RandoEFC

Mad how Arteta in his first coaching job has turned Arsenal into this side while the strings of more experienced and decorated managers at Chelsea and Man Utd over the years have made them worse and worse. Shows the importance of having your ducks in a row as a club and having an actual plan, but I also think what he's doing as a manager is a bit underrated still.

Can one of the clubs with a bit of money not just go all out and buy Cole Palmer this summer just for the sake of putting Chelsea into a relegation fight? I don't think we'll ever see a better opportunity for one of the Super League Six punted into the Championship.

I get what you're saying but those that have implemented the rules, sanctions and timelines have seen the league table altered in the courts 4 times this season and it could be 6 by the time the appeals processes are wrapped up. The clubs and the organisation itself both have to take responsibility for that. Regardless of who you blame for it, and I'm certainly not trying to make out that Everton are innocent here or shifting the blame elsewhere, but it is an absolutely whopping load of shite for the league table to be altered in any way by off the pitch events. The clubs that have pushed the envelope could still be punished by a sporting disadvantage by not being able to register new players, for example, whilst still having a league table that is solely decided by what's actually happened on the football pitch.

I'd be surprised if we didn't get hit with a points deduction next season too to be honest looking at our last set of accounts but at least we'll never get done for two time periods in the same season again. There was some talk about Leeds' accounts looking bad a few weeks ago as well. This is the new football now. Sad.

It is very different. The fact they've mentioned he's a Luton fan on VAR is one step away from alluding to match fixing. The truth is that referees getting too many decisions wrong is distorting results far too often and PGMOL need to make fewer mistakes. Forest are suggesting by bringing the guy's Luton allegiances into it that there's a deliberate element to it. Forest, just like every other club, are only upset because the decisions went against them. They don't give a fuck if the officials are incompetent until it affects them in a negative way. Until the clubs in the Premier League get together and put a vote of no confidence in PGMOL together or something then I won't take any one of them seriously when they start cry-arsing like this. All it is is them trying to twist it in their favour for the next match.

@nudge @Viva la FCB @6666 @RandoEFC @Michael @Pyfish @Bluewolf @CaaC (John) @...Dan @Dan @Redcanuck @Rick @Tommy @Rucksackfranzose @Lucas @Whiskey @Stan @Storts @DeadLinesman @N U F C and any others welcome. Below are the fixtures for Gameweek One. Montpellier vs Nantes PSG vs Le Havre Metz vs Lille Clermont Foot vs Reims Lorient vs Toulouse Strasbourg vs Nice Rennes vs Brest Lyon vs Monaco Marseille vs Lens My pick for Gameweek One is PSG. Good luck!

You have to go a long way to put "Everton" and "lucky" in the same sentence over the past few years. I'm mostly of the same school of thought but this football club has become absolutely allergic to being anywhere other than 15th-17th in the table. A part of me genuinely believes that if we'd have had the 6 point penalty last season then we'd have just found an extra two wins and if we'd have been deducted 2 points this season instead of 8 then we'd have just lost two extra games and ended up in the same position. Like you say, we've developed a knack of finding a win when we most need it but we also have a massive knack of failing to win any match that would see us climb to 13th/14th and allow the fanbase to actually sleep well for a couple of weeks. I admire what Luton have done of course. There's a lot of base sympathy for the underdog. But I also think their fans and the people involved with the club are just as big of a set of twats as everyone else and the fact that their squad costs naff all and their matches have a lot of goals in them doesn't change that. They were one of the worst fan-bases to come up to Goodison (twice) this season singing "feed the scousers" and "bin-dippers" and whatever else they think is funny. This attempted media narrative and their owner thinking that they've been hard done by because Everton have "only" been deducted 8 points when they're the only team in Premier League history to fight for survival against two teams that have had points removed is a bit hard to swallow as well. Not to do them down too much. They've punched above their weight and have certainly made a mockery of Burnley's attempt to stay in the league. I'd also rather see Luton stay up than Forest, especially after Forest's antics in the last few days and earlier this season. I'd also rather be competing against Luton when we're inevitably in another relegation fight next season because as entertaining as their matches are, as a relegation rival I'm quite glad to know that Luton can go into any given game and are probably going to concede anything between 3 and 5 goals. Hopefully for their sake, Danny is right and at least that style of play will see them fetch some good fees for the attacking players who have been allowed to put up some decent numbers as a result.

What is wrong with them!? I can't believe how many people I'm seeing on social media agreeing with them and praising them for "sticking up to the officials". I'm all for questioning the standards of refereeing but what Forest have done, questioning the integrity, is very different. Staggering how many people think Forest are "taking a stand" and not cynically trying to create an unconscious bias in their favour by applying this much pressure on PGMOL.

Probably good news that alternatives to 777 are being considered. I hope we don't follow the state ownership model though.

It doesn't ring a bell as far as I can remember.

Also what I forgot to mention is the number of Luton fans commenting on it saying well we'd rather have seen a draw so VAR not giving Forest penalties was actually not in their interest .

It's so embarrassing for Forest, isn't it? The implication of corruption is bad enough but I think it's the "the VAR was a Luton fan" angle that is the most shocking. I've actually seen a few figures in the media back them up on that as well. Referees and officials are clearly somewhat interested in football if that's the career path they've chosen to pursue, so chances are that they support a team. You can't . Can you imagine the precedent it would set if Forest had their request granted to remove Attwell from VAR because he's a Luton fan? There's footage of Michael Oliver somewhere wearing a Newcastle shirt and saying that he hates Everton and our fans will always mention that on social media if he ever gives a decision against us, but you can't expect him never to officiate any of our matches and I'd be absolutely mortified if Everton took to social media and started spouting off about him being biased. This Clattenburg thing is on really shaky ground for me as well. They've employed him as a refereeing consultant. For what? Looking at his Daily Mail column last night, it looks as if he's basically being paid to use his name as a former high-profile referee to put pressure on the current officials on the club's behalf. We've seen that current and former referees aren't shy about taking up big money offers, whether it's to fly out to Qatar or UAE to referee their matches during the week or in this case, to completely embarrass themselves in the public discourse by crying corruption at an organisation that he used to be a major part of, and would have insisted didn't contain an ounce of corruption when he was on the other side of the fence. I'd feel quite dirty if I was him turning around to attack PGMOL because that's what my paymasters want from me. The standards of refereeing in the Premier League at the moment are really horrendous and Forest were on the wrong side of it yesterday. Personally, I think all of the clubs should come together and demand better standards from PGMOL but they're all too busy looking after their own interests to take any collective action for the benefit of the fans or the competition. All of them will cry foul when it happens to them which says to me they're not really interested in better officiating overall but rather just decisions that don't go against them. Forest haven't really gone down the "standards of officiating" route at all. They've gone down an integrity route and it won't get them anywhere, quite rightly. They need hammering for that statement yesterday.

Results - Chinese Grand Prix This week it was @The Palace Fan's turn to go AWOL so no points for him. I know I'm not helping by posting predictions on Wednesday or Thursday, especially with so many of the races so far being overnight for those of us in Europe. I'll endeavour to get back to posting predictions on the Monday of race week. Onto those that did predict, everyone once again went for a Max Verstappen pole position and bagged 5 points. I think I've seen enough now to change this prediction to a Pole Position without Verstappen. Even if there's chances for other people to beat him on a Saturday, those chances are so slim that there isn't an incentive to take a risk, so for the foreseeable future, we will change the pole position prediction to one excluding him. Also resolved on Saturday was the bonus question. @Stan and @Tommy both backed Haas to get a car into Q3 and Nico Hulkenberg duly delivered on this again. Kudos to @Whiskey who backed a Q3 appearance for Sauber even before seeing their form in the Sprint Shootout and Sprint Race. Bottas bags him 5 points as well. Onto the Podium Minus Max, this week's result was Norris, Perez, Leclerc. Hilariously, everyone who predicted this week went for a combination of Perez and the two Ferraris here, so nobody gets any points for Sainz. @Stan and @nudge made the best fist of this, with Perez and Leclerc in the exact correct positions bagging them 10 points. @Coma, @DeadLinesman and @OrangeKhrush take 7 points each for their PER-SAI-LEC combination, while @RandoEFC, @MUFC and @Tommy have to settle for 4 points each. Finally, Yuki Tsunoda's retirement made it impossible to give any points for this week's random driver prediction. If anyone had put 19th, I'd have given points for that as he was the second car to retire from the race but I'm not giving consolation points for a driver who retired apart from that scenario. Here's what it does for the table: @The Palace Fan shows the cost of a missed week as he drops from 1st to 8th, but in terms of the points differential, still has 19 races left to recover a 12-point deficit to the top spot. @Stan is this week's "Driver of the Day" with an impressive score of 20 that also takes him to the top of the standings with a decent 5-point lead. Single figure returns for @RandoEFC see him lose ground in the standings and @MUFC remains behind his team-mate despite completing one race more - ouch! In the Constructors' standings, @Whiskey's return to the fray saw Ferrari bag this biggest team points haul we've seen so far this season, and they can begin to eye Mercedes up in the battle to get off the bottom. McLaren's lowest score of the season sees their narrow lead in the standings disappear, while Red Bull leapfrog both them and Aston Martin with a very strong score of 29 points this weekend.

Dan describes it perfectly here: Man City are objectively the worst club in football because of this investigation hanging over them, the completely plastic nature of their standing in the game and their immoral owners. It's impossible for most people to conjure up that sort of animosity though because they don't know an insufferable Man City fan whereas everyone knows half a dozen Man Utd fans and half a dozen Liverpool fans (and they're not all like this by any means but) who boast as if they're invincible in moments because they've got safety in numbers so you've got to poke fun at them when they get a knock-back because those are just the rules. The decent Man Utd and Liverpool fans who didn't boast that much in the first place just end up caught in the crossfire but it goes back to the whoppers in your fanbases who bring that upon the rest of you because they don't know the meaning of humility. That just isn't there with Man City. Yes, they should be the most hated club but if you don't have that day to day interaction with their fans then you're just not going to be as arsed.

I think this is the best title battle we've had heading into the final round as past champions @nudge and @Viva la FCB, along with @6666 and @Michael, are separated by just 2 points overall. With a maximum score of 7 available in the final round, it's almost mathematically impossible for anyone to come from outside the top four to claim the title.

I'm well behind on this again but here is confirmation of the final scores for this round. 9 points (6 correct picks + 3 bonus points) - @Storts 7 points (5 correct picks + 2 bonus points) - @Michael, @Lucas, @Stan 5 points (4 correct picks + 1 bonus point) - @Tommy 2 points (2 correct picks) - @6666, @Pyfish 1 point (1 correct pick) - @nudge, @Viva la FCB, @CaaC (John), @Rucksackfranzose 0 points - @RandoEFC, @Bluewolf, @...Dan, @Dan, @Redcanuck, @Rick I will get the French round started for next weekend. There are only 4 sets of fixtures left. If we're being honest, there's a very good chance we'll all manage to be eliminated in that time but if not, we'll decide that round with tie breakers in the last weekend. I'll get that started tomorrow.

I don't get to go to Goodison regularly but you can tell from Twitter 2-3 times a season that there are certain sets of fans who turn up and go full Tory with the feed the scousers shouts. From what I remember Luton were another unfortunately. Whichever one of them gets flushed this season, we'll only have Leicester fans back doing the same next season by the looks of it.

They signed 42 players since promotion and breached PSR by £35m on purpose and got a 4 point deduction and another team got a 6 point deduction for a breach half that size due to technicalities involving interest payments while building a stadium and thought there was an agenda against them. They sang "cheating bastards, you know what you are" when we went there earlier this season after our initial 10 point deduction and now they want in on the Premier League corrupt thing. Apparently spent all of today singing feed the Scousers too including when Beto was unconscious on the pitch receiving treatment. They were hard done by on those decisions today but my sympathy ends there. The statements they've come out with this season after their 4 point deduction and after today have been ridiculous and unbecoming. Wouldn't lose a wink of sleep if they went down.

Same reason why Chelsea made it to Wembley twice this season. Because no matter how poorly run your team is off the pitch, how awfully coordinated your recruitment is, how tactically inept your coaching team is and how complacent or fragile your players are mentally, if you're one of the only clubs in the competition that can invest £1bn in your playing squad then you'll still likely have players on the pitch with enough quality to overcome all of that more often than not.

Also I don't want to hear about any more fans of the breakaway six crying about other clubs being mean to them. Your clubs literally selected themselves to go off and make their own Super League because English football was below them. It's always going to be hilarious when you lose to one of the "peasant" teams or struggle to beat a team that's not even in the top flight of English football. Everyone else has to put up with the fact that they'll never be able to dream of seeing their club challenge for the title or become an elite club. I'm sure you can put up with people poking fun at you on the internet. Man Utd are one of the worst run clubs in the entire pyramid and yet you still get Champions League football and FA Cup finals, and if you get your shit together you could compete for titles again within a few years. Any of our clubs get run half as badly as Man Utd, you're looking at points deductions, administration, multiple relegations, you name it. The list of reasons for the rest of us to resent those clubs is basically endless.

I don't know what age group you're in but most posters here are around the early 30s sort of mark so most of us went to school with a number of Man Utd fans during Ferguson's era who had it way too good for way too long and had to put up with no end of gloating from them when they won everything and beat our teams because it was all they'd known and they thought it would last forever, so it will never not be funny when they get a(nother) comeuppance. And it is embarrassing I'm afraid mate. Man Utd could probably field almost a full eleven of players who individually cost more than Coventry's entire squad, bench and annual wage bill put together and they were a marginal offside decision away from blowing a 3-0 lead on 70 minutes against them in a cup semi final. You'd be loving it too if it was Man City or Liverpool.

Actually wins

Absolutely ridiculous from Man Utd. Plunging new depths on a regular basis for about 10 years now.

Honestly sounds like that mental owner they've got has got his hands on the official Twitter account and just gone rogue.

Are they talking about the VAR being a Luton fan for today's game or previously? Why would a Luton fan help Everton win? We were one point ahead of Forest with Luton still to go to. You could make a case that they'd rather Forest win or certainly see a draw.