OntarioFox

Each to their own, I and many others were of the opinion that he was lightweight for the majority of his appearances and comparatively lacked a lot of the midfield bite we got from Ndidi and Choudhury in his position. Admittedly he's young and could yet still develop, but considering Wilf in particular was already our best performer since Kante in the top flight at his age, I just can't see Casadei making it at the top level in comparison. I upset a few Chelsea fans on Reddit last season by wading in to express my amusement at Casadei being brought on during a match not long after they recalled him from his loan. Apparently I was the villain of the piece for pointing out that he was the weak link for us in the Championship, and that they must have been bloody desperate to be bringing him into the fold in the top flight. I apparently should have been grateful they had let us have this star in the making grace our turf! Weird bunch, but a source of great amusement since the wheels came off at Stamford Bridge. Everyone on their books is the best player ever, until they're not. They're like post-Wenger Arsenal with added racism.

Michael only wore one, and he was still far more effective on the big stage

For anyone nostalgic for Ceefax after the struggle getting updates today - here's a little treat for you. And yes, you can actually follow the live scores on it when the season starts.

As the Kaiser Chiefs famously said "everyday I love you less and less"

this is such a massive fixture that it actually disappeared from Livescore's list of featured friendlies mid-match

we are massive

Part of me hopes that Ward somehow ends up on Wrexham's radar. He gets to piss off down to his realistic level, while still enjoying some of the fame / trappings that come with them. Plus there's the Wales connection. Maybe Cooper can do him a solid since he used to play for their academy.

Does this technically mean Vardy has scored the first goal under another new manager? I know it doesn't really count in preseason, but considering KDH under Maresca was the only one to break a streak stretching back to Ranieri, it's still strangely comforting.

Leeds at least have the small excuse that they f**ked up their chance at EPL revenues and are going to have to operate on a shoestring and massively restructure next season to avoid EFL penalties. Poor form to look to the fans to squeeze pennies out, but they're probably desperate for anything they can get to balance the books. LCFC by comparison are quids-in this season even if we get fines or go straight back down. There's absolutely no excuse to do what our board is doing, given it's a drop in the ocean to our overall financial picture yet potentially deal-breaking for loyal fans. And yes, I am laughing at Leeds. We all are.

I see Enzo Fernandes now has a driving conviction to go with his racism. What an absolute todger he is. Good luck Enzo, you'll need it with that rabble.

I saw plenty of people with the new shirt at Kasabian on Saturday - they looked daft. Unfortunately proved the point for me that this fanbase has a huge number of NPCs who will throw money at the club without a second of critical thinking.

Gotta admit I was pleasantly surprised with it - very much a skeptic on how they'd be without Tom as lead and, while I still don't think Serge is quite as strong vocally it was still a bloody cracking performance and full of the usual swagger. I'd still like to see them bury the hatchet in the future, but if not then we've got the best of both worlds with the band continuing and Tom doing his own material, which I've enjoyed. Post-Tom material has been mostly crap though - I quite like Call but that's about it.

It's a shame there wasn't just a hint more tactical voting - we could have ended up with the Lib Dems as the official opposition.

It's a shame there wasn't a more concerted effort to vote tactically around here. I think both Mid-Leicestershire (almost certainly) and Syston & Melton (less likely) may have flipped if Lib Dem & Green supporters had gone for the Labour candidate instead. I can understand though, as it's only the Lib Dems that have openly contributed to primaries elsewhere in the country, and it's the Greens that are stronger in places like Charnwood. As it is, this is still an annoyingly blue county.

It's how I feel whenever I hear Farage talk about electoral reform. Go take a shower, you'll feel okay after a good scrub.

About the only thing that really appealed to me from Labour under Corbyn was the renationalisation of key industries, particularly rail. But I could never bring myself to vote for them under him given his fairly transparent revulsion of defence, dated affixation on restoring carbon-heavy industry and coal mining, and uncanny ability to choose the wrong side on most international matters (Hamas, Russia, North Korea, you name it). Turns out that not only is rail renationalisation still a policy under Starmer, but the sheer state of the network is practically doing their job for them - some franchises (LNER, TransPennine) have already fallen back under public ownership after the original private companies shat the bed and returned the contracts. It's one of those things the Tories could have taken some credit for, but it's so at-odds with their "privatise everything" ideology that they've unsurprisingly kept quiet about it. More of the railway network fell back into public hands under Boris Johnson than any other Prime Minister since Atlee. Great British Energy is also a great policy. Even if you disagree with the headlong rush towards net-zero, or are worried it may raise bills in the short term, you can't argue that owning our own power generation capabilities is hugely important in an increasingly volatile world - as the huge hikes in our gas-heavy system caused by Putin's invasion showed. It's also frankly farcical that so much of the profit for energy generation in this country goes not even to private firms but often state-owned providers from other countries, primarily EDF in France. I do wish they'd be more ambitious in applying state intervention to things like the water industry or Royal Mail, but now they're in I'm hoping we see that they've been holding their cards close to their chest until the right-wing media could no longer scare off undecided voters.

i for one welcome our new crypto-bro-scam-artist overlords waka-waka, hey, hey

Now the smoke's cleared a bit and I've calmed down about the insanity on show in the city yesterday, I've taken a look at Shockat Adam's credentials and, to be fair to him, he seems like a decent fella. I didn't realise he has an NHS background, or that half of his campaign was about the state of it. Obviously he's only in power because of the Gaza thing but who knows, he sounds like a decent human being with strong local roots, maybe he'll work constructively with the government on stuff. Which is more than can be said for the new representative for Leicester East, who get exactly what they deserve for choosing a Tory - at least 4-5 years of yelling into the void while the adults get on with trying to fix a broken country.

Scenes when the gang pull off her mask and it's actually Keith Vaz underneath

Everyone saying the ladies team will have a different sponsor gonna be real quiet when it turns out to be this

Bit of a misnomer - the main reason the Tories have risen in that area is due to their shameless exploitation of the community tensions between Hindus and Muslims, which the appalling politics of the past 14 years has helped manifest. True to their nasty slide into identity politics, they've managed to effectively brainwash a decent chunk of Hindu voters into thinking they're on their side in the whole debacle. It's legitimately the only demographic in the entire country to turn towards them in recent years. I think the term is "useful idiots". There are few, if any, Muslim supporters of the Tories in Leicester East. Rather, the fallout over Gaza and the shameless re-standing of Vaz and Webbe has split a vote which in any other scenario would have had a Labour MP returned. Instead, the fools who have somehow concluded that the horrible outgoing party "have their back" have managed to elect them in the vacuum of any serious challenge.

Actually a perfect analogy!

It's absolutely fallen to pieces in the past few years. I used to be very proud of this city and would always say that it's an example of "multiculturalism done right", but nowadays it's fast becoming another Bradford / Luton-type basket case beset by community tensions. There are even blatant cultural divides between established migrant communities from the 60's to 2000s, and more recent arrivals, most tellingly in Belgrave and its surroundings where first-generation arrivals are increasingly arriving with minds poisoned by nationalist Hindutva rhetoric - which is always going to turn any shared space with Muslims into a tinderbox. Maybe it was always there under the surface, but I don't remember any notable issues between folks of different religions there until the past 5-10 years? It's easy to say as a football fan, but the last time I genuinely felt the city was united was 2016, when we won the league. Everybody was in good spirits and we were proud to be from this city regardless of our background. Everything since has descended into something unrecognisable and very, very ugly.