The all-encompassing TV thread.

[Snake Plissken]

This is not news, but Vardy is a chippy little sod.

[ad hoc]

The rules on what kits clash continue to elude me. West Brom in blue and white stripes and a solid blue shirt back play Leicester in their home kit too. I know the shorts were a different colour but it didn't seem so easy to tell them apart especially from behind

[Antepli Ejderha]

Swansea go from being first to last on MOTD, normal service resumed. Both players should have seen red, not just Ayew.

[Hot Orange]

The rules on what kits clash continue to elude me. West Brom in blue and white stripes and a solid blue shirt back play Leicester in their home kit too. I know the shorts were a different colour but it didn't seem so easy to tell them apart especially from behind

Leicester's change kit is black, which was probably deemed even more of a clash with WBA's navy blue. I don't know if they don't have a third kit, or left it at home or something.

[evilC]

Details noted from the Arsenal - Watford match: an Armenian flag draped across the backs of 3 seats. The thing is, how did the person who brought it know that there were going to be 3 empty seats next to them, in such a splendidly successful season as this? Errr... answers on a postcard, please, to Arsene Wenger, c/o Springfield Retirement Castle...

[Pérou Flaquettes]

Am watching MOTD now as I was out last night, the Hudds-Swansea stats are mind-boggling even taking into account J. Ayew's dismissal early on (and I agree with you Antepli of course, both players should have been given their marching orders). Fucking heroic Swans' defence!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/43267243

30 attempts on goal for Hudds (only 4 on target), 0 for Swansea, 52 crosses for Hudds, 81% possession for them etc.

Shot-shy Swans - the stats

There have been three occasions of a team having more than 25 shots in a Premier League match but failing to score this season - all of them have been against Swansea City - Southampton: 29, Tottenham: 26 and Huddersfield: 30.

Swansea became only the third side to fail to have a single shot in a Premier League match after West Bromwich Albion against Manchester City in December 2004 (drew 1-1) and Blackburn against Tottenham in April 2012 (lost 0-2).

Huddersfield have failed to score in a league-high 16 Premier League games this season.

Huddersfield's possession figure of 80.84% is the second highest in a Premier League game (since 2003-04), after Manchester City's 82.28 against QPR in May 2012.

Jordan Ayew's red card after 11 minutes was the earliest a player has been sent off in the Premier League this season, and earliest in the competition since Jeff Hendrick against Watford in February 2017 (six minutes).

It was also Swansea's first red card in the competition since Kyle Naughton was sent off against Sunderland in January 2016 - they'd gone 84 games without one before Saturday's game.

Huddersfield (left) camped out in Swansea's half, while the Welsh outfit (right) touched the ball just once in the opposing area

[Logan Mountstuart]

Kev Sept. It's nice to see that amount of passion at LOSC. But let's face it, a couple of decent Hazardy seasons and out come the Jeannot's viennent recemment. Decades in a soulless athletics stadium.

Everyone knows the only real force in The North is RCL .

My MOTD observations:

Give Rafa a decent squad. Something might happen. But then pigs have been flying since Bobby Moncur retired.

Tony Green. John Tudor. Kennedy. That's the way forward.

Put Vardy on the plane. The ignominious exit will still happen. But then something weird and brilliant might happen too. An extra round might keep the Brexiters happy for a bit as Britain slowly burns itself.

[Logan Mountstuart]

Villeneuve d' Asq. That was it. And now they play in the Stade Jim Callaghan. Which is a massive improvement, I'll admit.

[Pérou Flaquettes]

Aye Logan, passion for one's club is great but thuggishness and lawless behaviour aren't, this tiny minority of idiots really is letting down the club big time.

I hope Lens stay up (John Bostock was awarded Ligue 2 player of the year last season but he buggered off to Turkey two months ago, not sure how he did in the first half of the current season).

What was Vardy mardy about after scoring exactly?

and out come the Jeannot's viennent recemment

Took me a few seconds to decipher this one... Opinionated Footixes are the bane of football.

[Logan Mountstuart]

I have such a soft spot for Lens. 150km from London and very few people outside the town know a thing about them.

The fact that my Canadian great uncle was blown to bits by a shell 1km from the Bollaert has nothing to do with it. He was apparently charging suicidally forward having been put on a charge for refusing promotion to Sgt. Major. The poor sod had been in every major Canadian action since 1915.

I'd been a Lens sympathiser ever since I'd lived in France. I only found out about Archie Dee years afterwards.

[Pérou Flaquettes]

Great story. Poor Lens, they've really been put through the wringer with this Hafiz Mammadov shyster.

Bollaert, what a ground... I went there twice in the early 1980s with a PSG supporters’ group (my childhood club). Great "English-style" stadium as they like to say in France about Bollaert ("un stade à l'anglaise"), fabulous atmosphere, fantastic baraque à frites too! (chippy vans)

[Ray de Galles]

Though I knew in advance about the size of it I was amazed by Lens when I went there for the England v Wales game in Euro 2016. There was less to the town than there is in the suburb of 20,000 people I live in but with a 40,000 capacity stadium bolted on to it.

I haven’t been so struck by the disparity between the level of football fame/stadium a town has compared to what else is there since...er, Middlesbrough.

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

Though I knew in advance about the size of it I was amazed by Lens when I went there for the England v Wales game in Euro 2016. There was less to the town than there is in the suburb of 20,000 people I live in but with a 40,000 capacity stadium bolted on to it.

I haven’t been so struck by the disparity between the level of football fame/stadium a town has compared to what else is there since...er, Middlesbrough.

Sinsheim/Hoffenheim and Leverkusen would compete I reckon. Leverkusen has a big chemical works of course, and Sinsheim has an aviation museum, but you'd struggle to fill a couple of hours between trains otherwise.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Though I knew in advance about the size of it I was amazed by Lens when I went there for the England v Wales game in Euro 2016. There was less to the town than there is in the suburb of 20,000 people I live in but with a 40,000 capacity stadium bolted on to it.

I haven’t been so struck by the disparity between the level of football fame/stadium a town has compared to what else is there since...er, Middlesbrough.

Thurles would blow your mind.

[ursus arctos]

Thurles is what would happen if one took any of the dozen or so US towns with a public university and huge football stadium, and removed the university, but left the stadium.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

I'm feeling faint. No-one has ever mentioned Thurles in the context of universities, other than perhaps "I feel very far from a grove of academe right now" as they stood outside Hayes' hotel on munster final day. There's only about 7,000 people in Thurles. It's an odd place. They wanted to build a giant casino resort there until the whole Celtic tiger thing went astray. What kind of town wants to be known for it's stadium that holds seven times the local population, and has a soggy sun city.

[Ray de Galles]

Thurles would blow your mind.

Is that where they used to have the massive festival, Feilé or similar?

I never made it out there but people who have played it said it was like a humoungous stadium had been plonked on the moon.

[ursus arctos]

That's it, Ray

TAB, I take it that you've never been to College Station or Stillwater

[elguapo4]

Oh yes feile, there's a separate thread about feile 92 somewhere in the OTF archives, I was there twice and mistaken for a drug dealer both times,other than that I had a great time there,I also saw Kerry Gaelic football player Maurice Fitzgerald score the greatest point I've ever seen in that stadium,unfortunately it was a last second equaliser against us so I didn't appreciate it at the time

[Cal Alamein]

Stillwater? Far better folks and decent atmosphere, but not in the league w/ College Station (but the majority of fans who are dicks).

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

College station seems to be bigger than Galway, and stillwater oklahoma seems to be about the size of Limerick. Thurles is more like the size of Stillwater New York, but I bet that Stillwater in New York is probably nicer. Thurles is very much the start of the Midlands, and I'm afraid that it is all too aware of that. It also seems to have a strong vibe of being stuck where it was in the 1970's, and the 1970's weren't that great.

[ursus arctos]

Berba, you have to take out the students, faculty and all of the people who rely on their custom.

Then you will be down to Thurles-type numbers.

Cal, I'm only talking about scale, not vibe.

[Cal Alamein]

Gotcha.

Just looked up Thurles. Impressive stadium for the environs.

[seand]

We're going slightly off topic here but Clones (pronounces Cloh-ness) makes Thurles look like a cosmopolitan metropolis. Despite have a quarter the population of Thurles (under 2,000) it's home to a 36,000 capacity GAA stadium.

[nmrfox]

Stoke, despite being a goal down to a lovely David Silva strike, certainly letting Man City know they are in a game. Whether they can keep this pressing tempo up for another half may be their downfall, along with a very dodgy left back whose name has escaped me.