Laivasse

Gabby's shagged. Please please make it another attacking mid instead of heskey.

ROFL 'Carlos Koala'

Who's the Northern Irish commentator and the other bloke? It's decent to hear some commentators that actually seem to know a little about Villa.

Is it Gardner that keep nipping at Gabby deliberately? Hope Cuellar breaks his **** shins.

Thank **** that Bendtner is utter shit.

Lively run by Cuellar, couldn't figure out what to do with the ball. Shame.

McClean has put in something like 4 viciously dangerous crosses already. If Sunderland weren't so damn sleepy and actually figured out where those crosses go every time, we'd be in trouble.

I have faith in Cuellar but McClean is giving him a nasty time already.

Great play Zoggy.

I presume you mean The best bit about this clip is that after Gazza gives him his card the ref reaches for his pocket for the card which is already in his hand. Hah, I remember that one now but it wasn't the one I had in mind. What I was thinking of was Gascoigne smirking and saying something to a ref after he had blown for a foul on him. The ref's eyes widened as if his cock had been tweaked and he gave an immediate booking. In fact if memory serves - which it might not - Gazza was already on a yellow and had to walk.

I just got done playing through Max Payne 1 & 2. After seeing the preview vids I was tempted into preordering, so I wanted to catch up on the franchise after having played no more than a few minutes back when MP1 first came out. They both hold up really well, I was surprised. MP2 in particular has a nice physics engine, great level design, nice animations and not-embarrassing-at-all face modelling. The bullet time is, of course, fun as shit. Now I'm salivating all the more for MP3.

Is it me or did officials used to be much stricter about dissent in the 80's and 90's? The image of Gazza getting carded for something he clearly said as a joke springs to mind.

If Gabby had taken Bent's two penalties this season, they'd more than likely have the same goal tally. But the critics are right, what a disgraceful waste of space he is, if MON offers anything more than a Mars bar and a hand shandy we should bite his hand off /sarc

It's true that nobody ever loses a player due to defensive cheating, but then people who get sent off due to divers conning the ref tend to be rarer, extreme examples, compared to the prevalence of diving on the whole. What I meant by consequences were consequences for goal scoring and the flow of the game. Much as a goal getting incorrectly chalked off is a major event - even though nothing in the game has really changed - denying somebody a goal opp by rough-housing can have major consequences. It's just that they're unseen and so the manhandling tends to go unpunished by bottling refs.

The point about being played out of position is not that players should be accommodated by being put in their 'favourite' slot, it's that players genuinely play worse when they're not playing their natural role. Then they see themselves playing worse and get demoralised. Furthermore, they have to change the way they think about the game in that new position, so when they are then moved back to their original role they might not play the same way any longer. Let's face it Gabby probably doesn't have room for many thoughts in his head in the first place, so all his striker's thoughts now seem to have been squeezed out of his ears. Ditch McLeish before Gabby though. One can perform better, the other can't. One has dragged us away from relegation this season... you get the idea.

If Villa get relegated it won't be down to a gypsy curse or some trick that god played to spite the fans who bet against us. It'll be due to having a shit manager, something that won't change regardless of whatever bets get made or don't. I see it as an insurance policy, nothing wrong with it (although I won't be making such a bet myself). Also, look at it this way: the more of us that bet on us getting relegated, the more it's likely to drive down he price. Therefore, by betting against us you may be decreasing the profits that opposition fans would make from our failure

Actually I think the consequences of manhandling people in the box are often just as big as those of diving, it's just that it usually results in a goal not being scored, rather than a pen being awarded. Getting the right kind of contact on the ball, say from a cross, can come down to a matter of inches, so many of the clear defensive tugs and shoves which occur in the box are in fact lots of little cynical attempts to deny goalscoring opportunities. Now granted, usually it's too jumbled and frenetic for a ref to point out any one single infringement and blow for it, but over time that passivity builds into a kind of acceptance of even the worst examples of infringement. Take AC Milan vs Barca at the San Siro for example: from a corner, Puyol attempted a diving header that missed the far post by inches, but Mesbah was tugging him back and making a tent out of his shirt. It's hard to imagine Puyol not getting better contact and hitting the target without a man's weight dragging him back. For me that's just as disgusting as any dive, and worthy of a red card for denial of a clear goalscoring opp, but that happened directly between the ref and the 5th official, in clear sight, yet they didn't give anything. It all comes down to gutless officiating. As for diving too, I honestly think the psychological compulsion to dive has arisen out of a lack of trust and respect for officials. If you're fouled nowadays and you stay standing, even if you're taken off the ball, the standard of officiating is so bad that there is no guarantee that the ref won't bottle it and give nothing. Therefore it becomes habit for players to go down when they receive any kind of challenge, in order to force the ref into a decision he can't weasel out of. Eventually a free kick stops being a punishment for infringement and just becomes something you 'win' by manipulating the ref, who you don't trust to do his job of keeping the game fair. Sure, giving out fines for diving might paper over the cracks for a while. But the root of the problem is the same as several other problems in football - bad refereeing.

I've found some use for counter when you're relegation candidate type teams, normally it'd be something I use if I'm a newly promoted team against one of the top 4, it gets varied results though. I've won some games 1-0, 3-1 etc. And then got absolutely hammered other times.Now that you mention it, I only just remembered getting some good mileage out of the Defensive strategies when I took charge of a Sampdoria for a short time. So essentially they work sometimes when you're managing (or playing against) some real cloggers who simply can't attack.

I loaned out my young hot prospect CB/defensive mid to small heath. He played 10 games and now his personal info says he's a bluenose He was also suffering from a virus. He literally came back contaminated.

Sums him up perfectly for me. However, as for him being more comfortable on the ball than most, I had a thought after watching him closely for his last couple of games: his first touch is often quite clumsy for a 'luxury' player. It tends to contribute to his anonymity and our failing possession, especially when the midfield is congested or overrun, because he just can't challenge for the second ball.

Oh and one more tip, it's an old one but it still applied to the 2012 demo when I played: Under Player Instructions, the game defaults to giving your two centre-halfs the instructions of 'Attack Far Post' and 'Attack Near Post', for attacking corners. 'Attack Far Post' is fine - give that one to your CB with best Jumping and Heading - but change the guy with 'Attack Near Post' to 'Near Post Flick On'. Whoever has 'Attack Near Post' will sometimes receive the ball to feet, so it's much better if they're a forward or someone with a strong shot, rather than a CB. Meanwhile the 'Near Post Flick On' guy will almost always receive the ball in the air - better for a CB with a clever header on him - plus the 'Flick On' bit is misleading as he'll more often go for goal with a header rather than flick it on.

Probably best if you do suit the tempo and such to your tactics. Nowadays you can do it from a couple of simple drop down menus, instead of messing with those annoying sliders. The 'Strategy' drop down has like 6 options, and the 'passing' drop down has three, but changing just one of those will change a whole host of the hidden sliders. For instance setting Strategy to 'Attacking' and Passing to 'More Direct' will bump your tempo right up, as well as automatically changing all the other small settings to suit, including automatically changing individual player passing to be 'more direct'. You can do all that through the tactics creator wizard, it's pretty streamlined nowadays. You can also tweak stuff mid-game with Touchline Shouts. Eg. giving the shout 'Retain Possession' will slow the tempo and shorten the passing. It's better to have a slower tempo and shorter passing if you're trying to break a very defensive team down, close out a game or if you're generally playing a short passing game with shoddy passers. Shouting 'Get ball forward' will activate Operation Ginger Thunder aka Collins Mode. A more 'attacking' strategy fits shorter passing if you have good passers, longer passing if you have a physically beefy team. Personally I don't have much use for the more defensive strategies like 'Counter' and 'Contain'. I hardly ever select anything more Defensive than 'Standard' even when playing on the counter, because much like real life, soaking up pressure is just asking for one of your defenders to screw up.

I think it's Ireland for me. Since becoming a more or less regular starter he's looked the most motivated member of the team, and has been the only reason we've been able to sustain a presence in the opposition half for many games. He has lacked some game time, but between lacking form and lacking game time, most of the team have struggled.

The Witcher 2 generated way more fuss and interest than the first game, so there's no way that all the people enjoying it are doing so with the benefit of knowing the first one's story. In that sense, I guess it must be self-contained and enjoyable in its own right as the devs have claimed. Still, I played the first one and I still get lost with the references sometimes Also, on PC if you have a save file from the first game, some minor - really very minor - things are altered based on your choices. The way CDprojekt write, they tend to pull a character name out of the air and act like you've always known them, which works on the whole since Geralt is rediscovering bits of his past along with the player. In most cases when you hear something you've never heard before, you'll be no worse off than a player of the first game. However, big characters like Zoltan, Triss, Dandelion and Foltest plus a few others all feature heavily in the first game. If you're not playing on console and you have a chance to check out TW1, I'd recommend it. I think I preferred it to TW2 on the whole, just something about the atmos and pacing that was better. Combat is very different though - click-and-wait style/timing-based, rather than twitch-based action-packed combat from the TW2.

Is it your first Footie Manager game? If so, I said some super basic things about the gameplay in this post and this one. As for specific tips about 2012, I'm not so hot since I only played the demo.