Finnegan

Not strictly one of ours but thought maybe some of you might be interested to know one Leicester born Charlie Savage (yes, that Savage) had a solid debut and contributed an assist for Wales last night. Anyone feel old yet?

Fvcking love The Bear.

This is genius. How have we not done this before.

I mean, they only need to score more than the opposition. It's alright saying they didn't score much vs Ireland and Scotland but they shut a vibrant Scotland attack completely down and kept them to 3pts. And did you watch their game against Ireland? It was absolutely, absurdly close. They ran in 50pts against Tonga and 70pts against Romania, they're capable of cutting loose but winning with defence first is just their thing and they're terrifyingly good at it.

I think you'll beat Fiji more comfortably than you imagine. I certainly think it's in your own hands, in the sense that if you turn up and play a good game then it shouldn't really matter what Fiji throw at you. I just think England will have too much in the forwards and the set piece for Fiji to have enough of the game. Everyone makes a big deal of the fact they "came within a last minute dropped pass" against us and overlooks the fact we were 20 odd points ahead comfortably out in front and just got complacent in a way you don't do in a world cup quarter final. We let them back in by getting sloppy. Their other results were a decent win of a catastrophically bad Australia, an extremely narrow win against an awful Georgia and a loss to a Portugal side 50% full of amateurs. Their attack is great fun, they're super to watch and they've definitely improved significantly round the rest of the pitch in to an all round solid, professional side. But if you put in the kind of performance you did against Argentina then you'll probably just smother and kick them to death tactically.

Absolute madness writing South Africa off to that extent tbh.

This is probably the problem. The UK's embedded oppositional defiant disorder. Just tell people NOT to do it and you'll be fine.

And just like that, Trav Le Bleu solved the Palestine crisis.

Jokes on them, the Harvester staff are throwing Harvester bread rolls back and I know which is tougher.

Oh fvck man. I know you're not being deliberately cold but I'd love to see you argue that distinction to some Palestinian mother roaring over the body of her baby because it had the accident of birth of being born in the same Gaza postcode some Hamas commander once passed through on his way to do his weekly shop. Dead civilians are dead civilians and it's horrific whether you walk in to a festival ground and start firing or you lob rockets at them from a mile away. Quibbling over the semantics to literally downplay one set of civilian deaths while emphasising how horrific another is is exactly the sort of hypocrisy people are objecting to.

Literally nobody wants to host it Tells you everything

It's something he'd joke about a lot himself really, England and the English in general just aren't really that big on their folk traditions. If he was from any other country in the UK & Ireland he'd have likely been a much bigger name (relatively speaking.)

Yeah my parents were pretty big folkies, saw him a few times in my life. Took my dad, who is a huge fan, to one of his last tours and possibly his last gig in Leicester in the Guild Hall before he died (VG that is, my dad's still hanging on bless him.) Got to have a chat with him flogging merch afterwards. Lovely bloke. Absolutely stunning voice. Genuinely saddened when he passed.

This has happened endlessly throughout human history. Vin Garbutt, God rest him, was one of England's greatest ever folk singers. He used to sing, usually a capella, a piece called When Oppressed Becomes Oppressor about exactly that. Often springs in to my head when this shit cracks off.

But it's been extremely easy for Hamas to get this point of being the dominant force in Gaza (OK, partly because of Iranian support) because of reactions like Israel's now. It's the same thing every time, othering Palestinians, literally calling them animals, committing war crimes on mass against civilian population centres, bombing the shit out of them and then cutting off their food and utilities when they try to recover as if Gaza is one large military base and everyone in it is a Hamas soldier. What a fvcking surprise when the victims of this get radicalised. Nobody (bar the odd crack pot) is celebrating loss of Israeli life but it is galling to see normal, sensible people (not on here of course) defend Israel's response by buying in to the narrative that Palestinian = Hamas and completely overlooking that @SecretPro is almost certainly right, if the Palestinian death toll isn't already much higher than the Israeli one then it imminently will be. They're not "animals" thanks Mr Netanyahu, they're human beings and they're overwhelmingly innocent victims.

I can't really argue with any of this it's a mostly excellent post other than the fact I think you took my glibness a little too literally. I don't mean to suggest by any means that there's no complexity at all in any resolution or that without America we'd just click our fingers and Palestine would be an independent nation tomorrow. I just get tired of the same thing being said every time Palestine comes up as an issue. People acting like there's no possible solution and it's all just this one big mystery why the trouble is ongoing.

Low key think it might actually be the hosts that could struggle the most actually.

Soyuncu injured or dropped?

Eh. He's obviously passed all the relevant head injury protocols and has been cleared to play, it's just an impact injury to an area of his body that should theoretically he safe anyway (whether or not you back some hefty Saffa not to test it I leave to your cynicism.) I'm pretty big on player welfare but if he's comfortable to play, he's comfortable to play. It's one of the most important games of his career.

Logically you should be right but nationalist demagogues have historically been very good at shifting the blame from themselves and presenting themselves as the solution not the problem. These willy pullers from Putin to Modi to Trump somehow manage to keep their "fanbase" (because that's what it is) blind to their faults and Netanyahu is firmly in their class.

It would be nice to share your optimism.

Be honest. You're just bitter because Australia have gone out early alongside the mighty Portugal (who beat the team that knocked you out) and you've still got weeks and weeks of rugby world cup to go.

Bottom line is, Ukraine war is as close to a straightforward Good Guys vs Bad Guys war as you'll ever get in the 21st century. An evil dictator tried invading his neighbour to steal some land and is being repelled. The current situation in Israel is largely Hamas undertaking what they perceive as retaliatory attacks on Israel following what's been a series of hostility from the Israeli state towards Palestine for months now since Netanyahu came back. Incidents like Jenin and Al Aqsa have been brewing all summer. Want to be really clear and repeat what I said earlier, Hamas are a completely disgusting fundamentalist religious terrorist organisation that commit horrid acts that should never be condoned. But this is pretty much exactly the escalation that Netanyahu was agitating for, he's pretty much got the inevitable reaction he was after and it'll no doubt be used as justification to put further sanctions on Palestine, take more of their land, agitate them further and keep perpetuating the cycle.

I do wish people would stop with the whole "oh but how do you resolve it it's such an impossible problem oh my gosh goodness it's just so complex" wishy washy rubbish though. I mean, it's not that complex is it? You've got a state with 98.7% Palestinian Arab population that overwhelmingly want self governance and have been under military occupation for decades. Give them their independence and stop trying to slowly colonise their best bits of land by force evicting them off it to move Israeli settlers in. There you go, Finners solves the middle east, took all of my vast genius knowledge of Arab-Israeli sociopolitical issues (of which I have none.) If it was anywhere else in the world, left wing, right wing or centre, we'd all agree unanimously they should have their independence. We couldn't fvcking wait to recognise Kosovan independence. Literally the day after their announcement the US and UK were tripping over each other in line to be amongst the first to recognise them officially. And just to be clear about this, the PLO recognised Israel's right to exist in peace as far back as 1993, it hasn't been seeking the destruction of Israel for 30 years, the two aren't mutually exclusive, you can have a free Palestine AND a fee Israel. The solution to Palestine isn't "complex", it's fvcking easy. When we say its "complex" and pretend it's "complex" and act like there's not an immediately obvious answer all the while being morally outraged at the audacity of Putin pretending these bits of Ukraine are his by rights, then are we being hypocritical and then @StanSP you do have a point. The solution isn't complex there's just a fvck off great big United States in the way saying no and they make up 40% of the world's global military spend so there you fvcking go. That's not complex, it's really, really simple.