Donut

Arguably doesn't get the credit he deserves. Lots of talk about the young guns bursting through from the US, very little talk about Koepka and he has loads of game. I think players like him and Dustin, when on with the driver are almost unbeatable. Hitting it straight and FAR, its just a lethal combination that opens up scoring opportunities

Had a nice little 37 pointer (gross 73) in the stableford this morning at my club, first competitive round this year as im just coming back from yips. Other than a couple of dodgy layups where i didnt fully commit, and missing a few short putts on 4, 7 and 16 i was happy. 16 was a three putt, that pissed me off a bit, but all encouraging signs so far. 7 was a snaky birdie putt downhill and left to right, not the nicest combination and it just lipped out.

Sky do all sports better really.

Good plan, I hope it goes well for you. Is that at Humberstone GC? been a long time since I played on that course. Has a very nice finishing hole though, that par 5 that sweeps around the corner and a little down hill. One other tip I didn't think to write, but its useful when you mention straight shots: The aim is certainly to hit the ball straight-ish. Straight enough to not carve the ball consistently into the woods. But using a natural shape on your shots is a good thing, and something that almost all the top players will do. The benefit of using some curvature on your shots is, it actually widens your target. Imagine standing on the tee of a hole, but you know that usually, your shots travel with a little bit of fade spin. Or draw. The key to the way this works is, eliminating what is known as a "two way" miss, missing left and right. This then allows you plan your misses, but also gives you the full width of the fairway to hit into. If you usually hit a fade for example, and can trust the flight, Then you eliminate the left miss. So hit the shot you want, the ball drifts into the middle of the fairway no problem. Over cut the ball slightly, yes, the result will be a slightly weaker flight but you'll be in the right side of the fairway or just the light rough. no problem. If you draw shots, then just reverse everything. so you might draw it back to the middle of the fairway. Overcook it a bit then you'll be down the left slightly. Problem is if you try to hit the ball laserbeam straight, then anything other than a perfectly square path, a perfectly square face, and a perfectly centred strike on the ball will always see the ball curving away from its intended target. Colin Montgomerie made a multiple order of merit winning career out of playing a gentle little fade off the tee with deadly accuracy, it really does work. Just from an improvement perspective, learning a slightly in to out swing path will most certainly improve your power and centredness of strike on the face. A side effect of this is you develop a small draw shape onto your shots, but this is also a good thing. So using curvature can help when used as part of course management. Let us know how you get on.

Its a strange view point to take, as the PGA of America inviting the worlds top 100 should give the strongest field of all four majors.

Assuming you are playing to the rules and taking proper drops etc, Breaking 100 is a big milestone, so anyone just picking up the game and shooting in the 90s, that's good going. Some things at this stage will help you quickly become better: 1) Try and take out all the penalty shots, like going into water, out of bounds etc. This will obviously happen some of the time, but really try and minimise these shots as theyre just a waste and if you can take 3 penalty shots off your score, theres 3 shots saved without really doing anything. 2) Really work on your putting so you keep 3 putts to an absolute minimum. Of course again, sometimes youll be faced with a 50ft putt with several slopes along the way, this will be tough for anyone. But if you can really eliminate three putts on the flatter greens and from inside say, 20ft, youll save a lot of shots 3) Try not to compound one error with another. How often does someone play a shot that lands them in trouble, then tries to recover by hitting a banana around a tree, or a shot that would require a very high level of skill to pull off. Sometimes, the best thing to do is chip it out sideways and play for a bogey, which can actually be a good score on some holes 4) When you go to the range, practice the things you aren't good at. Its easy to stand at the range on a flat mat with a bucket of balls and hit some nice 7 or 8 irons. But this doesn't really do much for your game except massage your ego. Practice hitting those 80 yard pitch shots that are so important to your score. Ideally, chuck some balls down around your practice green and chip away. Also, practice punch shots too, deliberately hitting the ball lower than normal. On a day where things are going wrong, punch shots usually keep you straighter and under control, and of course, are useful for when you are in trouble. 5) Try and work out how far each of your clubs goes on a nice hit. Not your absolute sunday best hit, but your average distances. Use these to plot your way around the course but don't fall into the amateur trap of over-estimating how far you hit the ball. what can be absolutely invaluable if you know someone who has one, or maybe your pro can let you borrow one for an afternoon, is a GPS device like skycaddie which can measure how far your shots are going, and then you can work out what distances you are comfortable with, and how this can help your course management.

Why would you go to a friendly, in france, and leave after 50 mins? What an absolute waste. Get pissed in England if that was the objective.

Ive just come back into playing after a long time off with yips. I was formerly a decent player, I was a 2 handicap and played a little county stuff, but the yips took hold and over the past 4 years or so, ive played probably less than 10 rounds. However, I am back and im seeing progress even if my scores aren't showing it the way they used to just yet. Its really good to see that you have a daughter who is interested in playing. Its a sport you can take up at 7 and still have a passion for at 70, and there are so few sports where people of all ages and skill levels can compete somewhat evenly. My advice from growing up playing the game and being interested from a young age would be: 1) Don't get too technical too early for obvious reasons, but one thing that will absolutely help, is learning a good golf grip from an early age. This could perhaps be combined with meeting other interested kids at fun lessons for example, there are also grips that you can put on a club that guide your hands into a good position. There may be a childrens version of this, but id say don't get too technical, but definitely make sure your child has a fundamentally decent grip. Her grip can be slightly STRONG if its going to be away from neutral, neutral is ideal of course but if you had a choice between weaker than neutral or stronger than neutral, stronger than neutral will be better. 2) Encourage the learning of the game from green back to the tee. Start with putting, as it provides immediate feedback as to how well someone is doing and they can see this themselves and enjoy it. A child can putt just as well as an adult can, challenge her to a friendly putt off around the practice green over 9 holes, and set her goals that she can achieve, but as she becomes more and more proficient, make the goal slightly harder. Say.....finish 9 holes on the putting green in maybe 18 strokes at first, so 2 putts on each hole. if that's too tough, make it a bit easier at first. Give her the sense that she is getting better but can beat the friendly goal you set. 3) Pitch and putt courses are far more enjoyable and beneficial. You and your child could nip around a pitch and putt in an hour together, and with the holes being close to the tees, there is a good chance she will be able to reach one or two of the greens, but if not, she will feel like she is close to the hole. There are several benefits of taking this approach I feel; it will help build her short game, which is the most heavily used part of the game for all players, so itll help with the visualisation of chips and pitches and lofted shots, and therefore itll also help her as she grows up and gets out onto the course. Itll also get her used to making some small swings at the ball, and to hit the ball from some new situations. Also, its a quick game, so itll hold her attention more rather than walking around for 4 hours with you and only spending about 3 minutes of that 4 hours actually hitting the ball. If you put your daughter onto the first hole of a golf course and it measured 420 yards, there would be nothing she could do. She could hit some lovely shots and end up walking off with an 8 without doing anything wrong, when she is "supposed" to have taken 4. Its a deflating feeling. Pitch and putt will allow her to maybe even make the odd 2 as she progresses. 4) Depending just how seriously your daughter shows ambitions, and just how much talent she really seems to have, I wouldn't cut adult clubs down in length. This will throw all the swing weights off in the set, plus if they are adult clubs they will have heavy, stiff feeling shafts. By trimming the butt end of the iron, this will make the club play even stiffer in your childs hands, and itll make it a lot harder to hit good shots. She would probably end up with a squirty low ball flight, and clubs that feel quite dead at impact. These kind of adjustments at too early and age will give her compensations that might end up sticking. John Daly for example has a big overswing as a result of swinging a heavy, long, adult driver as a child. Now of course, he has a talent to make that work, but it could hamper your daughter. Of course, at first, a cut down club is ok just to swing something, but id consider proper childs clubs, just a half set would be fine, but having clubs that are light enough to swing, the right length for your child to make solid contact, and grips that aren't too thick. 5) ENJOYMENT is the key. its not necessarily about being technically brilliant or supremely talented. Don't be pushy, but let her enjoy the game. Embrace the fact that you are spending time doing something you both like together, being outdoors on nice golf courses. If your child is talented, they THEMSELVES will initiate getting more and more serious. You cant push your child to make them get better, they will have an inbuilt desire to get better if THEY want to. they will intuitively figure things out, intuitively watch pros on tv and copy and adjust. Let that happen. Your daughter may never go below say, 20 handicap, but still love to play. Some people enjoy the journey of improvement with little intermediate goals. 6) When it finally comes to the longer clubs, hit the ball as hard as possible whilst in balance. Don't worry so much about direction, but hit it hard. Its much easier to learn control, than it is to get faster as you get older. One of the key ingredients to being good at golf is distance. its what makes up the majority of the difficulty scale when the EGU measure golf courses for their scratch scores (difficulty level). So theres nothing wrong with giving it a good bash as a child, even if that means the ball goes off into a lake. Obviously some of these points come further down the line, but those would be my thoughts for now. Keep us updated, would love to hear more

Well you were the one that came out with the notion brexit was failing because people were not getting behind it enough. Thats the only desperation youve got left, when all logic and all rational debate and evidence leaves the room, youre just left with blind faith and clinging onto hope something magical will happen if we all just believe soooo hard. If life is too short, dont come onto forums with shitty little brexit slogans and meaningless twaddle soundbites like "get behind it" or "brexit means brexit" or claim you know more about the real world than the heads of HMRC, the biggest employers in the country who manage integrated supply chains and the governors of the bank of england and imply that if they all just "believed" a unicorn would appear.

"people like you shut the fvck up and not try and wreck it so they can say i told you so" Are you out of your brexfvcked mind? No matter how people voted, we ALL have to live with the storm of shit that has been unleashed on the UK, and you think we all WANT to get poorer and deliberately fvck ourselves up to win an internet argument? Brexit is fvcking itself up, because its a stupid idea. But youre claiming that brexit isnt working because we arent getting behind it enough. What do you want people to do to get behind it more? paint their faces in the colours of the union flag, hang up pictures of nigel farage, all start buying the daily mail and boycotting the chippy because it has a greek owner? The government IS getting on with brexit. Because despite leaving the European Union which is what you wanted and managed to put your little cross in the box for, and despite claiming you knew exactly what you voted for and all your fellow brexiteers did, the brexit STILL isnt what you want. And a majority of people in the UK did NOT vote for it either, so youre factually incorrect. When you take out those who did not vote for it, those who abstained from voting who you are assuming would all lean towards brexit if they had to vote, and all people not eligible to vote which you assume the same again, then the majority of people did not vote for brexit. Id be over the moon if brexit made me better off, or made the country better off, and in a proper, tangible way that can be measured instead of some abstract concept like "sovereignty" that is punted about by goons, but the chances of that unicorn coming around are nil.

Donald Trump says the brexit plans will kill the chance of a trade deal with the US. So yeah, a better strategy would be to go for no deal, so domestic based massive car and aerospace employers can all leave, and then we can sign a magical trade deal to accept all their chlorinated chickens instead and lead a deregulated race to the bottom on standards that will probably put even more UK producers out of business. And while we are at it, once again, lets diminish our relationship with the biggest single market on the planet so we can trade second rate tat. Thats what its come to, going cap in hand to a racist misogynist who wants to call the tune on our brexit to open access to overseas markets for crap. (oh but the EU, theyre bullies, theyre bullying us, they want to make a big example of us........stop bullyyyyyying usssss)

The government don't want to fulfil "the will of the people" in the hard brexit no deal sense, because they cannot face up to the fact that fulfilling this mythical "will of the people" will wreck the economy and peoples livelihoods whether they voted remain OR leave, and they are not prepared to be the ones holding the can when the wheels fall off. There isn't, and never was, any kind of support in this country for no deal off the cliff edge brexit no matter how much noise extreme right tories want to make, and it should be absolutely obvious that: 1) We were ALL better off as we were 2) Everyone lied, and continues to lie through their teeth about what brexit really is 3) Everyone who says they knew what they voted for clearly didn't no matter what they say 4) No one even considered whether the elements of brexit they punted about were even deliverable 5) The only thing stopping people seeing sense,revoking article 50 and us maintaining our position as it is now, is the sense that people don't like to be told they were wrong, don't like to think outside of their spoonfed diet of far right tabloid crap, the conviction the media has created within them that the EU is an enemy, and an intrinsic xenophobia stopping them seeing the bigger picture. for 99.9% of people who contribute to this forum, and probably in the population, EU membership has ZERO negative effect on their life. It doesn't stop you going to the doctors or hospital. It doesn't stop you buying a house. It doesn't impose laws that ruin your life. It doesn't mean your vote in an election is a waste of time. It doesn't mean your neighbourhood will eventually turn into a shanty town. Yet our choices now are prepare for no deal brexit and ports chaos by shoving as much medicine as we can into warehouses and stockpiling as much tinned processed shit as possible, sticking up a border in Ireland, watching thousands of everyday normal people lose their jobs go irrespective of how they voted, putting billions into technology at ports that we didn't need in the past but now would, while trying to makeup for a shortfall in trade with the biggest single market in the world while we negotiate long drawn out deals with countries who were supposedly queuing up to deal with us and goat herding countries in the arse end of nowhere. A country where your workers rights will be heavily reduced, and one where bosses want as much deregulation as possible. Or to accept a deal that kind of looks like EU membership because that is better, but its not ACTUAL EU membership. Just a more watery version where we cannot affect policy or reform. And its all on the principle that "we won you lost" that means we have to keep going down this stupid road of being at best slightly worse off, and at worst shafted.

Possibly, Kane's strike rate is better than Shearer's for England plus Kane has gone to a world cup semi final and Shearer didn't. Shearer had long drought spells too in his England career. What makes Shearer clearly better than Kane?

There is some football manager language on here Iborra at half back will slot between the two centrebacks to pick up the ball and then move forwards. Like a third centreback that then comes forward with the ball from a deep position Ihaenacho as a false 9 will drop deep into midfield, and want the ball to feet to attack the box late, more than being an "out and out" striker.

Just my opinion, but the reason I don't like this is: 1) the left hand side of this formation looks weak. Chilwell's inclination will always be to be high up the field but in transition this could leave space down the left hand side to be exploited in the transition phase. Chilwell is arguably our worst player in that team in terms of quality, awareness, positioning, and im sure he would be heavily targeted by opponents down that side for their attacks. Presumably, youd also be asking Maguire to bring the ball out from the back from the LCB position, which again would leave space if possession was turned over quickly. 2) Would you not want Maddison deeper in this formation where he can affect the play more by getting on the ball more? We look cluttered at the top end of the field and a lot of teams will probably sit a DM between their defensive and midfield line. From a deeper position he would have more passing options as the man with arguably the best passing and vision we have in the team. Also, would you not want a midfielder dropping back into the DM slot to pick the ball up off the back 3 and create angles for passes? I think a more natural midfield might look something like: -----------------------Maddison (CM)----------Ndidi (Box to Box) -------------------------------------- -- Iborra (DM) 3) What is Iheanacho's role in this formation? an out and out striker with Vardy? if anything hes probably more useful in coming towards the ball to make room for Vardy to run into and bringing defenders out of their position....... so again if it was me id be playing Maddison deeper (but if its on, telling him to get forward).

I don't think that formation would win a game of football. Nothing in the middle of the pitch.

I think just in my opinion, the issue with the wing back system is it demands a lot of the two wingbacks, who can then also be left exposed in the transition phase if we lose the ball with the wingbacks high and against 2 v 1s in defending scenarios. In the second half against Croatia you could see how Ashley Young was being doubled up on and we were vulnerable to the quick switch of play from left to right. I think playing this kind of system also means a more passive style of pressing for the same reason that the wingbacks do not want to be exposed high up the pitch with space left down the channels. There aren't that many excellent teams that play a 3 at the back system, relatively speaking. You could argue Barca did it to an extent under Luis Enrique when Alba and Vidal/Roberto pushed high and Busquets dropped between the two centre backs, Chelsea surprised everyone with a 343 system but its not that common.

Monaco. Bringing kids through the youth team, selling them for £170 million. Comprehensively smashes our profit.

We have a mythical value we want for him. Big club looks at him, estimates mythical value and offers £10 million less. Player has the hump that we dont let him join big club despite them not meeting our valuation. Player proceeds to play at 50% of his capability Player ends up leaving anyway for £15 million less than our valuation.

A fully fit Kane would be in there, im pretty sure he must have had a knock of some kind tonight. Im sure id find a spot for Carlton Palmer too. And Steve Guppy.

Yeah but the dividend is being used to build warehouses for the medicine stockpile. Weve explored the possibility of buying a few factory spaces off Airbus and Land Rover though.

We can aleviate pressure on the NHS caused by immigrants by giving ourselves bowel cancer too and dying younger.

Evaporated milk, spam, corned beef and billy bear ham. The sweet taste of sovereignty.

Thatll knacker up the waters we are supposed to be taking control of. Then again, theyre our waters, ours to ruin.

And we could use the left over metal from the cans to build favelas for the people losing their jobs too. Its actually genius.