RandoEFC

@Lucas enters the Hall of Fame for a 4th time following his victory in the Serie A 2022-23 round.

@nudge extends her lead to a commanding one at the top after a third consecutive top-two finish in Round Three, while her previous closest rivals, @Dan and @Michael, failed to score, leaving our leader with almost twice as many points as even her closest competitor.

Danjuma deal is all signed at least. Not seen much of him but we're desperate for forward reinforcements. Seems to be an issue with Gordon as well now. Being linked with Newcastle again and apparently "didn't want to travel" to the West Ham game (unconfirmed). But his attitude has been poor this season and his performances have stunk the place out. Gladly see the back of him. The problem is that he'll go somewhere else where the environment actually exists to enable players to succeed and he'll do well. It's not a coincidence that so many promising young players have just stagnated at Everton and either stuck around and been a part of the decline or gone elsewhere and improved. Holgate, Godfrey, Davies, Gordon, Lookman, Kean. You can't develop players like this when you've had 7 managers in 9 years or whatever it is, without a consistent style of coaching and tactical approach between them.

Doucoure apparently not training with the first team following a dressing room bust-up. Presumably with Lampard? So it probably doesn't matter. Just another issue to throw on the pile. He's been absolute shite for about 18 months though. I won't lose any sleep about him not featuring in the first team as a result but he's sitting on a mad weekly wage while offering the club nothing like so many others.

Dyche does seem an obvious choice but I did see a rumour from a source I consider reliable (can't remember which one) that he's not being considered. It's really hard to see how any manager can come into this skip-fire and hope to succeed. Lampard obviously looks a pretty poor manager now with his combined record over the three spells he's had with different clubs, but the foundations and structure aren't there for any manager to realistically have a flyer with Everton. The next manager will be our 8th since Moshiri took over, not counting caretakers. How many times can it be the manager's fault? At best, the people picking the shite managers shouldn't be picking them anymore. More realistically, there's so much behind the scenes and running through the club that isn't set up for success that there's a limit to how much any new coach could achieve at the club, and it isn't a high ceiling. I at least saw that Thelwell the DoF will be doing the shortlisting this time. He's probably shite because he was employed by Moshiri and this board, but at least he hasn't been associated with the last decade of failure and decline, so maybe he'll actually make a decent call. But if he does then Moshiri will probably override it and do something mental and stupid instead.

How the fuck haven't they changed the manager yet? Gross, gross negligence.

35 years old with a metal hip I have to say I'd have stopped being arsed to do this if I ever could . That was the longest match of his whole career at just under 6 hours.

They already can't recruit enough maths teachers and haven't been able to for years. When I trained almost a decade ago now, I took over one class in a placement school who had a Maths teacher once, a Music teacher twice and a Geography teacher once each week for their four lessons. If there's a problem with the quality of Maths or general education in this country then maybe start there? I'm seeing a lot on social media about people leaving school not knowing how to do their taxes. Fine, then reform the Maths GCSE. I'd be all for that if it was done by someone serious and talented and not a random politician who hasn't set foot in a classroom for 20 years and has been an Education minister for six months. We could gear the Maths qualification in the UK a bit further away from some of the geometry and abstract algebra stuff that's still taught and further towards financial management, percentages, proportional reasoning and understanding data. But these are real solutions from someone with expertise so there's no room for it in British politics.

They aren't deluded. They just aren't educated about the political reality. Because there are no mechanisms in the UK for good information to be delivered into the public sphere. Politicians have every incentive to lie to suit their own needs with no significant consequences, the majority of the privately-owned media is utterly corrupt and the BBC has been cowed so badly by the last few years of Tory government that they won't relay accurate information about anything political in their programming for fear of getting hammered on their impartiality rules. Most people still don't have the first idea that you can't just "reverse Brexit" and you can't expect them to because, unless they've gone looking for the information themselves or happen to have acquired some relevant knowledge through their education, nobody's ever told them.

What I was talking about in my last post about it not being as simple as 'rejoin' or 'stay out' and all the ifs, buts and maybes.

The EU would indeed still be better off with Britain as a member. However they can't just let us back in on the same terms with the same power of veto and exemption from the Euro and all the other perks we used to have. Otherwise they'd be encouraging other members to just jump out on a whim for a few years knowing they can change their mind and come back without having lost anything. We're still a long way off this conversation though. Labour will probably win the next election and govern until 2029. I don't think Keir Starmer will campaign on rejoining unless he's completed two terms to 2033-34. You won't see a Conservative leader stand on a platform to rejoin the EU and I don't think you’ll see it from a Labour leader until they've either been booted out and seek reelection with a new leader, or the Tories shift to a much more moderate pro-single market type position. Politically, it's too difficult for either party to shift to a pro-EU position and hold together a coalition for a majority. The other factor I can think of is if the SNP suddenly dive bomb in Scotland and open up a swathe of new seats in Parliament for Labour. You never know though. These things can change quickly and have done in recent years. The polling shows a hypothetical rejoin referendum has support in the region of 57/43 which is pretty large, but it's not reliable until the specifics of what rejoining would look like are known.

I don't think these things really play into it. He's always made respectful comments about Everton in that way where managers try to express an interest without saying it out loud. Benitez came after all...

Lampard's record is actually awful for a modern Everton manager. Made to look less awful because his predecessor had a similar record. I wouldn't want us to sack him though for another loose cannon like Martinez or someone with no Premier League experience. I feel like you go with a Sean Dyche type where you know there's a glass ceiling to what you can achieve but at least you know more or less what you're getting. I'd trust Dyche to get 14th-16th with what we've got in the squad. It's not great though is it. Bottom line is now though that Lampard's position has to be open to review. It's not good enough so far this season.

@Viva la FCB enters the Hall of Fame once again, completing an undefeated hat-trick of victories in major tournament editions of Last Man Standing (World Cup 2018, Euro 2021 and World Cup 2022). Quite an incredible feat! Congratulations once again to @Viva la FCB!

The Hamilton-Russell dynamic is certainly going to be interesting. You can't sniff at the fact that George beat Lewis in the standings and won the team's only race of the season. However, Hamilton actually out-performed Russell for most of the season. Dropped a lot of points after a sloppy start but then generally had the better of him for most of the year. By that point, though, the car was miles clear of the midfield and Lewis was only scratching back a few points over George for finishing a place or two above him in the top six. It's going to be difficult for them if they're in a championship fight with Red Bull, for example. Perez simply won't take points off Max on a regular basis but Lewis and George will. I think Lewis tones down his mistakes and finds more consistency when he has a championship-contending car and therefore something to lose from going all out for a win/podium. He would beat George over the course of the year in these circumstances but not every weekend, and those weekends could cost him a title against Max. Depends what the competitive order looks like though. Mercedes may have improved in the back end of the season and nicked a win, but as things stand, they still have a long, long way to go to catch Red Bull for next year.

Is there anywhere the rule changes are detailed for next season? I don't think I know of a single one. Usually the competitive order won't change much if there are barely any rule changes. Unless there's a team who came across an entirely new concept for their car during 2022 and need months to put it into practice. Most teams will go for evolution rather than revolution with their cars in these circumstances so Max and Red Bull will be clear favourites for next year as well.

Here are the standings for this season with two rounds completed. With victory in the first round and a healthy runner-up spot in Round Two, @nudge has a solid six-point lead at the top of the standings. @Dan is her closest competitor with a pair of top three finishes, but nobody else has more than half as many points as our leader.

After years of honest competition and frustration, @Dan finally enters the Hall of Fame with his win in the Bundesliga round!

Don't know whether to find these little Twitter spats funny or boring.

Enjoyed the finale as well. The middle of the season was a bit weird with all the time jumps and cast changes but worth it in the end for the development of those characters and their relationships.

Disappointing first PMQs performance from Sunak who started off by saying he looks forward to having robust but serious exchanges at the despatch box before proceeding to play a Boris Johnson tribute act, answering questions about Suella Braverman's reappointment to the home office less than a week after she resigned for breaking the ministerial code and fiscal policy with jibes about Brexit, Corbyn, North London lawyers and made up numbers of new police on the streets. Cue the usual Daily Mail and Spectator columnists dutifully lining up to claim he "wiped the floor" with Starmer on Twitter. One positive, at least he appeared to commit to keeping the ban on fracking which Truss was trying to repeal.

Behold the Education Secretary merry go round. We've had five in just over a year since Gavin Williamson and you can search his name up earlier in this thread if you want an insight into his track record as the last one who lasted a year. The ministries of health, education, environment, etc., reduced to bargaining chips by each leader of the Conservative party since (at least) Johnson to secure their own job security with any thought of these key policy areas being managed properly treated as secondary at best. Rory Stewart, who I disagree with politically but is an honest broker of opinion and a reasonable critical thinker, rates Gillian Keegan highly so maybe we'll see something a bit better from her. The last three I genuinely couldn't even have named as education ministers after Zahawi.

Hopefully he's only as shit as May or Cameron, I dare not hope for better than that realistically. It's actually good for Labour if he does an alright job of vaguely stabilising things. Might lead to a smaller victory for them at the next election but if they took over from Truss or Johnson they might win a bigger landslide but the mess they'd be taking over would possibly kill them within the first term in office.

So Johnson pulls out of the race despite never formally announcing his standing for leader, but while claiming he had 102 nominations, despite barely half of that number having gone public, while also claiming that it was Sunak and Mordaunt who refused to do a deal with him to unify the party, after having himself done more than anyone to shape the Tory party into the disorganised mess that we have to tolerate for a "government" until the next election. He has got to be one of the most odious cunts in the history of public life. Jetting back in from his holiday that he was for some reason taking while parliament was sitting and not during one of the ~20 weeks of recess that happen each year, unironically claiming that no I have really learned my lesson this time and I'm ready to take the job seriously. His loudest cheerleaders were briefing this morning something along the lines of "Boris 2.0 is ready to take it seriously this time. He even had his shirt tucked in when he addressed MPs this morning." Seriously, go and look it up. That's what he and his supporters think qualifies as evidence for being a good Prime Minister. At least we don't have to tolerate him again. Sunak is a totally out of touch, plastic, right wing politician so we're still fucked but at least he should be competent enough at running things to slow down the news cycles again and not make anyone associated with the UK feel quite so actively embarrassed on a daily basis. The Tories still need to go extinct at the next election. Absolutely horrific what they've been allowed to do to this country.