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Yeah, I looked up the stories...the shitstorm on twitter abusing the victim make the story even worse.
Amen on that.
He flubbed his relationship with the senior players. While it is easy to have sympathy for him, it's all on him. As far as I can tell, he wasn't undermined by anyone else in the management and while it would be nice if Lampard and Terry et all had less bloated egos, it's his job to handle them.
It was a tough task for him, he had to learn to manage at an entirely new level, with superstars and entourages and all that, and not take a step wrong at the same time. Mourinho did that, of course, and AVB was meant to be a carbon copy of that appointment. Turns out there is only one Mourinho.
They've got some good counter-attacking players but everything isn't automatically fixed and they're not suddenly one of the best teams in the world. I still think they're a clear step below Man U, Man City, Bayern, Dortmund, Real, and Barcelona.
I like Bayern as a pretty clear favorite in the CL final. At home, and they're just flat out better. Chelsea was abysmal in the air today, which really surprised me.
Not to harp, but that's 35 million pounds, tyvm.
Never! ####### Chelsea.
Not to harp, but that's 35 million pounds, tyvm.
At least I didn't type "yen".
Yep. Then Newcastle would have to sweat the CL Final. Fancy Pants will probably split in half, literally. It's gonna be icky!
Just remember who has all the doomsday devices stashed away!
HAHAHAHAHAHA! I'M AWESOME!
Of course, now I have the mental image of them having a very orderly German riot.
Clearly. BTW, fans in Dortmund tore down the goals so they could salvage the net as a souvenir. Also took pieces of turf from the pitch...
But back to Köln.
While it's true that it's his job I think it's more on Terry etc... and Abramovich. The players should be professional enough to show up and play hard and not be a whiny bunch of crybabies (I can watch the Red Sox if I want to see that). At the same time, Abramovich has to know what he's doing when he hires AVB. He either needs to give AVB the freedom to kick Terry and friends to the curb if they're not getting it done or he needs to hire someone palatable to the inmates if he's going to let them run the asylum.
But these are good players, there is nothing worse than a manager that kicks perfectly good players into the freezer because of personal animosity, that is the ultimate sign of a weak manager. It's up to AVB to impress them with his authority, not to make big daddy Abramovich take care of the nasty kids. There is no manager that is so good tactically that he is worth nannying because he can't handle uppity players. It's AVB's and nobody else's job to make the players love him or, failing that, to fear him.
And of course, AVB had trouble making his tactics work too. If those had worked from the off, the chemistry would probably have been just great.
So in the end, AVB got a handsomely rewarded internship at a major club. Bet he'll put that to good use on his next job.
De Jong for Nasri? That's a defensive change for a side that needs three points.
And Yaya...is one fabulous footballer.
Genius.
And maybe another week's wait to see if Chelsea will spoil a fourth place finish.
Yeah, unless VDV was done (and they worried about injury), that made no sense.
The shame of this is that with a win they would have at least guaranteed a top-4 finish, regardless of the outcome next week.
And with Rose suspended for the final game, what to they do there? At least they got the point, so they give themselves a chance if Arsenal draw, but beating Fulham ain't gonna be easy.
It will be sad as a Fulham fan to see Dempsey go. He and Brian McBride were why I picked them as my favorite team in the EPL. But he's ready to play for trophies, and I know he's spoken openly about going to a team where he can do that.
Exactly. Harry really needed to find a way to get Defoe on the pitch for at least the last 15 minutes. Villa are too good at dealing with crosses and corners (and Spurs' delivery is far too ####) for Spurs to have much of chance via that route. Best hope was someone making a shooting chance out of nothing, and nobody in the squad is better at that than JD.
What a ####### buzzkill this season has been. Can’t wait for the 0-0 to Fulham.
He was about to bring Defoe on early in the second half, then took it back after the penalty. It was definitely bizarre that he never brought him on at any point when Spurs needed a goal.
It's not easy, Swansea is too good a team to quit playing defense against. If you front-load the attack the players who are supposed to deliver the balls would be exposed and vulnerable. The net result will probably just that be the surplus attackers will fall down the pitch to support the midfield. Or in the worst case, the team splits in two halves and Swansea gets space for counter-attacking.
It would be a pipe dream anyway. The goal difference is a lost cause. United can do no more than to win their game and root for QPR.
Playing "normally" won't get them a title, as there is very, very little chance of a City draw/loss at home to QPR.
It's not zero, more like 15-20% or so.
The color guy called that one pretty well. De Jong stays back and allows Toure freedom to move forward. Toure ended up bailing out Aguero who was oddly wasteful today.
Osasuna has a chance to qualify for a Europa League spot with a win & some other things going their way. They have a goal differential of -19. WTF.
To be fair, only 4 out of 20 teams in La Liga have a goal differential better than +1.
I think QPR are going to pull out the draw with City though. This EPL season has been all about failure. Every time a team has had something in their grasp they have failed to seal the deal;
City had the title early and gave it away
United had it late and gave it away
No one seems to want 4th with Chelsea, Arsenal, Spurs and Newcastle all giving it away at various points
Even in Europe the English clubs rolled over in both the CL and the Europa League (save Chelsea)
The League Cup was won on a penalty that went wide
Chelsea did everything in their power to blow a 2-0 lead in the FA Cup final
I just feel like we're in for one more "oops, what happened here" moment.
Should be about 1m per place IIRC.
I don't know if that's relevant or not but it struck me as interesting.
La Liga was immune to this but Madrid and Barca are much bigger clubs than anyone else there.
So, the Jerome Anderson/Indian chicken merchants experiment failed miserably. I'm guessing Jack Walker is rolling over in his grave, though he's probably been doing that ever since his family trust decided to cheap out on the club.
I honestly don't see Blackburn getting promoted back to the PL under the current ownership. They really don't seem to know what they're doing and they're going to lose their most valuable asset--Hoilett--for nothing. It's a long way from the heady days of the Ronaldinho and Raul rumors. Blackburn fans saw it coming, I suppose, when they made no effort to keep Jermaine Jones and the ridiculous "Phil Jones has a what-out clause in his contract?" fiasco.
In happier news, Forza Torino. 4 games to promotion. A win this Saturday against Pescara and I think they're promoted, though there's only 3 points separating the top 4 sides. Sampdoria has worked their way into a playoff spot. Hard to believe they're 2 years removed from the Champions League. They do, however, continue to have a fantastic badge.
In the 1994-95 season, Real Madrid, Juventus, Borussia Dortmund, Porto, Ajax and Blackburn Rovers won their respective leagues.
In a way, it's fitting that the financially doped Man City are taking Blackburn's place on that list.
Maybe it would be nice to see MLB's more parsimonious and greedy owners be faced with the thread of relegation if they choose to spend a decade letting every player go who makes more than half a million dollars and isn't named Brad Radke or Hanley Ramirez, but it would also mean teams that simply have less income would start acting desperate and going into debt, like the New Mexico State football team.
In the presence of financial doping, the alternative to widespread unsustainability is an equilibrium where every team other than the Big Four acts like West Brom and doesn't try to do more than go .500. But people don't like that either.
Leagues with hardly any "financial doping" recently are Germany and France. They seem like they have good systems. Bordeaux suddenly became really good largely because of their coach, and now he left and they're mediocre again. They didn't suddenly become good because they were bought by the Archduke of Belgravia and then end up playing in the Northwest Counties League once he left.
I believe the financial incentive is around three quarters of a million pounds per place in the table for those mid-tier clubs. Not huge, but it ain't chump change either. If your read on Stoke is correct, that's almost 4MM quid to be had for the club this weekend. Not too shabby.
There's been talk of changing the payout so that players get a cut of that "merit payment" and would therefore be more inclined to lay it on the line late in the season if they don't otherwise have anything to play for besides making some extra coin for ownership.
*Shrug* The likes of Bayern, ManU, Real, Bayern, Juve and Bayern have been buying titles for decades. If an owner wants to spend some of his own cash to level the playing field, I personally have no problem with that.
One of my favorite pastimes at the office is listening to a friend of mine (who is a die hard Yankee fan) rant about City's profligate ways. Its almost as good as listening to a Man U supporter complain about the nouveau-richeness of City.
"Financial doping" refers to vanity teams run at a loss, something of a concern for entrenched big clubs and few others. One could make the case that Spain needs a whole lot more financial doping to break up the parody their league has become thanks to non-doped Real and Barcelona. I solved the problem for myself by simply not caring who wins in La Liga (more than rooting for the underdog, but in Spain there are no fairy tales), it's like watching the Yankees and Red Sox dropping down to AAA while boosting their payroll, it's nothing but Scotland squared.
I don't see how FFS will help against undercapitalized owners like Gillett and Hicks or Ridsdale and co though, they are still free to borrow against everything a club owns. The rules are aimed against the Cities and Chelseas. Hmmm... are there really any more sugar-daddied big clubs than City, Chelsea and PSG around?
But you have to admit there is something fundamentally boring about knowing right now that there are only two (maybe three) teams with any realistic shot of winning the EPL NEXT season. Or knowing that it will be at least three or four years (and maybe many more than that) before anyone can even challenge Real or Barca. In La Liga this year the gap between 2nd and 3rd place is as big as the gap between 3rd and last place.
In some ways, I almost wish the big clubs really did just split off and form their own super-continental league. I would love for Manchester United fans to know the taste of the occasional mid-table finish. And then the rest of us could try to have a real league.
This year I've not even bothered watching the Champions League. I just couldn't bring myself to care all that much or watch players have hissy fits at officials / play with 11 men behind the ball as they try and Mourinho their way to a trophy.
Sharing television revenues more equitably would make the Spanish playing field much more level, but there isn't necessarily a strong fan interest in having that happen. On the one hand, you have a significant number of supporters in countries like Italy, Spain and Portugal who believe that the domination of a small handful of clubs is the natural order of things (thus the phenomenon of people who support a "small" club also having a favorite "big"), as well as increased attention on the Champions League, where budgets are more comparable. Indeed, a favorite justification for Barca and Madrid's gargantuan slice of the Spanish television pie is that they would be at a serious disadvantage in Europe if they had to share more than others.
Personally, I prefer leagues in which resources are more equitably distributed, but that says as much about my politics as it does about my view of the sport.
at a serious disadvantageon a level playing field with 3 other teams in Europe if they had to share more than others.Fixed, etcetera...
For me, Man City's success is just so boring. They've answered the age-old question--if you drop a billion dollars on a club will they win trophies? I'm glad we've got that answered. That said, if Silva and Aguero and Tevez combine for a great move to score a goal, there's still a visceral pleasure to it despite the fact in the moment leading up to the move I'm hoping for them to fall on their faces. I'm also happy Man City's long-suffering fans are getting some glory and hope they don't drift into the kind of fandom a lot of Chelsea fans have. Not all Chelsea fans, of course. It must be weird to have been a fan of Chelsea before the Abramovich years and to now get lumped in with all the bandwagon jumpers. Also, I realize sports fandom is kind of irrational and stupid and I constantly wonder why I care about this stuff so much. And then I think, goddam Golden State Warriors, why have you been kicking me in the balls for 30 years? But I digress...
Malaga? Wasn't AS Monaco recently purchased by a rich Russian, too?
I just assumed everyone was rooting for Man City in the title race. I want Balotelli to get a hat trick against QPR too, and see if the announcers praise him.
Go Delfini!
Blackburn fans would welcome a resurrected Jack Walker back with open arms, while Joe Lewis (Spurs) and the Mittals (minority at QPR) have Abramovich-scale resources without Roman's penchant for setting money on fire.
And Shooty, as someone who knows quite a few pre-tycoon Chelsea and Man City fans, yes, it is difficult for them, particularly when they find themselves priced out of following a club they've supported for decades by people who couldn't tell Dennis Tueart from Chopper Harris.
It's honestly really not that bad. It's slightly annoying to be insulted by Spurs/Gunners/ManU/whatever fans, but that would happen regardless. It's more fun when people do a "prove it!" and I pull out one of my Chelsea jerseys with their old, pre-Abramovich logo and old sponsors, and then have them stare awkwardly (that's right, I'm a Chelsea fan, one of the reasons I don't like posting on SpursThinkFactory [:p, I'm just joking about that last bit]).
Really, it just gives an excuse to point out how all major clubs are financially doped in some way and have other fans look at you angrily.
Though having fans who don't really understand the history of the club around is pretty annoying. I find people exaggerate how much so, though. People just like to feel superior and "I know more about this than you!" is an easy way to do so.
Basically, I prefer to watch the sport, enjoy the games, and not complain about the circumstances. Or whether some team isn't attacking enough. I find that, no matter what, there's always something I can enjoy in a match (yes, even in a 0-0 draw. Try watching the positioning of the players and their potential passing routes) and that people who spend their time complaining lose sight of this.
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