Finnegan

Forest fans:

Your bottle of CdP sat in front of every home game says otherwise old bean

I've had exchanges with @AjcW about this before. It's obviously difficult to switch your emotions off. Football, sport in general, is powerful because we form such close bonds to our clubs. As much as I poke fun at him for it (purely jovially, he's a lovely guy), @Daggers is an example of this. He's obviously not happy with the Leicester ownership and he'd like to tear himself away and follow Kettering but you can't just vaporise all ties to a club you've loved forever and pretend they don't exist. So, obviously I'd still have affection for Leicester even if this absolute scumbag was in charge, or a Saudi prince, or an American hedge fund owner or some other absolute detestable disease on humanity. But I wouldn't give them my money. If I was a Forest fan, or a Newcastle fan, or probably even a Man City fan, there's absolutely no chance I'd be giving them my revenue and I have no sympathy for Forest or Newcastle fans that still are, as much as I feel sad for them that their clubs were hijacked and they've little power to resist (beyond a sadly unrealistic mass boycott.) As I've said elsewhere, it's one of the main reasons I'll support the current ownership. I don't want to come across as some sort of bootlicker but a retailer baron with somewhat dubious relationship with a monarchy is - as awful as this is - one of the more ethical ownerships in the Premier League (which is awful) and it could be a lot worse if Top wants to sell up.

What an absolute ****

Definitely think this is a big possibility if he maintains this form and we don't **** his ACLs for lols. I think anyone at either Leicester or Brighton getting attached is naive. Will make Brighton some good wedge though and if he keeps us up I'm happy.

Ha! That's what I get for not reading Gen Chat anymore. What a thing to go viral for.

A big problem these days is the massive number of Premier League games on TV in every country, usually on multiple English speaking networks globally. It means there's a relatively large demand for former players to be pundits and, especially in the overseas market, these tend to need to be household names. By and large, a lot of footballers are thick as **** and being good at the sport doesn't actually mean you understand it on an an analytical level (you don't have to look further than Michael Owen for that.) Throw in the drive for diverse representation and you make it even harder to find the right people. There's so many pundits on TV that shouldn't be within a hundred miles of a broadcast microphone. It's why I quite like programmes that feature journalists. BT's European football show with James Horncastle or the old Revista with Graham Hunter were better watching than having to listen to morons like Rio Ferdinand or Jamie Redknapp attempt to simulate intelligence.

Who was it?

https://www.reddit.com/r/shittyfoodporn/s/MPQcls3YaG Hahahahaha has this been posted already? International fame.

Oh and another note on "pragmatism" being equated to versatility and playing more than one way, Arne Slot was asked before the Brentford game what he thought were their strengths and weaknesses. He said what made Brentford dangerous was that they've had a manager and a group of players together for so long that they can have had time to work on different systems, formations and patterns of play to mix it up because when you're new to a club just simply drilling one formation or style is hard enough and takes a lot of time. This idea that Cooper is somehow just this "pragmatic" (I really hate the way that word is being misused on this forum) manager that's versatile and is going to change the plan for every opponent is just ****ing stupid. For a start, no he isn't and there's been no evidence of it so far, we've done basically the same thing in every game and for seconds it'd be a daft thing to try and do anyway when he's been here for a few months.

No they don't. This is nonsense on several different levels. There are clubs doing well in almost every country that haven't spent billions building their squad but have an identity. You can also look at it another way and look at how Enzo got a tune out of Ndidi, Hamza, KDH and co' playing his brand of football just with good coaching when plenty of people said they weren't technically gifted enough to pull it off. Southampton and Burnley had and have poor squads. Our squad was better last year in the Championship than Burnley's was in the Premier League. On top of that, Russell Martin is a distinctly average manager that I wouldn't want here over Cooper. Brighton, Fulham, Bournemouth and Brentford have all gotten promoted and all found Premier League security by recruitment intelligently and playing progressive, confident football that is enjoyable to watch. The idea that you have to play some sort of "PrAgMaTiC" (read: negative), cowardly Dycheball to survive as a Newly Promoted Team™ is objectively false. Not a single person critical of Cooper's tactical decision making is saying this because he's changing it up or being "versatile", they're saying it because it often looks like there isn't a plan and there's a significant lack of cohesion in our play. They're saying it because he's having us try to build out from the back and he's claiming that the approach is still the same as last year but that he's taken away a lot of the foundation and building blocks that made that work as if he doesn't understand why it was succesful in the first place. Bless him, @StriderHiryu has written chapter and verse already on this this season not because Cooper's methods are so genius we can't perceive them but because they're chaotic, often contradictory and just poor. Earlier in the season he was absolutely isolated because Cooper disassembled a well structured and balanced attacking shape and turned it in to a negative and confusing mess. Against Southampton he came on in to a team that was getting bodies forward, had a number of other attacking threats for Southampton to have to contend with and was put out there to hold his width and attack his full back while other attacking players filled the middle of the park and tied up the defence, exactly as he was deployed last season and what a surprise! It worked! Shock of all shocks! Look, I get it, we don't have a squad that's going to go toe to toe with the top half, we aren't the same club that could push to compete for top 5 finishes anymore, there's obviously got to be adjustment. None of us expect the team to be walking the league or able to Barcelona our way through the Prem like it's easy. Some adjustment to the style of play was inevitable. Nobody is butt hurt about that. But you've got to be absolutely blind or watching the games pretty sauced up on a Saturday to not have problems with the performances under Cooper, in particular the first half showings where time and again we look lost and confused with no structure or plan. Not every club is going to just melt down and give us points like Southampton did when he's forced to take the shackles off and let the players go back to what they know (which, by the way, every time he's done that we've finally looked dangerous in games.)

In what world is Vardy's pen anything other than superb. The only way a keeper saves that is with pure luck. Would have to dive intensely early and just happen to be behind it which would mean diving extremely high. For the pace he put on it it was at a good height. Edit: in fact, on several more rewatches, it's also far enough in the corner that a keeper is never getting body behind it so it'd have to be an arm and have to be stretching. That's verging on unstoppable. If Ramsdale saved that it'd be the best save I've ever seen.

The Leeds one would have instantly been one of my top 5 all time favourite goals.

Saying the right thing to satisfy and connect with the fans has never been Cooper’s problem. His problem is following up on his words. It's one thing to imply we shouldn't be in a relegation scrap but if you then go and set your team up every week to be passive, defensive and cowardly against even the worst teams in the competition then it doesn't mean much.

Facundo has been in the country a year and played 40 times for Brighton in English football. That's overlooking the fact that every human is just different anyway.

"Just needs to have absolutely world class feet and start to look like he might be a generational talent"

Only chance he's here next season is if Man City or Liverpool loan him back to us.

Darwin Nunez is a **** isn't he

No

Their whole team got collective PTSD when he came on.

Yes

Nobody is eating humble pie or back tracking. Today was awful for Cooper. It was the most profound litmus test of the season so far, a direct comparison to last season. We played a team we absolutely devastated twice last year and they completely embarrassed us. And they've not vastly improved their side, they have the same coach and look at where they sit in the league. They're appalling and we needed a red card and a penalty to turn it around and beat them. Cooper left out a player that scored a hattrick against them last time and when he's finally forced to bring him on, what a ****ing shock, he changes the game. As did Harry Winks, whose omission from the start was equally baffling given he's a fundamental building block in how this team of players plays the football the manager claims he wants us to play. Claiming that today's game is some sort of vindication of Cooper's management isn't a clever gotcha that makes the mean "haters" look silly, it's an admission that you don't really understand what you're watching when you go to a football match that makes you look silly.