RandoEFC

Correction...

Yeah he was at the Leicester game last Wednesday sat on the bench.

Tom Davies is back in training but because he was unregistered in January from the Premier League squad due to his long term injury he's unavailable to help the team in the final few games if fit. To make room for incoming Alli and Van de Beek makes sense but apparently Tosun is among those registered as well so .

So you've finally come around on the Townsend and Rondon thing?

It's not so much a Klopp burnout but a sheer mental burnout from winning almost every game of football for two years. There's no shortage of occasions for any team that puts together a run like that where they really have to dig deep and keep going back to the well to find a late winning goal or equaliser on a difficult day for them. People have posted stats on here plenty of times showing just how rare it is for any team to retain a title. Even Man City haven't done it so many times in the last decade when it feels almost as if Liverpool's title win is the only time City have been stopped (I know it isn't). It's even harder to just carry on as normal when winning a title was as big of a monkey off the back as it was for Liverpool doing it for the first time in 30 years. For that reason, last season was always on the cards for Liverpool although the dip was made a lot bigger by injuries and other circumstances. I don't think too many people would have suggested that the "Klopp way" of playing football would just get to a certain point, fall off a cliff, and then Liverpool would just be permanently below the standards set until he left. The bounce back was always going to come and as we said the other week in the City/Liverpool match thread, the depth and subs bench situation for Liverpool has changed markedly now. Even without Townsend and Rondon.

Yeah I mean that one is clearly named after the government though, not called "United Kingdom". The Ukraine one, at a glance at least, appears to claim to represent the actual country of Ukraine rather than just the government. I know it's got that flag on it that calls it a government affiliated account but I'd personally feel quite uncomfortable if there was a social media account called simply "United Kingdom" with a blue tick and a union jack profile picture that was controlled by the government of the day and their communications team. It looks like it isn't that irregular though.

Lad ruffled some serious feathers in his Jordan days.

Well I'm fucking glad the UK doesn't have one because we could do without Nadine Dorries getting access to it and putting out deranged shite under the blue ticked name of the UK.

So last night I ended down a bit of an MCU rabbit hole on YouTube. Ended up subscribing to Disney+ today to watch the last season of The Walking Dead as well as the "Phase 4" Marvel stuff. I was sort of thinking that after the Infinity War story ended that most of the stuff I've seen advertised following it looks kind of meh, apart from the Tom Holland Spiderman films which I've watched and still find decent. Anyway, I just watched Black Widow on Disney+ and maybe I was too knackered this evening to appreciate it properly but, yeah, meh. 4/10. I'm not overly enthused by the mini-series and stuff but I'll probably give them a go.

Do most countries have their own official Twitter account like Ukraine? And does it get run by the government or what?

Is he interested in buying this place as well? He can implement a character limit here too so @Spike can actually read people's posts.

Finish him for fuck's sake.

Bought some new mugs from a lad on Twitter with an Etsy shop.

This is very far over the top.

Yeah that's the one I tried to post . Vettel and Verstappen have taken some excellent wins in that car but as they've tended to dominate those races as it was the best car, they're not as fond memories. Germany 2019 which was won by Verstappen was probably the most fun of his wins as a neutral. Ricciardo got 6(?) wins for them in that era which was more dominated by Mercedes with Ferrari in 2nd so usually something interesting happened for his wins. See also Baku that time when Lewis and Seb hit the joint self destruct button behind the safety car .

Red Bull's first win came on this day in 2009. If you had to choose, what is your favourite win by a Red Bull driver? For me, he's a race burglar:

It was mental. The equivalent of having about a 40 point lead in today's money with two races left and not finishing the job. It's weird because of all of Hamilton's seasons with McLaren, his actual championship year was probably his worst performance for the team with the exception of 2011 where Button outscored him. 2007 was arguably his best and that was a comfortable title for him if he had had anyone other than Alonso for a team mate. The same goes the other way too probably for Fernando.

Looks like they're back at it.

@Rucksackfranzose enters the Hall of Fame for a second time with his 2021-22 La Liga win. The 9 picks required to bag this victory falls one short of the record for a league edition.

Standings after four rounds in the 2021-22 season: @Bluewolf retains the overall lead thanks to his consistent point-scoring throughout the season, but @Michael's strong run to joint 2nd in the La Liga round closes the gap to just 1 point. @Storts loses some ground but remains in touch with the top of the standings while @DeadLinesman and @Lucas retain an outside chance of mounting a title challenge. @Rucksackfranzose and @Dan's strong scores in the latest round sees them move from the lower reaches of the table into the top half.

Nobody wants the #1 ranking on the Men's side at the moment.

I thought this might be appreciated here.

What the actual fuck!?

A bit of education too for those outside the UK who look quite rightly and go what the fuck is wrong with them: These are the two best-selling newspapers over here. The Daily Mail going with the line "there's a war on, pwease leave Bowis awone" as if the country who changed Prime Minister during the Second World War in which they were actually physically engaged couldn't change Prime Minister now because of a war that we aren't actually fighting in. Nobody tell them what's going on in France this month. The Sun simply concocts an alternate reality that can be reported as fact to people who haven't been following the story inside out (which is most people at this point because it's rumbled on for many months). Having a media so heavily biased towards one major party and political ideology really can be just as effective sometimes as the defacto state-sanctioned media they have in countries that are considered not to even have democracies. On the bright side, we have at least SOME balance from the BBC, ITV and Sky News who generally at least report fact-based news despite their imperfections and a couple of non-Tory rags in the Mirror and Guardian but they're fighting a losing battle.

I'm very much tired of this, but the facts are that the Prime Minister broke laws he made, lied about it (including to Parliament) and then when he was caught out, claimed that he didn't know he'd broken the laws he'd made and spoken at length about on live television on an almost daily basis. Either he's genuinely an absolute moron and didn't realise that he was breaking those rules or he's just a liar. The current line of defence is "now is not the time because of Ukraine" but either of those two conclusions about a Prime Minister are not desirable during times requiring serious political leadership. With these facts in mind, whether Boris Johnson is allowed to lead the Conservatives into the next election will tell us a lot about where their party stands now, and whether a Prime Minister that has committed the offences I've described, which really are all unprecedented and cardinal sins in the UK's parliamentary democracy, will tell us a lot about the standards of this country. This term between elections has really shown how much you're playing politics on easy mode if you lead the Tory party, and this phenomenon is on steroids with Johnson. I'm not one of those people who still bums Corbyn and has to go "told you so, should have voted for Corbyn" every time Johnson has one of his calamities, but he's the most recent example of a non-Tory candidate for Prime Minister and he took more criticism for what he *might* do in Number 10 than Boris Johnson has for his dreadful and indecisive premiership. We're almost numb to it now but that's because the media are so sympathetic to him. The late lockdowns, unclear messaging, PPE mess that his government presided over for a year and a half. All you have to do to get out of a political crisis like this is one thing and in his case it was the vaccine program which should be credited to that woman actually did the procurement (I forget her name) and the NHS but somehow was used to paint Johnson's pandemic management as a success. But, you know... "it was a tough time... he did his best... at least commie Corbyn wasn't the Prime Minister!" Same with everything that has come to pass since. The cost of living crisis, party gate revelations, the Owen Patterson sleaze scandal. All forgotten because we sent weapons that we can easily spare to Ukraine and "Boris" got over there for a photo opportunity this weekend which apparently is tangible proof that he's a great leader. Like I said, politics on easy mode. One reason for positivity is that even if he rides out the rest of this scandal, permanent net damage has been done to his approval ratings and his party's in a way that they didn't suffer through the pandemic/vaccine era. A lot can happen in the election campaign but he doesn't start it with a good baseline. Whatever the media and Tory MPs say, the public don't think that Ukraine leadership makes up for PartyGate like the vaccine did for the poor decision making in the pandemic. Also, it's Boris Johnson and he will get himself into another couple of scandals between now and the next election. As for Sunak, his ambitions for becoming Prime Minister are probably shot now. These tax irregularities and this fine have accelerated his undoing but it started with the cost of living crisis which his conventional austere policies have no answer for. This does two things. 1) he will potentially resign as Chancellor before the next election and not stand for re-election in his constituency and 2) it saves Johnson's backside for the moment because it gets rid of one of the candidates that Tory MPs may back as an alternative in order to remove him from the big seat. The Tories are kind of fucked in the medium to long run though. Johnson's brand has been permanently damaged and Sunak was probably the only one with the public standing to boost their chances going into the next election. The alternatives now are very much lacking, partially because Johnson purged so much talent from the party before Brexit.