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  2. The arrogance this mf has to give a response, put your head down, get results and shut the fuck up. So far you look worse than Potter if that's even possible.
  3. Throw the whole medical team in jail this is a fucking joke.
  4. Time will tell whether Mauricio Pochettino’s decision to shield Mykhailo Mudryk from the spotlight will be the correct one, if that is of course what he is doing. But whatever is happening with Mudryk lately, it’s positive. We know that one of the big positives about Pochettino is his man-management, so maybe he has been […]View the full article
  5. Cool. I still think he's a bellend. 🤷‍♂️ I find him a detestable footballer with his actions on the pitch and is one of the most instigating footballers on the planet. The whole "all i want to do is play football" whilst acting like like a complete dickhead 90% of time trying to invoke a fight with every player that walks past him, is in my humble opinion, bollocks worthy.
  6. How Biden Boxed Himself In on Gaza The president draws on 50 years of unflagging support for Israel, and not even a humanitarian crisis can dislodge him from that viewpoint. https://prospect.org/world/2024-03-28-how-biden-boxed-himself-in-on-gaza/ Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a knack for making world leaders do the jobs of their subordinates. President Joe Biden had to call Netanyahu himself in October—in the first weeks of Israel’s brutal assault on the occupied territory of Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas attacks of October 7—to urge that Israel allow more than 100 trucks of relief aid a day into Gaza. Normally, that’s a task a low-level economic officer at the embassy might handle. Five months later, the situation has only gotten more humiliating, with Palestinians suffering from an Israeli-sponsored famine. In mid-February, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan was expressing desperation that flour paid for by U.S. taxpayers reach Palestinians in Gaza. USAID Administrator Samantha Power was visiting stockpiles of humanitarian assistance in Jordan that were also held up. Then the Biden administration floated the idea of air-dropping aid into Gaza, a tactic of colossal expense and little value when Israel could just speed inspections and open up more entry points. The next day, Israeli troops launched what became known as the “flour massacre,” opening fire on Palestinians in Gaza waiting in a bread line, killing over 100 people and injuring hundreds more. The U.S. went ahead with the airdrop. Now the administration is planning to build a makeshift port near Gaza City to prevent Israeli forces from stopping U.S. aid with U.S.-made weapons. More from Jonathan Guyer The U.S. looks powerless. Biden initially warned Israel not to perpetuate the mistakes the U.S. made after the September 11 attacks. “While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it,” he said to Israelis in October, though now Israel very much has done that and has not faced consequences. If nothing changes, the destruction of Palestine will be a major piece of Biden’s legacy. Since October 7, the Biden administration has not applied pressure on Netanyahu to stop a widespread humanitarian crisis, but rather has transferred more weapons (often sidestepping Congress to do so), used its veto power at the United Nations to shield Israel from resolutions in support of a cease-fire, and played the role of technocratic fixer, trying to distribute aid that Israel is obligated under international law to provide to Palestinian civilians. Experts are almost unanimous about what policy changes are needed to save lives today: securing an immediate cease-fire, conditioning weapons transfers on following the laws of war, and withholding diplomatic cover in forums like the U.N. Security Council. Biden’s team has tinkered with its rhetoric incrementally to acknowledge the suffering of Palestinians and call for what they now call a cease-fire (previously, it was a “humanitarian pause”; both would only last six weeks). It has introduced some policy mechanisms that could in the future hold Israel accountable for what have been credibly described as war crimes. But for all of the outcry from voters, officials who have resigned in protest, and Democratic politicians, as well as anonymous, leaked criticisms from Biden’s own team, there has been no re-evaluation of the policy course. Beyond being unable or unwilling to stop Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians or the leveling of Gaza, Biden has not even been able to enforce the United States’ own laws on Israel. The reason for Joe Biden’s particular brand of Israel policy is Joe Biden. People who worked with him throughout his 45-year career as senator and then vice president say that on this issue, he is Zionist and pro-Israel, and he means it. He’s been close with every Israeli prime minister since Golda Meir, as he reminds audiences, and his go-to one-liner is “If Israel didn’t exist, we would have to invent it.” For Biden, Israel is not just a foreign-policy issue. As Haim Saban, the Israeli American businessman who’s raising millions for the re-election campaign, put it, Biden is pro-Israel in his gut. “It’s in his kishkes.” Biden has at times been forward-thinking on domestic policy and flexible in updating his old-school thinking when it comes to anti-monopoly policy or reproductive rights. As a retail politician, he’s eager to listen to workers on the issues they care about. On foreign policy, he has often strayed from the Washington establishment, withdrawing from Afghanistan and avoiding knee-jerk hawkishness on China. Not so on Israel and Palestine. And that willingness to buck the establishment has given him confidence in the face of outside criticism, and an allergy to changing course. Biden is stuck in a box of his own creation. He has watched while Netanyahu runs a war campaign so ruthless, lethal, and indiscriminate that the International Court of Justice is investigating it for charges of genocide. And still, Biden appears oblivious to how much the U.S. electorate has moved in its support of Palestinians. Several recent surveys show that a majority of Americans, especially Democrats, disagree with his approach to Israel. American voters’ support for Palestinians has been steadily increasing for a decade. Can Biden climb out of the box? The self-made trap preceded the war, says Yousef Munayyer, a researcher with the Arab Center Washington DC. “U.S. policy toward this issue was fundamentally flawed on October 6,” he told me. “And that really put the U.S. in a horrible position in terms of responding to this crisis once it started.” The driving force behind Biden’s Middle East policy, before the war, was that “Palestine is just not that important anymore,” Munayyer explained. “That turned out to be catastrophically flawed.” Remembrance of Things Past As a child, Biden lived in a world without the State of Israel. As a politician, his approach to Israel was shaped in the era of the country’s founding, by events that happened before many of his advisers were even born. He speaks about the Jewish state with the flourish of a vintage AIPAC speech. “You know, the miracle of Israel is Israel. It’s Israel itself—the hope it inspires, the light it represents to the world,” Biden said on October 11. “I truly believe, were there no Israel, no Jew in the world would be ultimately safe. It’s the only ultimate guarantee,” Biden added, another phrase from his usual repertoire. On that day, many American Jews wondered why America isn’t that place. He so regularly recounts his 1973 meeting with Golda Meir, and her admonition to him that “We Jews have a secret weapon in the battle with the Arabs … we have no place else to go,” that it clearly still informs his thinking. Biden has been even to the right of the ultra-hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, founder of the Likud party, which Netanyahu today leads. In 1982, Biden told Begin that he fervently backed Israel’s war on Lebanon, even if it involved Israel killing women and children. “I disassociated myself from these remarks,” Begin told reporters upon returning to Israel. “I said to him: No, sir; attention must be paid. According to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war.” He’s long been a favorite on the pro-Israel circuit. “I don’t think there’s any senator who’s ever done more fundraisers for AIPAC or gone around the country more for AIPAC,” Biden told their policy conference in 1992. He even lashed out at the George H.W. Bush administration for pushing Israel too hard in its diplomatic efforts that laid the groundwork for a peace process. When the Israeli government embarrassed Biden—and the U.S.—by announcing the construction of new settlements in the West Bank during the vice president’s Middle East trip in 2010, Biden nonetheless defended Netanyahu. He has ideological blinders, says Khaled Elgindy of the Middle East Institute. Israel for him is a kind of moral touchstone that transcends history and geopolitics, he told me. “Most presidents have had this Israel-centric view of the region, but even they were able to see when Israel went too far. Biden is not able to see that, and that’s the part that’s really astonishing.” And he’s missed opportunities to engage with Israel through his term so far. At least half of the buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, according to researchers. Biden is hugely popular in Israel, especially after his public bear hug after October 7. Inside the country, there are portraits and murals and graffiti of Biden on street corners, all coming from a place of true goodwill toward the president. But he is unwilling to use what should be a tremendous amount of earned leverage to draw firm red lines in Israel’s military operations and the transfer of humanitarian assistance to Palestinians—or else cut off weapons to Israel. No one has been able to convince him otherwise. “This is Biden’s personal project, this is his decision,” Sarah Yager, Washington director of Human Rights Watch, told me. “Nobody can touch it except Biden. He is the one that is holding reins of this policy of arming Israel.” Israel is no longer a small, defenseless state. It is a nuclear-armed regional power whose politics has been shaped by the endless occupation of Palestinian lands, policies that Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups have documented as apartheid, and now the incredible lethality that characterizes the ongoing systemic violence in Gaza. The Israeli center has been pulled to the right by Netanyahu’s Likud party, with extremist settlers in Bibi’s cabinet like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Emboldened by this fundamentalist flank, West Bank settlers have accelerated attacks against Palestinians—notably in a rampage in the village of Huwara that burned 30 Palestinian homes, with the Israeli military standing by. Now, Netanyahu’s extremist allies are using the pretext of Hamas’s attacks to fundamentally reshape Gaza and Palestine. “Israel this time has a different set of objectives,” Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace told me. “They want to take this moment to fundamentally change the paradigm and erase Gaza.” Throughout, Biden has held steady, refusing to look outside of this side of the box. Adviser “Groupthink” “The Middle East is quieter than it has been for decades,” Jake Sullivan, the White House’s foreign-policy gatekeeper, proclaimed a week before Hamas’s attacks in October. He was confident enough to commit that to writing in a cover story for Foreign Affairs magazine. Biden was the first Democratic president in a generation to not show a serious effort toward a Palestinian state. The idea was to keep the Middle East, a perennial career-killer, off the president’s desk. That led to a diplomatic void and the further disenfranchisement of Palestinians, which likely contributed to the current war. There were a handful of minor economic summits between Israel, the U.S., and Arab states, while settler violence surged in the West Bank. Even before the October attacks, Israeli human rights watchdog Yesh Din called 2023 “the most violent year in settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank in both the number of incidents and their severity,” which highlights just how late the Biden administration has been in its sanctioning of Israeli settlers. “I don’t want to finger one person, but it’s groupthink,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founding president of J Street, which has sought to be a liberal, but still pro-Israel, counterweight to AIPAC. Running point from the White House is Brett McGurk, the National Security Council’s coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, who worked on Iraq in the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. McGurk said early on that Biden was pursuing a “back to basics” approach to the Middle East, but it’s unclear where the U.S. would be going back to. (McGurk worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq during the U.S. occupation in 2003, so hopefully not back there!) In contrast, experts say that deputy national security adviser Jon Finer gets it. Finer, who started his career as a Middle East journalist for The Washington Post and worked in the Obama White House, is one of the administration’s progressive voices on foreign policy. In advance of the Michigan primary in February, he was dispatched to meet with frustrated Arab American voters in Dearborn. Other advisers include Amos Hochstein, a U.S.-Israeli dual citizen who has served in the Israeli military; despite holding an energy investment portfolio, Hochstein has been a key voice on national security. There are also two respected Middle East specialists, Philip Gordon and Ilan Goldenberg, who work in Vice President Kamala Harris’s office. The White House aide who most clearly articulates the president’s perspective is, not surprisingly, spokesperson John Kirby. His defenses of seemingly indefensible Israeli actions from the podium have now become viral memes. A typical line: When Israel had already killed 7,000 Palestinians in Gaza on October 27, Kirby said, “We’re not drawing red lines for Israel.” Washington insiders say the White House is directing Israel-Palestine policy, not the State Department. Still, the top officials at State, including those who have met with Israel’s war cabinet, largely share Biden’s pro-Israel ideology, chief among them Secretary of State Antony Blinken. As Biden’s longtime aide, he pushed Biden’s pro-Israel viewpoints and continues to, to this day. The special envoy for humanitarian issues, David Satterfield, has longtime links to the Israel lobby and managed to avoid any Department of Justice prosecution for handing off confidential information to AIPAC in 2005. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew served as an informal emissary to the American Jewish community when he was Obama’s chief of staff, and Democratic Majority for Israel applauded his new appointment. Counselor Derek Chollet also worked as a senior national-security official in the Obama administration, where he shepherded advanced weapons transfers to Israel that were unprecedented. Barbara Leaf, the assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, hails from the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy. When she co-authored a 2020 essay about U.S. policy toward Israel, she didn’t mention Palestinians. “There is no debate, and criticism of Israel is so hard to express within the administration,” Josh Paul, who resigned in protest from a State Department security assistance job in October, told me. Very few Arab or Muslim Americans serve at high levels of Biden foreign policy. Hady Amr, the special representative for Palestinian affairs, has been noticeably absent from press briefings, high-level meetings, and public appearances. The U.S. military, for its part, may be the most skeptical if not downright critical of this whole approach, as epitomized by airman Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington. But many of Biden’s appointees to the Pentagon, naturally, share the president’s view. Of note is Daniel Shapiro, the top civilian for Middle East policy at the Department of Defense, who served as Obama’s ambassador to Israel and then stayed on in the country, working as an adviser to Israeli companies like the notorious spyware-maker NSO Group. Still, Biden’s most important adviser is Biden. He believes in his own foreign-policy judgment and won’t be easily swayed by others. Meanwhile, Biden’s advisers say that they are working tirelessly to tinker with policies, but there is no major reassessment in the works. “Every time their policy has shown to not be working, instead of changing course or adjusting, they double down on it,” Elgindy told me. “At this point they are so heavily invested in what is a catastrophically failed approach, and to change course in anything but rhetoric would mean conceding that they were wrong from the beginning.” A Shifting Electorate Biden’s formative years in Washington were a time when being reflexively pro-Israel was good politics. From his perspective, you never pay a price for being too supportive of Israel. “The group of people around him in his close political circle went by the rulebook of the 1990s,” Ben-Ami told me. “And God forbid you do something that gets you on the wrong side of the Jewish community.” That may have been true when Biden was a junior senator, but today he speaks for a much narrower constituency. While many older voters share his views, he has grown out of touch with younger voters, minority voters, and Arab voters. Those groups happen to increasingly occupy positions in Democratic campaigns and as political appointees. Tariq Habash, a Palestinian American appointee, was the first member of the Biden administration to resign over Gaza. Habash told me Biden has been willing to “embrace innovative policies on domestic issues,” like in forgiving student loans, which Habash was leading in the Department of Education. Habash says Biden has been on the “forefront of listening to working Americans.” But on Palestine, Biden won’t move from his “unrelenting support and unrestricted military funding.” “They have not been listening for the past four and a half months” to Arab Americans, Habash told me. “If you’re not willing to take tiny steps to exert any kind of pressure, why would you expect Arabs to come out and vote for you?” This also contributes to the experience of many Arab Americans who feel that Biden lacks humanity and empathy for them. Arab American protesters in Dearborn, Michigan. The Uncommitted campaign received 13 percent of the primary vote in the state. Hundreds of members of Biden’s own campaign staff have spoken out, and members of the White House have begun organizing protests. “Islamophobia is not being taken seriously,” a current White House official with the group Staffers for Ceasefire told me. In response to the electoral realities of the Democratic Party in 2024, Biden’s team has slightly changed its message and amped up its humanitarian efforts. But those tonal shifts haven’t come with significant policy changes. And that was not enough to win over the 100,000 voters in Michigan who rebuked Biden with an uncommitted vote in the primary. While that accounted for a little over 13 percent of the primary vote, in Minnesota the next week, nearly 19 percent of the vote cast an uncommitted ballot. This side of the box may be the one that Biden may be forced to confront head on. He might lose the election over this issue. But for now, Biden’s team is helping him avoid pro-Palestine protests on the campaign trail rather than address the root of the dissent. Misunderstanding the Middle East Arab cartoonists are already skewering President Biden’s callousness for licking an ice-cream cone while prognosticating about a temporary cease-fire (a prediction that didn’t come true). Does the Biden administration grasp how detested its policies are in the Arab Middle East? Biden doesn’t seem to get the Arab world, where the cause of Palestine remains popular and galvanizing. And he has lost a lot of Arabs who were on his side. As Emile Hokayem of the British think tank IISS said, “the disaster in Gaza has completely disabused a large segment of liberals and professionals in the Arab world about Western claims of upholding and caring about values in the conduct of foreign policy.” That will detract from the United States’ ability to assert its interests, in the Middle East and beyond. United Nations votes show America isolated from the world, with just a few countries on its side. At the same time, Biden’s concept of the U.S. as an indispensable superpower requires huge costs and major risks—especially to U.S. personnel, as evidenced by the killing of three U.S. troops in Jordan in January. Thousands of service members continue to participate in endless wars in Iraq, Syria, and a network of bases in the Middle East and Africa, and run the risk of getting drawn into this war. For all of Biden’s enthusiasm to end the war in Afghanistan, no such commitment has been shown for these forever wars. So the U.S. is caught fighting old, irrelevant conflicts under the guise of countering ISIS or Iran or continuing the war on terrorism, and coming under fire at a time when militant groups see the U.S. as complicit in Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians. In that climate, Biden’s advisers thought they could clinch a long-shot deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and just set aside Palestinians. The concept is an extension of the “Abraham Accords,” an initiative of President Trump. Even now, Biden’s team has kept in place Jared Kushner’s formula of casting away Palestinian aspirations in service of pushing to normalize relations between Israel and Arab countries. In doing so, Biden kept in place most of Trump’s Mideast policies. (Only in February, four and a half months into the war, did the Biden administration overturn the Pompeo Doctrine of not viewing Israeli settlements as against international law.) The administration is clinging to the triple bank shot of a policy that: (a) Saudi Arabia would at long last normalize diplomatic relations with Israel, in exchange for (b) an Israeli pledge toward the establishment of a Palestinian state and (c) U.S. inducements for Saudi Arabia that might include nuclear technology and even an American security guarantee for the kingdom, which polling shows Americans don’t support. This would require so many contingencies—the buy-in of Israel’s extreme right-wing government, congressional approval, and fast-moving politics in an election year—that it’s difficult to take it seriously. The idea is reminiscent of another Biden fantasy solution, the three-way partition of Iraq along ethnic lines that he dreamed up with the late foreign-policy strategist Leslie Gelb. It was a ridiculous and incendiary idea that didn’t take into account how U.S. foreign policy affects actual people. By the way, as an undergraduate, Sullivan worked as Gelb’s intern at the Council on Foreign Relations, and now at the White House, he continues to channel that Great Game mentality of U.S. exceptionalism in the world. In a Box With Biden Unless President Biden is willing to kick down the sides of the box—checking his own assumptions about Israel, facing down the realities of the electorate, turning to new advisers with a broader perspective, and seeing the Middle East as it is—he will remain constrained. Many policies to ensure human rights and accountability are already enshrined in law. They are lying in wait, unused. “If we’re going to keep arming Israel then there’s not that much to talk about,” Yager told me. On most topics in any presidential administration, credit or blame can be broadly distributed. But in this case, the pro-Israel directives are coming from the president himself, with his instincts from another era. “Biden has a multi-decade career where he has proudly stood with Israel at every turn,” Zaha Hassan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told me. “The idea that now, in his later years, he is going to want to distract from that legacy is unlikely.” The most powerful foreign-policy officials in the Biden administration are negotiating with Israel about getting more flour into Gaza, tweaking rhetoric in press conferences, urging their boss to adjust small policies on the margin, like holding Israeli settlers to account, while failing to make the bigger adjustments needed to deal with the gravity of the crisis at hand. The story is not really one of foreign policy, but of the ideology and psychology of President Biden.
  7. Yes as I said before I was more surprised that Ukraine lasted this long. But they can't go on like that forever. Sadly for the Ukrainian people but the world don't want to do more. They done all they could and that's it for them. Another lose for the UN?
  8. It’s time we talked about the fall of Kyiv Far from this being a frozen conflict, a nightmare scenario is edging into view because the West is failing to send arms https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/its-time-we-talked-about-the-fall-of-kyiv-6l3vrxbhf Itis July and the Russian army is at the gates of Kyiv. President Zelensky delivers an emergency broadcast to repeat his defiant words, first uttered in February 2022, that he does not need a ride out of Ukraine. No, he needs ammunition to stay and fight the Russians. If only the West had listened and done more when the brave Ukrainians were pleading for help, that might have made the difference. While the allies squabbled and the United States eventually provided another $60 billion in aid, as spring turned to summer, Putin’s troops broke through the lines in the south and east. Retreating Ukrainian forces were able only to slow the advance. When the Russians closed in on the capital, a new wave of refugees fled Ukraine seeking safety from incessant bombardment. This is the nightmare scenario now being contemplated by western policymakers. Events are forcing military and civilian leaders in London, Washington, Paris and Brussels to map out the catastrophic collapse of Ukrainian forces denied the weapons and munitions they need. Contrary to the predominant view that this is a perpetual “frozen conflict”, with neither side able to win a decisive advantage, the front line is bitterly contested and there is a real risk of Ukrainian forces being pushed back. Nato leaders must hope their gathering in Washington in July for a summit celebrating the 75th anniversary of the alliance is not consumed by such a crisis. Only a year ago, it was all very different. The hope then was of a Ukrainian spring offensive that would reclaim territory. That didn’t work and, as the American magazine Foreign Affairs put it this week, “Ukraine is bleeding. Without new US military assistance, Ukrainian ground forces may not be able to hold the line against a relentless Russian military.” The governments who support Ukraine most strongly are clearly worried and considering even the worst scenarios. The US Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, has issued several warnings that Ukraine is running out of money, while urging Congress to pass the aid bill that is stuck amid legislative infighting. The US risked being responsible for Ukraine’s defeat, she said. A Russian advance would obviously be disastrous for the Ukrainians. It would also confront the West with all manner of tough challenges. Would the allies send troops to defend Kyiv? President Macron has clearly sensed the danger and is trying to steer the West towards a more muscular approach by raising the possibility of ground troops. Other countries, such as Germany, strongly object. When will the message be finally understood that peace for European populations is guaranteed only by strength? When Ukraine falls and Putin moves on to menacing the Baltics, Poland, Finland, Sweden or Norway? • Russia is ready for nuclear war over Ukraine, says Putin No one who is a supporter of Ukrainian self-determination against Russian barbarism wants this nightmare scenario to come true. Yet the stakes are so high. We have to be aware of the terrible price of defeat. I’m for maximum military support on the basis that Ukraine must win. The consequences of a partial or complete defeat would be calamitous in ways western populations have barely begun to understand. But we have a lazy habit in the comfortable West — away from Europe’s front line in east and south Ukraine — of wishful thinking and being unprepared for bad surprises. Indeed, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a surprise to most countries. The US and British governments ran a public campaign in the run-up to warn their allies. Few listened, apart from Finland, Poland and the Baltic states, where they know what it means to live next door to an expansionist Russia. Elsewhere, it was fashionable to dismiss this as the Americans and the Brits getting it wrong again. Remember Iraq? Ahead of Ukraine, the Biden administration was scarred by having failed to foresee the instant collapse of the Afghan government in August 2021 when US forces left. Then the early phases of the war produced another extraordinary surprise. Zelensky’s refusal to leave Kyiv demonstrated the power of the individual in history to set an example of resistance that is followed by his fellow citizens. Those are three enormous surprises in less than three years and it can happen again. Yet, weary western public opinion appears to have settled into a view that although we’re helping the Ukrainians to defend their homeland, they are stuck in an impossible stalemate before what is most likely to be some kind of “peace” deal fixing the current lines of combat. And then we can think about something else. Polling conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations in January in 12 countries suggested that only 10 per cent of voters think Ukraine can win. Some 37 per cent thought that a compromise was most likely and 19.5 per cent thought that Russia would win in the end. Scenarios other than military defeat are available, of course. There could be a coup in Russia or a newly elected President Trump might seek to impose a ceasefire and de facto Ukrainian surrender. Perhaps Ukraine holds on and Europe gets its act together, using the clout of a GDP ten times bigger than Russia with a population three and a half times larger. As it is, we are in danger of losing sight of one of the main lessons of Ukraine’s war. Retreating to the post-Cold War complacency about European security is not an option. We need to think entirely differently about how dangerous the threats are, arm ourselves accordingly, prepare for the worst and at best hope to be pleasantly surprised.
  9. Yes noobster. Well the only bad part is that we will need to stay with them for a minimum of 10 years.
  10. It's almost impressive how quickly American owners can destroy a club
  11. Today
  12. Sanchez may have his foot in the door again after his last appearance, we know what Poch is like
  13. Hope I never have to see Sanchez and Sterling again, then we might have a chance.
  14. Boehly and co getting what they deserve
  15. No way Conte comes back. He would be drop kicking Clownlake in the face within a week.
  16. “I don’t condone racism but he is a shithouse on the pitch so he can’t have a victim mentality” this is a really fucking daft take 👍 We are talking about a 23 year old who has endured a lot of racism in various forms for the best part of the last 5 or 6 years since moving to Spain to play at Real Madrid. I mean there was an effigy of a doll with a Vini top on hanging off a bridge for fuck sakes. I am surprised it’s taken 5 years for him to break down publicly regarding the racism he’s endured, just shows how mentally strong he actually is. I don’t think it should matter what he does on the pitch, if he feels like a victim of racist abuse, it is because he has been and unfortunately, will probably continue to be as people are morons.
  17. We will see but I still think people are expecting too much too soon from Lavia. I don’t think it was ever a reality that he would be starting ahead of any of those 3 and was likely going to be coming in to back up Moises perhaps. And even then, if he did, same old question as it is now. Would that MF 3 still not be lacking severely in creativity or someone who gets in and around the box to good effect? I mean even with Connor, it is lacking of sorts and he has probably been our best central midfielder for attacking output this season. Instead of going hell for leather in 2 windows and getting Santos, Ugo and Lavia (all pretty much fall into that same category as more defensively minded midfielders) we probably could have signed a more creative midfielder and a more experienced campaigner for the same money if not less.
  18. Think the story was along the lines of Rickie Lambert and Jos Hooiveld went in after a training session and tried to get him to slacken up on the amount of running they were doing. In the end, he didn’t and actually made them run more the next time round. Which apparently “broke” Lambert - who then went on to play his best football of his career in the 18 months Poch was there. If its that clip which was off from BBC, it has been thrown about twitter and Reddit very much as a stick to beat Poch with regarding these injuries, which is wrong. Rickie Lambert later has gone on and still said countless times about how Poch was the best coach he’s ever worked with. Aaron Lennon did try and say Poch’s training maybe was behind our poor start this season - but because our players wouldn’t be used to the intensity and load of it. Which says more about how far off it we were last season also with 3 different managers in terms of preparation.
  19. Yesterday
  20. Its undermining and sabotaging Chelsea FC. They should be in court and jailed.
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