Chindie

It's all alright. Osborne is going to find a naturally occurring source of cancer cures under Westminster in 2019 and UK PLC will turn a profit in 12 months.

Given Osborne seems to think we can go from borrowing £40bn in 2018 to having a £10bn surplus in 2020 he might need every penny. I don't think he genuinely understands what he's saying. Or he's got a helluva rabbit up his sleeve.

In fairness, a Labour PM could have announced an abolishment of tax, replacement of the Bible with Hayek's Constitution of Liberty in churches and schools the country over, closed the borders to all immigration and announced that benefits and tax relief would only provided to people agreeing to provide services to millionaires and Cameron and Osborne and the massed Tory horde would have crucified them for it.

IPT up again. It went up 3.5% in November...

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There's no Kingpin this time round I understand. The villain appears to be the Punisher to an extent, and the Hand. I'll be astounded if by the end of the series Daredevil and the Punisher haven't ended to working together, even of only briefly. He won't be in Civil War. The story really doesn't have much to do with the comic, beyond basic inspiration and themes. I think the best bet for the Netflix team to appear in the movies is the Infinity War films. If that happens I don't think they'll recast unless they're forced to, the Netflix series are heavily invested in the MCU and came out of it, unlike DC/WB Anywho, final Daredevil S2 trailer

They're making a fifth Indiana Jones movie. ...sigh.

It does kinda fit from O'Neill onwards funnily enough...

Black and white. We had a meatheaded showy manager, them we flip to the more stoic manager, then the clamour is for the meathead again. Couple that to Leicester being successful this season (ignoring that they were shit for the vast majority of last season and he spent most of the season barely clinging to anything close to behaviour befitting a grown man let alone a public figure) and bingo, Pearson is the obvious choice. Awful man.

I have one of those tumbledriers that spontaneously bursts into flames that was in the news a couple of months back. I filled out the thing saying come stop it burning the house down about a month ago and they've finally come back to me today. They can fix it in December.

If that's all you've taken from what I've said today I don't know what else I can say. You have your standpoint. That's fine. And can we pack this shit implying the only reason anyone likes Garde is because of how he presents himself in please? Nobody supports him just because of the way he acts, and I'm sick to the back teeth of seeing it being slyly (and not so slyly) suggested.

Either I'm really bad at explaining things, or you're willfully misunderstanding. Squad = bad. Sherwood = make squad worse - Tactically stupid, unhinged. Take a look at the now famous gif of him flinging his arms around nonsensically apparently trying to give instructions to the squad. He didn't have the faintest idea what he was doing, admittedly so, as he just flailed around with the teamsheet desperately. He had no plan. Squad = Still bad Garde = Hamstrung by poor squad, but clearly has some tactical nous (yet still makes mistakes) and has a game plan, which has seen improvement in the standards of play but results are still bad. It's easier to support and have confidence in the bloke who looks like he in at least some way knows what he's doing, than the bloke who clearly, and admittedly, hadn't got a clue.

Your prerogative. I disagree though. We look marginally worse going forward, I think, the back is better but undermined by never ending idiotic errors that I don't think you can tactically do much about (that get exacerbated whenever they happen by having the confidence go, every time), and the midfield looks better, a fair bit more composed and, well, professional. The forward play was bad anyway but Garde being less 'kitchen sink' in his approach makes look a little poorer than it already is. Saying that, we do make the odd decent chance, and then fluff it. We should have had about 3 yesterday, and thats with a team that is crap at creating chances. We're even worse at taking them.

No, he was a fool as well. The squad is bad, undeniably. I think Sherwood helped make it worse. Don't think that the squad excuses him. Anyway, this is a Garde thread...

Results wise, it's hard to disagree. I maintain we look a better side than we ever did under Sherwood in basic play. That doesn't change the fact we still aren't winning games, and we don't score and we concede silly goals. But I think the team now actually looks a bit more professional and bit more well drilled in other respects. I think that shows he has something about him. He has an idea of how to play, and he manages to get some of it out of the squad, but they simply can't do all of it. The few games, for me, where we had a bit of a run he managed to get closer to that plan and we did better. Then it fell apart and there's no recovery. He's the opposite to Sherwood, imo, who admitted he didn't really what he was doing and you could see it in the team, especially as the wheels fell off. His success seemed to be based on pure adrenaline, which works for a while but then putters out. I think the players liked him as a bit of a lad but it was never going to last, and his leaving combined with a different (in my view, long term better) personality and the team just being quite weak in many ways has lead to a malaise in the squad that's made the hole we can't get out of. A vicious circle.

On the face of it, is. But then you consider the squad. And the criticism has to become more nuanced. Because otherwise it's like asking someone to cut down a tree with a spoon, and criticising him when he's still stood there next week, with the tree stood next to him still. You've given him a tool, and it's got similarities to the tool you need to do the job, and it will do the job, eventually, but not very well. It'd be churlish to throw him under the bus for failing in that circumstance. With Aston Villa, you can actually extrapolate the strained metaphor, by saying the man with the spoon is stood in a bog, with a firing squad behind him, the tree keeps moving and someone keeps stealing the spoon.

At various times all of those, with the exception of Ayew as the performance you note was yesterday, have been dropped. Some more than once. Gabby was basically cast out for a few months almost immediately once Garde arrived. Just because the managers demeanour isn't showy doesn't mean he's unmoved by the situation. Whenever I've seen him talk, he often seems like he's seething but aware he needs to keep his cool, and also careful with his words. We already know he's a stern bloke, he showed that with Grealish. What do you expect a manager to do about getting a player in? We tried to sign players. They didn't happen - one was blocked by the authorities, one fell through at the last minute, another we wouldn't pay for. Garde was evidently livid about it in a couple of interviews immediately after January and there was a lot of paper talk about him basically walking in the immediate aftermath. I get that people don't like the man, and I can understand it to an extent, but I don't think we need to start stretching the truth, or simply making things up.

I don't think you can criticise someone for a scenario that a manager may do once or twice in their career. You can criticise Garde for many things, but lets at least be sensible.

It's a spectacularly interesting period that is under discussed and acknowledged in the UK (largely because it's in the shadow of WW1 and a convoluted mess of a situation). All of the Irish independence struggle is fascinating, even down to the nitty gritty of day to day life in parts of Ulster (bits of land being owned by London guilds and employing their own enforcers to fight against their neighbours is just a bizarre thought these days, for instance). The Easter Uprising is more relevant as a turning point of thought and action in Ireland than it is a success itself - the Uprising was crushed, ruthlessly. British forces outnumbered the Irish rebels to an obscene degree, the rebels didn't have popular support unanimously and they were outgunned in every way. The British were not prepared to have a rebellion on 'home' soil whilst the Germans were trying to bleed them dry so stamped the rebellion out. The Uprising's successes largely came about because they hit without warning and moved quickly - the moment their intention and actions were clear it was only a matter of time.

So close to a Darwin award. A damn shame.

I've never read the book, but I understand it's a little different. The meat of the plot, which revolves around a resistance movement, is apparently not in the novel at all. That doesn't really seem to matter though because as much as the plot is about the resistance, that really doesn't seem to be the point of the show.

Agree wholeheartedly. The appointments to the board are exceptionally unlikely to have anything to do with the protest. At all. And the protest isn't really anything approaching a movement with any force or power in relation to the club. I would argue it's very unlikely to ever be, but again I don't really support it do I have a bias, but either way it's absolutely not something of the size or power for the club to change any policy or approach as things stand. Which all the more makes 'pausing' even more baffling and will lead people to question the purpose of the protest, and also question why this pause has been made.

I finally watched Man in the High Castle over the last week. Enjoyed it. It's more of a study of an idea than it is a real storyline, but that doesn't seem to matter really. Looks great, some good performances, particularly Rufus Sewell, and doesn't outstay its welcome. Good stuff.

He used to be Citeh's chairman when they were really in trouble, and has been given credit for turning that around, and was also formally the FA chairman. He knows football but also knows business and finance. He's a sharp appointment for us.