Burning Gold

The FA are famously a clueless bunch of clowns, so no surprise they've got that one wrong.

Grujic strikes me as a player who looks good at youth level because of his physicality, but struggles at the highest levels because technically he's quite poor. I haven't seen a great deal of him so I could be wrong, but if that is the case it's worrying that we've fallen for it. Key difference to the Holgate incident is the bit about the allegation being made in good faith.

So your argument that Hazard is consistent is that he's had one good season?

I used to love Monster Ripper (the yellow one) which was pineapple flavoured, but they've gradually reduced the fruit juice content from 50% to 20% and it now just tastes like a sweeter version of the original. Obviously this is completely outrageous and we must take to the streets immediately

It's a fizzy drink, mate. I agree it's a bit shit that they've changed the recipe, especially as most of the appeal of Lucozade was down to the amount of glucose in it, but... come on. There are better things to be angry about.

He's been taking them backwards for over a decade though. That's most of his time there. It would be harsh to boo him, but I wouldn't question any Arsenal who doesn't want to give him a warm send off It's definitely true mate. Have a look here https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/sports-business-group/articles/deloitte-football-money-league.html We may get big crowds for overseas friendlies, but you get 15,000 more than us every week paying higher ticket prices.

You do get some hilarious meltdowns over completely innocuous things on mumsnet. It's like a menopausal ArsenalFanTV. There's a brilliant Twitter account called Mumsnet Madness that highlights some of them, although they seem to have stopped posting recently. https://twitter.com/mumsnet_madness Worth a look if you've got time to kill

Self criticism is one thing, but declaring your season effectively over when it obviously isn't is quite another. I suspect you'd've criticised him had he come out and said your season is over because fourth place is out of reach and you probably won't win the Europa League.

He has to say that, doesn't he? He can't exactly come out and say "Yeah nah, we're fucked m8. Season over, let's go to the beach". He is right, though. They're still in the Europa League, and winning that would constitute a successful season in my opinion, but they have to put all their eggs in that basket because 5th place isn't an achievement (especially as they've already qualified for Europe next season via the league cup - I think?) and 4th is out of their reach.

Wait a while and smuggle them back to America for a massive profit would probably be the most lucrative option.

I wonder how much of this is to do with Karius's rise in form and how much is to do with Mignolet's little outburst in the media. Hilarious if he thought he could win his place back by whining to the press instead of by not playing like shit and it's completely backfired. I'm generally in favour of this. Karius has done well over the last two games (although I'm not sure how much of that is just because my expectations for him are rock bottom) and I think we'll benefit from a settled back five. Mignolet won't be going anywhere in the summer, though, for the simple reason that no one will buy him. His wages will price out every club on his level; Championship clubs simply don't make that much money.

Because of the process. Please try to keep up

Sorry to hear you're struggling there @Dickie, but good job to learn to manage it instead of letting it dominate you. Love the hair

Go on Adam son

Tottenham are still in the cup, aren't they? It's such a winnable competition for decent sides, so I think one of us will eventually do it in the next few years. I give Tottenham the edge purely because they could still do it this season. It's nice that he's a home grown player from the academy, I'll always have time for that, but I'm so bored of everyone pretending he didn't grow up supporting Arsenal. Childhood allegiances are, quite rightly, meaningless to professional footballers, but it does my head in because it's such an obvious and unnecessary lie.

Weird analogy when Lacazette cost you £50m and he's two years younger than Aubameyang That's exactly why I think it's such a good move for Arsenal though. It would've been so easy for them to take the attitude that Lacazette cost a lot of money and looked good in France so they should give him more time, but in six months they've realised he's not good enough and are looking to replace him with quality. It's a very aggressive move that seems so unlike Arsenal, and I'd be excited if I were an Arsenal fan.

That's a massive assumption mate and I disagree completely. Despite the reputation he's somehow managed to get from Liverpool fans for being a great shot stopper, he's actually a very bad one, consistently ranking near the bottom of the league in whatever metric you care to look at. I do think he's the better goalkeeper of the two (although that says more about Karius than it does Mignolet), but Karius's distribution is better, which may help us break down shit teams, and I think the defence looks a little more solid in front of Karius as well.

Every day I become more and more convinced that Everton are just the West Ham of the North

Why even do this? Why not wait until the summer to negotiate? If we agree and announce a deal now for July, we're back to the old problem of every club in the world knowing we've got however much cash Barcelona have given us and raising their prices. They'll do that anyway because we're a big English club and we've shown we're willing to spend on VVD, but we don't want to give them a reason to do it further if we don't have to. There's also the risk that Coutinho will check out mentally for the rest of the season and his performances will suffer. If we wait til the summer to negotiate, there are no distractions to our season and there's every chance his price will go up, especially if we can initiate a bidding war with Real Madrid and PSG. By all means promise him that he can have his move in the summer, but there are risks and no benefits to setting it in stone now.

Rumours are a bit different to an actual guilty plea, though. Releasing Flanagan seems like a no-brainer to me given that it's obviously unacceptable behaviour and he hardly plays for us anyway.

We're also not taking Nike to court. In other news, I assume this stuff connecting the VVD fee to Coutinho is fishing, but I'll bite anyway. The two are unrelated. We had the money to sign van Dijk because our net spend has been low (or positive) every window since Klopp arrived. Every Liverpool-based journalist reported in the summer that we had about £200m to spend before any sales, and the van Dijk fee is the last of that money being spent. In other news, Flanagan has pleaded guilty to assaulting his girlfriend. Shocking

It 'looked like he's off' all summer mate and yet he still plays for us. Until a somewhat reliable journalist even hints that it's a possibility, I'm having absolutely none of it.

Oh ffs do we really have to go through another month of this nonsense. If we wouldn't sell Coutinho in the summer, why on Earth would we do it halfway through the season? Barcelona will continue their bizarre shithouse behaviour indefinitely, but it has no more bearing in reality than a year 8 telling you he fucked your mum.

I reckon he must've had a high pace stat on FIFA or something because almost everything I read when we were linked to him made reference to this blistering pace which he just doesn't have If you read about him you'd be forgiven for thinking he could leave Usain Bolt in the dust on a good day, but watching him on TV you'd see him routinely get outpaced by players you'd never class as quick. I thought I was going mad. As a striker, he's just not that good. You don't have to be to have a good scoring record in France, but he doesn't have anything about him physically, mentally, or technically that'll stand out in a better league. If he doesn't go back to France, he'll be at a mid-table club in a few years time.

That's what you get when you have a shite goalkeeper and defence, a squad and manager who don't know how to close out a game without scoring more, and no leaders on the pitch. Absolutely no one should be surprised by this. The one I'd be interested to see is how many points we've lost after being ahead by 2+ goals. Probably shitloads.