Inverted

If you can't see that this is the exact thing I'm talking about, then we're never going to get to the end of this. That sentence makes no sense. How did you rob us of a win? By drawing. You celebrated a draw. It's basically mathematical logic. So long as England fans can get a kick out of a result that shite, they'll always have something to fall back on that no other major country has. Meanwhile Scotland will always get unduly pumped-up for these kinds of matches and then blow it against other teams.

That's an accusation that's pretty hard for the weaker sides of most rivalries to refute. It's pretty standard that it's easier for the favourite side to say they aren't bothered by it.

When English fans are overjoyed by scraping a draw against us, it's very easy to mask it as just being glad to spite Scotland. But that's a difference without a distinction. Scotland offers a source of easy gratification that no other major nation has. Pleasure is pleasure. If Germany gets a late equaliser against Slovenia or whatever, they're embarrassed. And genuinely embarrassed - they can't lazily claim "oh its just funny to get one over the Slovenians" or whatever, whilst saying they don't really feel happy about it. This kind of spiteful happiness is a cheap source of satisfaction to cover up the fact that a team like England's should easily beat Scotland. If any other major nation played us, they wouldn't be happy unless they beat us by a couple of goals.

A big part of the culture of mediocrity in English football is to do with a perennial satisfaction with doing better than Scotland, a country a tenth the size with an even smaller fraction of the investment in football, very few decent academies, and an even more disastrously mis-managed FA. It's not healthy to think of a nation with every conceivable disadvantage against you as your main rival, but it offers a kind of weak gratification that can't be had from comparing yourselves to Germany, France, Italy or Spain. We invented international football together, and you've won a single major trophy more than us, think of it that way. Edit: the "rivalry" probably has a big part of the blame for our shiteness as well. Our "biggest" match is a fixture that we statistically should be expected to lose. Our whole psyche is based on making an underdog effort for a few key matches, rather than consistently performing against teams on or below our level.

I don't know what it is about Zouma but I think when a centreback has pace, I'm way more critical about them. It feels like a lot of young defenders rely on their speed to cover mistakes, and it hides positional weakness.

Never even tried it. My mum's a pretty heavy smoker, my grandfather also used to be one and then needed a heart transplant, after which he quit, and my father's parents both died of cancer before I was born. So you could imagine that I fucking hate it. I don't get preachy to people, but some of my friends smoke, mostly just when they drink, and it bugs the life out of me. I'm around 2nd-hand smoke normally at home, so I can't complain from that perspective. From a personal health perspective, I don't keep perfectly healthy to say the least, so I guess I need to let them have their personal poison.

I don't think he's actually a Catholic, but from what I've heard he is pretty much completely anti-abortion, except where the mother's life is at risk. But yeah, he seems to be a typical conservative - secures his own rights, and shuts the door after himself. So long as there's no racism or legalised homophobia, he's doesn't care about women not having control over their own bodies.

As far as I know, besides matters on gay rights, he tows the usual Catholic conservative line on abortion etc. One un-elected right-wing PM, who happens to be gay, doesn't get rid of Ireland's problem with religion and social backwardness.

Vor Frelsers Kirke in Christianshavn, in the south of Copenhagen. Me and some pals are trying to do some touristy stuff when we get time, since the semester's almost over. It's a beautiful view in all directions, it's worth the climb through some very narrow and steep passages inside the tower. Once is enough, though.

Wonder how long that fella had that photo in his library, obviously just waiting for the perfect banter opportunity.

Me after climbing up 90m of rickety as fuck 17th century church steps.

Under Guardiola I would never have imagined Müller leaving, but Ancelotti's style doesn't seem to suit him so well.

Doc Gonzo in his last post, should have quoted. A lot of people on twitter seem to be under the same impression.

Naby Keita is not a DM. Diego Demme is the holding player for Leipzig afaik. He's a box-to-box player who wins the ball and bursts through the centre of the pitch into the final third.

Doesn't exactly send a good signal. It's your team's biggest match in years, you've been strictly told not to do something, and you go ahead and do it so soon before the final. All you need to do is wait a few days, and instead you fuck over your club. For something so unimportant, so non-urgent, as a tattoo. He clearly doesn't give a shit. That's the kind of personality that no self-respecting club should be putting up with, unless he's way above them quality-wise. Hopefully this means he'll spend his career lingering around 2nd-tier shite.

Dele Alli is overrated because he gets a lot of goals, technically playing as a midfielder. In terms of overall game, he is still behind players like Eriksen, De Bruyne, Silva and Oezil.

The whole English media are once again happily ignoring what a non-native speaker is actually trying to say. Such cheeky bants

Studying abroad is kinda devouring my money so I've not had much on the go, plus there's still so much in Copenhagen I'm yet to do. In January I went to Weimar with my old flatmate and stayed at their flat there for a few days. Lovely town, but not much in the way of nightlife. That didn't really matter since I was there with someone with plenty of local pals and places to go. During the days we just went to museums and did some sightseeing. We also went to the remains of the concentration camp at Buchenwald, since that's just 10 minutes away by bus. It was fucking freezing the whole time, especially outside the city in the middle of the woods where the camp is. Apart from the paths, it was about shin-high snow. It gave you a miniscule hint of how it must have been for the inmates, though. In hindsight I'm glad I saw it.

I remember a what felt like a few months of Warburton saying he was due back in a few weeks, every week. I thought when him and Weir went off to Forest they might have let everyone know where the poor boy was buried and give the fans some closure.

Why not? Could loan him out for 3/4 years and make a tidy profit.

Love how United fans suddenly drop the "Peps a fraud" line and hail him as a great football mind when he rims Carrick. Same for his love for Scholes.

Yeah I'm a huge fan. My favourite book is The Metamorphosis, and I've also read The Trial/Process, as well as a few of his short stories like In the Penal Colony, The Stoker, and The Judgement. I managed to find an edition of the Metamorphosis with a load of his short stories in a little used book store in Glasgow.

I remember watching a YouTube video of one of his introductory lectures on the scientific method. Despite having zero prior interest in science (I did the bare minimum in school to get the grades I needed) I was totally hooked in. Anyway, I've moved onto this now: Its comparatively short to what I've been reading recently so I hopefully should be done in a couple of weeks.

People had a woeful lack of understanding about the legal situation with our EU membership - the actual proportion of our laws mandated by EU Directives is far below what the average person would assume. And the whole "sovereignty back" nonsense is just legally meaningless. Parliament has always had sovereignty, we are only in the EU by virtue of an act of Parliament. We didn't give up any sovereignty to the EU, we voluntarily decided to cooperate with, and take part in a union. And are now voluntarily deciding to stop that. Not to mention how few people understand that the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg is completely unrelated to the EU. The UK's insularity and paranoia means the media and public happily conflates every form of international agreement we take part in as one massive idea of "Europe".

I myself voted No in 2014, have never voted SNP, and I think it's perfectly legitimate to argue that we have another referendum. In Scotland we value EU membership very highly, and the direction that English/British politics has went in is entirely contrary to the principles that support the broadly centre-left consensus up North. Our Tories are probably more pro-EU than the Labour party currently is rn under Corbyn's leadership. When Brown and Darling made their massive last-gasp pushes before the vote in 2014, the EU was at the absolute crux of the whole issue. We were told that we would risk our membership, whereas the UK was a safe bet - remember back then almost nobody thought that Brexit would actually happen, the vote was meant to be formality, so that Cameron could calm down the upper-class Brexit nutters in his party. Unfortunately for all the normal working people of this country, especially in Scotland and NI, where the Murdoch media isn't trusted so much and the vacuous rhetoric of UKIP isn't taken credibly, the power games of Etonian school boys have hit their wallets pretty hard.