canarybubbles

It's pre-season, early days, we mustn't over-react, but my God that was rubbish. Sadly, Magdeburg looked a bit like the team we want to be according to Thorup. Can we buy Mathisen please? He looked way better than any of our defenders. If we sold Mumba for 1m, any chance we can sell Kamara to Portsmouth for the same?

Losing to a Bundesliga 2 team? How is this possible? Every time I point out what a wonderful loan season Tzolis had, my friend Hogesar tells me that was because it was only Bundesliga 2 and the level is utter rubbish, way below the Championship. Surely we should be winning this 4-0 without breaking sweat. I know it's pre-season but we have been very poor. Kamara has looked total rubbish yet it seems he is going to get chance after chance while players who are way more skillful than him - Mumba and Tzolis - were tossed on the rubbish heap after 30 minutes last pre-season.

I'm a bit worried that Sara seems peripheral to this game. Nunez hasn't been at his best either. Our defence doesn't look good at that near post. The goal came there and almost another. Was the problem Sorensen, as Dr Greenthumb seems to suggest, or someone else? That free header shouldn't have happened.

I'm obviously out of the loop. Who is Renecke?

I understand where the OP is coming from. I'm finding it hard to get fired up for this season. I got fired up about Mumba during his Young Player of the Season loan to Plymouth. Sold, because Wagner doesn't play wing-backs so we had no role for him here. I'd been excited about Tzolis since the Bournemouth game - it really looked like we might have found someone special. His fantastic loan spell at a level almost equivalent to the Championship was really exciting. Sold. And this time, to add insult to injury, we only got 50% of the money. The latest disappointment is looking like it might be another great loanee, Kamara, who has seemed flat so far, as if he is dreaming of going to Portsmouth. I think I've learned not to get excited. Yes, I know I should be excited about Sara, Sainz and Rowe, except at least one, and possibly two, of these will be sold before the season starts. So it looks like I'm going to have to try to be excited about Duffy, Barnes and Springett. Somehow I can't manage that. I know this season is a new beginning under new management and maybe that's a reason to be excited. But when we see that sign on a shop window, it's often because the old management were awful, everyone knows that, and the new owners are going to struggle to shake off the failures of the old. Maybe when the season starts, I'll feel differently. But it's not easy to be honest.

With a few exceptions - the Dutch and the Spanish and Turkey and Georgia - this has been an utterly soul-destroying tournament dominated by teams whose only interest is not to lose rather than to win. It will probably have a final which perfectly reflects this - England vs France - which will be, for neutrals, one of the most tedious finals in the history of international football where neutrals won't give a damn who wins but just be glad that at last it is over and they don't have to watch any more. In some ways this is a tribute to the professionalism of modern football: everyone nowadays can put together a decent defence, even countries with weaker players like Slovenia and Slovakia. And fans who see themselves as a grade above the hoi polloi will like this and say that those of us who want thrills and spills are dinosaurs who are incapable of recognising the tactical genius behind these interminable chess games. There is a problem in sport in that the players who don't make a mistake will nearly always beat the players who take risks. Think of Chris Evert, the most robotic tennis player ever to set foot on a court, who made about two winners a game but kept getting the ball back into the court, and won tournament after tournament simply by doing this. Or Steve Davis in snooker. As spectators we long for genius, but this happens very rarely and usually the players or team who don't make errors will win. Personally I can't wait to get back to the Championship, where there are lots of errors and therefore some excitement. I'm 70 years old and this has been the most pointless, tedious tournament I have ever seen.

The France-England final is going to be a footballing extravaganza, isn't it?

As far as I know, jogo (game) is masculine in Portuguese, and also the adjective should agree with the noun, so o jogo bonito (or if joga can be a noun a joga bonita.) Jogar also means to play, so joga means he/she/it plays, so could it mean he plays beautifully? Or perhaps an imperative, which would also be joga - play beautifully! I don't know if jogo could also be a male player, though, or if the phrase is Brazilian slang or whatever. And it's a long time since I lived in Portugal, so I might be talking nonsense.

Do people think it's the way we're implementing VAR, which turns the ref into a mindless robot on the pitch just being told what to do by the fly in his ear? Is that why our standards of refereeing are just getting worse and worse? Don't forget, these guys we send to the tournament are supposed to be the creme de la creme of our referees. God help us if that is true.

14 yellow cards in a match that wasn't particularly dirty, having not given any card for a foul that took Pedri out of the match and possibly out of the tournament. English referees must be close to the worst in the world.

The Netherlands game has all the hallmarks of one team battering the other, but then the other team scores a last minute equaliser and wins on penalties.

The way Connor Southwell is selling this on the Pink Un site pisses me off big time. Apparently we are getting a 'windfall'' of around 650,000 from Dusseldorf selling Tzolis to Brugge. No, we are getting a shortfall of almost 3m because of the deal Webber set up in the loan deal. That extra 3m should be going to us. Webber's gone, thank God, Connor. You don't have to suck up to him anymore because he's going to have a hissy fit if you don't say how wonderful he is in every paragraph and then he'll take his ball away and won't talk to us anymore. The poisonous ego has gone.

God has clearly decided that England are going to get to the final. If we don't do it this time, we'll never do it.

I agree that he has struggled to make an impact going forward but for me he was better at defensive midfield than either Sara or McLean last season. He reads the game well, which means he often intercepted the ball and got the team moving forward again. OK, so he doesn't make flashy, last-ditch, well-hard tackles because you don't need to if you read the game well. As Maldini said, if he needed to make a flashy, last-ditch tackle, he knew he'd made a mistake somewhere. So I am not as sanguine as you about replacing Nunez. For me, he is one of those players who no one notices but actually achieves more than his flashier colleagues. Nor, to be honest, am I as excited about Rowe and Sargent as many of the other people on here. The former, for all his brilliance, does not work well within the collective team; he is an individualist who lasts for sixty minutes and will often get you a goal or two in those sixty minutes, and I don't want to underestimate that, but we didn't miss him that much during his injury in the second half of last season because the collective was arguably better without him; the latter still has unreliable first touch and perhaps long-term injury issues. Sara I would personally do everything I could to keep. He's class. I have niggly worries about how he performed poorly in the big games against Leeds, but at the moment I put that down to a long hard season and Wagner's tactical limitations. But opinions are opinions. As the old saying goes, we all have them.

Well, we've lost Tzolis for 3m (we may have well handed Dusseldorf a cheque for €4m). Never mind, I'm sure we'll still have Barnes and Duffy. Thanks Webber.