrastructure (in the case of tunnels), but lacks the wit even to extort £3 per extremely unpleasant croissant from the thousands regularly held temporarily but hungrily captive thanks to the failure of its own signals. Companies like FirstGroup never take direct responsibility for anything as headachy as maintaining hundreds of miles of undulating track. They’re just tenants – they rent use of the lines from the government, from us. So we’re not just FirstGroup’s customers – it’s also ours. And it’s been quite demanding over the years. In 2011 it announced it was pulling out of its 10-year contract three years early – a presciently negotiated “break-clause” allowed this. Unfortunately for us, of the £1.13bn of rent it was contracted to pay over the decade, £826m was due over the last three years, the three years the company adroitly opted out of. This left the landlord, which is us, which is the government, in an awkward position. Does it look for a new tenant who might pay the £826m, or something approaching it, instead? That’s what it ought to do. Otherwise, what force does any future government franchise contract have? How can a landlord expect to receive rent if the sanction for refusing to pay it isn’t eviction? Unfortunately, the government’s most recent attempt to negotiate a major new rail franchise is universally known as the “west coast mainline fiasco”. The Department for Transport, shaken by cuts and new rules, totally screwed it up, and its decision was effectively reversed after a legal challenge by the incumbent franchisee. So, rather than get into all that again, the government basically told FirstGroup it could stay put. After all, its stuff was everywhere – an eviction would have been an admin nightmare. Or maybe the minister had just seen an upsetting news report about homelessness. Instead of the £826m under the original contract, the company agreed to pay£32.5m for a 23-month extension, a sum which economists have described as “massively less”. I’ve been miserably aware for years that this sort of crap went on. The contrast between extortionate and unreliable trains and the jaunty corporate slogans with which private operators daub their dirty carriages and demoralised staff has always made me resentful. The discovery that what the private sector lacks in willingness to maintain a rail network it makes up for in the ferocity of its bargaining with exhausted and under-resourced civil servants is not a very surprising one. But the rebranding of FirstGroup’s rail services (last autumn, after it had just been granted a further four-year franchise extension) as “Great Western Railway” added insult to ongoing and repetitive injury. For me, that really was the shit the burglars did in your bed. The adoption of the name of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s famous company, which actually built the railway, by one which merely profits from it is an act of breathtaking cheek. It’s up there with Mussolini appropriating the trappings of the Roman Empire. The Advertising Standards Authority has said nothing about that, merely that the firm mustn’t imply public ownership. The company has escaped official censure for another advert, which described Brunel as “our illustrious founder”. He is no such thing. The company Brunel founded was bought in 1948 by the British state, a purchaser that continues to own and maintain the railway he designed. Meanwhile the owner of this reproduction GWR grew out of the merger of some post-privatisation bus companies in the late 80s. FirstGroup plc doesn’t build things – that’s risky and expensive, as Brunel discovered on many occasions. Its mode of business is to profit from state enterprises thrust into private hands by Tories for ideological reasons. Were it not for the availability of public assets at a bargain price, and state subsidies when returns disappoint – and if it actually had to build a railway in order to operate one – FirstGroup might find it tricky to give shareholder value. But, like a sewer rat, it’s perfectly evolved for the conditions in which it exists. Which is fine, I suppose. Right up until the rat tries to claim he designed the sewer himself, because his main aim in life has always been cleanliness.' http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/03/firstgroup-great-western-railway-advertising-standards-poster

What's happened to @useless? I miss him.

LOL, sorry, I know I'm a full on 'grammar bore'. Can't help myself!

Said much the same thing myself . . . I'm going to try not to be bothered by whoever we appoint, because they're guaranteed to have been sacked by Halloween so it just isn't worth the bother.

That's just not true though is it? 'Average' maybe, certainly not 'abysmal at best'.

Thinking back to my own (miserable) school days, I can remember quite well being bullied by **** gutless wasters. To be honest, I think as a group they're probably particularly prone to becoming bullies.

Sadly I think you are. I thought and hoped the same, but it looks like he's just going to stick with the same old wasters until he gets the heave-ho. The selection I cannot fathom is Richardson. This is a guy whose contract expires after four more games - he's now worthless in a financial sense, as well as a footballing one. And yet Black keeps picking him! Why? What is to be gained? Why not pick Gil/Veretout/Grealish/Sanchez/Green/anybody else who is actually an asset to Aston Villa Football Club? It's not like Richardson is some kind of indispensable match-winner.

I disagree with almost every single one of those 'corrections'. There's nothing wrong with reduced relative clauses, and I'm yet to hear a single convincing difference between 'while' or 'whilst' as conjunctions, except that 'whilst' sounds more pretentious. The semi-colon is just wrong.

Agree with Mark on this. He shouldn't be able to get away with sheer incompetence just because 'he's trying to sell us'. He has a duty to run us well in the meantime, and that's what protests should be for.

He's better than every single player in our squad, by a considerable distance as well.