maybe he shd learn to cross a ball then
don’t see nv around tbh, tho if we start a ‘blue saturday’ thread with obscure youtubes and nonsense cocktail ideas he’ll be drawn out i reckon
Not that many footballers can cross a ball well, tbf 2 Theo
i don’t consider it an essential skill but wd argue it is a necessary constituent of wingerdom
Who’s the best crosser in the league then?
Sure I’ve seen plenty in my time who couldn’t manage it (xp)
maybe he shd learn to cross a ball then
Frankly, every footballer should know how to cross and yes, Theo needs to work on that but I had despaired of him ever really amounting to anything but a one-time WC tourist until I saw him play the wing against Udinese and (admittedly not cross) make that run into the box to score. It was unWalcottesque to me or at least a novelty.
xxp
god knows, hardly anybody plays wingers any more. Baines is a better crosser of the ball than Theo but it ain’t him
Oh I know you’ve always rated him Darragh. Just sayin’—last few weeks in particular he’s been so so good. God I love him. (xposts)
being a winger who can’t cross is like being a striker who can’t shoot straight oh wait gervinho i see a pattern
tbf half the wingers in the league are of the cutting inside variety these days. You don’t see many getting to the byline
i know, i just think that if you mainly do that, especially if you’re playing on yr weaker side and consequently are more or less unable to cross, u shd be called something other than a winger. not that Theo plays on his weaker side. but it’s like the difference between being a “centre forward” and a “striker”
K. Doyle for example is a centre forward but i don’t think he’s a striker
tbf half the wingers in the league are of the cutting inside variety these days. You don’t see many getting to the byline
Heaven knows why, as the latter is about a million times more effective... provided you can cross the ball, oh, that’s where it falls down
also unless you have a 30 million pound totem pole in the middle to head the crosses in this tactic mayn’t be effective
It can’t be Jermaine Pennant
Valencia used to do it but he seems to be completely frightened of taking on a defender since he came back from injury, and since he still plays on the right and doesn’t even have the semblance of a left foot cutting inside is completely pointless
Who’s the best crosser in the league then?
charlie adam’s corners are worth 10 million quid don’t ya know.
Corners are another kettle of fish entirely. Nani is an excellent crosser but his corners and set-pieces in general are awful
baines, bale, bellamy, gerrard, young, valencia all p good from top of my head, i’m sure there’s loads more.
Cleverley landed a few beauties against us too, nani prob worth mention. Downing always used to be, but these days i dunno.
i’ve seen some rotten corners this season too, guys who regularly can’t beat the first defender, several of them wearing Old Gold
rory delap, in a way.
Was going to mention C. Adam, but bombing down the wing and pinging over crosses seems beyond his physical capabilities (xxxxp)
Argh! Lucas! Six months! Now what? Henderson has got to step up big time.
Convinced that moaning about footballers being unable to cross the ball is a sign of getting older
don’t mind footballers being unable to cross, think wingers shd be able to. obviously i’m getting old and senile but that’s beside the point
I’m not sure if guys like Jimmy Johnstone, or whoever, were particularly great crossers either
NBS is teh_hoBB I’m sure
aye, just temporarily going back in time
Best crossers currently = Nani, Bale, Baines, Young. I’d probably rate Nani the best of those.
Assou-Ekotto is pretty sweet when it comes to putting in crosses as well.
corluka’s a good crosser
Footballers being one-footed, not being able to cross, set pieces being poor- pet peeves
Trevor Francis is the earliest “dude who can run really fast down a wing and has no end product when he gets to the byline” player i can remember but he perhaps didn’t invent it
bae- yep
Remembers Trevor Francis = noodle vague, no?
i thought it was obvious ages ago tbh
toyed with claiming to be pinefox for a moment
garrincha!
Oh yeah Mata as well.
dunno how Alan Ball was as a crosser of the ball but read an anecdote once where he complained to Ramsay that all he’d done was run up and down all match without receiving the ball
steve guppy- proper fuckin winger, son
have woken from my afternoon nap to be greeted with this ‘lucas out for 6 months’ news. Am sad for the player. Am sad for myself. May go for a nap for the rest of the season :(
will chime in with the ‘players being one footed’ pet peeve. Especially when they would rather not cross the ball at all than even attempt a cross with their ‘wrong’ foot!
xp. It’s not official, but Shelvey has returned from Blackpool, which is pretty ominous. Just as Sky and the rest had woken up to the fact that he’s rather decent, too. Gutted for him.
Shamrock putting up a proper fight against Rubin Kazan right now, 2–1 down at half-time
Don’t get why we think Shelvey is suddenly going to transform into a top class DM when that’s never been the role we’ve had in mind for him. Our overreliance on Lucas and our unwillingness to give him a rest has been hugely irresponsible and nothing short of a joke. Still, at least the fans can still dream of a trip to the new Wembley. And we do exist to win trophies. Yeah right. Fucking fuming right now.
Bruce gone
woah
woah. Hughes? McClaren?
Rafa or GTFO
Ha, just finished the Guardian’s everyone-stays piece that’s just gone up
Hahaha, looks like it’s been pulled
Martin O’Neill seems to be the early favourite but that’s a standard reaction at this point i assume
He’s not gonna want to be last on MOTD is he?
Got a shock when I saw Alan Curbishley on the list of candidates, had forgotten he was a football manager!
It is interesting to see you guys go “Arsenal are a 1 man team, Theo is shit and can’t cross.” Umm, who do you think made all his goals, and how they were made? Like 50% came from Theo crosses. Because he is the best winger in the league. But its cool, y’all still see him as the 16 year old who hadn’t developed yet.
RIP Bruce, heaven needed an updated Iain Dowie in the shit manager who kept getting top jobs without any talent.
Am I right in thinking Bruce hasn’t been sacked before?
Theo the second best winger in the league. Behind Micah Richards.
He usually walks to pastures new iirc
xp
I know, but not because he’s been about to get the bullet I don’t think. I don’t recall him ever overachieving or being under huge pressure until now—maybe he is a good choice for an unambitious provincial club after all.
haven’t seen the ‘like’ stats for assists, assume they’re not akin to the actual stats tbh
In any case, the original claim was that theo would stroll in and get rvp’s goals as and when needed. Is that ‘like’ goals or real ones?
Ha, just finished the Guardian’s everyone-stays piece that’s just gone up
― Ismael Klata, Wednesday, 30 November 2011 18:21 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Permalink
Hahaha, looks like it’s been pulled
― Ismael Klata, Wednesday, 30 November 2011 18:23 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Permalink
lol do you have the original link for this? the google cache might have saved it from the memory hole
RIP Bruce, heaven needed an updated Iain Dowie in the shit manager who kept getting top jobs without any talent.
― big popppa hoy, Wednesday, 30 November 2011 19:16 (50 minutes ago)
sunderland won something like 5 in 29
he is dreadful
Premier League managers seem safer with sack-happy culture on wane
Has the closeness of the Premier League meant chairmen are finally resisting pulling the trigger as soon as a poor run occurs?
Newcastle’s Chris Hughton was the first Premier League manager to be sacked last season—on 6 December. Photograph: Craig Brough/Action Images
Jamie Jackson
The Guardian, Wed 30 Nov 2011 15.39 GMT
Blogpost
In the sack-happy culture of football, next week could prove a landmark in the fragile life of a manager. If all 20 Premier League No1s wake on Wednesday still employed, a record will be set and a trend may be developing.
Newcastle United’s Chris Hughton was dismissed by Mike Ashley on 6 December last year, the first to go in the 2010–11 season. Before that, at least one Premier League manager had been sacked by then in every term this century (Martin O’Neill, who left Aston Villa just before the campaign started, resigned).
To explain this season’s lack of changes Neil Warnock points to the Premier League’s competitiveness, where Aston Villa in eighth are separated by nine points from bottom-placed Blackburn Rovers. “Everybody’s so close,” the Queens Park Rangers manager says. “Apart from the top seven teams, from Villa below, everybody knows they’re in a battle.”
While it may be too early to declare that chairmen are finally resisting pulling the trigger whenever a poor run occurs, a shift is found throughout the game, with only six managers sacked so far in the Football League, again lower than every season this century except for last term. “Stability is key, you need time in any job – more so than ever at the minute,” Warnock says. “That’s what the owners are trying to do. When you look at the Premier League they’re all trying to support their managers – I look at Chelsea and clubs like that.”
The League Managers Association, though, urges caution. Since the Premier League was formed in 1992 160 managers have been removed – an average of more than eight each season who are forced to look for a new job. Last year, 50% of clubs across all four divisions finished with a different man in charge, while around half of first-time managers are not employed elsewhere.
“We normally review the stats in December and that’s when we’ll know whether or not there’s been a change,” says Richard Bevan, the LMA chief executive, before offering the following reasons for the past two seasons’ trend. “There’s always less sacked in the Premier League than the Football League, and we have some incredibly talented and experienced managers. If you were the owner of Wolverhampton Wanderers you wouldn’t want other than Mick McCarthy or Roberto Martínez [at Wigan Athletic], or Sir Alex Ferguson or Roberto Mancini at the top.”
Jez Moxey, the Wolves chief executive, agrees: “You must get the right manager. Once you think you have, maintaining him in the post over the medium to long term has a whole range of benefits that perhaps aren’t seen by supporters and others if they don’t get immediate results.”
Bevan is clear regarding the advantages of stability. “At the end of last season 50% of our clubs had had their manager in for less than 12 months, so that brings a nervousness around the boardroom, the fans, the local media, the players,” he says. “In any form of working life – business, government or sport – you need time to build your team and deliver that philosophy on what you’re looking to achieve. So from that perspective, it’s great news that no Premier League manager has been relieved of his duties.
”Hopefully the owners are recognising that if they want to achieve their objectives they’ve only got to look at Sir Alex Ferguson celebrating 25 years this season. In the main I think most do recognise that. Clubs are beginning to recognise that they have to manage the expectations around them. For example, for the owners of Blackburn Rovers [Venky’s], it was nonsensical for them to come out and say: ‘We’re looking to finish in the top four or five.’ I don’t think you’ll say many statements like that.“
Moxey believes ditching a manager too soon is foolish. ”The downsides of changing are enormous and costly – it’s almost like a roll of the craps dice,“ he says. ”As long as they are doing the things that you want them to do and in the way the club is set out [it should be OK].“
Bevan agrees that both the board and manager must have a shared vision. ”From a manager’s perspective everyone has a different objective. For some survival will be an achievement in itself, others it’s trophies or promotion. One of our guys said the other day it’s about: ‘Staying in the race long enough to win.’ If you look at any other industry or went to any business school they would tell you that if you change the most important person in your organisation every 10 months it doesn’t take rocket science to recognise that all you’re going to achieve is nowhere near your fans’ expectations.
“What you need to do is look at the core business and make sure the people running the clubs are having very close liaison with the key personnel. An example: until recently I haven’t seen in many clubs a written document of what the board is looking to achieve with the manager and the players. In business we call them key performance indicators. We are glad that for a lot of chairmen, chief executives and managers the communication is beginning to improve, that they are saying: ‘Let’s meet on a quarterly basis to ask what are our goals? OK, we haven’t achieved our last quarter, let’s set our expectations for the next quarter, for where we want to be. Let’s make sure the fans, the local media don’t think we should be top of the league.’”
December, though, can still be the cruellest month: after Hughton last year, five more managers were axed before the new year.
lol yeah that showed up in my google reader like 2 spots below BRUCE OUT
thank you, great timing
If you were the owner of Wolverhampton Wanderers you wouldn’t want other than Mick McCarthy
if i were the owner?
Utd match is pretty grim. Problem with these games is Fergie just uses them to give the bench warmers a run-out, so you get Berbatov, Macheda and Diouf all playing instead of any attempt at a coherent team. And Gibson. Fucking Gibson. The club tried to get rid of him in the summer and yet they’re still giving him games over promising players like Morrison and Pogba (who’s threatening to leave). Fabio went off after half an hour. I feel bad but playing him is basically throwing away a sub at this point. I’m not sure he’s ever completed a game for Utd.
any links to spurs streams
www.wiziwig.tv is the new incarnation of myp2p
haven’t seen the ‘like’ stats for assists, assume they’re not akin to the actual stats tbh
In any case, the original claim was that theo would stroll in and get rvp’s goals as and when needed. Is that ‘like’ goals or real ones?
― daramaracas.jpg (p much resigned to deems), Wednesday, 30 November 2011 19:49 (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink
Actually the original claim was that Arsenal would do better with RVI out than Ade out, but whatever, keep changing the goal posts.
btw lol at the first four suggestions you get when you type in robin van persie to google being “robin van persie twitter” “... muslim” “... rape” and “...stats”.
Van Persie has 17 goals this season and Walcott has 5 assists (1 more than RVP)
taActually the original claim was that Arsenal would do better with RVI out than Ade out, but whatever, keep changing the goal posts.
than spurs would with ade out, i take it? claim is nonsense
tks for tip #0 but that site suxxxxxx
spurs 2–1 down after 41 mins, luka took a penalty, stream lolled all the way through it so i dunno if that was our goal or not
any links to spurs streams
― daramaracas.jpg (p much resigned to deems), Wednesday, November 30, 2011 3:42 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink
http://tykestv.eu/channel2.php
you should be thankful for missing the first 30 minutes
Doesn’t suck if you’re using sopcast. In fact my Utd stream switched to a crystal clear one of the Spurs game at half time
i dunno i’ve always been wary of sopcast tbph
I use nothing else these days. Complete reliability and nigh on HD quality quite a bit of the time
Morrison on for Berbatov thank fuck
sopcasting from dutch tv now- awesome
paok just pulled the most devastating offside trap i’ve ever seen
Would love a Joy of Six on that. Maybe a write-in poll.
FFS Rafael has to go off now. Morrison has made an appreciable difference though
Absolute wonder goal from Palace
fuckin hell rose really startin to look like that imaginary winger we were discussing earlier, kane just missed a sitter from a ‘beat yr man, put it on a plate son’ act from him
paok just pulled the most devastating offside trap i’ve ever seen
― daramaracas.jpg (p much resigned to deems), Wednesday, November 30, 2011 4:11 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink
this was awesome
gif needed
i’m intrigued. was it from a free kick?
yes
Utd didn’t let palace enjoy that for long
pretty much the entire spurs team was offsides when it was taken
xxp
yeah, by the time the cross reached gallas there were 8 spurs men in the box and not a paok player within 10 yards, guys were like 100m runners
harry kane is gonna be a good player for sheff utd imo
That’s the other bookend to Macheda’s career.
getting villa flashbacks now IK
seems to easy to predict which young players won’t make it. kane has looked pretty good, imo, just ko’d some defender with a powerful ball to the head.
watched that offside play, brilliant and funny
kane has a powerful shot but his touch, movement, passing, decisions have been pretty poor in this entire uefa run
Next rooney obv
shit
Refs got that badly wrong imo
no wait, its been chalked off?
Ref still dreadful there, either he called a stop and no goal, or he didn’t and it’s a goal.