RandoEFC

Can't wait for Klopp and Guardiola's annual bitchfest about the League Cup next season while they say nothing about the extra fixtures proposed by the new Champions League format because they definitely don't pick and choose when more games is bad and/or dangerous for the players. English football has managed to stem the tide on this for long enough but each year, the proportion of people looking out for the interests of the majority of clubs and fans in football over the increased wealth of a select few clubs who already enjoy huge advantages over the rest gets smaller and smaller. The League Cup will eventually get reformatted to the benefit of the small handful of teams that are already best equipped to deal with the extra fixtures and at the expense of the other 90 teams in the league pyramid. It's a shame and in the long run you have to ask where the line gets crossed between the current situation where the big teams have massive advantages but are still fallible and teams like Leicester, if they get everything right for several seasons, can get in amongst them, to a situation where the shop really is 99% closed.

Bottom line: pick your battles. This lot, especially in the social media age are going to give a lot of opportunities. More interested really in the political landscape in Scotland between now and the May elections.

We really need to stick to the proven, actual corruption. Stories like this where we might conclude that there's no smoke without fire but in reality can't be proved allow the government to either create enough plausible deniability or even prove the accusations to be unfounded, which undermines all of the valid criticisms that can be made of them and gives the blindest among their loyalists an excuse to keep defending them.

Surely this is totally absurd. His stated aim is to secure a majority of pro-Independence parties in Holyrood, but all he's doing is going after those who will already vote for the SNP? Unless there are pro-Independence voters who hate Sturgeon so much they will vote for another party but I can't imagine there are that many and his approval ratings are embarrassing compared to hers. Seems a bizarre attempt to make himself relevant again and restore his own credibility at Sturgeon's expense, which only damages the independence cause in the long run.

I don't think I've commented on this for a while. I think you just keep it with a few small changes: - Referee/linesman needs to commit to an on field decision before going to VAR. If 60 seconds isn't enough to find evidence to overturn the decision then it isn't clear and obvious and the on field decision stands. - Keep using VAR for offsides but get rid of the geometry kit. Pause the replay at the point where the pass is released and if it's visible to the human eye that the on field decision is incorrect then overturn it. - Sack off the screen beside the pitch. If the VAR official can't tell the referee the on field decision needs to be overturned without the referee having a second look himself then it isn't clear and obvious, get on with the game. Taking this approach removes the effort to go from 95% refereeing accuracy without replay assistance to 100%, and replaces it with an effort to get 98-99% of decisions right and eliminate the absolute howlers. This is what VAR was supposed to be in the first place, and yet we've never seen them try to implement it this way. Outside of VAR you still need to look at handball rules and, if anyone aside from me is still remotely arsed, simulation, which remains the biggest form of blatant cheating in football yet is actually punished more leniently over time rather than more harshly. Don't dare to have both arms in tact while defending in the area and having the ball twatted at you from 2 yards away or collide with someone on the turn whilst being 1cm closer to your own goal than your closest team mate though.

Portuguese league next.

The table update following round six of this year's tournament. @Rucksackfranzose is the big mover of the round with the highest score of the season propelling him to joint 4th in the season standings. @...Dan moves up to 2nd with a whopping 7 point haul but @Viva la FCB's consistency pays off, 5 points for 3rd place in the Dutch round essential in keeping the competition at arms' length. He now goes into what could be the final round as the overwhelming favourite to reclaim the league title he won in the 2018-19 season, with his closest competitors @...Dan and @Mel81x likely needing to win the Portuguese iteration outright to have a chance of stealing top spot. At the other end, of those that have taken part in every round, there is a much closer fight over the wooden spoon between @Bluewolf, @McAzeem, @Pyfish, @Storts and @Stan .

@Rucksackfranzose enters the hall of fame following his 2020-21 Eredivisie victory, his run of 6 correct picks the best since @Eco in the Bundesliga well over a year ago.

This ought to be interesting if true .

By-election in Hartlepool in six weeks. In 2019 Labour won with around 13k votes with 10k each going to Conservative and Brexit Party. Richard Tice might stand again for whatever they call themselves now. Be interesting to see how that goes.

When you see it .

This assessment relies on an assumption that everything else remains more or less unchanged politically for the best part of four years which simply isn't credible. Swinging 50,000 votes because Harris is less palatable than Biden in some key swing states isn't an unreasonable prediction but nothing else changing is unrealistic. Nobody can say with any certainty now what the permutations and coalitions will look like in 2024. We will see...

Very poor look for the police. This all comes from poor leadership, there should have been no question about this vigil being allowed to go ahead.

And there was me thinking I was good at the internet .

Am I being stupid, I don't get it, Stans?

While this remains concerning, it can be rationalised to an extent. Polarising, divisive, culture war politics was/is at its peak at the moment and Trump was at the centre of it. An environment like this where supporters of both sides are so scared of the alternative is always going to mobilise voters. Luckily for everyone (even those who wouldn't agree) he mobilised more voters against him than he did in his favour and he also had the most votes against him of any candidate ever (I believe) if you wanted to look at it that way too. I'm also sceptical of Trump's ability to build a bigger base over the next 4 years, and of the Republican Party's ability to build back without cutting ties with him and his wing of the party. I think they're currently scared that they'd lose more Trumpian voters than the moderates they'd win back by ditching his agenda. They might be right, but even if Trump broke off and made his own party to run in 2024, he could never win on his own without all of the automatic Republican votes that he'd lose by running as part of a different party. It's understandable to see why Trump and the party think that sticking together is their best chance of winning the Presidency back, even if in my opinion, unless Biden and co fuck up real, real bad, that's little to no chance at all. It's a huge gamble to stick with Trumpian politics into 2024 and it's asking a lot of those followers to stay as emotionally invested as they are now for four years. Victory isn't impossible on that route I suppose but it seems better from their point of view to rip the band aid off and start to win back both moderate voters and some of those that Trump takes with him in time to have a foundation for 2024.

You would advise against most people, male or female, walking home alone in the dark if they could avoid it, but the point is that women have to take a lot more precaution than men when they shouldn't have to. The problem is with this message is that blokes who aren't ever going to cause anyone any harm are both the ones who will take that message seriously, whilst also not being the ones that really need to hear it. Let's be optimistic and choose to believe that there are some fundamentally good men out there who just don't understand how their behaviour can intimidate women at times who can learn lessons from the discussion around this incident and change their behaviour accordingly. I do think there's value in what one or two people have suggested which is that if you find yourself walking behind or towards a woman on her own, especially at night, then cross the road where possible so that she doesn't have to worry about it. That doesn't cost much and can make a small difference in terms of the stress for them. We as men can't control or alter the behaviour of our peers much of the time, we can influence a small group of friends at best and the sons many of us raise by setting a good example, but beyond that we can still listen, reflect on our behaviour and adjust accordingly if we can, as tempting as it is to shrug it off in the knowledge that we would never actually harm or intentionally intimidate a woman ourselves.

^ How it started. How it's going: For context, 75 cases in a day is roughly equivalent to 60,000 a day in the UK when you scale it for population. We're now having our worst outbreak since the start, my housemate is mildly symptomatic and waiting for a test result so we're partying like it's 2020 over here.

This Sarah Everard story is just horrible on so many levels.

It'll be good for Liverpool when the fans are back in the ground. So many lawnmowers flying around the opposition team won't even be able to get on the pitch.

Well in lads .

I was talking about Clinton .

Trump couldn't even rig an election when he was the literal President. I'll cede to the superior expertise of others when it comes to US politics but as a logical thinker I just can't see how enough people in the US can make the psychological journey required to put him back in charge. Yes he got a huge number of votes at the last election, he still got a fucking lot less votes than the other guy, because he mobilises voters, but we've now seen that he mobilises more voters against him than he does in his favour. If Trump runs again in 2024 the Democratic candidate needn't even appear behind a podium because they can spend all of their campaign money buying TV adverts to repeat footage of Trump mobilising an army of terrorists to march on Capitol Hill and enough of your central swing voters will remember what they'll actually get if they vote him in again. QAnon claimed today that it's the day Trump is going to retake the Presidency fully in the knowledge that he won't, losing them even more credibility with their base. These are the types of people who form part of Trump's support base. Do you really think these are the people who can hold together a coalition of support over the next 4 years that can get them anywhere near an electoral majority? Trump's biggest achievement in office is creating this myth around himself. He was an unorthodox candidate who managed to thread the electoral college needle despite losing the popular vote against a weak Democratic candidate. Even after he became the biggest loser in American history by conspiring to lose the Presidency, the Senate and the House all in a single term, people are STILL convinced that next time, against all logic he'll win "because it's Trump". Throw all this big lie stuff at me as much as you want. I don't buy it. The only way he gets in again is if Biden's presidency is absolutely horrific or the Democrats nominate a different candidate who is absolutely awful.

I don't know, but according to political Twitter she defended herself pretty robustly and effectively this morning so I think she'll be coming through this just fine.

Scottish Tories tabling a no confidence in Sturgeon motion.