KentVillan

Important angle to this signing is that Wesley will have another Brazilian player at the club the same age as him. Will surely help both players settle. I think this is a great signing if we are also still chasing Phillips, as I have felt for ages that we actually need 2 DM options, especially as we will sometimes want to play 4-2-3-1 rather than our usual 4-3-3 / 4-1-4-1.

I agree, and don't think we'll become a "selling club", but there's no way we can stop the elite clubs from being interested in our best players.

One season in the Prem and I think we're going to struggle to hold on to this lad. Could see Klopp taking a shine to him, in particular.

I actually followed Trezeguet a bit in the World Cup, because he was tipped as one of their better players besides Salah. Thought he was absolute garbage. But I can maybe see the logic. He's very cheap, and having Elmo here already will help him settle quickly. I imagine Elmo has vouched for him as a person, so maybe that's what's swayed it. Plus they may be thinking that we now become the second PL team in Egypt after Liverpool, which could be great for sponsorship deals and general brand awareness. Ability-wise, though, I'd be surprised if he turns out to be anything more than a useful option off the bench.

Should definitely stay up if we play 4-1-4-2 formation. Alex Ferguson was very successful with this at Old Trafford, with the referee sitting behind Keane and Scholes.

As I said in my first post (the one you started arguing with... it wasn't aimed at you), I'm a recovering addict. I've spent plenty of my life using and abusing alcohol, pot and various more damaging things, so I'm not some Sunday School teacher giving you a drugs are bad mmmkay lecture. I was never trying to say pot is the most dangerous thing on the planet, just that for some people it can cause problems. We have more common ground than you realise. Definitely wasn't looking for a slanging match.

You know heroin is derived from the opium poppy? It's not "designed to be addictive", it was discovered by scientists experimenting with alternatives to morphine and codeine, which are also derived from opium, and are also addictive. All opioids are addictive. You might be confusing its origins with those of fentanyl, which is a synthetic opioid which has caused a lot of deaths in the States, and was arguably designed to be addictive. Plant vs. chemical is not a meaningful distinction, and definitely not a sensible way to pick your poison. Lots of plants are fatally poisonous in small doses and lots of synthetically produced chemicals are relatively safe. From my experience, people don't "hate pot", they hate the evangelism for it. It's a mind-altering substance. Some people get on with it, some don't. It's not the path to spiritual enlightenment, left here on earth as a gift from Jah. There is plenty of evidence that it can trigger or exacerbate mental health problems in vulnerable people, especially if the THC:CBD ratio is skewed towards THC. It's not a societal conspiracy that's driving that.

The logic is good, but you're not factoring in the possibility that signing Butland reduces our budget for the outfield players needed to avoid relegation. You have to factor that increased possibility of relegation into the calculation. But yes, broadly I agree that Butland is a better value long-term signing, even at £20m+.

Yeah and some people don't find heroin addictive. You're right, the vast majority of pot smokers have no issues with it, and no doubt you enjoy smoking it and living your life. But to deny it's destructively habit-forming for some users is to ignore reality. We all know someone who has lost touch with reality and given up their real-world responsibilities because of a pot habit.

Yep and also clean sheets are a crap statistic for judging goalkeepers. Teams keep clean sheets, goalkeepers make saves. Petr Cech holds the Premier League clean sheet record because he played behind an incredible defence in a tactically defensive team. This statistical analysis of keepers in the 2017/18 season suggests Fabianski was the third best shot stopper in the league that season, but his team (Swansea) got relegated. He finished 10th with West Ham last season. Good keepers can play for bad teams, and vice versa. It's the job of our scouting team to separate the keeper performance from the team performance.

It's 50/50 I think in that video? And I think all the ones where he palms it back into the box are the harder close range saves where he didn't have much option. Maybe question him a bit on the Eriksen save. All the other saves are incredible.

Grealish comes from a family of proper lifelong Villa fans. Do we know Phillips is actually that passionate about Leeds? A lot of professional footballers aren't fans.

You're totally missing the point. Loads of foreigners perform well in the Prem, I'm not denying that. The question is whether they do it from Week 1.

Definitely not. Benteke and Gueye found their feet quickly, for example. But I think the risk is greater, because players are human beings, and settling in a foreign country is often stressful and overwhelming, even in the pandered world of professional football.

These were all players on the downward slope of their careers. Dunne and Collins served us well initially, and Gabby wasn't even a signing. The point is that if we sign ambitious young players with English football experience, it's more likely they'll hit the ground running than a foreign player who will face a culture shock both on and off the pitch. You really think Kalvin Phillips is just going to put his feet up after landing his first Premier League gig?

Probably a decent signing. Note of caution on his age though - lots of keepers carry form into their late 30s and early 40s, but there are plenty who fade in their early 30s. He might not be a long-term option.

As a recovering addict (to a very nasty illegal substance) I personally believe that any habit, including cannabis, can be "addictive" if it finds the right victim, and most people who have beaten an addiction to "physically addictive" substances like cocaine or heroin will continue to display addictive behaviours - to exercise, coffee, work, sex, whatever. We don't know enough about the human brain to define all this stuff properly. It's obviously a confluence of social, circumstantial, psychological, medical, genetic factors, and no two people experience addiction in the same way. Cocaine, for example, is said to be less addictive than nicotine. It doesn't have strong physical withdrawal effects - you can return to "normal life" after a decent sleep. However, it is incredibly difficult for many users to stop a single line of cocaine turning into a 24-hour+ binge, something which never happens with cigarettes. This can trigger psychosis, heart attacks, strokes, etc. even in young, healthy, infrequent users. So defining its danger purely by its supposed "addictiveness" seems reductive to me. Like any drug it has a complex set of primary effects and side effects that differ by user. The same complexity applies to cannabis. I'm troubled a bit by people who promote it as some sort of wonder drug. Yes, it's a relatively safe drug for most people, and I probably support legalisation, but there are plenty of people who've disappeared into a rabbit hole of paranoia and depression largely due to a cannabis habit. I find it quite disturbing how big business interests are exploiting the hippy mythology around cannabis to exploit ordinary consumers. It's no different from people who promote goji berry smoothies as a cure for cancer. It's reductive, unscientific bulls**t.

If we were talking about replacing Nyland with Alisson then I would agree with you. We're talking about Steer and Butland. Steer is not a complete muppet, and while he's not the most gifted shot stopper in the world, he does pull out decent saves and I think he comes across as a stronger personality than Butland. I would obviously see Butland as an upgrade, but you're suggesting Steer will cost us 2 goals a match, which can't be true. Football is a low scoring game, and most of a keeper's work is basic stuff. It's rare that a game is decided by a world class save. Clean sheets say more about the team than the keeper. Edit: just to be clear, I still want us to sign a better keeper, and I think it will be important. I just think DM is such a glaring weakness at the moment that it needs sorting if we're to have any chance of surviving.

I think we have to fill positions in order of weakness. The marginal gain of signing a specialist defensive midfielder is bigger than signing a better goalkeeper - i.e. will be worth more points over the course of the season. Steer is a gamble, and I'd prefer Butland, but I don't think splashing on Butland will keep us up, if it's at the expense of fixing our glaring outfield weaknesses.

How do you make a publicly funded institution free from Government interference? The Government of the day controls their budget, so they'll always be able to exert influence by fair means or foul. Reining in the BBC was one of Cameron and Osborne's projects, and you imagine a Corbyn government would also have plans for the BBC. I'm not sure the compass is as far off as you claim. I think the issue is quality rather than ideology. Too much superficial coverage of personalities and short-term controversies, and too much showboating from presenters and journalists. Reminds me of this excellent Charlie Brooker parody:

Fair enough, yes I get you. I thought we were still debating the stat. Yes, I do think balance is a messy concept, and because it's impossible to reduce to a set of clearly defined rules, it obviously depends on subjective judgment, discretion and trust - which in cynical worlds like politics and the media are not exactly reliable foundations. I'm sympathetic to the BBC. Balance used to mean basically presenting a mix of Labour and Conservative views. Now it means left/right balance, male/female balance, Remain/Leave balance, racial balance, regional balance. It's too complicated, and it's not as if TV producers are statistical gurus who can manage this is a quantifiable way. They're working to a deadline, people drop out at the last minute, they call up their reliable rent-a-gobs. Balance is further complicated because you can apply it on an individual show basis, balance across all its output, and balance in terms of staffing. Women's Hour on Radio 4 will always be for women only. That doesn't mean it fails the balance requirement. The problem is that some of these concepts of balance (particularly gender and race balance) are strongly associated with the Guardianista left, so the BBC ends up looking like it's pushing a lefty agenda, when I think they are really just trying sincerely to be representative of all sections of society. I guess the question is: what is the alternative? An entirely privatised model means a small group of rich people own the truth. Abandon the objective of independence and balance, and you end up with a state propaganda vehicle. And as I've outlined above, transparency might not be the silver bullet, because this stuff is so hard to quantify in a meaningful way.

You will always put forward a panellist, but if you put forward some low-profile deadbeat, the producers will do their own thing. I was simplifying it somewhat, and can see how it looked contradictory, but you're nitpicking here. It's not really central to the point I was making, which is that MEPs are bottom tier politicians for the major parties. Neither the parties nor the BBC are interested in booking them on Question Time. Whereas UKIP's key leadership figures have typically been MEPs (Nigel Farage, Diane James, Gerard Batten, Paul Nuttall). You may then ask why a party with no MPs deserves air time on Question Time, but they were the third largest party by vote share at the 2015 General Election, and consistently strong performers in EU elections, so I think the BBC had no option.

It is the process, I used to work for a political party. The BBC will always have a Labour politician and a Conservative politician, and then the other parties will appear on a rough rotation. The Labour, Conservative and Lib Dems politicians will virtually always be MPs, and usually ministers / shadow ministers, or prominent backbenchers (e.g. Jacob Rees-Mogg). This is a mixture of direct invites and haggling with party HQs. The BBC's preference is for high profile, outspoken figures, and the party HQs prefer "safe pair of hands", so the BBC do go behind their backs at times, but typically the parties manage to exert some control over who appears (in New Labour's heyday, this control was very strong, nowadays it's more of a free-for-all). Anyway, there is such a large pool of famous, outspoken, media-ready MPs, Peers and Advisers from the main parties, that there is rarely any case for inviting an MEP from any of those parties. So MEPs will almost always be from UKIP. Indeed, they'll almost always be just one MEP - Nigel Farage. Don't get me wrong, I think Question Time is a zoo of ignorance that serves no useful purpose, but I think this stat is misleading and the implied criticism is unfair.

I think the need for a defensive midfielder is arguably bigger than the need for further squad depth (beyond the players already in our sights). If we put out weakened squads in the cups, then realistically we only have 38 games to worry about this season, and most of our players won't be playing internationals. The workload means we should be able to avoid an injury crisis.

This is a bit misleading. MEP is a less prestigious position than MP, so usually parties will put forward an MP for QT. But until 2014, UKIP had never won a single seat in Westminster, so their senior politicians were always MEPs. A better statistic would be all elected politicians (MPs, MEPs, MSPs, AMs, etc.) and I think the proportion there would be much fairer.