Finnegan

That's exactly the sort of weird thing someone cheering for the Jambos would say.

Good man Raj

Come on Celtic.

They have

And Jermaine Pennant.

Absolutely spot on. I feel that you think I'm defending the club, Top or Rudkin. I'm not absolving them. I just don't think it's them out there dictating transfer policy. They absolutely should have reigned Rodgers in in the same that John Henry did. They didn't. They're culpable of course they just committed other sins.

Rodgers did a decent job coaching the match day squad, yes. But it's become abundantly clear in hindsight that he wasn't doing the job of a modern head coach but ultimately of an old school, conventional manager. He was doing the job Rudkin should have been while JR was busy delegating it all. It's Rodgers that sees us inflate the wage bill and spend unchecked on players with minimal upwards trajectory (Fofana aside) to match his philosophy of rehabilitating "broken" players. As much as Rodgers might have been a decent coach he was an absolutely awful manager, we just didn't really see the full iceberg until after he'd gone.

I think knowing what we know now, we were always doomed when we signed Brendan Rodgers. He was probably the worst possible manager to come in to the club with only Top and Rudkin to supervise him and no operating model in place designed to curb his influence. His entire strategy is short term and self serving, he had no interest in developing the long term security of the club and building in the same way Pearson did. Vichai probably would have had the strength of will and the fiscal shrewdness to keep him in check but Top never appeared to have any spine with him until it was far too late. By the time the relegation season started the damage had already been done. I used to feel that waiting too long to sack him cost us a shot at someone like Emery, who wound up at equally floundering Villa not long afterwards and I felt that was a bit of a revolving doors moment. But I think in hindsight the squad had been allowed to get so poor, especially in the defence, and the wage bill over spend was so high and we were sprinting headlong in to points deductions and sanctions and this five year spiral of waiting for all their contracts to expire and I just think whatever happened we were ****ed. Maybe not THIS ****ed but still.

No. They aren't. Everyone has prejudices, that's not the same thing.

Every issue is split black and white these days. People can't hold contrasting thoughts in their head. The internet has been making it worse for years, so has the falling standards of education and journalism in this country and the rise of social media "news."

I mean, she might be the single least effective party leader of any major party in my lifetime tbh and that includes Liz Truss. She can sit the **** down.

I really, really, really, really hate these videos and the people that think they're any kind of clever gotcha. Just ****ing moronic. You don't want a stranger coming to live actually in your house so you must be some sort of hypocrite. Jesus ****ing christ. For the record, if I did have to have a stranger come live in my house I'd much rather it be a migrant from almost any country than a Reform voter.

I really wish I shared your confidence.

Now you mention it...

My old man could fill about twenty pages of this thread on his own. I swear he's always on the toilet when we score. It's such a meme we actively send him for a piss in dull games just in the hope something will happen. Alarming how often it works.

See this is the part I just can't agree with. Politics and music have gone hand in hand pretty much for eternity. Even just looking at what we'd probably think of as contemporary music, starting around the 60s or so you've got the entire counter culture movement that's steeped in political feeling. Not just in the music and lyrics themselves but in the words and the actions of the performers both on stage and off. For me as someone that's spent most of my life listening to rock, punk and metal I'd probably find it harder to list apolitical bands than political ones and for pretty much my whole life I've been watching artists go on stage and use the platform to speak out. Edit: just because I've seen @Samilktray react to this post, it's not exclusive to rock either. Look at the infancy of hip hop, from Gil Scott-Heron through to the early years of NWA et all, there's always been a heavy political current through hip hop.

Not specifically talking about you as I've got no idea what you listen to but it does make me laugh how many of the people that trot out phrases like this these days are watching groups like RATM or SOAD or Green Day or some punk band whose lyrics and behavior have always made it clear they are profoundly political in what they do I'd say 90% of the time I hear people being outraged about a band or artist having made a political statement it was a band or artist that are famously and notoriously political like, all the time. Ain't nobody turning up to a Taylor Swift gig and all of a sudden hearing her yelling from the river to the sea or **** MAGA or death to Putin or something are they.

"Left Wing" political parties biggest problems, in both Britain and America, is that they stopped actually being left wing political parties around the late 90s and now that's exactly what the world needs. Labour and the Dems both turned themselves in to the parties of middle class, neo-liberal changephobes and corporate interests. It got them an uptick in popularity at the time because they hung on (for a while) to their working class base who they thought would never change allegiance and they gained a whole swathe of the middle. But then a global financial crisis happened and that's just steadily rolled in to another and another over the last two decades and every time we have some major cost of living escalation, the richest still get richer. It's now twenty odd years later and Labour still don't have a clue how to talk to, let alone win back, the white working class. It started with Gordon Brown's "bigoted woman" and it's come all the way to today's Kier Starmer. Even John Major made the point recently, talking about how the Labour Party he was used to fighting was made up of working class socialists that kept British politics in check and gave an actual voice to the working electorate. Now the Labour Party is a bunch of upper middle class bankers, lawyers and career politicians that's indistinguishable from the Tories except for being less corrupt than Johnson's hilarious cabinet. Reform are just political vultures funded by bad actors representing the interests of anyone that can afford to pay, be that billionaires or Russia. Farage doesn't care, he'll take anyone's money and say anything to get in power and get rich. He's just the Trump of the UK, a vile, traitorous, self interested leech. Nobody with any sense should vote for him. He'll cause significant harm to the lives and the wallets of the common citizen in this country. But Labour have to do a much better job at presenting an alternative. They need to wake the **** up and accept that most of the country are fed up and want change. They've been dealt a horrible hand, it's not exactly an overnight job to fix the economy and they've got to constantly fight Rupert Murdoch and the overwhelming right wing bias of our news infrastructure but that still. Isn't an excuse for just how bad they are and how out of touch they are. And if they go with Streeting, who is about as right wing as you get in senior Labour ministers, then they've learned absolutely nothing and we're ****ed.

Cooper is absolutely dreadful and I'll be amazed if he's ever up to much anywhere in his career. But I imagine Cifuentes and RVN will have decent spells with clubs elsewhere. I don't love their brand of football and they're definitely not any kind of tactical visionaries but they're OK. Good enough to have done better. For both of them I think a lot of it wasn't just about how poorly run the club was longer term but - as a symptom of that - how poor the mentality of the squad we've assembled is and how much none of them give any ****s. It's such a long way from the personality of the squad that Pearson built. I really rate Danny Rohl and I wanted him here but I doubt it would have been significantly different if he'd come. You could have had Daniel Farke here, one of the best proven current managers at Championship level, we'd probably still have been shit. The squad just don't care and have no heart or bottle.

This time of the season it's just pointless predicting isn't it tbf. Everton and Chelsea both perfectly capable of absolutely murdering Spurs. Also both capable of being on the beach, giving no ****s and coughing up easy wins.

Looks too good, we'd ruin him.

Does it need to be solved? I don't think it's getting any better or worse, it's pretty much happened for as long as I've watched the game and it's ok? Football media just likes to invent these dramas every now and then to "sell the product". A crucial VAR decision in a tight title race right at the end of the season is obviously going to make a fuss, hence why they panicked and took about a million years to make a decision. But I'm pretty sure 99% of people agree it was not only one but two fouls and the goal couldn't stand. Other than West Ham complaining because it might get them relegated its not really a thing.

Blows my mind it's 2026 and fans of his own club still haven't cottoned on to how good Vardy was. Vards, Kante and Mahrez were all comfortably world class footballers.

What the ****

So uh. We're all Freiburg right?