RandoEFC

F1TV isn't licensed in the UK . I have been watching some of the season reviews though.

They should have like a streamlined mini-Championship in the off-season for rookies only or something.

When does Drive to Survive come out? Because I know it's a crock of shit but I miss F1.

Benitez gone apparently. Good job we didn't just sell James Rodriguez and Lucas Digne for him, or sack the Director of Football, medical team and scouting team for him either. God I fucking loathe Everton.

I wasn't really paying attention in the Milliband days but the bacon sandwich thing definitely gets talked about in the folklore of the ongoing incestuous relationship between the Tory elite and the media elite. That's what I mean though on the short memories thing. If all of this had come out at once they could have just sacked Boris Johnson off and had a relatively clean slate to some extent. When he had to admit he was at one of the parties (we all already knew anyway), that was their last chance to feign ignorance and turn on him but they haven't. Every day that passes now, that hole they're digging gets a little bit deeper. It's glorious because whoever started leaking this stuff has always kept just enough back to let them think they could ride it out, but now the stuff keeps coming and they're in too deep.

Lab 14 points ahead on this poll. I genuinely don't understand why Tory MPs aren't falling over each other trying to be the first ones to publicly distance themselves from this government. Goes to show how much they actually fancy Sunak and Truss in part. Again, I'm happy for it to continue. Every time they try to back Mr Blobby again only for another story to be leaked, they make it just a bit more likely that the next government might actually not be a Tory majority, and makes it harder for them to just recycle another leader, do another rebrand and contest the next election as "we're not like the last Tories" yet again.

It just keeps coming. Also today there were reports that Johnson is making up a list of staff members he can offer up as sacrificial lambs to stay in his job, and he himself dubbed it Operation Save Big Dog .

He needs to go. Seeing him lift the trophy in two week's time after refusing the vaccine, admitting he just carried on going about his life after testing positive for Covid and probably infected others, and admitting that he lied on his visa form, is a kick in the teeth not just to regular Australians who would never have got away with trying to do that to get into their own country, but to people in that same boat around the world. If Djokovic is allowed to play this tournament and especially if he goes on to win it, he will become a worldwide poster boy for rules not applying to people with money and status the same as they apply to the rest of us. He needs to go. It really shouldn't be up for debate. In other slightly more cheerful news, Andy Murray won his semi-final against Opelka in Sydney and is now in his first main tour final since 2019.

The Conservative party truly must be full of morons. They keep telling themselves "this is the last one" when it's been obvious since these leaks started getting drip-fed to the press in November that whoever has it in for them (probably multiple people by now) is sacking them into the trap of thinking they have a chance to get away with it, letting them fight amongst themselves and then dropping the next one when it looks like they've survived. Kudos because this is far more damaging to the government and the Tories then just revealing it all at once and like I said, they're too stupid to stop walking into the trap. I expect it from the ministers, most of whom know they'll never get a sniff of government again under any other PM but eventually the back benchers will surely wake up and smell the coffee. Wouldn't mind see them eat themselves alive for a little bit longer first though.

All Kecmanovic aren't we? The draw is a nice one for Djokovic. Tommy Paul might be a mild danger in R2 but the seeded players he could face in R3/4 are Sonego, who I genuinely haven't heard of, Monfils, who won't be able to concentrate for five sets because he's mental, and Garin who is an average, solid top 20 player who buffs his ranking by pounding the minor clay court tournaments throughout the year. Berretini in the QFs could be a threat. Norris won a Masters 1000 at the back end of last year but I wouldn't back him to really trouble Djokovic. Then it's over to Zverev or Nadal in the semi-finals. As for Andy Murray, who has made the semi-finals of the warm-up event in Sydney this week after losing to Facundo Bagnis in the first round of his first event of the season, he faces Basilashvili in the first round who is seeded, so a good player, but one of the ones who Murray went through in his Sydney progress this week. 2022 will be make or break in terms of seeing whether he can get his ranking back into at least the top 50-100 to stop needing wildcards for big events, and perhaps become somewhat relevant on the tour again. If it doesn't happen this year, it isn't going to.

What do they actually still get out of backing him? It's actually psychologically fascinating.

Priti Patel literally said on national television people should ring the police and snitch on their neighbours if they were having gatherings in their back garden and here she is, out to bat for Johnson over this. You couldn't write it.

Douglas "Dross" Ross, leader of Scottish Tories, calls for PM to resign. But some still on his side...

I got 8. The Williams one wrong because I saw 0, 19, 40-something and assumed the bottom answer was even bigger so didn't look at it . I also got the Belgian GP one wrong - they were saying the correct answer was 1, I'm absolutely certain that this is incorrect and they did 2 official racing laps to reach the threshold of a race result? 2 wasn't an option anyway. Whatever. I'm not having the Bottas one was forgettable though. There were only three sprint races and he won the one in Brazil which was only 2 months ago or less. Not that hard to remember .

He's apologised now and called it 'misguided' to go to events on the 17th and 18th after testing positive on the 16th. "Misguided". Cunt.

Starmer has infuriated the Left by not calling for Johnson's resignation on a number of occasions. I think he's been right to err on the side of caution as calling for resignations only for them not to materialise just makes you look weak and reminds everyone you have no power and all you can actually do is say things. Here it is though. He must be pretty confident that this is the moment. Or he's just seen the polling from Monday that 66% of the public and almost half of Tory voters with an opinion believe that the PM should resign.

I'll let you have Blair then, fair enough, I'm too young to have seen him be Prime Minister and address the public in that role for many years. I still think Johnson is a different animal to at least Cameron and May though, and the majority of other senior politicians, Corbyn, Sturgeon, Starmer, Milliband, etc. The threshold of just how much he has to insult and mock the public for anything to stick to him is on another planet to the rest, and he knows it and exploits it, which is why I object to the "they're all the same" thing. I don't think we'll see another leader in our lifetime who gets away with some of the things Johnson has got away with. The reason he'll end up going down anyway is that he can't help himself from pushing and pushing until it finally gets too much. I will also agree that it's totally sickening that if and when he does go, it won't be for any of the hundreds of valid reasons that there are, such as his incompetent handling of the pandemic, his pursuit of Brexit when he knew it would be no good for the nation, etc. etc. If this party stuff does finish him off, the reason for it won't be that he went too far down the path of moral repugnance, it'll be because the threshold of how many Tory MPs scared of losing their seat and the power, influence and money that comes with it will be high enough for them to oust him. No matter how depressing it is though, and regardless of whether it's some awful Truss or Sunak who replaces him or a Labour government that don't really offer many truly progressive policies, my opinion of Johnson is so low that anything else for me is a step in the right direction.

Alright, fine. So how does "we need to tear the whole system down" help anyone? Because it isn't going to happen. We might have to agree to disagree but Johnson is a compulsive liar who lives hand to mouth in terms of surviving in his position, it's burned into his psyche and he's driven primarily by two things - dodging accountability and staying in power, not because it actually gets him anything, he does it just to see if he can. I'll hold my hands up and admit I was a teenager who didn't pay much attention when Blair was in power and while the Iraq fiasco played out. But with all of the Prime Ministers I've seen before Boris Johnson, they at least played by the rules in terms of understanding that different people and institutions, from the courts to the average voter, would hold them to account if they did or didn't do certain things. Johnson simply doesn't play by those rules and his government are actively trying to destroy them by justifying any law-breaking or broken manifesto promises by shrugging and saying "we'll be accountable to the electorate" which basically gives them licence to do whatever the fuck they feel like for four years, breaking the contract with the electorate which all previous PMs have at least somewhat tried to uphold. I don't disagree with any of your criticism of New Labour and I have no great love at all for Blair, May, Cameron, etc. Hopefully I've highlighted why I think Johnson is worse but if you look at him and think that seeing him kicked out and even a different Conservative take power, or even see Starmer or a similar Labour politician win the next election, and not think that that's at least a small step in the right direction (which is all you're going to get realistically in a short timespan) then I'm afraid I have to firmly disagree.

Maybe, the rumbles are getting louder. Think he's on a knife edge with his back benchers at the moment. If it isn't this it will be something else in the near future though, goodness knows what else he's been up to that hasn't been leaked yet. There will be plenty more, and he is stupid enough to lie and try to cling on which will make the next revelations in a week or two even worse. I think you also have to keep 'the culture of politics' and Boris Johnson's individual misbehaviour separate though. What he does and what he is is completely different from the already low bar of expectation there is of politicians on average. I cringe when I hear people go one further and say "they're all as bad as each other" because they aren't. He is much worse than Blair, Cameron or May, all of whom will have been guilty of polishing the truth for their own ends on an almost daily basis, but it really feels like Johnson just does whatever the fuck he wants, sometimes with no better reason than just to see if he can get away with it. I don't want to be accused of re-hashing the argument of EU membership and it has become an almost lazy cliche to say you can trace the start of this back to Brexit... but you can trace the start of this back to Brexit. That was where the national debate really lost all of its good faith where one side was having a somewhat evidence-based conversation about the EU and the other side basically kept saying shit that had a sliver of truth to it and pushing the boundary to see what they could get away with pretty-much-but-not-technically-lying about. Johnson's heavy involvement in the Leave campaign is obviously linked to the way his time as PM is going. The kicking and screaming from the Remain side from 2016-2019 and trying to invalidate the referendum result was never really about the EU at all, it was about trying to subvert an electoral result which was not really fought on the terms that had previously been permitted as the minimum standard of good faith debate. And since then, well it worked for them so why change? Anyway, there are genuinely hundreds of MPs and those who want to be MPs out there from all of the parties who are driven by a genuine sense of public service. These are the ones who rarely make it to cabinet level though, which isn't a coincidence, and in that sense I very much agree the way politics is done has to change.

And we're back...

Might upset a few people but I'm praying for him to be kicked out to be honest. The anti-vax crowd are dangerous enough without being allowed to feel that their kicking, screaming, protesting and general losing of their minds over this case has been vindicated. I would have had some sympathy for Djokovic if this whole thing was a mix-up with his papers and the evidence suggested that he genuinely tested positive in the past six months to get an exemption. However, the claim is that he tested positive on 16th December, yet there is evidence of him at an awards' event on the 17th and a photoshoot with L'Equipe on the 18th. So either he was parading around carrying on with his normal life against the rules having tested positive, or the positive test on the 16th is simply an outright lie. Morally speaking, either of these should be sufficient to send him packing, but I understand that using evidence of him wandering around with Covid in Serbia, France, Monaco or wherever probably can't easily be used in a court case in Australia. There's a lot of narrative about him being 'locked up' which seems to be garnering him increasing sympathy from the global media. I'm sorry but the way refugees and asylum seekers are treated in some countries, they'd give an arm and a leg to be getting the treatment Djokovic is getting down there. Competing in the Australian Open isn't a basic human right either. He's been a silly man not getting the vaccine in the first place and it looks like he's gone on to be genuinely a pretty big dickhead either lying about having Covid to get what he wants or knocking about with other people while he knew he was infected. If he goes on to be allowed into the country and compete in the tournament, which he'll likely also win, what message does that send out to the rest of the world about following the rules? I don't like him but he's a role model to many.

You were going off a couple of weeks ago when Liverpool lost or drew a game that they were out of the title race "because they were the only team who didn't cheat to get their games called off". You can hardly cry hypocrite now that there's stories about false positives getting a game called off. None of us can prove either way about how genuine any of these outbreaks were or how much clubs may have manipulated the rules. I'm absolutely sure it's a genuine mistake from whoever does the testing and that Liverpool have done nothing wrong themselves, just to put that on record, but it is worth saying that the probability of one false positive is very, very small, let alone several. You have to assume it was a problem with a batch of tests and how they were processed or something. Although if we're talking about the flow tests it does seem a bit suspect. Ultimately, though, if there was any risk of Liverpool getting exposed for foul play I doubt Klopp is openly talking about this in the media.

Over the course of their whole careers, Murray clearly falls comfortably behind the other three, but in the context of the time people actually talked about the Big Four, Djokovic was only just winning his first Grand Slams and Murray wasn't far off. He was basically as unbeatable for the rest of the tour as Federer, Nadal and Djokovic. His head to head against Nadal has always been poor, but he's only 14-11 down to Federer, and 25-11 to Djokovic is exactly what you'd get from a player who's the bottom of a top four. Murray also picked up a lot of achievements outside the Grand Slams, winning the Olympic competition twice, the Davis Cup almost single-handedly, and made it to the #1 spot at year's end. The Big Four in a historical context is a fallacy, obviously, you don't have to look beyond the Grand Slam count to prove that. However, the comparison to Wawrinka is disingenuous. The Big Four were christened thus because there was a phase in mens' tennis where the semi-finals of any Masters 1000 or Grand Slam competition would almost exclusively involve those four players, or at least three of the four. There was a huge gulf between them and the rest of the field. There was also a gap between Murray and the top three which prevented him from from winning more Grand Slams but it was a smaller one. This is laid out in how comfortably Murray (after his peak) dominated the tour in the back end of 2016 where Djokovic had a small dip in form and Federer and Nadal had injury problems. Ultimately, whether you want to argue over whether you want to call it a Big Three or a Big Four during that era of tennis is semantics. It is very clear that Murray was the 4th of the four, but he was much closer to the other three than anyone else was to him.

The doom mongering is out in force this morning from where I'm sitting.

Murray has had a way better career than Wawrinka but won't be remembered as a part of the big four historically. What's more telling is someone being rattled enough to bring that up unprovoked the best part of a decade since it was relevant . On Djokovic, it's now come out he did a photoshoot with L'Equipe two days after he 'tested positive for Covid' as well as the awards event thing.