RandoEFC

Makes my skin physically crawl.

excellent stuff.

Using hyperbole and pretending that people are asking for Mbappe and Sancho and spending hundreds of millions when literally nobody is even close to saying that only serves to undermine your own argument and is why you end up calling each other spoilt brats or dickheads. There's a fair debate to be had from both sides so I don't see why you have to make out that expecting just a couple of signings to add depth is in any way equivalent to playing Football Manager or FIFA with unlimited money switched on. It's basic stuff. Even if you already have the best team in the world, all of them are another year older and it's normal for clubs to refresh the squad because any team can always improve. If you stand still while everyone else improves their squad then eventually they overtake you. If the finances don't work then fair enough, make that point without pretending that the other person is saying something they aren't. Bad luck to Liverpool for finally fighting their way back to the top at a time where the global pandemic is messing with the finances of clubs who are still trying to live within their means. Not everyone can do a Man Utd and be shite for far too long then get back to the pinnacle just in time to be the biggest benefactors of huge swathes of money suddenly being poured into the sport. I think the concerns raised about Origi are fair enough. Unless he can play like prime Drogba against teams other than Everton and Barcelona then you should be looking to bring in a fee for him and put that towards another option in the front line. Minamino needs time to settle in and work with the team. Klopp has made loads of signings that have taken 12 or even 18 months to come into their own then been absolutely quality. He might well be the latest one of those. Then again, he's come from the Austrian league so it's not like he has a proven track record of stepping into the first team of a team competing at the highest level. I'm a bit fuzzy on the timelines but Lovren and Lallana both left this summer didn't they? Fair enough if you've got young players who are as good as those but it's not the same as having someone experienced to step in who is a known quantity. Thiago would clearly be a quality signing but depth in midfield isn't really an issue for Liverpool with Henderson, Fabinho, Milner, Wijnaldum, Chamberlain, Jones in there already. He is a different type of player though and you could free up Fabinho as an emergency centre back if you got him in. You can't rest on your laurels. Key injuries kill you if they come at the wrong time. You got knocked out of the Champions League last season because Alisson was injured and your second choice goalkeeper wasn't up to standard at that level. Comparisons to other teams aren't always helpful and yeah, backup goalkeeper is always one of the trickiest positions in the squad to get right, but if you had a Sergio Romero or a Willy Caballero instead of Adrian, you could have stayed in contention for another European Cup that night. It could come at any time with Van Dijk or Salah or Mane if you don't have the right cover. You don't have to be a spoilt FIFA armchair fan or think you could do a better job than Jurgen Klopp to point that out. I think it's absolutely fair enough based on what the team has achieved in the last two seasons to not be worried, but there are rational arguments to support you if you reckon that Liverpool haven't done enough to improve the squad this window. The only thing I disagree with is acting as if people who take the opposite stance to you are being ridiculous. Not every debate has to have a clear consensus. Sadly, because it's the internet, it's easy to forget that.

Pretty sure they just want a bit more depth in one or two key positions. There is a middle ground between buying nobody and spending £400m.

They've always been like this to be fair . This is why I was talking about Liverpool being an interesting case to keep an eye on this season. These guys all make very valid points on both sides of the argument. We'll find out this season if this Liverpool side has achieved what they have with quite mediocre strength in depth primarily because of that desperate hunger to get the Premier League sized monkey off their back, or is it still feasible, against all logic and reason in this day and age, to get to the top of the tree and stay there with the right coaching and conditioning allowing a team of 13-14 genuine regulars instead of a Man City-style bench of £50m squad players? Getting to the top in modern football with a squad structured like Liverpool's seemed impossible, it wasn't. Staying there seems even more unlikely. If they can do it, they'll be a historical team not just because of the records and the trophy count but because you could see other teams change their philosophy and use them as a template, it could change the established approach towards building an elite football team to compete on all fronts. I'm genuinely fascinated, not as an Everton fan but as a football observer, to see how they respond to winning the league, not least because whichever way it goes, this thread's going to be full of some pretty fucking big "I told you so"s.

Hope Thiem wins.

Surprising as I thought he was one of those characters that would totally move on from football and pursue his other interests after retiring.

I mean, I can see both points of view. You've established yourselves as the team to beat, now is the time to make it into a real dynasty again like Man Utd did under Ferguson, rather than one exceptional Liverpool side that slowly fades with age and players moving on to new challenges. However, there are practicalities and if the money isn't there, it isn't there. You could also argue that players like Curtis Jones and Neco Williams save you from spending money on new players in those positions. I still think it's easy top two for Liverpool this season. I can't see Chelsea, Man Utd or Arsenal catching you. You could easily win the league again if you get the momentum up. I think a back to their best Man City could pip you to the post but there's no guarantee that's what they'll be. They haven't made wholesale improvements to their own options and I really don't think Ake is the man to fill that Kompany-shaped void in the defence and the dressing room. Transfer window remains open though.

Liverpool are going to be a really interesting case this season. You started to see elements of burnout just before and certainly after the lockdown kicked in last season. If you look at their last three seasons in context it's been an absolute Herculean effort winning the Champions League and the Premier League, made into an even greater emotional and psychological victory given that in both cases, they'd come so close the year before. Having banished the Godzilla of a monkey on their back by finally winning the first title in decades, it would be totally understandable for this group of players to subconsciously breathe that sigh of relief. It's not going to be easy for them to maintain the unprecedented level of intensity in every single game that's brought them this far because they've climbed the highest mountain now. At the same time, you'd be an idiot to bet against them coming back right at that top level. I do think they could do with some fresh faces though, as good as this team has been.

Another spike in cases in at least England and France isn't good news. Luckily, the new cases are predominantly under 40s and very few of them in the vulnerable age groups. 30 more deaths were confirmed today in England which is the highest in several weeks. What do you do though?

Oh come on, I'm no great lover of Djokovic but that was clearly not intentional or particularly dangerous.

Can someone pin this topic to the top for me please? @Stan @nudge @Batard

My apologies folks, I properly ended up ghosting this. I thought I'd come back and clarified that we were calling it quits there as the only real option for a final round was to go back to a league we'd already done or use the MLS. Therefore, the final table is as above and @Lucas claims the championship this year ahead of @Eco and @nudge. Well done to the top three!

I wondered what it would take for people to start admitting they were wrong and it turns out all you had to do is make it too late for them to change their minds. 55.2% of people in this poll in the UK would now prefer to stay in the EU with only 34.9% maintaining that they'd still go out and vote to Leave. Well done everyone.

I do think that idiots saying early on that it was a hoax and just the flu and didn't want the economy shut down have now inadvertently caused exactly what they wanted to avoid because by introducing a "debate" over the realities of this virus the hyperbole pretty much became necessary to make sure people got the point about staying at home and social distancing and so on. You can't pursue a zero-covid strategy in the UK like you can in New Zealand or the Isle of Man. There are too many people around who want to achieve a zero risk approach to things like schools reopening, border controls, etc. You can't achieve this. You have to balance the economy and public health because without a population that's protected from the virus the economy dies and without a functioning economy, people start becoming destitute and dying anyway, and how do you fund the NHS. The UK have fucked this up really badly and it all stems from locking down too late. By waiting until the virus was more rampant before submitting to the lockdown philosophy, not only did more people die, but it led to a higher peak in the number of cases, which means a longer lockdown and more economic damage. Now so many people are really struggling to get out of the killer virus mindset. Nobody is doubting the danger of this virus but people are absolutely convinced that it's more infectious than it really is, more dangerous than it really is and that it's killed more people than it actually has.

I have all the time in the world for this lad's attitude ever since his major injury. We need to get shot of him because he isn't the player he was and he's on inflated wages but 10/10 for the commitment he's shown towards getting back near the team. Desperate to see him gone but I think he'll leave with all the well wishes in the world from our fans. At least he should.

Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland had announced the same already.

Good. This is going to cause havoc with university places unfortunately but that's less of a problem than students getting life changing adjustments to their A level grades.

We just had to do our best but we obviously used as much data as possible. The availability of mocks and other objective data varied depending on circumstances but no matter how many mocks you do, you have to use a hefty dose of your own judgement to try and get the order right because different kids take the mocks more or less seriously. It's one thing ranking the kids in your own class but then the heads of each subject have to combine each of those classes into one big list having not taught most of the kids themselves. The whole thing was a nightmare for them. Its turned out almost pointless assigning them grades now anyway. This algorithm has decided how many As, Bs, Cs each school is allowed so we might as well have just ranked the kids and sent the list in without the grades.

Not randomised, we were asked to rank the kids within each grade so if they decided we needed to demote a B grader to a C grade, it's the one we put at the bottom of the B grade list. It's still unfair though. I had two kids in my class who were capable of a B grade, I don't think it's fair on us or them that we had to decide which one was more likely to get it when they both could have gone either way had they actually sat the exam. In fact, this argument pretty much applies to the whole concept of insisting that the average grades can't be more than a few percentage points outside of the usual standard. A one-off exam isn't exactly a fair way of determining who is the better of the two either but at least in that scenario it's determined by what they've actually done themselves rather than our best guess as a school and the arbitrary line drawn by their algorithm. When I sat my A levels ten years back I already knew what grades I was getting before I sat my summer exams because the courses were modular and I'd already completed two thirds of the assessment for each subject. Sure would be handy at a time like this but Gove and Cummings decided it should all come down to one exam period at the end of Year 13 when they were running the Department of Education.

I posted about it in the UK politics thread if you're interested in a teacher's thoughts. Unfortunately going off the school's average results over the last 5 years or so is the best of a bad bunch in terms of fairness. It doesn't work well for newer schools or schools that are clearly on an upward trajectory, but realistically speaking, if you want to predict a cohort's rough outcomes, the best indicator is the school they attended in about 75% of cases. Sad but true. If they had taken it school by school and aimed for the same average grade as the school's last five years then it would work out fairly in most cases. Not entirely fairly but as much as possible. However they seem to have used an over complicated algorithm which is apparently 150 pages long and of course it's top secret so it's hard to really trust it. You don't need that many variables to create an algorithm that fits in most cases. A simple method like I've described works for the vast majority of schools and colleges then you deal with the clear exceptions on a case by case basis. Applying a single algorithm to every single centre just isn't going to work. The experience we had as a school is confusing. We had 10 A level maths students in this year's leavers. They were below the standard that we usually get on average so we put in credible grades for them in good faith and if they'd have been given what we put then it still would have been a worse set of results than a normal year for us. Still four of them got put down by a grade and we're not given any information as to why. It can't have been because they were over inflated for our historical results because they weren't and it wasn't linked to the AS grades they achieved in Year 12. It's a real mess and the way they've changed the appeal system at the last minute and publicly said you can use a mock exam result as your grade if it's higher without specifying how secure those mocks need to be hasn't helped. Some mocks are done as a full mock exam in the exam hall with outside invigilators. Other "mocks" are done over the course of two lessons on two separate days which obviously isn't secure because they can go away and swap notes between those two lessons. Anyway, I've ranted enough about this today so if you want more you'll find it in the UK politics thread.

This has been raised in a couple of circles today. They could have hoovered up the really egregious errors which applies to a minority of kids but is making all of the headlines and retweets now.

I don't know the exact distributions, it could be what you said as a lot of people seem to have had multiple grades nerfed. The idea behind what they have tried to do was possibly the best way but why they have had to make a top secret 150 page algorithm is beyond me. I'm no expert on university admissions but it looks like the teacher assessed grades weren't taking the piss. It's not like schools have tried to take advantage by handing out full classes of As as 96% of them have either stayed the same or gone down by one. With the number of students deferring and the likelihood of lectures being delivered remotely at many universities over the next year, it seems to me that the lesser of two evils would have been to let the results stand and encourage the universities to make a bit more room. It's not like you'll have top universities getting overrun with students who aren't in their league because the applications were done way before any of this was an issue and you wouldn't have kids destined for a B and two Cs getting conditional offers from Oxbridge. Yes it's a bit unfair on someone in five years time who goes up against a 2020 A level candidate who has inflated grades and they lose out on a job as a result but (correct me if I'm wrong) I really don't think specific A Level grades take precedence over a degree and or an application letter and interview in most recruitment processes. I don't know, I'm not going to pretend it's simple but I can't look at this government and even begin to convince myself that they'll make a genuine effort to help the disadvantaged kids that have lost out today if it costs them even a milligram of political capital and we've seen the same thing multiple times throughout the pandemic.

No I've just seen that and it's messed up as fuck. They're complaining that the results would have been a record high by 14% if they'd let all the teacher grades stand. Well boo fucking hoo. The grades are higher because we've put in what those students are capable of and it isn't the place of me, my headteacher, the exam board or the government to decide which 14% of those kids wouldn't have got that actual result in the exam because that's usually around how many don't hit maximum performance on the day. 14% really isn't that bad. I know it might cause some complications with universities being oversubscribed but theres also a much higher proportion than normal that are understandably deferring because they don't want to have to do their freshers year in the midst of social distancing and possibly video lectures when they're paying £9000 a year for it. They're acting like it would be the worst thing ever for the results to be higher than usual. I get that it would mean some kids (a minority) this year get a better grade than they would have which arguably gives them an undeserved advantage over kids who sat their real exams in other years. I think if you can't give them the benefit of the doubt this year and sacrifice a little bit of the integrity of the exam grading system due to exceptional circumstances, then you need to have a rethink about your priorities.

And today I'm absolutely disgusted at the handling of the A level results. I'm on my phone so I might have more of a rant later but as a teacher I have no idea how some of the grades had been determined. We had a lesser achieving group go through this year so what we predicted them is slightly lower than what we get as a school in a normal year. 40% of them knocked down by a grade, one of them down to a U and another one costing him his place at his preferred university. Hopefully he gets in on appeal but still. It's a good job we've got Nick Gibb, who I'd never heard of until this week when he graded the government handling of this factor of the crisis as an A- to sort this out. Oh and Gavin Williamson, the former fireplace salesman who got sacked from government 18 months ago for leaking stories to the press, the man who took two months of insisting that primary schools had to full reopen without lifting the 15 per class rule which would have meant doubling the number of classrooms and teachers available nationwide in the middle of the pandemic while his pals in number ten got on the phone to their media stooges and told them to start bashing teaching unions so the government could save face. Yeah, this guy that obviously wasn't taught the definition of irony in school said this morning that he didn't want A Level grades to be inflated above the usual standard in case these students end up in jobs off the back of those results that they're not really qualified for. Best look a bit closer to home mate. Fuck these absolutely shambolic cunts. Our 18 year old maths students would form a better cabinet than this lot. Absolute incompetent morons.