Upo

Stop messing with the formation. Krul** Aarons** - Kabak* - Hanley**/Gibson - Williams* PLM** - Normann*** - McLean*** Sargent**** - Pukki**** - Cantwell** *Some players who turned a mixed performance against Watford need an opportunity to respond. Especially the young/new ones. If we don't let them pick themselves up, we're done. Kabak's failures against Watford are a case FOR him. **On their average day, these players are fit for PL. We need that solidity. Cantwell is in, because in the end he is PL quality and he needs to respond to his Leicester game foolishness. Hanley I'd start but switch with Gibson if he's tired. ***Normann is not a defensive midfielder. He found Pukki once and that was no mistake. McLean is needed to compensate defensively. Gilmour I think is luxury we can't afford atm. ****Sargent must get opportunity to find connection with Pukki. Emi is gone. Need to muscle in more.

He is 20. It was Liverpool. Wasn't his fault we conceded 3. Let's not give up on him just yet.

It's f***** Arsenal and not the plague riddled wreck that Brentford played against. Let's not lose our heads.

That sounds a bit like Teemu is an obstacle for Idah and Sargent to break through! I'd expect nothing less from a striker who scored 26 last season in 41 games and had 14 goal involvements in 36 matches last time in PL.

Aarons - Hanley - Kabak - Gibson - Giannioulis Normann - McLean Rashica - Cantwell Pukki I really want to see Kenny play.

"Knowing how to win" is a bit of an expression of magical thinking. You don't win by knowing. Kabak for example played for Liverpool and won a lot of matches. That should tell us that he was good enough to play for Liverpool. Not that he knew how to win. Out of the probable regulars for this season, Max, Teemu, Todd, Tim, Kenny and Grant all have substantial PL experience under Farke and they were our best performers in 19/20. They also had very good 20/21 seasons. In fact, Teemu had an absolutely superb season with 30 goal involvements, and Grant took a huge step forward. Out of the best performers in 19/20 we're "only" missing Emi and Sam Byram. Adam, Lucas and Christoph are likely to feature in atleast some games and have PL experience under Farke. Out of incomings Kabak did well in Liverpool. Most incomings have top tier league experience and have been standout performers in their respective clubs even if the clubs performed poorly. If we wanted "winners" from PL, we'd have to triple our transfer and wage budget.

His arm muscles look reassuring. Should be good for pushing around people.

He was quite solid in 19/20. Our defence was horribly leaky... I'm confident he'll get himself together mentally, but I doubt his footwork will improve much. Thankfully our 2nd choice is top class. We'll see.

Reasonably optimistic, because we haven't collapsed during games. Even against ManC we were consistently awful. We got ourselves back into the game against Leicester after conceding a ridiculously soft goal very early on. My primary worry about Covid's impact on player fitness has been allayed. Teemu and Kenny are back in business. Now some problems: Tim Krul looks weirdly shaky at times. It's like he's doing the big saves, but can't get a handle on the simple stuff like where to pass the ball to. If he kicks the ball more than 15 meters, it is conceded to opposition. Has been lucky to not lose the ball from his own feet and end up in YT gag reel. Generally it's the same incredibly stupid stuff like playing it out from the back when standing inside our pen box. Consider Hanley dribbling the ball cross end line to concede a corner against Leicester. Farke needs to concede a bit of ground here. We should play ugly going down and pretty going up. Just hoof the damn ball. Break the game. Get those cynical yellows. If we have a highway through our middle, then we need to kick the ball off field occasionally to regroup.

We literally had a great header disallowed. I really like Max Aarons' playing. Deserves to be noted.

Great effort by Teemu. Looked sharp, very hungry. Fine pen. Perfect place for Sargent to punch through Leicester defence.

Teemu is running himself ragged pressing. Switch is coming...

Gilmour defended very well.

Rashica's last few decisions going forward have been very good.

You can quote this post after game and laugh at me, but we are going to crush them in second half.

What a pen.

No. He gives us options. It is not his problem that the others can't keep up. He is playing very aggressively. Probably Sargent is coming on quite early next half.

There is a difference between being shell-shocked and a bit meatheaded. Gilmour needs to come off for his own protection.

We need to hold on to our 0-1 disadvantage and switch Gilmour at half-time.

Again Rashica misses Pukki who was going to an open spot. He needs to increase his game IQ and fast.

How I wish I could disagree. We need patience with him, and someone to watch his back.

Brandon was careless, but Gilmour failed to mark his man completely. This is not a good sign. What we need now is spine. I like us going forward and our good pressing.

Complete immunity evasion is extremely unlikely. However, selection pressure promotes viral evolution towards higher immunity resistance and/or higher infectivity and development of variants with higher viral "fitness" is certainty in presence of infections. Studies show that Sars-CoV-2 is consistently evolving towards higher viral fitness. Long term infectivity is a much bigger problem for mankind than virulence or immunity evasion. In principle, more infectious virus gets more chances to develop resistance against immunity than an immune-evasive virus gets to develop higher infectivity. In Sars-cov-2's case, reproduction number seems to correlate with virulence. Delta is atleast twice as infectious and probably about twice as deadly as the original variant. At the bottom is a chart from April 2020. Delta R0 estimates currently round up to ca. 6. Waves of infections have been caused by orig./wild type, Alpha (B117)+Gamma (P1) and Delta respectively. Others are noise. This suggests doubling of infectivity every two generations, with 3 to 6 months between emergence of new dominant VOCs. The recurring "waves" separated by similar times are consequence of viral characteristics and societal response. Each variant is consequence of this interaction due to its impact on selection pressure and volume of infections. Societies respond to new variants by increasing mitigating measures to match R0 of a strain, but generally do not overshoot, preferring to control and mitigate. This leads to sustained spread of infections and chances for viral evolution. Peak of evolution probably occurs when cases are the highest, but selection pressure only truly starts to weed out the weaker variants under lockdowns and emergence of immunity in population (infections+vaccines). Once infections go down, restrictions are eased and the newly emerged variant begins to spread exponentially. Initial level of infections is low and viral spread is lost in background noise for a while. Once alarms go off that something new has developed, sequencing takes time, and confirmation of a new variant of concern (VOC) requires epidemiological observation for a period of time. It seems that this "dance" takes about 3 to 6 months. The picture is muddled by variants developing in different geographic locations. Regardless, waves seem to propagate from region of origin to everywhere within a few months of its identification as a new VOC. We thought that vaccines would short-circuit this interaction, but evidence is quite clear that the opposite is happening: Pre-existing infection derived immunity had already trained the virus to increase its fitness. The fact that delta developed under very little interaction against vaccines is evidence that herd immunity is unachievable. Delta hasn't succeeded in escaping immunity, which is why vaccines protect against severe disease. Instead, Delta has escaped herd immunity. This is critical, because infections drive viral evolution. Countermeasures let only the fittest survive. My guess is that effective but incomplete mitigating measures drive viral infectiousness and population immunity drives immunity evasion. If we are lucky, virulence is a side effect of infectiousness. If we are unlucky, virulence is an important mechanism for infectiousness. I think the answer is a mix of both, leaning towards side effect. The fatality rate is too low. Unfortunately it is moving in the wrong direction, so it probably drives infectiousness too. It is notable that every strain has been more dangerous than the previous one. Essentially mankind is the best P.T. a virus like sars-cov-2 could have: Always at the edge of suppressing the pandemic but never achieving it. A doubling from current R0 6+ would create a variant competing with Measles as the most infectious disease we know. It is uncertain if there is any upper limit to potential infectiousness of sars-cov-2. I think it is plausible this will evolve into the most infectious disease mankind has ever faced. I'm on the fence whether it theoretically could evolve into the most infectious disease in the 4 billion year history of life. https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/when-will-it-be-over-an-introduction-to-viral-reproduction-numbers-r0-and-re/ Below is a chart

That would explain this:

Unfortunately the writing is on the wall. Data over past couple of months crushes any hope of vaccine/infenction derived herd immunity. Worse still, vaccine efficacy vs severe delta infection is no longer good. Frontrunner Israel: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/grim-warning-israel-vaccination-blunts-does-not-defeat-delta Here's preprint of the study: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.29.21261317v1.full.pdf In short: Vaccine efficacy falls over time vs delta. Fall was expected, but magnitude was not. Protection from hospitalization is no longer sufficient to prevent flooding of hospitals by vaccinated people. "Breakthrough infections" are now the rule, not the exception. We should not call them breakthrough infections anymore. Just infections. Booster shots are not an optional policy. They are necessary. We're already moving towards 3rds shots. We'll see their efficacy in Israel first. Almost certainly they will only buy us time to come up with better vaccines or other policy measures to prevent infections and more dangerous variants from developing.