Gubbins

Hopefully the wolves fans will boycott this. If they continue to sell out at those prices then surely the rest of the 'other 14' pl clubs will decide to bump their prices to similar levels. Really feels to me that the PL is on the verge of reaching a tipping point as far as the traditional local matchgoing fan is concerned. The whole horrible money obsessed thing really makes my skin crawl.

You are underestimating how utterly woeful Ward is as a goalkeeper. The opposition would still get chances regardless of which players we had in defence, and with Ward in goal most of those chances would end up in the net! If he didn't exist we would 100% still be a prem team.

The defence was obviously a big problem last season but we were relegated by a point. A point we would have easily got had we played an actual goalkeeper as opposed to the extinction level event that is Danny Ward!

This is such a bizarre take. We went down playing with fullbacks so getting rid of them is a smart move? Almost every team in world football plays standard fullbacks. Playing with an inverted one is a fairly bizarre choice especially as we have only a single player who can play it competently. We were relegated with centrebacks as well and two centre mids but we're not going to do away with them. The most sensible position to do away with is surely the lone striker not your right back. And whilst it wasnt solely the goalkeeper, player wise Danny Ward was far more responsible for relegation than anyone else.

Please don't think I'm trying to make Beckford out to be anything other than crap. My point was that it used to be the case that leic fans valued the strikers closing down and running their balls off almost more than them scoring. Hume scored roughly 1 in 4 and Howard and Waghorn only 1 in 5 yet despite this fairly poor return all were at times fan favourites. Beckford with 1 in 4 was never really liked despite being no worse or better than the other 3 goal wise almost purely on workrate. Daka has the workrate this season but doesn't get the pass others used to get.

Oh for sure he was pretty useless but I wouldn't be surprised if his goal to game ratio was similar or maybe even better than the first three I mention but he was largely disliked less for his goalscoring than his attitude and the fact he didn't tear around after the ball when it was in the opposition half. Daka does more of this than our other current strikers and I wouldn't say is spectacularly worse goal wise than the other 3 but takes by far the most stick.

Times have certainly changed. In the past you'd have the likes of Hume Howard and Waghorn being given a free pass for their incompetence in front of goal due to their work rate. At the same time you'd have Yakubu and Beckford being far less popular for lack of effort regardless of them sticking the ball in the net.

I genuinely feel the main reason for the vitriol is that it now seems the majority maybe even the vast majority absolutely hate Marescas style of play. It was rumbling in the background even when we were winning. Now with the wheels hanging on by increasingly loose screws there's nothing stopping people venting about it and his absolute refusal to make any changes just cranks the annoyance up even more.

Not really a surprise that ufc 300 delivered given the sheer amount of talent on the card. Pereira is probably the best pound for pound fighter right now given the no of champions he's beaten imo. Holloway the star of the show though. Surely the best end to a ufc fight ever. Topuria looked genuinely nervous when he called him out afterwards and rightly so!

It's one of the most unenjoyable but no way is it the most stressful. The title winning season takes that easily. I was on bloody kalms tablets the last few weeks of that. Hell I was so tense that I genuinely pulled muscles in my arm and neck celebrating the goals against Palace and Sunderland!!!

Here we are, 5 games to go, top of the league and yet the majority of us are pissed off, miserable and would happily see the back of the manager. Surely this situation has never happened before in football! And it's not entitlement either as far as I'm concerned. It's been a uniquely unenjoyable season due to the style of play and In my 32 seasons bar the ones that ended in relegation this is probably the season I've disliked going the most which is incredible bearing in mind there's a decent chance we could finish champions! Pretty clear as well from the reaction on here over the last few weeks and the murmurs of discontent throughout the whole season that Maresca will not last long here. Despite what some football hipsters tell you his football is dull and shite and he increasingly looks like what he is, a coach promoted beyond his means. The rapport with the fans just isn't there to pull him through any particularly long period of bad form. Hel be long gone by next Xmas regardless of what happens.

Think we can all agree his finest hour was helping Forest towards the Championship trapdoor in the mid 00s. Has my respect just for that!

I was in Madrid a few weeks back and felt compelled to have a look round the club shop at the bernabau. Home shirt with Bellinghams name and number available for the low low price of 120 euros!!! Makes ours look only mildly overpriced.

As the wheels have now completely fell off I genuinely don't see any benefit in keeping him around. Both leagues are ready to smack us with points deductions anyway so you can't use not wanting to overspend as a reason to keep him. He wouldn't last til Xmas if we somehow get promoted anyway, and if we dont he's out in the summer. Frankly our best hope of promotion is to bin him now and rely on the new manager bounce. Even if like last season it doesn't work at least we won't have to suffer his f**king 'controlled and patient' bullshit style anymore!

Yeah I'd done fellowship and two towers there previously as well. For me LotR is the best film trilogy of all time and came out during my uni years so have a bit of an emotional attachment to them. It's also got the best film score ever imo so couldnt not go to these. Definitely reccomend seeing a fave film with orchestra if you've not before. Seen Raiders and Jurassic Park previously and going to see the Tim Burton Batman in a few months. Wonder if theyl have a Prince impersonator for that one 😄

Watched Return of the King with full orchestra at Royal Albert Hall over the weekend. Quality experience. Not watched it in a while and forgotten how spectacularly brilliant it is. Crazy that it's now 20 years old. The whole rings trilogy was truly lightning in a bottle film making. Nothing made nowadays comes close.

Maybe it is pathetic but seeing as you mentioned him I imagine that the vast majority of fans would be pleased to have Ward banned for a lot more than 9 games. Just to be on the safe side!

If the weak mentality in big games is a real thing then I think wel blow the title. Should still manage to go up automatically but I really think next season in the prem will be a horror show. We won't have the massively superior quality anymore which our style of play ideally needs and it seems we still won't be able to grind out results.

Its surely a mixture of both the opposition and the way we play. We could try something different rather than relentless controlled possesion but choose not too and even when we do it is often eventually abandoned for more cb passing drills. Even if you're right I still find the thing exhaustingly dull to watch which just goes to show that it's modern football and not just maresca ball that I don't like.

Haha I actually brought up that man utd game the other night with my dad citing it as one of the main reasons teams now almost exclusively play with inverted wingers rather than getting to the byline and crossing it in. Forgotten it was as high as 81 failed crosses though. Hoofball wise I remember back when puel was taking loads of abuse on here sticking up for him and comparing what he was trying to achieve favourably to Shakespeare who had his team playing a style that could best be described as 'defend for your lives and hoof it for vardy to chase'. They would rarely make it past 3 touches of the ball before giving it away. Watching Howard flick a hoof on to the opposition/give a foul away alway used to enrage me as well so I'm def not pining for a return to an at this point prehistoric style. Someone made the point earlier that we have now been playing a similar possesion style since 2018 now and whilst there's been differences particularly in the early Rodgers years I think some people just want a more obvious change. Maybe there is more purpose to marescas football but on the surface which is what the majority of people will see, vestergaard to faes to Doyle to hermanson to vestergaard is very similar to faes to amartey to Justin to ward to faes. I appreciate you trying to get people to look at the game differently but certainly in my case and i suspect many others my eyes generally follow the ball. I'm at the game to hopefully see leicester try their best to get that ball in the opposition net and even if I could start following the oppositions lines movements I'm doubt I'd find it particularly exhilarating and thinking multiple steps ahead is just not how I watch football and why I can't really enjoy our current play style.

I do think a large part of the dissatisfaction that I and many others feel is just to do with the current stage of football evolution (God that sounds rubbish!). Not being a tactics nerd I'd often in recent years watch us fail to get past a low block or get pressed into mistakes whilst in possesion and be completely clueless about what we could do to counter these tactics. I fully understand how our endless passing about in our half is supposed to eventually both draw out the low block, get past the press and eventually tire out the other team. Its proven (against poor quality opponents) to work well, sporadically it looks really good and goodness knows I can't think of another method to do it. This is probably the way most top clubs will move towards playing for the next few years. However I hate it. When the opposition aren't drawn out far enough it is literally just the cbs and goalkeeper passing to each other, yes eventually itl work but it's a drag having to wait for it to happen and frustrating as all hell when we do break the press only to quite often turn around and start over again, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes seemingly not. The comparisons to chess have been made a few times on this thread and there is a reason why it's not a big spectator sport. Part of me would honestly like to give up on football as not really enjoying watching us when we're winning combined with the cheating, greed, VAR, media bias and all the other awful stuff that makes up football nowadays should be the final nail in the coffin. It's just very hard to kick a 30 year habit.

It's hardly that new a style, it's a more successful variation on Rodgers 'horseshoe of doom' as much as anything and i expect it to flop hard in the prem next year. I fear this is the way modern football has gone at the top levels though. It's now quite often the better quality team hogging the ball whilst the other team sits in an organised low block frustrating and hoping to hit on the break. Ferocious pressing often adds some chaos and fun but overall I and it seems a good percentage of us don't really enjoy it and go more out of habit and the eternal hope that things will get better. Can def see myself not bothering at all within the next 10 years if football continues on this course.

But we pass teams to death primarily with our defenders in our own half. Effective or not it isn't possible to make that entertaining to watch. It's painfully similar to how we played under puel and latter years Rodgers. The main difference being we are no longer playing teams with enough quality to press us into mistakes and then successfully exploit them.

Thought we looked really good for the first 15 to 20 mins but looked dull and at times quite poor after up until we scored again. There is a real joyless feel to this season both on the pitch and in the stands. I think its partly just a symptom of the way modern football has gone but the possesion at all costs style play really isn't a fun watch even though its effective. Its made worse by the fact we are clearly levels above most of teams we play. I'm also more convinced than ever that we will be annihilated by most prem sides if we keep playing this way next year. We won't play any side as bad as Swansea in the prem and their pressing had us under the cosh for most of the 2nd half until we got a dodgy pen to pull away from them. Gonna have to be some major changes to our style of play if we're to have a chance of staying up.

Never really got the dislike for True Detective s2. Obviously a step below s1 but it's still got that hbo standard quality.