feltmonkey

81 crosses! if only we'd hit a few more, we might have won.

One of the weirdest matches I've ever seen. How many crosses did we end up on?

You can't fault our comic timing this season.

Now can we hang on? Everyone in defence!

Woohoo! Slightly disappointed it didn't come from a cross.

Looks like Januzaj has been sent on with instructions to get some more crosses into the box. Good thing too - our rate has started to drop a bit. We were going at better than one per minute in the first half, but only 10 in the first 20 minutes of the second. We're not going to get to 100 at that rate.

Great minds both.

One definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

47 48 49 50!

We seem to be working on that principle. Anyone else finding the game frustrating but oddly entertaining?

We can do better than that. Get Valencia on and go for 100. Lol 46 if you include dead balls. Seriously impressive.

Carrick unlucky there.

That should have been 2-0

Well, we are completely dominating the game, but we don't seem capable of doing anything except getting it wide and crossing it. I don't want to jinx it but I think we will probably turn it around.

Oh good grief!

he's not played for about three weeks though, isn't that considered a rest? by the way, why aren't Fulham playing that Greek striker they bought?

we're never going to see RVP, Rooney, Mata and Januzaj in the same starting line-up, are we? it defies logic to buy a brilliant player and then use him as a straight replacement for your other brilliant player. Januzaj has been our best performer this season by far, why is he the one to make way?

because money is the only thing that's important, right? anyway, i think we're more concerned for the England team than KP himself, even though he has been treated shoddily.

i think that's very disputable. he personally did all that? his own captaincy, sure, and there's some argument that Peter Moores' departure was partly, but not completely, down to the dispute with Pietersen, but where are these other two departures you're "indisputably" pinning on him? KP is a divisive figure. some people love him and will forgive him anything if they can watch him bat, others hate him and will fall over themselves to blame him for anything that goes wrong. every time England collapse, the picture in the papers is of KP, even if other batsmen played stupid shots and KP got a bad decision. in Australia, pretty much all the batsmen played rash shots at bad times, and KP was not the biggest culprit. that honour goes to Cook, i would say. getting out hooking in the first over of a day when you needed to bat all day to save a game is as bad as it gets. KP is clearly a right tool and a nightmare to work with, i'm sure. but this is international sport - it comes with the territory that there are going to be difficult characters. the personality type needed to get to that level means that you are going to get people who are very driven, with huge egos, and many of them are very strange individuals. a game like cricket, which puts an unusual amount of mental strain on the players means that you are going to get cracks developing, which will manifest in different ways. with KP, it seems to have been a complete inability to accept fault in himself or listen to criticism, leading to him attacking some of the people around him. the thing is that all top sports teams have some lunatics in, but if they contribute to the team winning, you do whatever's necessary to get them doing that, even if that means coddling them. Vaughan says he tended to big KP up, tell him the crowd were there to see him, etc. if that worked, why not keep doing that? isolating him the way England did this winter seemed a strange thing to do. anyway, pointless ignorant speculation is pointless and ignorant. looking at it from a purely on-the-pitch perspective, England have sacked their best batsman at a time when he still had something to give, and when we're already lost several good players. that seems like a bad idea to me.

yeah, i played the PS2 version of the first Disgea extensively, then got the PSP version and played it even more. much more, in fact. it's the same game with no compromises i could see, the only difference being that it is a perfect fit for a handheld.

i think teams taking legal advice against refereeing decisions can only be a bad thing in the long-term. having said that, why hasn't Flores been punished for his reaction? why do you never see anyone get booked for feigning injury to try and get an opponent sent off? bookings for simulation always involve a dive to win a free-kick or penalty. why don't the rolling face-holders get booked?

this kind of article is usually garbage, but there's some interesting views from Michael Vaughan in particular here. http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cricket/26041494 some amazing, but completely typical, lack of self-awareness from Boycott too, complaining that Pietersen wasn't a team player and would only play his own way rather than adapting. this from a guy who always played for himself rather than his team, to the point when in one instance a teammate was sent out with instructions to run him out because he was batting too slowly!

i think you can probably add Kagawa to that list.

this. it's a bizarre piece of scapegoating, of a guy who is England's most talented player, and at 33 still had a few years left in him. he was far from the worst performer on the tour, as well. the likelihood is that he was putting someone's nose out of joint, and there was a clash of personality. the England team in recent years has become some kind of ridiculously touchy gaggle of cliquey schoolgirls. someone needs to point out to Cook that half the job of captaincy is to manage the different personalities in the team, not ditch anyone who's difficult and replace them with a bunch of androids. it's pathetic. this is a really harsh way to treat a guy who's given a lot to the team over the years, despite being pretty erratic both in style and personality. 8181 runs, an average of 47, but all he gets is a "fuck off KP, we don't want you anymore." what is going on with English cricket at the moment?

do you wear hotpants when you play it, Strategos?