Creative Midfielder

Much as I've always despised Ronaldo's diving the fact remains that 'things like that' should be free kicks and penalties. You aren't allowed to hold player's shirts or wrap your arms around them yet defenders do it routinely, usually get away with it and then get surprised and offended when a ref actually applies the rules correctly. Of course, there is a huge consistency problem when the rules are so rarely enforced but I think the only real answer is to complain every time the rules aren't enforced rather than on the occasions when they are.

IMO Gary Neville is very definitely one of the better pundits and don't think many will find that remark even slightly controversial as he's probably called it right - I think most of us would struggle to remember a poorer MU side than that.

Surely we are already all that point - not just as regards Covid but A & E generally. More and more reports of people spending many hours both waiting for ambulances to arrive and also waiting in ambulances outside hospitals for hours before they even get as far as triage.

Surely the important point is not that they are inferior or superior to vaccination but an additional tool to vaccination - none of the tools we have are 100% as we all know. So it baffles why it has taken this long (cases and deaths have been far too high for months now) and a new variant before we start to make proper use again of the simple, and according to the scientists pretty effective, tools we have available to help get us through this pandemic without the need to resort to the more drastic measures which we know will be the next step if the situation continues to deteriorate. Well actually, it doesn't baffle me but I think the points about our utterly useless PM have already been well made..........

I'm not at all sure that they will - Tory MPs generally would like to hang on as long as possible I would have thought. But there was quite a lot of speculation a little while ago (late summer perhaps?) suggesting that No 10 thought that they might have a better chance of winning in 2023 than in 2024 - not entirely sure why but I suspect the thinking was that the pandemic would be well behind us and there might be a slightly better feelgood factor then, whereas as waiting until 2024 is going to make it much clearer how much Brexit is still damaging the economy and how painful paying for the huge cost of the pandemic is turning out to be. Like all Tory governments they want to go into an election having just cut taxes rather than having been increasing them for the last three years, although I think their chances of achieving that this time around are somewhere between minimal and zero. But having said all that, much has changed recently so I doubt that anyone has any idea when the next election will be or who will be the Tory and Labour party leaders at the time.

Yes absolutely, I was questioning @Capt. Pants suggestion that working from home will have no impact - seems very likely to me that it will have an impact on slowing the virus down. It is one of the relatively painless measures, along with increased mask wearing, that should have been brought in some time ago to slow the virus down without having to resort to the more severe restrictions - restrictions which are now probably going to be required as well in the very near future. As always, Johnson has dithered, fudged and done too little and far too late.

Not too sure about that, maybe some are but plenty don't seem to be, plus there is the travel there & back especially for those that use public transport, viz the Underground.

Amen to that, although in practice several things have to happen before it becomes a realistic prospect. First is obviously the removal of specifically Johnson as PM and more generally the Tory government. Hopefully they will risk an election in 2023 rather than holding out for as long as possible. In 2024 the NI Protocol will be reviewed and NI will get to vote on it - this is likely to be the first real opportunity to try and fix some of the worst aspects of Johnson's stonkingly bad deal (and perhaps improve relations with the EU in the process). Hopefully by then the economy will be re-established as one of the dominant issues in UK General elections and given the damage that Brexit has caused and will be causing to the economy then common sense will start to re-assert itself on most voters (total Brexitty idiots excepted but there won't be enough of them left by then).

He really is a muppet if he thinks an 'investigation' by the Cabinet Secretary is going to convince anyone. Is it going to be an investigation into the party that we already know definitely happened or is it going to include the other parties that are now being reported as well? Johnson isn't just a serial liar, he's a complete halfwit - as Purple has already pointed out, he lies instinctively and without any thought as to consequences and ramifications that may follow or any idea as to how explain himself when he is caught out. Given the amount of experience he's had of lying and the trouble he's got into over it, you think he might have got a bit smarter/more careful about telling real porkies. But as we've seen in many areas of his Premiership Johnson is a man who learns nothing from his previous mistakes and seems quite happy to keep repeating them - dither, fudge, lie, dither, fudge, lie, dither, fudge, lie, dither, fudge, lie................ad infinitum, or at least until Tory MPs wake up to the fact that he has turned from being an electoral asset into an electoral liability.

Pretty easy actually, there are 8 of the 27 EU countries with populations under 5m and they seem to be doing generally OK and Ireland with an almost identical population to Scotland has done fantastically well within the EU. There are also 3 more at under 6m including Denmark and Finland also doing extremely well and as fellow Northern European countries I suspect they are the countries which Scotland will be hoping to emulate. So this would seem to be a case where size isn't especially important. As for the lack of trade agreements, they would be joining the Single Market and all the EU trade agreements which puts them miles ahead of what the UK has to offer!! Diplomatic service likewise. Military - who knows how that would be unpicked - they do after all make up a good chunk of the UK military and they have our submarine and other naval bases but I'd guess that a military capability would be the least of their concerns.

Except that he wasn't, he was given at least £60m.

😂😂 I see you share Johnson's contempt for the Scotch (amongst other similar views), you make a fine pair of English........

Afraid you are wrong again as I'm English, living in England and actually haven't actually been advocating Scottish Independence per se, it seems to me that it is Johnson who is the most effective campaigner for the SNP and it is primarily him that will be responsible (eventually) for both Scotland and NI leaving the union. What I (and I presume you) think is pretty irrelevant given I don't have a vote. But for the record if I was Scottish and had a vote then I would be voting Green/SNP but not primarily because of independence rather that they are the only parties in Scotland have politicians and policies that I would have any confidence in - independence is one of those but not actually the most important. Finally I'm not blind to the similarities but I am also very aware of the differences, which is what my post was about, and which you seem unwilling to even acknowledge.

I don't think your comparison really works for a couple of reasons: Firstly, there seems to be a reasonable consensus amongst the pollsters, analysts etc that regaining the 'sovereignity that the UK had lost to EU' was one of the main drivers behind the Brexit vote. Of course there is no exact science behind that but it does broadly chime with what a great many Brexiteers have said, so seems a reasonable assumption. But of course that was simply one of the Brexit myths as the UK has, for hundreds of years, both inside and outside the EU always been a sovereigh nation. Whereas for the Scots, whatever you think about their aspirations for independence, there is a very real and genuine issue of sovereignity and escaping control from remote and disinterested governments in Westminister (containing almost zero Scottish representation) who are focussed entirely on English interests and voters. The second thing is that you assume that because Brexit has been a train crash then Scottish Independence would be likewise or worse, which assumes that Sturgeon is as stupid and irresponsible as Johnson which she manifestly isnt. Of course I thought the UK leaving the EU was a bad idea but it didn't have to be as bad an idea as Johnson has turned it into - you are well aware, I'm sure, that there were many forms of Brexit that would have been less damaging to the UK than Johnson's exceptionally bad deal. The two situations are simply not comparable - Johnson gave up the benefits of EU membership (which again you are clearly aware of) for absolutely no tangible benefit to the UK or its citizens. Scotland leaving the UK will doubtless be difficult/painful in parts but at least there would be the very tangible benefits of EU membership and regaining the sovereignity that as a country they lost 314 years ago, so there is an upside as well as downside - Brexit is all downside and then some in Johnson's version of it.

😂😂 They really are a bunch of idiots aren't they?? I reckon they are at least a couple of decades late to be claiming GPS as cutting edge technology 🤣

I think you need to reread what I said which was not that having head office imposing candidates was undemocratic but that it wasn't a valid criticism of PR because it happens in all systems - completely different thing. I don't disagree that voter engagement is a problem but it is very much a secondary problem to the fact that under the FPTP system the represention elected is not remotely representative of what the electors who are engaged actually voted for. I would further suggest that voter engagement is so poor in the UK precisely because the FPTP system renders the vast majority of votes meaningless thereby massively reducing the motivation to vote at all for the majority of the electorate - a problem which PR fixes at a stroke. Wriggle whichever way you like but FPTP is an absolutely cr@p system both in theory and in practice, and you only need to look at how it is working in the handful of countries still using it to see the truth of that. It may have made some sense 300 or 400 years ago, but it makes no sense at all and has nothing whatsoever to recommend it now.

Don't think that is a valid criticism of PR at all since it happens in all systems which are party based, i.e. all of them - the Tory party in the 2019 election being a prime example of central office tightly controlling selection that was in theory only locally based. PR may not be perfect or a total panacea for all the problems of our current totally dysfunctional electoral system, but it unquestionably delivers a better correspondence between voting numbers and representation in Parliament which is therefore, by definition, more democratic than FPTP - which as someone, I forget who, said earlier is the worst of all worlds and long abandoned by modern democracies. Only us and the US, it seems, cling to centuries old electoral systems which are demonstrably failing to produce both democratically elected and even vaguely competent governments.

Exactly this ^ Can't say I've ever really liked Webber, including the one and only time I met him briefly, but there can be no dispute that the club has made good progress on a number of fronts during his time as DoF. So adding this to his achievements at Huddersfield gives him an excellent CV, but this pre-season and season to date has proved that he is well past his sell by date as far as NCFC is concerned and the sooner he moves on the better.

Don't think the 'whinging' is as a result of today's defeat - think that most people would agree that last week was a worst performance and result than today's. IMO the reason people are getting upset is that we're seeing exactly the same failings that Farke was supposedly sacked for continuing unabated under Smith. Whilst it is still early days for Smith, the fact is that the failings, especially about a number of the players and their disappointing performances, is neither Farke's nor Smith's but Webber's responsibility.

Yes we were but that's hardly unexpected is it when you are bottom of the table playing a team who I think were top half at the time away from home? You would be surprised if they didn't throw the kitchen sink at you. Nevertheless, we went in at half time 2-0 up and saw the game out, away from home - think that ticks pretty much all the boxes. Contrast that with our previous away game under Smith where we played 80 mins against a 10 man bottom of the table team and only managed to salvage a point with a combination of an opposition mistake and fantastic finish from Pukki. Today - fair enough, we would have lost whether Farke or Smith was in charge.

Fair enough if that's your opinion, we'll have to agree to differ. Fair enough also to point out that we have retrieved points under Smith after going behind but still not addressing the point that Brentford away was a much better performance than any of the four under Smith's leadership, precisely because we went out dominated the game, scored goals and then saw the game out for the only time so far this season. Had that momentum been carried into the next four 'relatively easy' games under Smith's leadership I think Farke would have picked up more points.

Maybe but seems an entirely artificial point to make that comparison since the best performance, by some distance, in those five games was Farke's win at Brentford and immediately following that win things looked less bleak for us than they do tonight. Of course it is still very early days for Smith and things could change by the end of the season but IMO had Farke not been sacked immediately after the Brentford game we would be sitting with more points on the board tonight than we actually have (not that I would have expected to collect any today but the previous two games were both big opportunities missed).

When you say their systems 'worked' from day one what you actually mean us that they paid out to pretty much everyone who asked and that included billions to fraudsters who have long since made off with their ill-gotten gains leaving taxpayers nursing a massive loss - I don't think that is the definition of 'worked from day one' that we were hoping for.

Think that is a very good analogy, although sadly the UK isn't going to have the very high standard of living or the very democratic governance that the Swiss enjoy. Still if we eventually reach the stage of de facto membership of the EU that would be a huge improvement over the current sh1tshow that is UK 2021 😊

Yep, never understood why we let Emi take the corners - it was far and away the worst facet of his game.