Sampson

Gonna be appearance 450 today if he gets on the pitch, crazy stuff.

Vardy is on 449, Walsh on 450. There’s the updated appearance list on the history section of this website

Would kill the league I think. Without playoffs, about 80% of the league would have nothing to play for from about November and attendances would plummet.

There were people on here still saying Danny Ward was fine until like March time last year, was bizarre.

I think it’s also unrealistic though. A lot of the time those more intelligent than the role your in will leave quite quickly because it’s easier for them to find better jobs and sometimes the candidates just aren’t there during the hiring process:

Yeah this really. It sucks, but there just are certain industries where you can only book holidays off at a certain time else it could not only screech to a holt an entire industry that's important for sustaining a society but put people's lives in danger. Unfortunately any job where you're in care, health, tourism or service is inevitably going to be like this, there's no real way round it even if I have obvious sympathies for the workers.

Yes I realised that just have been the case after i posted

Were some of our favs genuinely booing him today? Edit: oh no wait I guess it was the Birmingham fans as he’s ex-Villa

Might get deleted as we can't have politics, but for me it's more about changing demographics than discussing ideology. Interesting studies showing there's a growing divide between men and women regarding the political opinions of those over 30. Up until recent years men and women generally had similar political opinions on average, but this seems to be changing. A new global gender divide is emerging (ft.com) .

I mean you’ve answered your own question there. King will be remembered because he’s our top scoring midfielder of all time and for his incredible achievement of winning all too 3 divisions with the same club. Something no other player will repeat. Albrighton will be remembered for scoring 2 of the biggest and most memorable goaks in the clubs history in our CL run and for playing over 300 times for the club. Those don’t get forgotten at all. Steve Walsh is a good example because in reality he had one good top flight season in 96/97 for us before becoming a more of a squad player under ONeill after that (and he was injured/not first choice even when he was fit in Little/McGhee’s PL season) and was largely just a very good second tier defender for us in his time here. He probably was not in the top 50 best players in the clubs history in terms of actual talent and ability but he gets remembered as a club legend due it his commitment, longevity and iconic moments vs Derby in a second tier playoff final (which wasn’t really a big thing to win in the context of our whole history). Izzet too was also never considered our best or most important player under O’Neill and got relegated twice, the 01-02 season he was especially awful and looked like he couldn’t be bothered and got lots of stick at the time, he only started to get called our most important player during the Micky Adams era where we weren’t even really good enough to be in the PL and we’re probably a weaker side than we are now, let alone than we were between 14-21. The reality it the poor performances get forgotten too and nostalgia builds players up. I don’t really buy the recency bias argument when we’re talking about comfortably the clubs most successful ever era. I personally think the opposite is true and people really overrate the Bloomfield and O’Neill era players in comparison to the 2014-21 players out of nostalgia and because they’ve forgotten all those average performances in favour of the good ones.

Thats not a very coherent argument though. You’re inventing a hierarchy and idea of respect that doesn’t exist and no one uses in real life. No one is “disrespected” by calling by calling an extremely influential and memorable figure a legend because they aren’t amongst the very very 2 or 3 most elite of memorable and influential figures, there’s never been a hierarchy or grouping involved in calling people “legend” or “cult hero”, they’re just terms used to indicate notoriety, they’ve never been used to mean terms of the absolute most elite level of notoriety. “Legend” has never been used as a way to indicate an elite group of people, it’s just about having fame, influence and notoriety. You don’t disrespect Beethoven by calling Giorgio Moroder, Sam Cooke or Woody Guthrie a musical legend because they aren’t in the same category of musical and cultural influence and innovation as Beethoven. You don’t disrespect Pele, Maradona or Messi by calling Michel Platini or Zico footballing legends because they aren’t in the same group of level of footballer. King and Albrighton are objectively and unquestionably amongst the most notorious and memorable players in the clubs history, just because they’re not Vardy or Arthur Chandler doesn’t make them not a legend, and neither is it disrespectful to Vardy or Chandler in calling them that.

Agree about world class, not legends though and think Finnegan is usually a reasonable poster, but he's definitely on the unreasonable side of the argument here. World class means that someone is in the best "class" of player in the world. That definitely gets overused and used on players who it shouldn't be, like when some of our fans used to try and argue Tielemans was world class despite him probably never being in the top 30 midfielders in the world and clearly never anywhere near the same class as someone like de Bruyne. "Legend" just means someone who extremely famous and notorious, of course in the context of the club and therefore a "club legend" is someone who is extremely famous, notorious and associated with the club in a positive way. Of course King and Albrighton fall into that category, both will be incredibly well remembered and revered by fans for decades to come. I think Football Manager has caused people to want to gatekeep that term since it brought it in on the club information screen and created a "hierarchy" between legend, icons and favoured personell that was never used previously in the context of football and was just used for a few people so it wasn't so cluttered and you could have your own players in game on there and feel more special, and was created for computer game mechanic purposes so you had some hierarchy your players could build up on. No one ever used to be so snooty and gatekeepy about the term “club legend” until football manager introduced those computer game mechanics, the idea of "club legend" being the select group of only the very highest 2 or 3 people associated with a club (like people who get stands named after them for example) in a hierarchy only exists on Football Manager for computer game mechanic purposes and the term simply has never been used that way to indicate an elite 2 or 3 people associated with a club irl, neither does it really fit the context of how the word "legend" gets used, like there are hundreds if not thousands of people who society at large would be recognised as "a legend of music", it's not just Mozart, Beethoven, Elvis and the Beatles and no one else. I mean Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, Woody Guthrie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, Nirvana, Public Enemy, Giorgio Moroder, David Bowie, Dean Martin and hundreds if not thousands of others are clearly musical legends, even if they aren’t in the same class of cultural and musical influence as Beethoven and the Beatles

The lack of subs scares me a bit. Starting to feel like we need fresh legs.

Rejoining the single market and ending hard Brexit for sure is pretty likely at some point in the not too distant future, not sure about the EU proper though. Think it will be another generation at least until that's on the agenda. Think we'll probably drift into some Norway or Switzerland like status with the EU somewhere within the next 2-15 years though.

Yeah of course there’s that, but I mean legally it’s written into the GFA already that a referendum can be automatically triggered if it looks like it will pass. There’s little the UK or Irish governments can do about it even if they did want to. I think many have come out since and said the GFA was always kind of made under the long term assumption than Ireland would eventually unite after 2-3 generations of the treaty once the living memories of the troubles had largely died out.

I think this one is quite likely given the changing demographics and the mechanics of the GFA the UK government can’t deny a referendum like it can with Scotland. Wales I think is very unlikely to become independent in any of our lifetimes, there’s never any appetite for it in polls. Scotland I think is definitely possibility but I’m not as convinced. A United Ireland by 2050 if not much earlier is definitely a very likely possibility I reckon though.

Eh. Thats thankfully illegal for obvious reasons. You can’t tell someone to come to training or play and then not pay them neither can you offer them contracts like that without things like paid holiday days in between.

Yeah the season before last he had the best goals to minute ratio in the PL. To say his decline happened 3-4 years ago is bananas. Definitely since the start of last season he seemed to drop off a cliff that summer though.

Knockaert did feel like the kind of player we hadn’t seen for a while when we signed him and he was a very good player as us but he doesn’t belong on the same rating as the likes of Huth, Drinkwater, Ulloa, Ndidi, Maddison, Ricardo, Tiekemans, Simpson, Nugent and Okazaki. James Justin or Fofana shouldn’t be 9s either though and both feel more out of place than Knockaert. Justin especially feels way out of place amongst the 9s. The most bizarre and out of place one is definitely Beckford getting a 6. He was a an absolute big money marquee flop and a complete panic buy and along with Matt Mills who rightfully scored a 2, the epitome of the early overspending under KP that Pearson had to reign in. Beckford should’ve been getting a 2 or a 3 if you wanted to be really generous because of that single performance vs Forest.

I think it probably is a generational shift. It definitely feels like games vs Coventry feel like noticeably bigger games than games vs Derby these days. There was a time in the early 90s where Derby games had a lot of needle to them but I haven’t really felt that for 15-20 years now and you have to be in your 40s now to have real memory of those days really. We had that period in the 00s where it felt like we beat them 4-0 twice a season and it felt like a bit of a procession and lost its edge. Feel like many younger fans don’t really see Derby as much of a rival these days nor get up for those games. While Cov in the early 90s probably would’ve been seen as the 4th or 5th rival behind Villa and Wolves even whereas nowadays it definitely feels like a much bigger game with more riding on it. Not sure Coventry feels quite as big as Forest yet overall, but it wouldn’t surprise me if in 10 years or so the Cov games felt the biggest. Feels like many younger fans see it as a bigger game than Forest and you can definitely feel the bigger bite to Cov games these days than it used to be. Coventry definitely seems to overtaken Derby as the 2nd biggest rival in general at least

It says “low -7C” then gives an average temperature for each hour. I don’t see what the issue is? The temperature won’t stay -5C for the whole hour. It will vary during the hour based on cloud cover, different front etc. -5C is just the average for that hour, not its lowest or highest point. But “low” showing -7C means the lowest predicted temperature not the average.

i think it’s probably the opposite. Walsh was great for longevity and commitment but his peak was not as high as many others on that list if we’re honest. Outside of the 96/97 season most of his best performances were in the 2nd tier. The likes of Morgan, Huth, Elliott, Soyuncu, Fofana and Evans’ best seasons were better than Walsh’s best seasons, but there’s a lot more to take into account with Walsh in terms of longevity and iconic goals etc. So it depends what you’re taking into account

Personally think Soyuncu’s one great season was better than Maguire, Fofana or Taggart’s one good season tbf (in the top flight, Taggart had a good season in the Championship too).

For me The 2 most iconic kits from the king power era have got to be the white kit with blue pinstripes that Albrighton scored our first CL goal in and the FA Cup winning Northampton maroon Tirlemans got the FA Cup winning goal in. They are the ones they need to re release if anything.

You are delusional tbf. Of course the playoff semi final win was bigger. Some of our fans coming across as a bit bitter and desperate tbh.