Dr. Gonzo

I just hope Iran doesn’t immediately escalate. There’s enough internal pressure in the US and enough external pressure from Saudi Arabia and Israel to push for the US invading Iran. So if Iran gives them a reason to invade, I’m not sure there will be enough people to counsel this administration to restraint.

Managers will always bitch about it. Pep and the Wolves boss have also been fairly vocal in recent weeks. It makes the injury risk to players higher. Honesty, it’s much worse for lower league sides that don’t have big squads. But no manager likes it and they’ll always campaign to change it.

The news here was talking about how Iraqis would be happy about this. Yeah maybe the Sunni’s in Iraq. But Iran quite is popular with the Shia population of Iraq... and that’s why Iran’s had such influence in the country - especially after ISIS went through Iraq killing Shias for YouTube videos. So that’s about 60% of the population that liked this guy because he funded and trained militias with the Iranian military. And don’t forget Sunnis were a minority running the show before the US toppled Sadam. Which is why the current Iraqi government is pretty friendly to Iran. Sectarian shit is stupid, for sure, but it’s also an incredibly important part of why that part of the world is so fucking tense. And it’s not really thought about a lot by the west, despite them doing shite in the Middle East forever

Russia’s invaded Georgia (unsuccessful) and Ukraine (annexed Crimea and still at war with Ukraine), committed assassinations in the UK and Turkey and attempted to do it in Germany. They’ve got to be up there. There’s also China secretly-not-so-secretly doing its best to take over the Middle East and Africa, granted not as overtly aggressively with their military in every sense. Saudi Arabia & Iran are pretty bad as well.

I think Trump might invade Iran because no wartime president has ever lost an election tbh.

That's really shit about Chambers. I also think Arteta looks a lot less of a risk now that we've actually seen him manage Arsenal. I think he'll actually do quite well with them - you can see he's already done a lot in terms of imposing a style of play and the Arsenal midfield actually has played a few matches where the players look like they've been given defined roles and they don't look like headless chickens just running around anymore. And them fading in the second half of matches is understandable, given what David Luiz and Sokratis said after the match yesterday - they admitted that currently the Arsenal players don't have the fitness to press with the intensity Arteta wants them playing with for 90 minutes. That's going to come with more time on the training ground and more matches where they play in his playstyle. So for this season with Arsenal at this stage, yeah you hope you can finish as high as possible because that's what all football clubs try to do, but the important thing is that the new man gets his philosophy implemented and the players all reading off the same page. If Arsenal can actually get Xhaka performing like he did before they signed him, because he was actually really good in Germany, they'll be very happy. And considering how it was looking with his Arsenal future not that long ago, that's seriously impressive.

Fixed

Origi’s goal against Everton last season is my goal of the decade

Holy shit have you seen how little he was paid before? I’ve given him shit before, but I think a big pay bump is well deserved considering how little he’d been paid & that he is an important player at the club

Has he missed a load of games? Genuinely don't know - because with that stat and scoring every 140ish minutes you'd think he'd be up there with Rashford, Mane, or Salah with their 150 minutes per goal. He's a weird player though - it seems like he's much more comfortable finishing with his head than his feet... but he doesn't look like that kind of striker when you see him. He's obviously improved since last season where I thought he was total dogshite, because he's almost got 10 league goals this season. I'm assuming this is the best he's done in a half season? Maybe it's a breakout year for him and he'll actually get callups to the England squad like you suggested - because he does seem to offer something a bit different than the other England strikers. Although I think Danny Ings ought to be back in consideration for the England squad. Also if they could get Vardy to unretire... I think he'd be in too.

They did yesterday? In any case, I think the VAR application with offsides has been a bit shite to say the least. People being offside by a pixel or their armpit hair isn't "clear and obvious." Even for our goal after they checked to make sure Lallana didn't handball, they then checked a few different angles to see if Mane was still onside (even though it was pretty... clear and obvious... that he was, given that he made his run from fairly deep). I'm not surprised people are hating VAR for these close offside rules where you've got someone offside by a pixel, like that Wolves player. The technology isn't good enough (or precise enough) to be used in it's current application. And it's not meant to be used to make sure that everything was inch perfect for an offside, it's meant to make sure the officials didn't make a clear or obvious error. 6 years ago Sterling was found to be offside against Manchester City with this: Instances like that are where VAR could be used to reasonably overturn a pretty clearly incorrect decision. He's miles onside and an idiot linesman flagged him off and took a goal away. These really tight decisions where you can't tell what frame the ball leaves a players foot and have to zoom the fuck in to look at the pixels on lines that sometimes seem arbitrarily drawn by idiots like Martin Atkinson... they're causing a lot of controversy because we're relying on technology that isn't good enough to decide things by fine margins. And other leagues aren't having anywhere near the same amount of controversy with VAR. VAR is here to stay. And I'm sure the technology will get better to where you can tell exactly by the frame when someone is offside or not more clearly - considering cameras keep making huge leaps forward, sooner or later we'll get better resolution in our VAR images that'll allow for more precision. But there's a lot wrong with it's implementation in our league - particularly in these decisions with the fine margins that the technology quite frankly is not suited for.

He says it's meant for checking of a clear and obvious error was made, rather than wasting time spending time looking at different angles to decide something marginal... which is literally what we're regularly seeing with these offside decisions.

General secretary of Ifab says that the league is using VAR wrong for offside decisions: https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/premier-league-var-wrong-offside-review-ifab-goals-replays-a9264306.html?utm_source=reddit.com

Government is planning massive farming subsidies to counteract the effects of Brexit on our agriculture - so much for less reliance on the state

Not really, that’s less than a goal a game which is pretty impressive I think. I’m more impressed we scored 4 on a defense that had only conceded 14 in 17

I think that means they’re unlikely tbh, don’t think we’d stop a kid’s development suddenly if we were just planning on bringing someone in

That would have been mental. Although, I think you're right that KDB and Salah needed to leave Chelsea for their development.

Nat Phillips is being recalled from loan for cover at CB. Probably means bad news on the Lovren/Matip front tbh.

Fuck the premier league saying we can only wear that badge for one match, and that it can only be against Wolves. If we’re going to flex on anyone, why Wolves? There’s clubs from Manchester and also our dickhead local rivals? If not for not wanting to piss them off so they don’t fix matches against us, I’d say fuck it wear it each match. But they can arbitrarily make things up as they go. Fuck the premier league though, the worst thing that ever happened to football was them breaking off from the football league and pretending they’re gods gift to football.

I just want to once again congratulate the Leicester board for absolutely fleecing United with the Maguire signing

They were talking with Arteta for a week or more without even contacting and discussing compensation to City. It’s understandable City would be annoyed with Arsenal

Jesus the people making the big decisions at Arsenal truly have no idea what they’re doing, do they?

I wonder if we'll be in for a CB in January. Lovren/Matip/Gomez are all good when paired with VVD - and I think young Joemez is the best of the 3 - but they've all got their injury problems. Lovren's never played more than 6 games in a row for us... so I think he's unreliable as a backup in an injury crisis... because chances are he'll soon be out with injury/illness. I think we want to avoid moving Henderson/Gini to the defense as much as possible. I think bringing in a CB as competition for Matip and Gomez would be good, particularly if they're less injury prone than Lovren in case the other two are out for whatever reason.

Minamino is having his medical before January, so he’ll probably be the first signing of the window

I don't think humanity will ever be rid of racism. Fear of "the other" is an effective political strategy to get votes (and is nothing new and certainly never went away at any point in our history) because of how tribal people are - it's an easy way to paint an "us vs. them" situation. I don't think humans have the capacity to not be racist or xenophobic... and even if they do, I imagine some other type of bigotry would take it's place. Tribalism is in our nature & it allows emotion to beat out reason. Sad, but true. The London thing is also pretty easily explained, tbh. For decades we've seen Westminster throw money at London and comparatively neglect the rest of the country - we've seen towns around London have massive spikes in population, while cities around the country have eroded... because there's less opportunity in peoples' hometowns, so more and more people move to London. To be honest, I have no idea if that's anything new or not - I imagine it's probably not, London's always been a bigger hub for business than anywhere else in the country. It's the business, media, and cultural capital of the UK... as well as the actual fucking capital. It stands to reason that throughout history, people have left the city they come from to go to London because of higher opportunity. But people, rightly, feel irritated when they see their cities and towns neglected and money has been funneled to London. I'd argue that's actually a big part of why we've seen a rise in populism in the UK. That disdain for the status quo of London first + Tory scapegoating of the EU for most of the domestic problems is a big part in why so much of the rest of the nation has fallen in love with EU-skepticism. When people point at London's high crime statistics... I feel like people always need to be reminded there are more than 7 times as many people in London as the next biggest UK city. And what people discussing crime statistics should really doing when comparing crime rates is looking at the per capita statistics. In any case, if the UK wanted to address the disdain towards London... we'd need a government that doesn't just prioritise London & particularly the City of London (which the financial sector won't stand for - and as they're the biggest portion of our GDP, they've got an enormous amount of clout). It's not exactly an easy fix. And if you want to address people talking negatively about London in respect to understanding crime statistics... well we'd need more educational funding around the country. Which we need regardless tbh, before critical thinking is completely killed off. One thing I'm looking forward to in a post-Brexit UK is that the government's failings will have to fall on the shoulders of the government - after Brexit it would be so hard for anyone to point the finger at the EU for the shit our government has failed the country in.