Finnegan

Speaks like he's a career recruiter posting on Linkedin.

McCarron is going to be an absolute ****ing drip isn't he?

Sure OK but you're still not entertained by the quality of football are you, you're entertained by your investment.

They've got a whole tournament to get through, in pretty hot climates, with more teams, and can easily win the group even dropping some points. Teams that go full gas for the whole tournament will run out of steam. Games like this are rarely entertaining other than for a bit of schadenfreude. Cape Verde are such massive underdogs that the best they can do is park the bus and hope and nobody is going to fault them for that but it's not gonna make the game exciting is it? Spain will get the criticism but there's not really any style of play that's good to watch when your opponent refuse to engage at all and just bet it all on their keeper.

I will admit it wouldn't have been to my taste but I do know people that love cheese and would smash that. I stand by the point, though, nothing wrong with simple food as a snack and it looked like quality ingredients.

I'm assuming the pub didn't put them there in fairness.

It's funny actually, quite a popular meme photo that gets trolled on a lot and has popped up a few times on reddit as "let's all laugh at British food" is from a pub in Leicester. I think it might be the Blue Boar? And it's a cheese and onion cob, actually really quite a good looking one. It's got a generous slab of cheese in, either red Leicester or cheddar and it looks like a really decent quality crusty cob. I think the idea to them that the bread and the cheese might actually both be genuinely nice in their own right as well as fresh and not just plastic nonsense is really alien to them. Plus, I mean guys, it's a ****ing bar snack.

Most of the pelters come from Americans on the internet. They in turn just copy the French, with no sense of their own actual self awareness. If they had any self awareness they'd realise the irony. America comfortably has the worst food of any country I've ever visited, it's horrendous. When you say this to them they immediately start getting outraged by any number of things, either banging on about some amazing migrant cuisine you can get there (whilst dismissing British claims to it's own migrant foods, like the vast majority of curries eaten in the west), the number of amazing restaurants they have there (with chefs trained in France, just like the fine dining we have here) or as a last resort they'll start screeching about BBQ as if they're the only nation on the planet that's ever cooked meat outside and it's somehow sophisticated? All of which is missing the point tbh. Restaurants are irrelevant, every major country in the world these days has great places to eat and many of them all sorts of multicultural cuisine from all sorts of different cultures. It's just not a brag for them any more like it might have been decades ago. When I say they have the worst food I'm talking about what the average family is actually buying from the supermarket and eating at home. I'm talking about the convenient food, their fast food, their day to day snacks. It's absolutely appalling. It's OK boasting that your country has "freedom" but when that means your farmers and food manufacturers have the "freedom" to bend you over because you have no regulation at all to protect the consumer, I'm not sure that's the kind of freedom you want to celebrate. Everything is rammed full of sugar, salt, preservatives and **** knows what else. Even just their bread is disgusting, it's like eating cake. It's produce for a country that has free health care and, oops.

Maybe it's just because I watch so many other sports with frequent pauses but I just don't see the problem tbh. Rugby Union has absolutely blown up over the last couple of years, try scoring records are being broken left and right, we're getting some of the most high scoring, intense, entertaining games in the history of the sport. Yet we have longer pauses just for a routine penalty, a kick down the pitch and the subsequent line out than a hydration break in football. The excitement doesn't die in that time. People get injured in football matches all the time resulting in stops longer than a hydration break and pretty much every match that was exciting before a stoppage was still exciting after.

I've said this before but no, I don't agree. Rodgers had already done the damage by that point we just didn't realise it at the time. We give our managers an enormous amount of control over our squad spend and our transfer philosophy. We let him bloat the wage bill up to 116% of our revenue on players that we had no chance of up selling for profit because his hubris thought he could "fix" "broken" players and his self-serving nature gave zero ****s for the long term health of the club. Should Topkin have done something about that and do they shoulder a share of the responsibility? Oh yeah definitely. Of course. But the point is that Rodgers' narcissism and his Dunning-Kruger estimation of his own coaching ability got us in years and years of financial crisis and decline.

The word is hubris. He's just the second coming of Brendan Rodgers which is horrifying when you consider the damage he left behind him.

Irrelevant isn't it? We need almost an entirely new squad. Our best players have to be sold to cover financial shortfalls. We're going to be stuck with the ones we don't want regardless of whether they fit Martin's style or not. We don't have the money to buy 23 new players even if we could clear everyone out. He's going to have to make do. It'll be a test of his ability as a coach. Enzo got mileage out of plenty of players written off as incapable of playing possession football, Wilf, Hamza et all. Even Daka looked good joining up play under Enzo, don't @ me.

I really didn't think this would be an unpopular opinion but the amount I've heard about it I'm starting to think otherwise: I don't give a shit about hydration breaks in football. It's hot out there, it's for player welfare, it pauses the game for like a couple of minutes. It's not a big problem. Use the time to go for a piss, get a drink, check your phone. It's not the end of the world and it really isn't killing the intensity of the game, that's a really stupid claim.

I agree with the sentiment but the execution is horrendous and at a time when Labour desperately need a win and some popularity.

Yesss

Was that Ruud on their bench?

Donyell Malen doesn't deserve to be on a team managed by Ronald Koeman. Poor guy.

Collins John and Sergio Hellings in bits

That was Hal Robson Kanu esque

Only the septics could sponsor a ten second count down at the start of a game of sport.

True or not, the confidence to post this now with your tournament record in warm countries is certainly something

All British podium? That can't be common?

Morocco's 23 looks decent tbh. Tidy on the ball and putting in a shift tracking back.

Love a good technical failure.

Oscar is far too posh for Spoons.