RandoEFC

This is what gets lost in the edgy "Congrats to Frank Lampard for taking Everton from 16th to 16th this season" hot takes. We might not have been in the relegation zone but the club was in a death spiral and the rut of confidence was worse than anything I've seen before at Everton. We would have finished 18th or 19th if we'd carried on that trajectory. Not using it as an excuse to have another dig at Benitez but his man management style could not have been a worse fit for the players in our squad. Still an absolutely mental appointment by Moshiri and another reason why we have to hope this takeover talk goes somewhere.

It's disappointing that Labour aren't excelling quite enough to have a great chance of a majority, although I do think they could bag a slim one at this rate. Starmer's strategy of moderate rhetoric and picking his moment has worked quite well at times but it's also seen him miss a number of open goals that have left a lot of people uncertain about him. I've personally been disappointed in how spineless he's been over the RMT strikes. In a sense, maybe he's stopped the Tory/Mail/Murdoch axis from calling him a Marxist but at some point you have to put principle ahead of the risk averse approach that has served him to an extent and you still make a strategic net gain. The good thing about Starmer electorally is that soft Tories that won't vote Labour but would consider the Lib Dems will actually switch now because he doesn't scare them as much as Corbyn. Basically all of the minor opposition parties would rather prop up a Labour government than a Conservative one at this point so all it really takes is the Tories to lose their majority to put Starmer in Downing Street, provided that he doesn't end up having to resign over this silly Durham thing. It could be perfect timing for Labour actually if they added a more inspiring leader to the current picture on top of the Tory death spiral. I'm still hoping Labour have some decent policies held back for the next general election campaign but I'm not expecting much. Starmer is so paranoid about being associated with Corbyn in any way that he's dropped most of the policies that he was going to keep from that era which I'm really not sure about because some of them were broadly quite popular. I also don't know whether Labour have any ideas on how to change the conversation on Brexit and create the political breathing space to stop or undo some of its most damaging aspects. Returning to the single market if possible and re-establishing free movement are no-brainers. Still, even an underwhelming and disappointing Labour government would be a huge improvement on what we've got at the moment.

Lol that's an absolute spit roast. Boris is such a winner and electoral asset.

What British empire? We get a special treat today as the Tories get an absolute hammering by Labour in Wakefield and probably also lose in Tiverton to the Lib Dems, breaking the record for the biggest majority lost between a general election and a by election. World beating Boris in action again. Gets things done.

Rookie numbers from Max.

I thought your claim was that Labour MPs colluded with authorities to cover up these crimes. This article describes a Labour MP who tried their hardest to sort it out, not cover it up.

Neither of those articles mention anything about Labour MPs conspiring with police to cover it up.

So in short, no evidence at all. You'll spout it anyway though.

Any evidence to back this up?

Fucking fucking hell.

Alright so Bush winning an election against Gore because more people voted for him was more of a coup than an army of gun-toting pro-Trump extremists breaking into the government buildings to protest against the fact that more people voted for Biden than him. There really is no position on American politics that a decent amount of people can't convince themselves is sensible. The post-truth era.

The Home Office cancels the first flight of deportations to Rwanda because the ECHR managed to make enough of a case against every individual deportation leaving the flight empty. It isn't news that this is a horrible, tinpot government who try to appeal to their base by being cruel to vulnerable asylum seekers but it's also another example of their embarrassing incompetence that they just tried to "strong man" this out after being warned it was an illegal scheme and now they've just got egg on their face.

Had a rough 24 hours but gradually getting better now. Honestly I was so convinced that Covid was so mild now after three jabs and I felt so ill overnight I thought nah this isn't Covid. It's still no joke!

Finally got it. Thought I was fundamentally immune .

So Moshiri is open to offers but he wants £550m whereas Kenyon's consortium have offered £400-450m and a separate American consortium have offered £350m.

Oh okay.

I think that was true for a couple of weeks by about 0.05ppg but not by the end. I might be wrong. I don't particularly care anymore. Rafa probably wouldn't have got us relegated either... maybe, it was more the fact that he was setting fire to any structure the club had actually managed to sustain through the Moshiri years that made it urgent business to get rid of him. Anyway, the betting industry is bad, definitely. EGaming is a major industry on the Isle of Man and I have a couple of friends who work in the sector. One of them works for a company who provide one of those massive gym/leisure areas in the building with games consoles lying around they can use as much as they want and said "they give us those perks to try and stop us from thinking too much about how we're getting paid to design games that trick people with gambling addictions to give us more of their money". I don't blame the workers on the ground so much because you've got to earn a living, but man it's unsavoury when you lay it out like that. I know most big money advertisers in football and other sports are generally less than reputable but sponsorship deals make up a smaller percentage of revenue than they used to thanks to broadcast deals. One of our recent deals was £12m for a year and I just thought, it simply isn't that much to a football club in the Premier League. Make a statement and put the club charity on the shirt. It'll never happen though even if the club hadn't fucked themselves into a dreadful financial position turning it into a simple case of selling to the highest bidder. We'd only go and spend that £12m on someone shite anyway. That Rudd is still a wrong 'un though. Nothing stopping her and other journalists writing a thoughtful piece on the unhealthy relationship between gambling sponsorship and football but she's chosen to have a pop at an individual club instead because it'll probably get more clicks but then I suppose that's just her making a living too.

I know nothing about them to be honest, and I'm not really that arsed. Any gambling firms are too scummy as far as I'm concerned. If it were down to me we'd have Everton on the Community on the front of our shirt as I've said for years. And if I wasn't being impartial, that would be one thing as a random nobody on a football forum, and something else if I was claiming to be a professional football writer for a national newspaper. She has form for it as well. Her article titled "It was deluded to think that dreamer Frank Lampard would drag Everton out of the mire." where she argued that expecting him to get the better of arch-pragmatists Sean Dyche and Roy Hodgson in a relegation battle was, well, "deluded", has aged particularly well given where Burnley and Watford ended the season. The fact that she's a Liverpool fan isn't even the main thing but when someone writes biased and or clickbait shite about one team on a regular basis and they happen to support their main rivals it's going to get mentioned. But I'll still listen to you mate. With gems like "I think Rafa will actually be the best manager Everton have had in my lifetime and I can see him winning them a trophy", I'd never want Liverpool fans to stop commenting on Everton entirely.

Alyson Rudd (Liverpool supporter) casually writing in a national newspaper bashing Everton for taking a new shirt sponsor from the gambling industry. Can't find any past articles from her on any of the nine Premier League teams that carried betting sponsors on their shirts last season. As I've said, I disagree with us having a sponsor from this industry especially so soon after the Sport Pesa deal and the trouble they got into a couple of years ago. But to single Everton out for this and actually using the amount of mental health charity work the club does as a reason to try and spin it as even worse for us to do so? If you're working for The Times or any national and reputable news sources as a "football writer" you could at least try to keep up some pretence at impartiality.

Dickheads. Surprised that never crossed my radar on social media to be honest given how low the bar has got lately for justifying a pop at our fans. I've not been around Liverpool so I might he wrong but I do think things will settle down. That was probably the most emotionally heightened part of the season for our fans which isn't an excuse for what you've described but there's always nobheads around who can barely behave at the best of times so stress like that is going to tip them over. (I'm sure it wasn't one sided though either) It's also why they tend to prefer the Saturday 12:30 or Sunday 14:00 kick off times for the derby and similar fixtures. Having it at Saturday 17:30 or Sunday 16:30 like this one is asking for trouble. It's been bad on social media admittedly. The loudest and most biased trolls and wind up merchants on both sides have been worse than ever this season and while the vast majority would never bother really instigating, it's hard not to respond to the shit said by the other side and then someone else says something that sets off someone else and it just escalates. This isn't unique to the Merseyside rivalry either. Hopefully it doesn't spill over but it is a genuine fear that as the conduct on social media gets worse and worse, more people are going to go to football matches convinced they genuinely hate people because they wear a different football shirt to them. All very silly really.

The Champions League final?

I think everyone has just got a little sensitive lately on both sides. We've had half a season of getting laughed at over a genuine existential crisis for the club (not by all of you lot but still a plentiful proportion of them) and so you've ended up getting a lot more back than usual over losing out on the league and Champions League at the end. There ended up being a lot more overly antagonistic and emotional vitriol thrown around by both sides. It'll settle down over the summer and the first derby still isn't usually until about November. I think it's a far cry to suggest anything like that would seriously happen.

Bizarre player. Either brilliant or terrible but on a club by club basis rather than a game by game one.

Based on what?

Painful reading.