Creative Midfielder

I don't keep hammering the UK for its vaccination program which in general has been pretty successful albeit I think it is perfectly reasonable to say that the booster rollout was initially shambolic - though TBF that was nothing to do with the NHS Vaccination program and everything to do with this government's longstanding and complete inability to come up with simple, accurate and clear messages about the virus. In fact I'm pretty sure that I've never 'hammered' the UK vaccination program & I've been very happy to be a beneficiary of it - what I have done on a few occasions though is to push back against the sort of nationalistic triumphalism we heard quite a lot of earlier in the year that our vaccine program was unique and a success which no other country would match whereas in practice although they may have started a bit later than us many countries have not just caught us up but overtaken us. Anyway there was deinitely no criticism of our vaccine program in my post you replied to - I was simply pointing out that @Ricardo, who seems to delight in any problems our European neighbours may hit and use them as an excuse to peddle the same old myth that 'there wouldnt be a fag packet between them when all is done and dusted' is completely wrong. We all know, @ricardo better than many, that the vaccines have completely changed the arithmetic of the virus.and therefore countries like the US & UK that performed very badly last year in terms of unnecessary deaths are inevitably still going be poor performers in the final analysis. So given the huge existing discrepany in deaths between UK and Germany, even another wave of virus isn't going to change that gap much since both countries have pretty good levels of vaccine meaning the death toll will be of a completely different order to the last year without vaccine. The whole point of restrictions last year was to buy time until we had a vaccine and some countries played it a lot better than others and protected their citizens much better than others, and the vaccine is gradually baking those differences in as it scales back the death tolls for everyone - we are not all, despite @ricardo's protestations, going to come out of this with very similar overall outcomes.

No, it doesn't which is why I quoted it, you on the other hand.......

No, it isn't - Germany have certainly performed far better than us right from the start and a blip now is neither here nor there in the overall scheme of things. Their deaths per 1m are only just over 50% of ours and given the level of vaccinations in place now in both places there isn't a chance in hell that when it is 'all done and dusted' that there will be any signifcant change to that position. And of course you Tories are always very keen to sell the myth that the restrictions had to be lifted despite the health risks in order to drive the economic recovery - unfortunate therefore that we have also been out-performed economically by those european countries who 'thought continuing lockdown throughout the summer was somehow a good idea'. Turns out that they knew something that we didn't.

That isn't a particularly persuasive argument - not sure who you are including there but you said something very similar about France, Spain & Italy a couple of weeks ago because their numbers were starting to rise a bit. But as I pointed out at the time they were only rising gently (and have continued to do so) and having been at a tiny fraction of our numbers for months and months they have still only risen to a small fraction of the level that we have been seeing since July - that applies to the numbers whether you are talking cases, hospitalisations or deaths. Germany (and Poland) seem to have hit a bit of a bad patch but given the levels of virus that we have seen ever since the unlock and still rising again now, I would think that most West European countries think they've done pretty well by comparison, just as they have done on vaccination.

Spot on, and seems like we might finally have some long overdue opposition to this corrupt and incompetent governement - better late than never I suppose 🙄

Sadly I think that is a very good point - even though we must be pretty apprehensive about which idiot will replace Johnson I don't think there is any doubt at all that it is in the country's best interests for him to go asap. But if I was one of the candidates to replace him I don't think I would be in a rush, I'd be hoping to hang as much of the baggage of the last two years on Johnson as possible before getting rid of him, and as you say there is going to be plenty more to come out. Thing is, pretty much anyone within Johnson's two cabinets is tarred with the same brush so who does that leave - Jeremy Hunt??

Good call - there would be a beautfil symmetry in Cummings planting the final dagger between his shoulders. Its a funny one though - I could never work out, even allowing for Johnson's stupidity, why having kept Cummings in place when he clearly should have sacked him, Johnson then makes an extremely well-informed enemy of Cummings by sacking him simply because the real Prime Minister didn't like him and wanted one of her mates in number 10.

Looks as though we're trying to pick a fight with the Danes now https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/17/denmark-accuses-uk-of-breaking-brexit-fishing-deal-over-trawling-ban Good to see that our pair of idiots, Frosty & Johnson, haven't learnt a thing from taking on Macron & coming off second best. Maybe they really are stupid enough to think they can work their way round the EU picking a quarrel with one country at a time - if so they are heading for a really big disappointment 😂

Quite astonishing given the extent of the corruption that their excuses/explanations don't even rise above the childish 'the dog ate my homework' level. Since Parliament is quite clearly incapable of policing itself it seems to me that its time the Met was involved and investigating whether any of this wave of governmental corruption could justify criminal charges.

I'm pretty sure that @Barbe bleu understands that very well but, dissembler that he is, expressing himself clearly is the last thing he is aiming for. He is a Johnson apologist trying to masquerade as the voice of sweet, unaligned reason and it is an act which has been wearing very thin for a long time now. I've generally found that he shies completely away from discussing anything based on fact (presumably because they are usually inconvenient from his perspective 😊) but his mask really slipped when he foolishly dashed in to defend Johnson's corruption and stupidity the other week and made a very obvious factual error in his argument. That he seems determined to die in a ditch of his own digging rather than simply admit he was wrong, again much like Johnson himself, I think tells us everything we need to know about BB's own motivation and character - maybe he and Johnson are one and the same, they certainly share an awful lot of opinions and character flaws 😂

We can only hope......😊

Ooops, I was told the cards were only for the original jabs and weren't being used for boosters, as were the rest of the family - more confusion it seems.

Just signed - good luck and hope you succeed in getting the right thing done.

Certainly has and serves Johnson right for once again trying to sneak things through hoping no one will notice instead of doing the right thing. Doing the right thing appears to be something Johnson is congenitally incapable of doing.

Yep, a prime example of the horrible, negative and cynical cheating that passes as football in the Premiership - not that there are any shortage of those.

You are very much on the right lines but just for clarity the items I'm having the most problems with are French rillette, German smoked cheese, and a nice red from Carcassonne - if that isn't reason enough I don't what is 😃

I think you are being unduly pessimistic there KG - perhaps we are fortunate that for once Johnson's utter stupidity and arrogant one rule for you lot and a completely different one for me and my mates approach has finally worked in our favour. I'm sure you are right that if Johnson had let Patterson take a very light rap across the knuckles as punishment for his corruption then it would scarely have raised a ripple of interest. He was, after all, pretty much a southern non-entity whose only claim to fame (apart from being corrupt) was that even in a party of thicksters he stood out as being particularly dense. But Johnson's own stupidity has turned it into a real issue and even his usual backers in the media are happily turning up case after case, day after day. Seems to me it is causing damage to Johnson both amongst the electorate generally and many of his own MPs. And is definitely a campaigning gift that will keep on giving for a long time to come, though I wonder whether it might be of more help to Lib Dem candidates where they are the main challenger to the Tories than to Labour - nevertheless other than the Tory MPs with super safe majorities I would imagine most of the rest will be concerned. Johnson is now definitely being seen as an electoral liability by the party rather than an asset, which is a very dangerous situation for any Tory leader and not normally one that persists for too long.

Well your favourite comic doesn't seem so sure 🤣 Quite apart from the almighty b@lls up that Brexit has turned out to be which seems to be the reasoning behind this Express story saying a majority want to re-join (very strange that the Express even ran the story), there is another major factor which they didn't mention - the Brexiteers won only because they scored very highly amongst the over 70s - they were in a minority in all other age groups. So even leaving aside those Brexiteers that have changed their mind because of how badly its turned out, the simple fact is that Brexiteers are dying off more quickly than Remainers and on top of that each year well over half a million young people become eligible to vote, and they are overwhelming pro-Remain/Re-join. So you are quite wrong - we almost certainly will re-join at some point but it probably won't be a straight hop back in - Johnson's oven ready deal has already come out of the oven and proved inedible. Expect years of ongoing negotiations as we gradually edge back closer to the EU in the hope of rescuing something from the shambles that Johnson has created.

Seems as though it is and a majority of them want back in.............according to the Daily Express!! Brexit fury: EU can 'disrupt UK trade' with move that can have 'significant consequences' | UK | News | Express.co.uk Appears they are having great difficulties with their left and right hands at the Express nowadays 😂🤣😂🤣

Sick joke - a significant downgrade from Daniel Farke. Webber out!!

Yep, happy to agree to disagree - i understand why you, and many others, feel the way you do but its not the way i see it. The one bit I continue to completely disagree with you on is this question of due diligence - the succession planning that we are supposed to have in place would dictate that we have a regularly updated and researched hit list of our prefered replacements in the event of the need to replace Farke, or him getting run over by the proverbial bus. Of course that may need to flex a bit depending upon the exact timing but IMO talking to numerous managers is exactly what we shouldn't be doing. We should be talking to our no 1 target whoever he is and only if for whatever reason we can't get him move onto number 2 etc. Of course we know little of what has actually gone on this week but I think we know enough to know that we are not following that targetted approach - at least I hope not. I would hate to think that we really did have a target list and Lampard was no 1 on it 😃

Are you still in the pub from last night? Even by your normal standards, that is two paragraphs of total bollox.

Yes, I do - all of it actually - I worded it quite carefully to articulate as clearly as I could what I feel about the current situation at the club. Maybe I didn't articulate it clearly enough but it is only a personal opinion after all, and in fact we appear to agree on a fair bit. Where we mainly part company, I think, is how you measure/assess 'progress' and I guess that also ties in somewhat to timescale, i.e. patience. IMO the club has made a huge amount of progress both on and off the field since the Webber\Farke era began - not a particularly contentious opinion I would hope. But especially given the state of the club when they took over it was never going to be straight line upwards progress, and so it has proved but nevertheless a huge amount of progress has been made. So your view, along with many others, is that due to a disappointing start to this season that progress has not just stopped but can't be restarted without a change at the top. I understand that view but fundamentally disagree with it. That was my initial reaction to Farke's sacking and TBH has been strengthened by the shambolic week which has followed - maybe Webber will still manage to pull a rabbit out of the hat but the fact that we've even been talking to coaches such as Lampard and Smith suggest to me that this whole affair represents an enormous lapse of judgement and due diligence by Webber.

Quite, and if Webber does know what he is doing, I really wonder what he was doing when he recently gave Farke a 4 year contract!

Who cares how much of a laughing stock we are, given that we are one already and if the dozy pundits want to laugh a bit louder and a bit longer then stuff em, would be my take. They know bog all about us to start with, and haven't had the least interest in us until they think we might be attracting a 'celebrity' manager - complete waste of space the lot of them. Having said that, whilst I applaud LDC's sentiment I think Farke has far too much class to come back even in the extremely unlikely event of us asking him to. So I think we just have to accept that we have just blown a once in a lifetime chance of having a long term manager who could eventually have transformed the club into the top 17 club that it has aspired to be for many years but has never quite made it. We aren't going to make it this time either and IMO probably won't ever because 'we' (and that means both the fans and the owners but mainly the fans) don't have the patience to run with a long term project. That for me is the very sad lesson of Daniel's time - not only have we seen seasons of glorious football but the club has been hugely strenghtened in both footballing and financial terms. But because we might get relegated again (in a much better position than we were last time) we've lost our nerve and thrown out the baby with the bathwater. So we're not completely back to square one but the Head Coach's job has been turned into something of a poisoned chalice and its hard to see how the next guy, however good he is, is going to even be given the time that Daniel was. So we're back on the managerial treadmill, spinning merrily and aimlessly.