Dave

I think a draw was the fair result on the balance of play. We created chances, we got punished by a horrendous error, we created chances, we got punished by another horrendous error, we created more chances and got back in the game.

I did smile when Jordan Ayew went down to win Leicester a free kick and our fans went berserk. We were the beneficiaries of his smart brain for six years.

It's nice to know all the rule abiding clubs will be behind us to put these persistent cheats behind everybody else on points where they belong.

Quite intrigued to see what happens with Nketiah. Judging by Glasner's quotes you'd expect him to start but we've got no idea where he'd play or if we'd change our system to accommodate him.

Norris

Norris

Leclerc

Piastri

16th

Nepo Stroll

To think there's people out there that thought Trump did well last night.

Plastic bag suffocation, needless in mouth, chairshots to head... it's like Tony Khan forgot he's in negotiations for a new TV deal and currently hasn't got one.

Hopefully Ten Hag stays at least another full season.

Miles 100% thought by mentioning he has cancelled holidays to work on this he was going to get brownie points from people and all it's done is concern people further .

10 hours ago, RandoEFC said:

Fair enough, I'm just not getting good vibes overall. I don't think you read many stories about players getting this upset about being forced to leave though! 

I think his time at Lyon is enough of a red flag now for me to think hes not going to be a steady owner any PL football club needs. He's caught the football bug and behaving irrational. 

I had sympathy for him at first when the previous dictator did everything to freeze club funds because he no longer had total control, but his transfer dealings have been bizarre this summer. Sending Forest 57m euros for two backup players, one who has already been loaned to Everton, when you have your own transfer problems is just odd behaviour. Then there's paying 28.5m euros for Nuamah who you're also trying to immediately get rid of. 

Kiran Maguire compared him to Massimo Cellino, which should be alarming to anybody.

21 minutes ago, RandoEFC said:

Textor has tried to have a fire sale at Lyon by all accounts after they've got themselves into the FFP hot water.

He was the driving force behind Mangala's loan to Everton and trying to get Nuamah to move to us as well.

I think if you're trying to force players out to this extent you have to draw a line as well. Especially at that age. There's a way of moving players on when it's needed to benefit the club.

The whole multi-club ownership model and owners using one club to do another one of their clubs a favour with a player or a loan or a fee to soothe the accounts just doesn't sit well with me overall, even though this one ended up with Fulham instead.

I'm well aware of Lyon's financial troubles and the Mangala debacle, I mentioned it on the last page!

With this though I don't think Textor has done anything wrong. I doubt Dobbin, Kellyman, Anderson, Gallagher etc envisaged they'd be used as pawns to cook books when coming up through the club's academy but needs must. Nuamah only joined Lyon last summer (through some clever accounting with Textor's Belgian side) and given his ceiling likely saw them as a stepping stone, it's really not as deep as people are making it out to be.

I'm not sure what the issue is? Every club accepts offers for players that would rather stay.

Joachim Anderson for example said the way Palace treated him was cold. He's nearly 29 and is about to make a guaranteed six million over the next six years from the never ending pay roll of The Khan Family. We did him a favour.

https://www.footballmanager.com/news/development-update-football-manager-25-0

I think these are all pretty alarming to be honest. No international management, player weights and tactical touchline instructions feels like a major step back. The first two inparticular were there when I first played in Christmas 2001.

On 04/09/2024 at 13:54, Gunnersaurus said:

Is that dave meltzer? To be honest the people who don't like him seem to go on about it more than anyone. The thing is with his star system is he never watches the matches twice before giving the review. It's about how much he initially likes it. It's not a critical review where he watches it then re watches it takes notes etc. Basically it's a subjective review which is what he has actually said. I'm not aware of him saying that you have to agree with him. I watched a match in aew years ago. Anarchy arcade or something it was called. Loved it so if I had to give it a star rating I would probably give it 5 stars. But that's just an opinion. The match wasn't mentioned as a match of the year contender. Doesn't mean I can't like it. Same way that meltzer is allowed to say what he thinks of matches.

Ironically the people that complain about him all the time are worse than him. They are trying to say they are right and that's that. 

I agree about Meltzer. Whoever has been advising him to come across so dislikeable and condescending on Twitter really needs to stop. I have to respect him as a historian but when he inserts his opinion as if its factual in his write ups i facepalm. As you said, it's all subjective. Meltzer gave Rock vs Hogan 3 stars and I'll argue based on crowd response it's one of the greatest matches of all time. Meanwhile Chuck Taylor has a five star match.

The rumours he spreads without fact checking have ruined lives and it's pretty obvious at this point he no longer has any sources in WWE. Anybody who pays £15 for his subscription now is just burning money.

Regarding Cagematch, it was basically small site where a couple of thousand of people who like the Japanese and independent styles of Wrestling would go and rate matches in detail. It's not catered to WWE fans at all, and it wasn't meant to be (I think Roman and Batista have lower scored than Eddie Kingston for example). Unfortunately when Tony Khan was trying to flame a WWE vs AEW fans war he said he checks scores of matches on Cagematch to see if they were any good or not, and ever since then there's just been tribal keyboard warrior wars on that website between WWE fans and AEW fans. So Tony Khan's effectively made the website owners life ten times more stressful.

2 hours ago, OrangeKhrush said:

There is no limit on what players can earn,  there is a limit on what clubs can pay for wages,  thus if they want a player that wants 400K a week, 

Which is putting a limit on a player can earn, hence the new changes were a non-starter.

13 minutes ago, OrangeKhrush said:

Clubs should be able to spend what they want but constraints on wage caps which are proportional to revenue  sort of like MLB.   That will prevent signing rockstars as you cant sustain the loses on the wages eg: cant load a team with Mbappe, Bellingham etc and pay 500m in wages for a revenue stream that only supports 250m.   If a team violates this first offense 1 window ban, second offense 3 window ban, 3rd offense relegation and the club placed under league administration to cut costs

I remember hearing the problem with the proposals to change the PSR rules at the end of last season was that they'd effectively be putting a limit on what players could earn, and the EFL lost a legal battle around salary caps in 2020 so they'd struggle against a stated case.

The lawyer that went up against the EFL in 2020? Nick De Marco.

1 hour ago, RandoEFC said:

You can point to individual transfers all you want. Here are the facts of Everton's net transfer spend over the past five seasons, which ENTIRELY covers the period for which we were docked points. I don't really care about the 18+ months before that because they're irrelevant, that's not the period for which we were charged.

The only current Premier League team to have made a profit on transfers over the past 5 years. Outspent by Luton and Burnley. Even the likes of Brentford, Bournemouth and Fulham have spent £150-200m more than us in that time period. Everton have had a problem with inflated wage budgets throughout those years which offsets these differences to some extent but not a big enough one to justify calling our dealings reckless or irresponsible. Our financial problems are nothing to do with transfers we made 8 years ago like Sky Sports News and Twitter would have you believe. It's all shitty historical debt and an owner who had his main source of funding removed because of the Ukraine war. All those transfers you mentioned, Everton could afford at the time. We've cut our cloth but we're strangled by interest on loans that go back to Kenwright's early years at the club. The owner has botched the sale of the club three times which is generating more debt. In the meantime, those at the club are doing everything they can to stay in the league and on the right side of PSR until we can get into the new ground, which itself has been a huge financial bell-weight hanging around the club's neck, the funding of which has also been affected by the Usmanov issue.

Rules are rules and Everton breached the threshold, but if you want to comment on this, you need to get your facts straight. This wasn't down to a series of egregiously reckless transfer dealings like you seem to want to believe. Nottingham Forest might have "disregarded the rules" by signing 30+ players in one transfer window. I don't know about Leicester. But to level that charge at Everton is unfair.

Everton fans won't defend our ownership. Most of us accept that the club had a case to answer, but the Premier League botched it and lost all right to be treated with any respect or good faith. They came after us twice in one season because of their own poor administrative processes and requested that we get docked a total of 17 points in one season. This isn't the behaviour of a good faith actor. To initially give us a worse points deduction than you'd get for actually going into administration was a disgrace, then Forest got a 4 point deduction for a breach twice the size of our initial one which we got 10 points for which was reduced to 6. Now Leicester are getting off on a clumsy technicality. Man City get to set the terms of their hearings while Chelsea's spending completely takes the piss out of the rest of the league.

You say you don't care about the 18+ months before, but the reality is that period is still important as you would have amortised transfer fees and still paid those players wages. So let's consider the whole picture before making 'get your facts straight' jibes.

2 hours ago, Happy Blue said:

What if the rules are illegal? are they still valid if it's against English law?

However you're trying to justify Man City's achievements counting for anything to yourself is fine by me. You do you in the corner.

8 hours ago, RandoEFC said:

"Over time" . I.E. When Everton fans were clued up on this 18 months ago and told everyone the rules and their implementation were a farce, and that they were about to become a lot more people's problem, and nobody wanted to hear it, we were right, and now it's been proven.

You're admitting now that the rules aren't fit for purpose so why should Everton and Forest not have a gripe with the fact we've been docked points because of them?

Everton have been very poorly run but there was a lot of mitigating factors behind our losses and "having no regard for the rules" makes it out to be a lot more egregious than it was.

 

How much money was wasted 18+ months prior on the likes of Gbamin, Delph, Iwobu, Tosun, Keane, Gomes, Kean, Klaasen, Walcott, Bolasie etc?

I dont think you can have any gripe you have been docked points when you've drifted closer and closer to the sun every year and eventually got burnt.

20 minutes ago, Stan said:

To have no regard for rules that don't work? 

Usually rules are foolproof and rigid. PL's rules clearly weren't. 

I think clubs that have done things differently have done it in spite of the rules, not because the PL can turn around and say well done. 

 

I got a speeding ticket for going 60 in a temporary speed zone of 50 at 5am on an empty motorway where the roads are usually 70. There was no need for the temporary speed zone and the rule was stupid but I still paid the fine because that's the rules. 

Just because you don't agree with a rule doesn't mean you should be allowed to ignore it. Even more so to gain an advantage over others that are able to be succesful by abiding by the rules. Over time these rules will probably change but until a better solution is agreed teams need to play by the current rules.

1 hour ago, RandoEFC said:

Forest and Everton aren't the problem with what's happened to Premier League football though. Nor are Leicester.

Oh come of it .

The rules over time have shown to be not fit for purpose but that doesn't mean any of you were right to have no regard for them.

1 hour ago, Dr. Gonzo said:

just because their manager's a shithead. Having said that, Ben White did something similar with Southgate's England so...

I think you've got your shitheads confused.

In hindsight, the PL should have let the EFL discipline Leicester City last season when they offered to. There's visible improvement since Trevor Birch has taken over.

The fact Leicester City have managed to wrangle out on a technicality which everybody thought was a far stretch is really concerning and sends out the message that there is no deterrent for breaching these rules.

Sadly, nobody seems to respect Richard Masterts and this verdict isn't going to do his standing any favours. The sooner we get an independent regulator in the better, and I say that knowing Steve Parish has the biggest sway in these PL Chairman board meetings.

13 minutes ago, Dan said:

You know as much as I'm loving winding up Forest and Everton fans online currently I do think they need to completely bin this and compensate those two for last season somehow. None of us should've ever been docked anything.

No. You all should have been docked something. Rules are rules and it would have been unfair on everybody else that have a developed a succesful model to operate at this level should idiots like Maranakis and Moshiri get away with a blatant disregard to the rules because they couldn't control themselves.

16 minutes ago, Dr. Gonzo said:

Koeman calling Gravenberch lazy after being pissed off last year that Gravenberch wanted to stay with us after joining to work on fitting in with his new squad better rather than sit on the bench for the Dutch. Weird guy, especially considering the last 3 games Gravenberch has had for us.

Koeman's odd. The Saudi's could make life very difficult for him if they wanted too after his Bergwijn comments.

17 minutes ago, Gunnersaurus said:

To be fair there were a lot of injuries. Danielson having his career on the line added to the match. I'm not to keen on career on the line matches unless the wrestler is going to retire. However people weren't sure if he was going to retire and it almost made it seem like a real sport. Me and the person next to me were hugging because Danielson wasn't retiring. He was pissed though ha ha.

Mjf did do other things to be fair. He attacked fletcher and Oku. Speaking of Oku, he had a match before dynamite that wasn't shown in TV. He got a really good reception the crowd knew who he was. There are rumours he will be joining aew. If you ever get a chance go watch rev pro. The tickets can be as little as around £20. I'd go all the time if I lived in London.

All I know about Oku is he gets very high Cagematch scores, which I feel sorry for him for as people online are probably going to use that as a stick to beat him with.

On 29/08/2024 at 12:59, Gunnersaurus said:

It's hard for me to rate all in. There was a light under the screen which meant I could hardly see it. Gonna watch it tonight and then I'll have more of an idea. The atmosphere was great for the main event though. And due to not knowing if danielson was going to retire or not it almost felt like a real sport. I went to dynamite and collision as well so that's a lot of time I have spent at wrestling shows this week 

It felt like most AEW pay per views in the sense that you knew everybody would perform and the best way to enjoy it was to forget how they got there.

Like Ospreay, MJF, Swerve, Bryan etc are all excellent. You just have to forget MJF has tried to get boos in America for being Mr America and Bryan won a number one contender tournament yet still put his career on the line.

Im not too bothered about Ricochet. I enjoy his matches for what they are but jesus for a guy who struggles to exhibit charisma on TV he comes across like such a douche. Like he started arguing with one of his fans last week because they said they'll now watch the highlights of AEW because hes on it. I want to see him and Ospreay again though, given how much Ospreay has improved in the last 7+ years. 

Those Lucha Underground producers back in the day deserve to be working in Hollywood now. They had Ricochet looking charismatic on camera, Pentagon looking like a 6ft+ monster and Rick Knox looking like a competent referee.

The confidence to even try that.

A much better second half from Palace yesterday. It's frustrating that Parish and Dougie treat August as a pre season period but there's good signs for the future.

Hopefully Doucoure can get up to full fitness over the next two weeks as that will feel like a new signing alongside Wharton.

I think special praise has to go to Dean Henderson. I thought he had his best game for Palace yesterday, and I don't think it's a coincidence that it's happened as soon as the competition for his place left.