Plissken

VAR?

Sweet Child O'Mine, which is overplayed by itself before you get to the cascade of shit covers by pub bands. Under The Bridge. All I Wanna Do

Knee or thigh is fine.

That's a routine save, elevated by the moment when it was required to be made.

Mbappe just turned into Wout Weghorst!

Bloody hell!

I know some of the squad have been ill but he looked like he would rather be anywhere else than playing this game.

Messi 12 yards outside his own box, helping his midfield in tackling the opposition. That’s why he’s better than you Cristiano.

To be honest, even I could have run into three acres of space and then hit the ball into the ground too. 😀

Well, don’t I look like a silly.

Di Maria. I don’t get it and never have.

Messi always shows the idea of sticking the ball outside the corner arc to be the bollocks it is.

Calm as fuck, that penalty. Shouldn’t be given mind.

I've said before that we're a very silly team. Bitterly cold Turf Moor, and with the visitors on a run of four wins in the last five it seemed like we were set up for an intriguing encounter. Which for the first half, we got. Intriguing as in "nothing happened". Boro set up camp just inside the halfway line, with 24 yards between the front line of forwards and the back line of defence. Burnley passed it around the back and no Boro player made a single attempt to challenge for the ball. The gameplan was to wait for the defender to give the ball away to a forward and then charge at goal. That was it. Boro must have crossed halfway with possession maybe three times in the opening half hour. They were aided by a number of misfiring Burnley players, with Brownhill, Cullen and Benson all having their radar very badly calibrated. Second half start with more of the same, until suddenly Benson tried to hook a backpass from halfway and sold it way, way too short. Watmore ran onto it and finished into the corner. Cue celebrations like they had won the Cup and some noise from the away supporters. "Top of the league, you're having a laugh". Steffen in the Boro goal got booked for time-wasting and the cumulative effect on the home crowd and players was "Screw this". Benson cut in from the right and scored at Steffens inside post, his celebration a mixture of joy and apology. Five minutes later, he stands at the right hand corner of the penalty box and does his favourite thing, curls an inswinger aiming to hit the far post, where an attacking forward can nod him. We've scored twice from this at least so far this season, and Steffen being rooted to his line made it three as the ball bounced off the inside of the post and in. A few minutes after that, Brownhill swings a corner in and a Boro defender flicks it into his own net. "Top of the league, we're having a laugh". The away side have a novel challenge in front of them, which is to score a goal without us gifting it to them. They show little sign of being able to do so, although Steffen has realised that he's allowed to take goal kicks without waiting for permission in writing. As the clock ticks down, Muric comes out for a ball, misses, a bit of chaos, it loops up, hits the top of the bar. A few seconds later, the ref blows. Has he had the Hawkeye watch notification thingy? Nope... he's pointing to the spot. Linesman is waving for a handball. It's down the other end from me, so it must have hit somebody but... when? Then the red card comes out for Connor Roberts and he goes mad. Straight dismissal for handball preventing a goal. Having seen a replay, the ball comes down and hits the bar, Roberts arm is up but... it doesn't go near it at all. The officials have messed up. VAR would sort it, but no VAR in the Championship (for which I'm grateful). Ball on the spot, striker does the stuttering run-in and places a weak shot bottom left, which Muric gathers in. Justice. Time enough for Scott Twine to come on after spending all season out injured, get very heavily fouled twice and substituted himself - Kompany said it was tactical, I genuinely think it was because the Boro players had lost their heads a bit and were taking out their frustrations. Final whistle blows, top of the league, six points clear.

At Turf Moor. It’s not the best weather to be sat watching one side camping on their halfway line and not challenging for the ball and the other failing to do anything about it.

Oh come on, that's pretty damned clever.

On one hand a raving Serb nationalist lunatic. On the other:

On the call with Neil Martin, ex-F1 strategist. Went through the pit stops. 36 different processes. Two people simply employed to push down on the sidepods to stabilise the car when it is jacked up. Mechanics are chosen per wheel based on their dominant hand, as the idea is to minimise physical movements. If a driver misses the box by 20cm, it is 0.4 seconds added. The strategy stuff involves about 40 million calculations - he could predict the top 8 in order (barring unforeseen events like safety cars) by lap 10. They know what the other cars are capable of based on live and past data and predict what they are going to do and run various scenarios. For USA 2012, they worked out that starting 6th (Massa) and 8th (Alonso) on the grid was worse than starting 7th and 9th. But they noticed that deliberately giving Massa a penalty would give them a better chance of getting Alonso into the podium places. They worked out that they needed Alonso to be 4th after turn 1. They set the car up to maximise it's first 400 metres and for him to drive around the outside of the corner and he could get to 4th. They don't deviate from strategy, they just run it so many times that everything is considered. "Why are Ferrari so bad?" The tools are very good, but its down to the humans in the background who are making the decisions. Teams train to minimise mistakes, but it is all about pressure. Ferrari has the most pressure (due to history, name etc) and that often overloads them. Best driver in his experience - Alonso, but only if he feels loved. If he feels that team isn't behind him, "he drives like I do". Mika Hakkinen and Kimi Raikonnen were absolute geniuses. How do teams get one up on each other? "It's about finding the holes in the rules." Once you had chosen a solution (e.g. a longer wheelbase compared to others) then either it works and they dominate or they are screwed because you can't change. A team at the back of the grid now would be the dominant team twenty years ago, purely down to the professionalism and training. The top teams don't do "gut feel" - everything is planned, simulated and/or tested. After Spygate, teams are self-policing on people moving between teams and taking information with them. He get's 60 LinkedIn requests asking "how do I get into F1?". Join Formula Student, work on STEM subject, find an edge in terms of working in racing so getting experience. Interesting comment about F1 vs Formula E. To watch F1 you have to go to a race, so people are interested in F1. With Formula E, being in a city, then you can shut down a city and people in their apartments are getting exposed. So you have a crowd of a couple of hundred thousand people in the middle of Hong Kong who would otherwise never get to see racing. Now we've spent an hour making cocktails, so I'm well on the way to getting pissed.

*sidles up and coughs quietly* If I was you, I'd have a look at the current tournament. Especially the season special...

Bugger.

All those in the Press who were claiming this Moroccan team were the successors to Greece 2004 have shown themselves for the idiots they are. They’re immensely likeable and work like absolute demons.

That third goal was something else. With Gvardiol, Messi is giving away fifteen years to one of the stars of the tournament and one-on-one just beat him like a rented mule.

Ultimately, football is a game of small margins and England were on the wrong side of those small margins. Can't remember if I've said this here already, but the one thing that I would say is that France played the ref better. He wasn't going to whistle for a foul if he thought the fouled player exaggerated at all. France seemed to figure this out and England didn't. The French were a little bit more streetwise but ultimately those moments tipped the game against England and well, that's football.

Yes, it was just a little joke on the GMs part.

I'm with @Boothjan, there's a lot of people using the clarity of hindsight to predict what they should have done, and ultimately would you have had the balls in that moment to tell Kane that he wasn't taking that penalty? Reminds me of a story I heard about a guy who analysed (ice) hockey on Twitter and was so good at it he got a job at an NHL team. He sat in the press box at his first game and immediately on the final buzzer the GM of the team came over and asked him for his instant analysis on the performance. "Er..I.." "Lot harder without replays, isn't it? *winks*"