Hobsons Choice

I'll get Farage on the case. And then drop said case off the nearest cliff. The white cliffs of Dover are appropriate, I think.

No, it will destabilise Northern Ireland.

That's the huge elephant in the room though, isn't it. You can't offer a vote on terms that aren't entirely within your control. Why should the EU bend over backwards to meet the criteria put to the British Public, when they hadn't agreed to them in the first place. It's like me putting a vote to Villatalk that we all get free Ferraris, and VT users getting p***ed at Ferrari when they say 'hell no, why would we give you free cars'. What kind of Brexit voters wanted is irrelevant if those terms are not on the table. I mean, it sounds as though we barely discussed terms until we were out, which was YEARS after the vote itself. It's all nonsense.

Spank...I mean speak for yourself, there, bud.

It would be like watching two supertankers manoeuvring through the Suez Canal.

We don't need a bloated squad, but we definitely need some more bods. I'd be saying that even if we were only in the Prem etc next year. Our squad is ludicrously thin in places.

Slight sideways jump, but BT Sport are showing previous CL final highlights in the run up to the weekend, and last night they showed the Liverpool v AC Milan game in 2005. I idly watched it again. Everyone marvelled at the comeback at the time, but watching it again, they should never have won it. Gerrard f***ing dived for their regular time penalty. It wasn't playing up a foul. There was no contact. At all. They have been dining out on that night for years, and they only won because Gerrard cheated.

Can anyone who has watched UE's other sides say whether the asymmetric approach flips sides during the course of a season at all? Or did he build the team so it was only ever in the one configuration?

According to an article in the British Medical Journal (yeah I went there), return to full performance after an Achilles Rupture can occur in as few as 61% of cases (depending on injury type). It's still more likely than unlikely, but that is a large uncertainty.

He's played 25 minutes of first team football since August 2022. I know we all hope he will pick up where he left off, but that might not be the case. Edit. And he's been available for selection since 12th March but was brought on only once for 25 mins.

Now add another 10+ games to next season's work load.

As only 3 teams used fewer players in the PL last season (OK one of them was Man City, but that's cos they have enough depth to field a 'cup team'), and we used 10 fewer players than the teams topping that list, I'm thinking we need at least 4 or 5 challenging for first team places. We were particularly short at CF (lucky that Watkins didn't pick up an injury), DM, RW, LW and CB, and were an injury or two away from disaster in those positions. I do not want to see two or more keepers on the bench next season. I would preface that by saying that I would be OK if some youth filled those spaces, although I'm not sure how many of our academy grads are good enough to warrant it.

Tielemans for free to bolster a threadbare squad is as close as you get to a no brainer, surely?

Not in the slightest. That's why it's clearly russia behind the dam burst. They don't care one jot about their citizens.

Then it's cold as f***. It could kill a lot of people, including Russians.

My lotto entry: 26th June.

Aren't Russians running the power plant? But yeah it surely hampers the Ukranians more. That said, they must have realised this was a possibility, they've speculated about it for months. I imagine they will have contingencies.

If it was blown up, it seems to me to smell a lot like Russian panic at the counteroffensive. They are damaging the water supply (at best) of their own citizens in Crimea, at a time when they have rumblings of internal dissatisfaction. It reeks of panic. If it was blown up. They must be s*** scared of this counteroffensive.

We need to land some fish, man. I'm sick of Paris St. Birdseye getting them all.

If you are into PC gaming and City Builders, do yourselves a favour and download the demo of 'Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic' (don't worry, as far as I am aware the developers are Slovakian, not Russian). It's still in Early Access, but totally playable. The learning curve is steep, but the intricacy and complexity of the systems involved are insanely deep. As someone on the Steam review page put it 'It makes Cities Skylines look like Clash of Clans'. I absolutely love how detailed it is, but I appreciate that it won't be for everyone, hence why I recommend the demo. I play in 'realistic mode', which basically means that all resources required for building, including wood, gravel, cement, steel, workers, etc have to be collected and moved to building sites, with the right equipment deployed to build. And they take time. Think Cities crossed with the old Settlers games, but realistic, and with 20x the detail. There are working economy, resource acquisition, temperature, weather, physics (water and sewer supplies need a gradient) mechanics (and more). Graphics are passable, but not brilliant, but that's not the point. Honestly I'm blown away by the amount of work required to create a game like this. Amazing effort, and it's still not in full release yet.

Quick counterpoint to the Spider-verse stuff. Took my wife and two kids to see it yesterday. My kids (6 and 8y/o) were obsessed with the first one. For my part the first spider-verse film was probably my favourite ever Spidey film. Two of us, myself and my youngest loved the new one. I thought it was endlessly inventive, clever, and absolutely gorgeous to watch. My wife and my eldest strongly disliked it. Reasons given included: too long, too complicated to follow (as told by my kid, not my wife, haha), and that the plot seemed a bit muddled and bloated in the middle. I disagree with most of those points, although I think it could be tighter, but my eldest was visibly very bored toward the end. I appreciate our experiences seem to be in a minority (which is good because I'm very much looking forward to the last part).

Ah, thanks. Quite presumptuous as a term, eh? Like they were already part of the army, just not yet given a gun and a map.

Am I missing something with this talk of full mobilisation? I thought that 95% of their army was already in Ukraine? Does everyone mean conscription?

They are all about names. That's what they do.

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