Hobsons Choice

Front two decent again but they're having to scrap for every little chance. We're not really feeding them.

Just been a bit sloppy again for me so far. Without some of our midfield creativity We're not looking as dangerous.

Donk and Youri in midfield. Very disappointed with that. Pace will be a major issue.

Regardless of anything else I never doubted his passion and commitment to England. Never seen a player before (in my time) or since that was prouder to play for us. For that reason I find it very hard not to like him.

I think we should go very strong to make a point tonight after Warsaw. We need a win to keep us around and about. I think we will go strong.

Let's face it, we've had; 3 Prime Ministers, 2 failed economic policies, a genuine economic disaster, increased climate pledges, decreased climate pledges, migrants being stopped on ships, migrants being HOUSED on ships, partygate, covid emergencies, covid exaggerations, covid underestimates, a lockdown and so many ministerial changes it's impossible to count, since the last election.

Yeah, same. I never shirk H&S as we all want to go home safely, but this was mental. The work we were doing was pre-construction ground investigation, and was IN THE MIDDLE OF A FIELD. It's hard to get a location with fewer complications. Borehole drillers I was using are one of the biggest in the country, with each driller having decades of SI work under their belt. I suppose cows are a risk? Not that there were any, but you know. Cows in potentia. Quantum cows.

Soooo... HS2 cancelled. As someone who has done a fair bit of engineering work on the section of line just cancelled, it in no way surprises me that it has gone way overbudget. I had to deal with so many mid-level idiots who demanded levels of bureaucracy hitherto unseen by humankind that it was obscene. The levels of H&S documentation that have otherwise been fine for every other large scale principal contractor I've ever worked for were suddenly woefully inadequate for this job for some reason. Well actually the reason was that you had reams of people justifying their oversight jobs by dissecting every word of a document that is essentially an internal Health and Safety scope. One comment I got, and bear in mind that this is not a report, it's a Risk Assessment (in most cases never read by anyone except the person who writes it and using it as a guide to safe site operation), was that it was 'too repetitive'. So I needed to write scintillating prose in an internal RAMS. Long story short, I spent nearly a week on various iterations of a document that normally takes me 20 minutes to complete, and is perfectly adequate to folks like me and my subbies who have 20 years of site experience. Anyway, it was probably all a way to get people involved in a large scale project to keep unemployment figures down after a period of financial meltdown for the country, so who gives a monkeys.

Defecation and laughter.

S's and G's?

That would make a great deal of sense. It did appear to be too much of a parody to be real.

He does seem to mention a certain...ahem....adult website an awful lot.

You think it's better now? Waiting 5 mins to celebrate any goal because someone has a toenail in an offside position during a previous phase? Mistakes happen, it's life, we're humans. The real mistake would be to think that VAR can eliminate mistakes by taking responsibility away from refs in an effort to quantify the unquantifiable.

I'd prefer no VAR at all. If we had to have it, single camera centrally mounted continuous feed. At most. You imply that this needs to be complex to be effective. Far from it. KEEP IT SIMPLE. Until VAR came in the refs had no replay option at all. Maybe they can just use their bloody judgment, as refs have been doing for over a hundred years.

If the purpose of VAR is solely to give referees access to review decisions made on the field, why have VAR analysis people at all? Just put a big screen next to the pitch with a rewind button on it, and let the ref use it when he wants to look again. No, there is a layer of interpretation and decision making going on off the pitch by VAR officials- what should the ref review, what angles should he have, what lines, where lines are drawn. That's why it sucks. It's been implemented, in part at least, as a way to make decision making empirical. But this is not tennis, where the ball is in, or out, likewise cricket. Even the so-called empirical elements such as offside are not, as there is a layer of context to be applied (phases of play, eyelines, etc). That's why it's rubbish. I could handle refereeing mistakes in the heat of the moment, but the way it's working now is like a surgeon taking 2 weeks to prepare for an operation, and then wading in with a chainsaw while two other doctors stand by and argue about how many microns the tooth size on the chainsaw is.

Me too. He's got things to prove here. If he goes to Utd, flops because the players are prissy nobheads who don't listen, then he'll never exorcise the Arsenal demons. Anyway if you look at his record, aside from Arse and PSG he's mainly gone to mid to upper level sides and made them great. That's his forte, and I think he'll think his career needs some stability right now. He's got the world at his feet here if he can just go through some hard yards this season and possibly next.

Can someone please confirm how to pronounce Castore, as I've only seen it written down. Is it like Castorr, Or like the Italian Castoray (moon, eyes, pizza pie etc). Many thanks in advance. Kind Regards

Please, please get chatgpt to knock that up.

Excellent work there. Traditional but clean. I'd go for the left one myself, and perhaps reduce the size of the banner underneath the shield relative to the shield itself. That said, superb stuff. My preference is a round badge personally, but if it is to be a shield I'd be certainly happy with that one.

How can it be migrants? Brexit's been done. The bus said. Onto the next weak minority they can leverage hate against.

They know they are losing, so the veneer of pretending to pander to the centre is falling. They are going mega right. Braverman will be party leader after the next election and they will go full anti-intellectual denier mode.

WTAF? Trumpalikes.

That sounds like the Oxford English Dictionary definition of Xenophobic.

Ugh.