The thing is that there is a sequence of ‘hard’ tackles there. Most of them look fine to me. However, players are so entitled that the last one launched himself in - late - in the belief that someone on the other side fouled someone and I get to have revenge. Tackling hard is not a foul.
I agree, hard tackles are pretty much a thing of the past now but as you implied, it can escalate into a free for all if not checked. Which is why they've gone the other way and turned it into a non contact sport. Probably all of those tackles would be called a foul in the PL.
It's crazy mate isn't it? I read earlier that their owner previously was at Marseille, would have likely been literally executed had he done something like that there.
Sorry gentlemen and gentleladies, I feel the need to have a rant. I'm not entirely sure it's the right thread for this but it's kinda football related. It's about Joey Barton. Now I'm sure you've all seen the constant vitriol he keeps dishing out about female commentators and he posted some **** today about Aluko (who I actually met once when Reading played Chelsea, at Farnborough). Firstly, let me say Joey Barton is nothing more than a vile, pathetic, disgusting thug and given his weird obsession with female commentators, we can add misogynist to his list of 'virtues'. He's a **** manager so he's been sacked again (even if we didn't beat Bristol Rovers back when we played them in August when he was manager, scoring a 93rd minute equaliser was glorious not even for the point but to deny that prick a win and hopefully make him cry) so all he can do is make ridiculous controversial comments in order to try to stay relevant. What also grates me though is the responses to comments or articles about his comments, the people that go "he's just saying what everyone's thinking". Well actually, no that's not true because I don't think it because I'm not a pathetic snowflake that whines and cries about the freakin' commentators in a football game. Maybe they're good, maybe they're bad. Frankly, I don't care because I'm not a ****ing 12 year old so I don't really give a damn what commentators say. Frankly the only thing I care about to do with commentators is that they can say the names of the players so I know who has got the ball, everything else is meaningless to me. He says female commentators are ruining the game. Not VAR, not clubs going bankrupt, not B teams in the EFL trophy, not the constant talk about the super league, not teams like Newcastle being bankrolled by blood money, nope female commentators. Honestly you have to be a special kind of fragile snowflake to get hysterical about that. Also what grates me is those people that whenever anyone calls people like Joey Barton out or if ITV release a statement they scream "Freedom of speech waaah waaah", as if 1) freedom of speech means freedom from consequence. It doesn't work that way. Go to Jerusalem and start walking around screaming "Hitler was right" and see how that goes for you. 2) freedom of speech of speech doesn't work both ways, because if Joey or whovever is free to throw vitrol around (not that freedom of speech should mean that, rights come with responsibilities after all), then other people are free to call him out on that, after all freedom of speech. Yet when people say "Freedom of speech" what they really mean is "Freedom of speech for people whose views I agree with, shut up if I disagree with your views". God it makes me so angry, I'm sick of people, and they can all **** off starting with Joey "****ing twat" Barton. And anyone who uses the word woke, and all the ****ing snowflakes that get hysterical because of, for example, the skin colour of a fictional character. Sorry, rant over....
Just watched the Spurs- Burnley match. If I didn’t know they were PL players, I would have thought it was a L2 match. Such poor ball control and misplaced passes by both sides. Maybe Saints won’t be lambs to the slaughter. Although I don’t like the keep ball ideology, at least Saints are good at it so far.
I don't like a lot of female co commentators on football, I also don't like a lot of the male ones either. Has nothing to do with sex just my opinion on the commentary. Its funny because I actually prefer the female commentators on cricket to most of the men. Some people just have better sounding voices than others for my delicate ears.
To be honest, you nailed a lot of the world's problems/social media in this line - "all he can do is make ridiculous controversial comments in order to try to stay relevant".
As someone who killed their Twitter account and moved to Bluesky, it's been fascinating to see how much more substantive people's social media became for a spell when it was just accepted that nothing you said or did there was relevant. Didn't matter if you had 1m followers on Twitter...now you have 500. You couldn't rage-bait, you couldn't dunk on people for 50k likes, the best you could hope for was to say something interesting and perhaps three people would engage with you in some fashion. Alas, as it grows all the usual pathologies reemerge, but it was a good couple months there.
And of course it's fine to have preferences, that's only human, but I think any reasonable would say the presence of a few female commentators is not even in the top 10 most pressing issues in football. Hell, it's so trivial that any reaction beyond a mild "Oh, Aluko/Scott/whoever, is commentating, she's not my favourite commentator/not a huge fan of her voice" is just weird. It certainly doesn't justify the reactions some people have had, especially Joey who seems to be obsessed. And tbh, nothing justifies ever justifies agreeing with Joey about anything. Even if he said abolish the house of lords, I'd feel dirty about having the same opinion as him.
Tbh, I only really use Twitter for live scores of Farnborough and Portsmouth and reading the comments on Portsmouth scores, especially for the memes. Though for some reason Twitter keeps sending me notifications of the rightwing snowflakey posts that I've been talking about. I don't even comment or retweet them so I dunno why it keeps subjecting me to that. Facebook I mostly use for memes and NFL banter and Vikings talk but then a lot of Vikings fans are moaning nellies. Honestly most social media is ****e, forums seem to be the only non-terrible form (though the general forum on this site was horrific back in the day, I haven't looked in years so maybe it's gotten better). Discord seems okay but also seems so superficial. Useful for planning events I guess. Never heard of Bluesky though... I liked Bebo back in the day
Barton’s latest one lacked any form of logic. I’m still confused by comparing a pundit and a commentator to a pair of serial killers. Utterly nonsensical.
Le Tissier is doing his usual thing of basically agreeing with Barton, but thinking he's being clever by skirting around it and not saying anything directly. Twat.
Joey Barton's basic starting point of thinking it is wrong that a lot of very under qualified and poorly performing pundits/comms were getting roles based on their gender rather than ability as a pundit was a valid one. It is even one I agree with - the likes of Sue Smith and Aluko are terrible and would not be in that job if Sky wern't trying grow womens football by using the mens game. The problem is, that whilst he did have a valid point, he is also clearly a scumbag and is unable to stop at just stating that its wrong to hire someone based on gender instead of their ability to do the job. Instead, he has gone on to show that he is clearly sexist and then gone further and started personally attacking these pundits and comparing them to serial killers and rapists. Even though his problem is with the employers (ITV/Sky) rather than the pundits themselves.
This. I agreed with his general point in that Earps shouldn't have won SPOTY but then he went way too far with his opinion. He's just a nasty piece of work.