dsr-burnley

I suppose you have to wonder whether Leicester signing Ulloa and Kramaric for £10m or so each while Burnley signed Jutkiewicz and Sordell might have been partly to do with Leicester having a chairman putting money in, rather than the ability of the manager.

He didn't at Burnley. At the end of his last PL season (after several years of restricted transfer dealings) the big sales were Nathan Collins (21), Dwight McNeil (25), Maxwell Cornet (24), and Nick Pope (30, but a goalkeeper). Also Ben Mee and James Tarkowski left, they were both free because out of contract, but they had been at the club 11 years and 6 years respectively and couldn't help getting older. When he signed players of limited technical ability at Burnley, it was because we couldn't afford better. When we did sign quality (Stephen Defour), we qualified for Europe. Don't worry about the quality of football in the Championship. There is no way to play un-entertaining football when you're scoring goals and winning.

The academy was category 3 and in a mess (possibly special measures) when Dyche turned up, and the training ground was in an awful state. The 2009-10 PL windfall had been wasted. When Dyche won promotion his demand was that the club should spend a large chunk of the extra money (about £40m per year in those days) on the training ground to build for the future. This is the youth team and under 21 squad for 2014-15. Who should Dyche have put in the team? https://www.burnleyexpress.net/sport/football/burnley-welcomes-new-scholars-2636557

(ahem) Chris Wood? Also Ashley Barnes, Danny Ings, Andre Gray, Sam Vokes. He knows how to turn decent forwards into good forwards, and perhaps if he was given good forwards he could turn them into excellent ones. He also turned Scott Arfield and George Boyd into PL players. Give him a better starting point and you might finish with a better finishing point.

Just a point about his last couple of years at Burnley - the then owner (Mike Garlick) was keeping very close control of the transfer budget, in the sense of not allowing it to be spent. By the time Dyche finished, Garlick had sold up and taken the £80m cash in the bank with him. So not only did Dyche have the club with the smallest income, it was a club that wouldn't let him spend the relatively few funds available.

I wouldn't call him a promoter of youth either. Dwight McNeil was the exception, not the norm. On the other hand, he did sign young players like Michael Keane, Ben Mee, Kieran Trippier for relative peanuts and bring them on. What he does do is find the gaps in the squad and fill them if possible, but he prefers to leave them unfilled if the right man isn't available. You should have more leeway than Burnley ever had for player signings because of parachute money, which Dyche didn't have first time. First time round, he performed the impossible of taking a mid table side, selling the top scorer, and getting promotion on the signing of free transfers (though having Danny Ings helped more than a little). Second time round, he signed Andre Gray to replace Ings and signed Joey Barton for the midfield - and whatever we say about Barton (and who doesn't!) he was a model pro in his time at Burnley, such is (or was then, at least) the power of Dyche's man management. As for stopping up, it's more or less impossible now IMO. To stop up this year, any promoted club would have had to finish above one of Spurs, Man U, West Ham, Wolves, Everton. Everyone else is 49 points plus. Regardless of who the manager is, we'll wave at you as we swap places again next summer!

Don't worry, our roads are perfectly smooth with no possible hazards.

Not any more. Going back quite a few years the councils used to sell the rubbish to recycling companies; now (and even in 2023 when this was posted) they have to pay to have the companies accept it.

Dyche's best performance with Burnley was finishing 7th in 2017-18 and qualifying for Europe. True, he only had one other top ten finish, 2019-20. Unfortunately by then the chairman had stopped investing on players, and by the time Dyche got sacked Burnley FC had £80m in the bank. (Now we have negative £60m because the outgoing chairman took it all with him and replaced it with an IOU from the incoming, skint chairman). He only had two full seasons at Championship level with Burnley. 2013-14, P46 W26 D15 L5, F72 A37, 93 points, second. 2015-16 P46 W26 D15 L5, F72 A35, 93 points, first. The first of those seasons, we had finished 11th the year before under Eddie Howe and were forced to sell our only saleable asset, Charlie Austin. All Dyche could sign were free transfers from Bristol City, Huddersfield, and Wiigan. (Admittedly they were Tom Heaton, Scott Arfield, and David Jones, and a better free-transfer window there has never been.) And as Leicester supporters know perfectly well, if you have a side less inclined to fanny about at the back and more inclined to get the ball to your goalscorer in prime position, and it wins you the league, it is entertaining. Incidentally, for those who think he isn't the man to build, in his first PL season he demanded that his transfer budget be reduced and the money spent on a new training ground (cost £11m, incidentally). He was not happy that the first PL promotion had done nothing for the club infrastructure.

Must cost a bob or two to keep the glass polished.

Alex Ferguson had 9 assistant managers while at Man United. A great manager can cope with not having his own players, so surely he could cope with not having his own backroom staff. The problem with RVN is not that he hadn't got a great backroom staff; it's that he isn't a great manager.

I checked mine over the weekend and it's up several thousand pounds over the last year. Either I have a genius pension company or else I have failed to take the short term view!

It's complicated, but after two or three goes at it, the laws committee have made it make sense. It's part of section 2. https://www.thefa.com/football-rules-governance/lawsandrules/laws/football-11-11/law-11---offside Broadly speaking, if Smith the defender has time to see the ball coming and no particular pressure, and chooses (say) to head it back to the goalkeeper having not seen Jones the forward in the way, then it's not offside. When Bloggs the goalkeeper lumped it forward, Jones was in an offside position but not interfering; when Smith deliberately played the ball in a controlled manner, it became a new phase of play so Jones was not offside. If the ball had been wellied at Smith from five yards so that he didn't have time to adjust and it flicked off his head in an uncontrolled way, then Jones would still be offside because Smith hadn't played the ball in a controlled manner. The law is specific that attempts to block a shot don't count as deliberately playing the ball.

It did, but the old rule about being played onside if it touched a defender was abolished in about 1972, and the new rule is specific that it doesn't apply to a blocked shot. It only applies if the defender has time and space to control the ball.

It would be even better if they hadn't got the colon and semi-colon the wrong way round.

You can (at least sometimes) get home without a passport. I came back from a trip once with a man who left his passport in his camera bag on the station platform on the journey home, but (with the help of lots of phone calls to various places) they still allowed him through eurostar to get home.

Rumour has it that when it gets closer, they could ram it with a spaceship (unmanned, unlike Hollywood) that would give enough momentum to change its course.

Might be worth remembering that if the majority of professional investors felt the same way, the price would be higher than it is now.

1.2 is fine. I've got a 13 year old Corsa that does about 45 mpg over that sort of distance and it's easy peasy driving up to 75 mph or so, which is plenty. If you want to push it to 80 mph then you have to hold the wheel firmly and your mpg goes down.

The graph, so far as I can read it, is based entirely on the model figures. It does mention in the detail of the article that the model started in the past so they could compare model figures with the actual figures, but I can't actually see in that article where they have done it. Thanks for the info, anyway. The second article is interesting too. The raw data can (I think) be found by putting together the various bits of info scattered around the article, but what I think it amounts to is that the number of days with more than 2 inches of rainfall, for any given part of the country, has gone from about 3 every 10 years to about 4 every 10 years. I wonder how much variation would be expected on a purely random basis? From personal observation, about floods not rainfall this time, there is a certain caravan site in Eckington, Worcestershire which used to flood every winter without fail in the seventies. In the eighties this stopped happening, and people replaced their old fashioned tin box caravans (no electric or plumbing) with newer ones with all mod cons. In the nineties the site flooded once, and in the 2000's, after the caravans had been replaced, it flooded once more. The site has now moved to the next field on higher ground, but the original site is still flooding only rarely. There are multiple causes - I doubt that lower rainfall is the cause, but improved river management of the Severn and Avon probably is. (The 2000's flood was a summer flood, which is unusual, but the figures from your second article suggest that summer rainfall is not increasing anyway.) There is also a bridge in Worcester marking the height of the River Severn floods. There are numerous examples from the 1600;s, fewer from the 1700's, then nothing until the second half of the 1900's. There is clearly more to flooding than just climate change, and studies need to be very much in depth to get to the bottom of it all.

No, that's a prediction. Even the so-called historic data is a prediction working backwards of what it might have been. Is there any actual recorded data that shows number of extreme rainfall events?

Are there statistics for that?

A lot of the problem is dredging policy. In the seventies, policy was to dredge rivers to let the water flow quickly. Now, policy is not to dredge rivers because it's better for wildlife. The water can't get away as fast so it builds up and builds up until it has to go somewhere else. Couple that with less efficient maintenance of drainage systems, and more houses on flood plains and the Victorian sewers being 50 years older, and it adds up to floods.

It's a strange stat. It would only be meaningful if they told us what produced the steam. Maybe the steam was generated by oil-fired boilers. Coal or wood (then as now) would be a very bulky source of power.

No, that's true. You would have to do more than just destroy their businesses to get them to be poor. But how vital is it that they should be poor? Would you give up your job and your home so that Gates and Musk had a little less?