Rival watch

Wish we were.

Away to Forest.

 

City vs Chelsea, tasty one that.

 

I’ll be honest, didn’t expect them to get through tonight but they really do like European adventures in recent years so not massively surprised.

Great for Glasgow and Scotland to have 2 teams in the best club competition in the world.

 

Celtic and Rangers both in the CL draw for the first time since 2007

 

Next round of the League Cup is going to be played on November 8th and 9th. Bit of a gap.
Champions League draw is tomorrow and the first games are on September 6th and 7th.
The fixture list is about to get very, very congested.

 

Why are they playing the League Cup fixtures so late?

 

There might not be any space for teams in Europe before then.
There's another stupid international break in September and loads of games leading up to it.
After that there's three CL midweeks in October and one PL midweek, too.

 

Last year that would be the Oil Derby

Instead we had that at the weekend...

 

I still can’t get my head around the fact that the World Cup is mid season.

Baffling

 

Six all PL clashes in the League Cup

 

I want Spurs to win any trophy at all so hope they take this seriously, but going out early is a blessing in disguise this season.

 

Season killer cup mate, look how many things you've not won by taking it seriously

 

<BBC>
Man City have charisma to sign big players - Guardiola

Football Focus
</BBC>

Yeah, like being a financially doped Sugga Daddy FC
has NOTHING to do with the above.

 

Clubs with charisma don't need to claim to have charisma.

 

I am sure your comment is rhetorical because we all know why. This World Cup was purchased by a country without any football pedigree and possessing a summer climate that makes it very difficult, if not dangerous, to play football. Temperatures around 50c are far too hot for football.

The game continues to change as the money dictates. The Americans want 4 quarters not 2 halves so they can get the adds. in. We are already seeing 'drinks breaks' in the PL and elsewhere, ostensibly to protect the players. Yes with increasing temperatures they are no doubt needed but this will be the excuse that eventually gives the Americans what they want. VAR could prompt further add break opportunities and in the end the game resembles US Football and we lose the continuous play we have developed over centuries.

Since the PL came into existence the game has changed more than it did in the previous 100 years. We are losing our game.

 

The modern world confuses having money with having charisma. You just have to picture people like Murdoch, Bransen, Bezos, Musk, Trump, and Gates to get the point. Putin? the Russians seem to think so or is it just fear?

 

I still can't get my head around the fact that a serial human rights abuser is hosting it, constructing multiple stadia which will without question be white elephants within weeks of the tournament finishing, simply because Qatar's entire population is roughly the same as the stadia's total capacity, while a significant chunk of said population believes that sport is entirely prohibited.

Meanwhile the carbon footprint of stadia equipped with air conditioning pales into insignificance when considering how many migrant workers have lost their lives, gone unpaid for months, forced to live in crowded and filthy quarters and work 16 hour days in temperatures exceeding 50 degrees, only to be summarily deported if they utter a word of complaint.

I would say it is baffling, but this is FIFA at the end of the day. Cabal of utter ****s.

 

To make the WC a truly global game, the European
leagues cannot have hegemony on the needs of their
seasons over other locales.

So in that respect, WC 2022 is an experiment that
would have to be done eventually, and on paper
I support it (as at worst it causes disruption to the
seasons of some locales once every 4 years) .

The problem IMHO is the false equivalence of
the above with the fact that Qatar has quite an
unpleasant socio-political regime (though to be
fair I am unsure as to which nation in that parish
would be the far "lesser evil" on that front) .