do these fucks never learn

It's obviously doubtful that Hamburg or Betis are substantially worse than West Brom, Fulham or Sunderland but you could make the case that, in terms of the number of experienced internationals and the money spent on assembling the squads, the bottom six in the PL should be more competitive for teams in the top six than in most other leagues.

because the championship is decent & well-resourced as second tier leagues go

the logic is circular: lower epl team gets a result vs a champion league side = extraordinary precisely because lower epl sides (despite being far richer than lower la liga sides) are mostly total shit so it seldom happens = the epl must be special to witness such extraordinary results, no way would anything this extraordinary happen in another country

http://www.express.co.uk/sport/football/269087/Ashley-Young-s-as-good-as-Messi-and-Ronaldo

from 2011 tbfttl

?

nobody without organic brain damage ever though ashley young was as good as pedro rodriguez let alone gd messi

*thought*

not arguing it wasn't stupid in 2011, just sayin he may not stand by those words today

It's going to be a banner few months for this thread what with a World Cup coming up, no need to dredge up anything from three years ago.

James Ducker @DuckerTheTimes

Lot of talk in Germany Klopp will stay at Borussia Dortmund but very much doubt he would turn down #Barca or #MUFC if offers came

WHERE NEXT FOR MOYES?

BORUSSIA DORTMUND
Jurgen Klopp could head to United in a job swap.

BAYER LEVERKUSEN
Sami Hyypia was sacked this month, leaving a vacancy.

TOTTENHAM
Tim Sherwood is on his way and Moyes has previously been linked with Spurs.

NEWCASTLE
Alan Pardew is under pressure and Mike Ashley could move for Moyes.

INTER MILAN
Walter Mazzarri’s side are 34 points off the top and his position is uncertain.

that's some punchline

The idea that Dortmund would consider Moyes is the most incredible thing I have ever read I think.

considering a "when/where will Moyes get a new management job?" poll

Looking at the prem table the only options I see for him remaining at that level are Newcastle or maybe Villa, though he could take six months and wait for the pre-Christmas panic sackings.

Neil Lennon heading south and Moyes heading north doesn't seem too much of a stretch - otherwise it's upper Championship level. I really can't see him working abroad.

Villa is the one but would he want it

he could take six months and wait for the pre-Christmas panic sackings.

That would be my advice

There's a grim inevitability at Moyes to Villa.

Carrying on the succession of failed Scottish managers there

wouldn't really have a problem with that (in fact I'd be quite chuffed), but I'm sure I'd be in the minority

He had a broadly successful, uninterrupted eleven year career in the PL. Unless he's mentally fucked, anyone below Spurs could be lucky to have him.

united maybe, they have a vacancy

xp - absolutely SV, I agree. I think his skill-set would be a pretty perfect match for Villa right now. Solid defence and an attack geared to hitting Benteke every time we get the ball is pretty much what Lambert's tried to do, but he's made a fucking pig's ear of it and has also bought appallingly while trying to play the market on the cheap. Several of the big problem areas atm seem to things which Moyes would be able to put right.

otoh I think the Villa crowd have maybe just had enough of Scottish managers for now, think the masses might be hankering after a fancy continental job when Lambert gets the boot

Joe Tarring ‏@joetarring 3h

Paul Merson tips Yannick Bolasie to play for England next season. Yannick Bolasie has 3 caps for Democratic Republic of Congo

looking forward to United's meaningless training ground exercise today being dissected by pundits with things to say

Steven Gerrard - The slip that enabled Ba to open the scoring will haunt him; so cruel as nobody had done more to keep Liverpool on the front foot. 7

gerrard finishing his career without ever winning the league because of a bad mistake he made when they seemed to have a title in the bag does have a certain appeal

he had the whole of the second half to make amends but his passionate committed leadership mostly extended to hitting speculative shots into the bleachers

i'd like them to win but if their downfall has to be gerrard in his new defensive role making an error which his centrebacks, pushed high and wide, can't cover for.....then yeah, this is the other side of the rodgers project and it would be rather apt

"I think that he [Giggs] is the one man they should go to, really," Ferguson said at a fundraising dinner in Manchester this week. "He's got 20-odd years of experience at Manchester United. I signed him as a kid at 13 years of age. He's gone through the gamut of emotions at the club – he's experienced all the highs and lows. He knows exactly what's needed to be a Manchester United player and I was so pleased he brought Paul Scholes back in, and Nicky Butt of course – two great professionals.

"They understand the club, they are hard workers, they are straight as a die. So you have got the right combinations there, there's no doubt about that."

when he says 'there's nae doot aboot that' he's lying through his teeth, always

very much doubt he believes giggs can walk straight into managing in the champions league but hes trying to keep his clique alive and hoping giggs will strongarm the board by winning crapshoots in noncompetitive games

also plausible deniability cuz when van gaal is appointed he can say he was only talking about the interim period

nb to all shit hacks -- guardiola already had a year managing barca b, the equiv of a championship tteam, before he got the main job, he had a fantastic winning percentage and brought through busquets and pedro

also he is an insanely devoted tactical thinker of the highest degree who spent his nights arguing into the small hours with his friend bielsa rather than an ever so slightly dim looking part time coach who somehow successfully managed to cuckold his own brother for a decade

two decades of sneaking in round the back of snoozing defences cuckolds

i see a margin case possibility of Giggs getting it when every decent manager declines the financial terms and expectations

irl van Gaal is a done deal already obv

there is no conceivable set of parameters that leaves an even borderline rational case for appointing him

absolutely. is there a scenario in which every competent manager enquires about the strictures and fucks them off tho?

"here's Luke Shaw and 40 million quid. finish top 4 or you're out"

there are plenty of competent managers out there when competency is defined as being less risky than a total neophyte, at least one of those would take at five million a year and a nice severance package whatever strictures are imposed

obv. let's wait and see.

malcolm glazer was a hard cunt, who knows what his wonky looking scions are like but surely they can see that the influence of ferguson and his cabal of former players within and without the current squad has been entirely unhelpful since the day he retired

to leave too many of them lingering around causing trouble for van gaal or whoever would be a foolhardy decision, they were careful to brief once giggs was appointed interim coach that he would not be under consideration for the fulltime role

if giggs is assistant to the new manager then he just sits there like a venerated version of tim sherwood, resentfully dripping poison until the manager is fired

this is the only stipulation that might alienate van gaal, his people seem to be briefing that he would like to take roy keane as an assistant (co-assistant with kluivert probably) for the obvious reason that keane unlike giggs and company has demonstrably failed as a manager already

if giggs fucks off entirely then estimate percent chance he takes a managerial job elsewhere and risks getting showed up vs chance he leads a media campaign like shearer, trying to blackmail the owners into appointing him

i think i said at the beginning it was an edge case hypothetical. this afternoon i started thinking about van Gaal asking his headhunter how much money and time he wd really have.

not an edge case hypothetical that they do bottle it and renege by giving it to giggs, that's unlikely but not vanishingly unlikely

there is something at stake here though, in that numinous phrase 'the soul of the club', that alchemical property that coalesces around a couple of dozen venerated cuckolders and hotel suite roasters, a nyse listing, a synergistic global branding portfolio and a compound in south florida, and a lot of people are invested in trying to keep the spirit of ferguson's reign alive and correctly fear that someone like van gaal would rip it up and start again

then there would be no soul left

i dunno how much clout any of the "soul of the club" folks have with the ownership at this stage? the apparent state of affairs is that Ferguson has been little more than a useful idiot for the Glazers, even if he used that status to aggrandize himself.

i mean, a Giggs wd be a purely mercenary appointment, the cheap option that wd keep the traditionalists most onside. i'm sure that the owners' main consideration is an immediate return to the Champions' League, but who's realistically advising them about the potential cost and difficulty of that target?

the most interesting imponderable about this is who those football advisers might be and what they are telling them, they could have run the whole club through the ferguson years without knowing a thing about the sport and now they have to become experts

they surely have no investment in 'the soul of the club' in anything other than a marketing sense now because ferguson's argument that they let a shit imitation of ferguson manage the team as a continuity candidate has failed so desperately, but as a marketing strategy the presence or simulation of soul counts has let liverpool maintain good commercial revenue through years of mediocrity

the nativist element that's in the air right now is slightly repugnant though, keep it in the family or the country, suspicion of foreigners and outside influence, ferguson's best years came when he let queiroz and ronaldo reshape the team, before he got old and conservative in his instincts

the extent to which that "nativism" is of real importance to the owners or their advisors is interestingly moot, too. clearly the financial value of the club doesn't depend much on the opinions of British pundits or ticket buyers on one level, but every aspect of what United - any football club, probably - is, is tied into every other. we still feel a long way from a postmodern club that can exist purely thru it's imaginary iteration to overseas fans

and so the "realness" generated by the lumpenfans is still v. important to the brand as a whole, i think

yeah it is, and if they do fail to clear out lingering embers of ferguson's reign before the fires start, it will be because their branding people have seen twitter explode and they've decided the brand needs to have some realness on the frontend

real madrid have mostly been quite successful in this respect, when they have venerated former players with exec level talent like valdano they appoint them, when they have slightly dim former demigods like zidane they put them in the dugout next to the manager and his actual assistant, they drag di stefano out at every opportunity etc etc

the day they let zidane actually manage the team will be the day it falls apart

the crassness of this little stunt with Giggs now is that it will tell nobody anything about his managerial qualities. they cd have had anybody pick teams for the 4 remaining games last Tuesday, with no pressure or expectation other than that they play a consequence-free attacking game. maybe the fact that Giggs accepted the appointment is the most telling measure of his nous.