Leicester than zero? - Premier League 2018/19

[N est à?]

Remember that game when arsenal beat leicester with an injury time winner and everyone was like 'ah, they'll get reeled in now by the north london giants', and then arsenal didn't win again for about six weeks lol. Good times, great memories.

[N est à?]

Also, when tottenham finally blew it against chelsea, watching a spurs fan quietly in tears at the bar, alone

[N est à?]

Men with london accents calling leicester players by very familiar nicknames: "Go on All!" "Great take, Kas!" "Get rid, Drink!"

What a spring that was

[Third rate Leszno]

City could get the quadruple - league cup looks a formality, Champions league looks weaker than the past couple of years, league is eminently winnable once De Bruyne is fully fit and no reason they can't win the FA Cup either.

[EIM]

Jesus Christ.

[That Night In Barcelona]

You just think liverpool are likable because you're not paying enough attention.

All the middle aged Gammon faced rage merchants like EIM and andy tate must be completely confused. They have to be happy for the first time since their teens, and they're all pregnant after being exposed to sexy football that god damn sexy.

the Funniest bit of it all was how Jamie Carragher and Martin tyler had a manly manly mangasm about how fucking manly Paul pogba's second goal was. Jamie was likening it to Bryan Robson, and essentially Pogba had proved his manly manhood by sticking his head in where Kevin Moran wouldn't have put in a boot, on a prosthetic limb. So manly. If he said Courage once, he said it a thousand times. It was like they had all received a letter from upstairs that they were to start saying nice things now about paul pogba. Manly Manly Manly. No-one had ever challenged a keeper for a header like this before. It was fortunate that Graeme Souness wasn't being a pundit, because he'd either have had a stroke, or had a stroke, and been dragged out screaming that he wanted pogba to carry him away in his arms while "Love lifts us up where we belong" plays in the background.

This is remarkable. It really can't be good for your mental health to let yourself get so wound up about people on the telly having different opinions to you about a game of football.

[Nocturnal Submission]

I want as many football fans to be as happy as possible, without exception.

However, if Liverpool win the league and banners saying "Your Dream, Our Rightful Destiny" start appearing in the Kop along with oil paintings of Jurgen Klopp ascending to Heaven supported by the archangels Bill Shankley & Bob Paisley, I may tweak that sentiment.

[hobbes]

According to the Blue Moon message board there's a conspiracy between the FA, Sky and the Premier League to hamstring Man City and make Liverpool win the league.
So much so that they couldn't fit Harry Kane getting booked for diving into their tiny minds. Because of course Spurs are in on it too and the conspirators want them to finish second above poor old hard done by Man City.

It seems every team has its own version of RAWK.

[EIM]

Blue Moon is an incredible place. Not as sentimental and overwrought as RAWK but far more bitter and they love a conspiracy theory.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

I want as many football fans to be as happy as possible, without exception.

However, if Liverpool win the league and banners saying "Your Dream, Our Rightful Destiny" start appearing in the Kop along with oil paintings of Jurgen Klopp ascending to Heaven supported by the archangels Bill Shankley & Bob Paisley, I may tweak that sentiment.

I'll tell you what, glasses are difficult to get right on statues.

[Toby Gymshorts]

You're being very reasonable these days. When you're not being a gammon, like.

EDIT: To EIM

[hobbes]

Why do they call your lot "rags" EIM?

[EIM]

Why do they call your lot "rags" EIM?

Because we were broke in the 1930s. And wore rags. Alternatively it stands for Red Arrogant Gits, but that's almost certainly a backronym. They're just fucking weird. The Rags from The Swamp.

[Sean of the Shed]

Sounds like a name Roald Dahl created.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

This is remarkable. It really can't be good for your mental health to let yourself get so wound up about people on the telly having different opinions to you about a game of football.

You should read that again. You didn't do a great job of it the first time.

[That Night In Barcelona]

You should read that again. You didn't do a great job of it the first time.

New year's resolution to instead go out for a walk the next time you're thinking of writing a long post about 'manly manly mangasms'.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The issue isn't that they disagree with me. The Issue is that they disagree with themselves only a few weeks ago, and it's utterly fucking hilarious. Until a couple of weeks ago Pogba was portrayed as being a ditz who was too interested in hair and shoes to focus on his career, like an 80s page 3 dolly bird that used to hang out with Frank McAvennie or Charlie Nicholas. Then when he goes up for a header where realistically speaking there's no danger from the keeper and he's Bryan Fucking Robson fighting off an inter-planetary invasion single handed before rescuing whole families from a towering inferno, all with two broken collar bones, and a dangerously low blood alcohol level. You don't get to see transformations like this outside of the He-Man cartoons.

It's fucking hilarious. the Tortured masculinity inherent in the way football is presented is absurd. But at least Carragher was a thuggish oaf on the pitch so at least he's kind of being consistent. I can't stop Laughing at Steve "Fake views" McManaman. Listening to him commenting on games, you'd think that he was basically the English Roy Keane back in the day, rather than the 90's Mesut Ozil.

This is the goal that had Carragher spurting uncontrollably about courage. There's literally nothing whatsoever courageous about this goal. It's just a really well judged, and well timed run. But this is largely because football isn't about being brave, it's mostly about being really clever.

[torres]

They've got endless hours of airtime to fill, so there is going to be an inordinate amount of bullshit spoken.

Just do what I do and turn it off until the footys back on.

[3 Colours Red]

Seriously Berba, zone out when the pundits speak. Life's too fucking short.

Avoid defeat on Thursday and the tinfoil trophies will be seen in the crowds at Anfield before you know it. Better than making hats out of it, I suppose.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

This was the immediate response to the goal. Also You shouldn't just ignore this sort of thing. That is how a fucking toxic disgraced has been like mourinho got the man utd job in the first place. This is how you get to Brexit. The bullshit way that things are framed is really important. And it would seem that the instruction has come down that now that Jose has gone to bring his 'Heath Ledger Joker' Cosplay tribute act to another club, Pogba is the main star in the Man Utd soap opera, so lets get the fuck out of our default position of calling him a treacherous airhead lady boy, and start retooling him as a traditional english football hero.

[Nocturnal Submission]

Or he's playing better.

[Satchmo Distel]

Man City v Liverpool on Thursday.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Or he's playing better.

Sure he's playing better, but that doesn't explain Jamie Carragher's tearful eulogies to his courage. It's the overcompensation for what went before that is particularly eyecatching. Courage courage courage courage courage. I don't think the keeper even reached the point where pogba was when he headed the ball, and by the time he got there, pogba was well behind him and about to start his celebration.

I was listening to two GAA players talking on the radio on a panel show and they were talking about dealing with the Media, and they were talking about how you have to do quite a bit of media stuff if you're an upper end, inter county player, and generally it's grand, but the thing that drove them both mad was the way that people just kept boiling everything down to the winner wanting it more, or in some way being more manly (the word one of them used) You're talking about two teams, who have to drive miles to go out training in the cold at night all through the winter, to work incessantly at their basic Skills, their fitness, their team play, the quite sophisticated instructions, and then they go out and play a match. Now the match may be ultimately decided by whether or not a shot struck by someone on their weak side, running away from goal, by the sideline, 70 metres out, goes over the bar, or a foot to the right, and it will be the odd score in 45, but after the match, it will be because one team wanted it more than the other.

This drives players fucking crazy. It shows you didn't understand anything about what happened out there on the pitch on a technical or tactical level at all, and are completely ignoring the achievements of both teams, to simply boil everything down to an inherent personality trait that you are imputing into them on the basis of a game. Both teams wanted to win, they wouldn't be out there on the pitch in the first place if they weren't inherently the sort of people who were incredibly driven to win. Not only are you ignoring the skill and the massive mental and physical effort that went into the performance from both teams, and robbing them of most of the credit they deserve, but you are effectively insulting and denigrating what is perhaps the most prominent personality trait in the team that lost.

Yet for some reason, this is the prism through which sport is usually Presented in these islands. There's a bit of a clear cultural difference happening at the moment though between Ireland and england. Football, the GAA and Rugby had the same set of pundits for a very long time, but they have essentially all been replaced by a whole swathe or recently retired players who talk about the sport in an entirely different way. The divide is sharper in GAA and Rugby, but the younger pundits rarely talk about things in terms of personality traits any more, and more about organization and tactics.

It's very different though in English football where it seems to be that whatever level of football you played at, and whatever your underlying level of intelligence, you set your punditry filter to Paul Merson, and get on with the job. The Thing is that I think that if you're a top player, and you've been on the receiving end of a lot of the manly man praise, it melts your brain. Jamie Carragher could be remembered as a defender who had his limitations, but understood them very well, and used his positional discipline, awareness of where other players were, and ability to read the game, along with his intelligence, to consistently make an awful lot of good defensive decisions over a very long period of time. This enabled him to carve out a career at the top level of european football for a long period of time. He might not have made too many world XI's, but he was Essentially a serious player worthy of a considerable amount of respect, and a considerably higher place in the pantheon of all time liverpool defenders than you'd think.

But instead he'd Prefer to be remembered and the beating bollocks and scouse heart of Liverpool, making heroic lunges and last ditch tackles. (Which is what he had to do on the relatively rare occasions that he fucked up his starting position) And that's why he ultimately sees it through the prism of the 'footballer as Bronze age hero.' Roy Keane was a player with a complete idea of how to play football in his head, broken up into a thousand little jobs that you had to do, and he set about doing them. However He talks about football entirely in terms of personality traits. But he's clearly insane. Paul Scholes is a more miserable version of Keane, and that's a heartbreaking thing. He should really know better. It's upsetting as well the degree to which Gary Neville goes along with this nonsense. The thing that I don't understand about it is that why do even these players talk about football in such terms, when they know it's a lot more complicated than that.

Either way, the official mood music around Paul Pogba has seriously changed. The things he was most criticized for are now apparently his strengths.

[elguapo4]

It's this stuff that obviously drives Berba mad is the reason I haven't listened to a pundit in years, except in the pub or a friend's house where you can't get away from them, half time comes I either change the channel or mute it and read something more interesting, full time whistle another programme goes on immediately, I mean, has anything any of them have ever said made your day better?

[G-Man]

I want as many football fans to be as happy as possible, without exception.

However, if Liverpool win the league and banners saying "Your Dream, Our Rightful Destiny" start appearing in the Kop along with oil paintings of Jurgen Klopp ascending to Heaven supported by the archangels Bill Shankley & Bob Paisley, I may tweak that sentiment.

You are saying it like it might not happen if Liverpool win the league. It would happen as surely as Liverpool fans sing superannuated showtunes before home games.