stevegrant

MSD UK Holdings Ltd was only formed on Monday (!!), and its registered address is a registered office service called LegalinX. Odd...

A year or so ago, that probably causes a pulled hamstring. Shows the immense improvement in his physical condition in that time

But we can only do what teams will allow us to do with their own systems - there are two teams on the pitch, and the opposition are allowed to have tactics to negate our strengths. It's only teams who are either so much better than us that they don't need to worry about it or teams who are very stupid who come to St Mary's and play a high line and allow us to play balls into the channels for the likes of Long and Redmond to run onto. If we play more direct, Long might win a few flick-ons, but because the opposition defence is so deep, more often than not the second ball ends in the keeper's hands or out for a goal kick. It's easy to defend against. In my opinion, the faster and more direct passes need to be horizontally rather than vertically - switching the direction of play quickly (in the way that Liverpool seem to have pretty much perfected) opens up much more space in attacking areas than playing a quick out ball to the centre forward. In the heat of Thursday evening, it's far better for us to maintain possession even if that involves a pass backwards from where it can then be moved across to a less-populated area of the pitch - there's no benefit to having to do all the running in 30+ degree heat, it's a fast track to knackering yourself out very quickly. The high pressing game that Ralph wants us to employ is obviously much more difficult in this sort of heat, and I think there's a natural necessity to slow the game down at times when we're in possession in "sterile" areas in order to allow us to have enough energy to press properly in the final third.

The problem is that there's the talk of an "uncharacteristic" error here - by my reckoning, he's made six such "uncharacteristic" errors in the 21 league games he's played. Man City away - came to punch a cross, missed it, directly leading to the winning goal. 1 point cost. Arsenal away - came to punch a cross, missed it, directly leading to a 96th-minute equaliser. 2 points cost. Newcastle away - failed to hold a relatively tame shot from distance, directly leading to a late winner. 1 point cost. West Ham away - failed to hold a simple cross, dropping it at the feet of the striker to give West Ham the lead, shortly after we had equalised and were on the front foot in the game. 1 point cost. Arsenal home - presents the striker with an open goal, AND spills a shot to the feet of another attacker. 1 point cost. Angus Gunn has looked pretty ropey this season, too, but I don't think there is another keeper still in the league (West Ham very quickly binned that Roberto fella who looked like he'd won a competition to play in goal for them) who has made as many errors that have directly resulted in a goal as McCarthy. We have three first-team goalkeepers (in terms of stature and salary), all of whom have strong credentials, and yet none of whom appear to have the unqualified faith of either the fanbase or coaching staff. Given the other defensive problems, it's a dilemma we could really do without.

I genuinely don't understand how you don't see that the game has moved on from "lump it up to the big man" and "a pass backwards is SCANDALOUS RETREAT".

At the bottom of the page there's a "Go to topic listing" link

No. All that would do is result in ganging up on certain people whenever they post, regardless of the validity of what they're written.

They've tried to keep the US and UK setups separate in terms of funding, as far as I'm aware. The UK project was well funded (and needed to be in order to persuade that amount of big-name and probably big-salary journalists to make the leap) and I'm sure will be given time to show whether it can/will work over here.

I strongly suspect there will be a few people down there for it if that's how events transpire

Funny how things turn out - not that long ago they were looking forward to sending us down on the penultimate weekend of the season.

A very low bar, tbf . It was also his man who he let run into the area unmarked for the second goal...

I'm sure everyone was saying that when Bournemouth get all their players back fit again (i.e. when David Brooks gets back fit again), they'd fly up the league and clear of safety. They have been absolutely abysmal here so far

Some ISPs set their DNS cache (and the cache on routers in properties too) to store data for far too long, so when a site moves server, it can take days for it to refresh. Infuriating and pretty unnecessary considering the size of the data they're storing there.

To be fair, with VAR, any that are clearly not a penalty would get overturned, as we saw this evening. And Man United spent a long time in Spurs' penalty area this evening because Spurs spent the entire second half defending as if they were a non-league team defending a fluke 1-0 lead against a Championship side, camped in their own penalty area and just booting it 50 yards away every time they won the ball back. Kane was clearly nowhere near fit, it's ridiculous that so many managers decide he has to play every minute of every game, and then act surprised that he keeps getting injured.

I've cancelled all of the PayPal recurring payments as we're now using a different payment provider, and the URL PayPal would post updates to doesn't exist anymore. I've got a spreadsheet of all the paid subscribers from the old site and am gradually working through them to add proper site subscriptions with the correct expiry dates to those user accounts, but all of them are in the Subscribed Users group already with all the permissions/privileges you get with that subscription.

Can't see anything other than a comfortable Man United win here, the Spurs centre-back partnership of Sanchez and Dier would terrify me if I was a Spurs fan.

1. It wasn't intended to be unlimited. Just because you took advantage of a bug after a software update, doesn't mean it won't stay. 2. I don't care about other websites. This site costs money to run. If you don't like it, as ever, feel free to go elsewhere.

Can't quite believe how much space they're giving us here, but then I guess most opposition teams' fans probably say the same about us most weeks

Solid start, Yan

Everyone doing it for the first round of games and that's it, I think

Pretty much the expected line-up, I guess, with Long's injury. Doesn't say much for Hasenhüttl's view of Kyle Walker-Peters that KWP still can't get in ahead of Yan Valery despite the latter having had a bit of a train wreck of a season for various reasons.

The EFL has a target start date of 12th September, which is the weekend immediately following the first international break. Reasonable to assume that the PL will be aiming for the same weekend, I think. There's talk that the European qualifiers will not participate in the Carabao Cup next season to ease the congestion, although that would seem to be a slippery slope to devaluing that competition even more and then removing the Europa League qualifying round place that goes with winning that trophy. Although of course for next season it gives clubs of our ilk a very realistic opportunity to actually win something...

Yep, on the post list page, next to the post title is a dark circle or star depending on whether you've posted in the topic or not - clicking that, rather than the title, will take you to the first unread post.

Apparently the EFL are preparing for next season on the basis of a 10% capacity restriction. If that extended to the PL, we'd have a useable capacity of around 3,200.

Apologies for that outage, sudden and weird spike in database connections and took a while to recover. Annoying.