CHOULO19

Second half performance has been much better even before the red card.

Need the whole block to step up 10 yards in the second half and increase the intensity of our pressing to get the second. We can't rely on Hull to be as shit as they were in the first half.

And Iva to be fair. Other than, it's been a shower of shit. Very lucky we scored an early goal or we would have been struggling a lot.

Literally everyone has been well below standards. Poor performance so far.

But he's a "Jose-type" player

Watching him for Milan, I can't help but feel very impressed by the level that Jose had him performing at last season. While he was at best average last season, he was still a thousand times better than he's been for Milan. On a different note...

Luis against a team that will park the bus. Whatever are we going to moan about after the match?!

The Iranian nuclear talks are taking less time!

So.....who are we loaning him to next season?

To be fair, he was injured for half of the season and Luiz and Iva had incredible seasons at CB.

Hull have never won at the bridge in the PL so I'm going for a 3-0 win like against Tottenham

I love how that went from extremely confident to very pessimistic in a single sentence!

Heard this from a stand up comedian and thought it was brilliant: "The bonuses that bankers got after the economic crisis is like Ben Laden getting air miles for the 9/11!"

Yeah, probably.

Yes, and both our attacking and defensive systems are built with a number ten (if you could even call it that) like Willian and Oscar. We would need to alter our pressing system and the dynamics of our movements in the final third if we want to play Cesc there in bigger games. That's exactly my point.

Was it because he had different duties or because he is unable to play like Oscar and Willian?

The question is whether he can perform there better than Oscar and Willian. I don't think so, although, like we said above, there isn't exactly a large sample to judge on.

Very interesting interview in the Guardian with one of the leaders of ISIS on how the militia and a lot of the development of modern 'Islamism' all started started in US prisons in Iraq: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/11/-sp-isis-the-inside-story

I thought he was largely uninfluential in the game. Oscar and Willian usually have a lot more impact on the match in that position.

I'm pretty certain that's his "what the fuck have I done to deserve these shit journos" face

Luis Quilles. I really like his works: http://www.boredpanda.com/controversial-illustrations-gunsmithcat-luis-quiles/

Now, THIS would be a good time to utilize your over use of exclamation marks!

But that's just down to the lack of quality we had in the youth teams, again, as evident by the fact that Jack Cork is our most successful academy product. How many of our youth products were as good as Courtois or Lukaku or KDB at the age of 18-19? Jose actually just said it before (or after) the Sporting game that the first time he was here the quality in the youth teams was much lower than now. Hopefully, now that the quality is increasing we can start doing what we did with Courtois to our own academy products.

By watching them play? I'd sincerely worry for you if you think that any of the youth players is currently better than the first teammers, or would you like us to have less quality in the team just for the sake of their weir obsession of promoting youth? They get a chance to prove themselves at competitive games through loans. Ideally it should be through the reserve system, but the gap between the reserves and the league has been rapidly widening in the past 10-15 years that top teams can't have players make that jump. Fuck off Again, loans. Yes, it is extremely unlikely that a youth player can make the immediate jump from the youth setup to the first team at a top club, which is why you loan them to small(er) teams where the gap is not as big. Of course, there could be exceptions like Ake, for example. The debuts for the players that won't be part of the first team anytime soon, is mainly PR, yes. But they are also a motivation for those players and the other academy players to work harder. Incidentally, right on cue:

*insert half-joking Mikel related post here*