Finnegan

I mean yeah, I'd play two of BEK, Facu or Skipp depending on the quality of the opposition. That's fair. It's still honking though.

For heavens sakes, don't put him anywhere near TV cameras, let alone the first team squad, before he can sign a professional contract.

The fact we just had our best ever spending window, apparently, and our best 11 is still last year's 11 except KDH going is ****ing tragic.

This is what drives me absolutely insane about diverging from the Maresca shape, especially given all of the claims to be "not changing anything" and wanting to ultimately play the same way. Last year's formation already enabled us to drop in to a solid 4-5-1 block if we really wanted to. Mavididi and Fatawu are both hard working wingers who graft defensively with impressive defensive numbers, you had Ndidi (or Skipp I guess now?) dropping in to sure up the midfield alongside Winks and you have a well established back four made up of English, Danish, Belgian and Portuguese internationals. It's not exactly flimsy. The thing I absolutely loved the best about last year's shape is that it could be anything you wanted it to be. Allowed us to be both defensive or progressive, passive or aggressive.

What's funny about that is that arguably international football is a bigger deal (comparatively) in women's football.

Yeah Miles has talked a lot in the last 24 months about user data and trimming features that aren't used much so they can put more resources in to overhauling the rest of the game. I don't doubt not many people manage nations. I just can't imagine it's much development? It's just managing a team with a couple small mechanical changes that they copy paste every year.

What an odd feature to remove.

This is just the same engagement bait / agent shenanigans as Matip. We'll probably get dubiously linked to all the free agents because there's an unprecedented amount of them this year. I don't see why we'd signs another attacking midfielder, though, and he's not brilliant.

And if you must insist on playing this system, you can solve most of your problems by just mirroring it. Our best attacking full backs are right backs, Ricardo or JJ would both be better options as attacking width down the right than VK is on the left. VK is strong, athletic, aggressive, works hard and is solid enough in the tackle. He can be the most defensive full back. You then get to play Facu on the right as the narrow wide player tucking in as the second AM. He is by far the best equipped player in the squad go play that role and it gets both Facu and Bilal in the team at the same start which is clearly what we want. You then have Mavididi, who is probably our best goal threat outside our strikers and our fastest and most direct ball carrier out in his best position on the wing, terrifying defenders. The only major casualty is Fatawu, who has looked fairly lost and isolated in this shape anyway and appears to be struggling.

Put simply, our best 11 is not playing Cooper's preferred shape at all. That's the problem. You can't recruit for one thing and then hire a coach to play something different. It's moronic. Funny that, given I'd expect such a PrAgMaTiSt to adapt his formation to the players he has but yknow.

I really enjoy the singing of anthems. I think national anthems are pretty cool, can be amazingly rousing. Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau before a major sporting event always gets me in the mood. I'd like to think it's possible to enjoy something without having patriotic weirdos ruin it. You don't have to get all nationalistic and weird about whether or not someone sings.

Hideous reading.

I appreciate you're probably trying to take the piss but given how long he's had with the team and the fact we, let's be honest, don't have a lot of very good players - it was a really good performance. Pretty exciting, created a lot. Absolutely zero quality in front of goal but I mean, we have very few quality forwards 15 shots 1 on target I was pleased with it. Good start.

You're just jealous of Bellersballs

Bellersball looks better after five minutes than Cooperball. Hired the wrong Welshman.

Had loads of this in Italy a few months ago. It's glorious. Really loved it. Closest I can get here near me is non filtered Moretti with sea salt which doesn't quite cut it

The EFL absolutely will be waiting for us if/when we go down I don't think there's much doubt about that. But they can't impose any competitive penalties while we're not in their league. I mean, all the more reason the Premier League being a separate entity is a travesty tbf but that's another issue.

Yes. But to circle back around to the start of this conversation, you implied that our owners are the most likely to implement dynamic pricing. I'm just disagreeing and I don't think there's any evidence to validate your point other than just general pessimism and low morale at the current state of the club. Our owners don't do anything every other Prem club does but lots of other Prem clubs do do things worse than ours.

Would imagine his agent is pretty much throwing out every club's name possible to just whip up a bit of interest. I doubt we'd add to the squad at CB in the free transfer market without looking elsewhere first. It wouldn't surprise me if we do add someone to the squad on a free but Matip would be a shock.

Like what? And again, I mean compared to every other Premier League club? To iterate, I'm not suggesting for one second that our owners are perfect or that I like the ownership model and the pricing structure of our or any Premier League club. I hate the money and greed in football, it's completely taking over. But I just think people singling out our owners as if they're specifically, uniquely bad OR wishing for them to sell up so we could have different owners are probably being a bit naive. We're not getting a 51% ownership model, we aren't getting greater fan power, we aren't getting Dale Vince rocking up looking after the common man and the planet whilst still keeping the club upwardly mobile. There's fans at basically every Premier League club that will be upset that the club aren't fan orientated in their thinking, are constantly rising prices, that shirts cost too much, that fans are ignored, that the match day experience is prohibitively expensive, etc. That's modern football. I'm not saying you have to accept it, you could organise, mobilise, boycott, march, protest and you'd be right to do so. But the problem is the entire commercial infrastructure of professional football, not just LCFC.

... Based on what?

We have the third cheapest season ticket in the league despite a considerable waiting list? I know everyone loves a shit on our owners and lets not kid ourselves, they're obviously billionaire capitalist that want to make money, but that's true of every owner in the league and most are worse than ours.

If we can now afford to sack the manager, yeah.

They're already weak. 90% of arguments in favour of Cooper are just that it seems too soon to be worried.