youlots

Welcome to the site. Entirely agree with your thoughts on the matter. Stick around.

so....let me ask you: are you of the view that if you beat a team 4-0 that you can't be described as having a 'defensive' style of play?

deary me squared.....'pretty bitter comments'?!? He's asked whether Utd can catch us in the interview. All he does is answer the question & it's a very fair answer & appraisal of how we play. That's it. No bitterness on show whatsoever! It's got to the stage with some you on here where you are just reading in what you want to read in whenever he opens his mouth. I speculate that if he'd chosen to answer 'no comment' to the question that had been asked, some of you would react by saying he was jealous or pissed off.

deary me...how on earth does one arrive at the conclusion that what Mourinho said in that interview with Sky Sports after the game is in any way sarcastic or that his comments are an attack on us?!? All he has done is to describe how we are set up & how we play. If anything, and given his football philosophy, his comments can only be interpreted as very complimentary of what Conte & the team has achieved thus far this year.

Most indebted club in Europe - probably the world - to the current tune of more than 400 million pounds of which Utd claim that 88 million pounds has been caused by the drop in sterling post the Brexit vote/debacle. Easily manageable debt given its revenues but the depressed pound is significant now in a wider sense & for all british clubs over the longer term. And let's face it - the top clubs can only sell a handful of first tier aging players for ludicrous sums to the chinese clubs & less so now because the chinese league has just reduced allowable imports from four to three per club.

hehe...so which comes first? Always the rooster. I like to think on occasion that it might explain at least some of the hatred Le Arse supporters have for the spuddies.

ain't that the truth - the only posters who keep this thread going are the ones who either hate/d him & can't let it go or, now hate him. The irony concerning the latter is particularly tiresome. Here's the thing - jose is jose - he hasn't changed much at all. But now that he's not at our club some of you that were, shall we say, a bit shy in coming forward to take issue with his statements when he was our manager & we we're doing well, feel that it is necessary to comment on his on-going pronouncements whereas most of us who stuck by him for a long period but subsequently & long ago accepted that what was done was done & have moved on. The incessant & continual whinging concerning what a past manager says in his new role is really truly only a reflection on those posters themselves. Are these posters so obtuse not to recognise this? Wasting their time having a whinge about an ex-manager who in the main was great for our club but who has not been here now since December 2015. Smarten up – have a whinge about the economic suicide of Brexit or the dangerous waters of all things Trump but for f**k sakes get a grip – it’s football….only football.

After all the song & dance start Fab routine on here I was relieved when the team-sheet came out & saw Matic. The right choice by Conte & he had an excellent game against Le Arse. True it is that the Coquelin/Oxlade-Chamb. partnership was an awkward pairing for them & so it proved but Matic I feel had some of his old swagger back & for me was important as Kante on the day.

Apparently, they don't award any points for possession stats. And besides....why not let em' have a bit of the ball - all that exquisite passing.....

disagree - he's had an excellent 1st half

ha...bondi... you want a beach - try my local: http://www.mollymookmiltonholidays.com.au/gallery/banner7.jpg just voted 8th best beach in Oz good to have you aboard ;-)

don't think so.

February & Arsenal very rarely disappoints.

Do you think there will ever come a day that you might stop hating jose? Do you think there will ever come another day when you'll realize that you're the patsy & that you've been the patsy all along? Because the sooner that either come along, it'll be a good day for you.

crikey.....I was always of the belief that if you won a game & got all the points on offer and/or got through to the next round in a cup tie it was about as good as you could do but now you've set me straight....

Just like many other threads. Terrible knee jerking when a scapegoat is needed. However when things go well, they don't say a word on this "remove the board" campaign. Not when in you didnt need hindsight in the first place to realise the amount of rubbish coming out from a few bitter individuals. Righto – let’s just consider your posts shall we? First, and prior to commenting on the posts, some background that I feel is neutrally made: (i) Brit opened the thread on 26 August 2016 – less than a week before the summer window closed; (ii) On the one hand, and in isolation only, it could be said that Brit was a bit guilty of hyperbole & possibly projection in terms of the thread title & in respect to some of his comments – ‘complete balls-up..’ etc. before the window had closed; (iii) On the other hand, I believe most of us are in agreement with Brit that the summer window of 15/16 was completely underwhelming & a huge disappointment & that our defensive stocks (with less than a week to go) were concerning to us all; (iv) Moreover, none of us were to know at the time that the thread was created (or indeed until 1 October 2016 after mortifying defeats to pool & l’arse) that our incoming manager was at some future stage going to completely revolutionise our playing system in terms of playing the 3-4-3/3-5-2; (v) Both Alonso & Luiz were signed on the last day of the transfer window & the signing of the latter was a complete surprise to most. (vi) The thread was created after our complete fall from grace & the top 4 in 15/16 & in circumstances where there was an incoming manager new to the EPL. Now it is not in issue that so far this season the incoming Manager & the team have exceeded all expectations. Given our low stocks at the end of last season and, since October, it has been a remarkable transition & exciting for everyone. Now – as to your posts: First & given the above, you’re somewhat guilty of hyperbole/over-reaction as well are you not? I refer to ‘terrible knee-jerking’ & ‘remove the board campaign’ & ‘bitter individuals’ et al. I mean which poster in the thread ever expressly stated that the board ‘should be removed’? And your comments are made some 5 months after the thread was created & after Conte & the players have completely turned our fortunes around. It seems to me that your comments could only have currency if you had predicted at one & the same time – ie. at the closure of the summer window – that we would be in the position we now find ourselves in – ie. top of the table. But I don’t recall having read a post of yours of that ilk & made at that time. Perhaps I’m wrong – perhaps you did predict that – in which case I apologize in advance but I’d still like you to reproduce that post (if it exists) herein. Secondly, and more seriously, and given all of the above, you state that ‘you didn’t need hindsight’. I have to say that that comment is ridiculous. It’s the sort of comment that Donald Trump would make & in fact does all the time. You would do well to read up on ‘hindsight bias’. The simple fact is that hindsight bias affects all of us & each one of us has to factor that in when making statements as far as our recollections are concerned. Brit started this thread with good intentions & his concerns were felt by many of us at the time. What is the point of having a go at him & others, as you do, now? Does it make you feel somehow superior?

how sad....used to be the case with this site that any poster who used descriptors such as 'skank' or c**t' in respect to an ex-manager of our club was shown the door: and that even extended to an ex-manager who should not be named let alone a manager who was instrumental in bringing us three titles. It would seem that those days are gone however.

so...in what imagined way could it be maintained, as you do, that Obama was a 'usurper'?!? Did he become President by way of an illegal act? No. Did he become President by force? No. Perhaps my recollections are wrong but wasn't he the clear winner of the presidency on two occasions of both the electoral college & the most votes? So how was he a usurper exactly?

Could you post the whole article? Thanks in advance.

Fixed it for you. One assumes that the police (on the basis that the complainant brought it to their attention) would have referred the matter to & sought advice from the DPP (or the English equivalent) and one infers that the latter advised that due to the effluxion of time and the salient fact that the accused was dead that the institution of criminal proceedings by the crown would be unwise and a waste of resources.

irony? where is/what comprises the irony exactly?

fixed it for you

(responding to ploks from the white courtesy telephone) mmmmm...not a good look & a strategic blunder from our board (especially given what had been emerging over the last decade concerning the priesthood etc), the magnitude of which we can, for now, only speculate on so now, of course, we're in full damage control. I wonder whether the external legal firm now carrying out "an investigation" is the same firm which initially advised the board as to the options available to it at the time - being of course full disclosure as against a confidential pay-off. anyways I imagine that this is just the start of a long saga involving many clubs that made similar confidential payments in the past & that there must be a lot of nervous club directors/former club directors out there.

Outstanding tribute from Guy Rundle in today's Crikey: Without arrogance, or even temper, Leonard Cohen summoned transcendence Like smoke caught in a beam of light, that voice. Joked about when he first used it, stepping out from behind Judy Collins at a concert in 1967 to perform the song he’d written for her, Suzanne. Nerves got him, he couldn’t finish it, fled the stage, had to be talked back on. Was a sensation. He sounded nothing like the singer-songwriters of the era, those now impossibly distant years of hope in a radical liberation. Collins, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor — James Taylor sounded sunny even when he was singing of a friend’s suicide in a mental institution. Collins’ version of Suzanne, for all her art, lacks some, well, lack, that the writer’s voice brings to it, a knowing of how tenuous and incomplete the encounter is. In the writer’s version, it’s a song that seems impossible to enter into it ungendered: you’re either the singer or the sung-about, the voice with no attributes, or Suzanne, the lady of the harbour, asking nothing, giving all, but never by it possessed. In 1967, that was simply a writing of how things were. In 2017, it is an invitation to step into those roles, to take the pleasure of them. Heard in any year, it’s a one-off. There is little else like it in the post-war pop canon, Beckett and Buckley’s Song to the Siren, Nick Drake’s Fly, Johnette Napolitano’s Side of the Road, perhaps. Not that it’s the best song, however, that could be judged, but simply a singular one. Nothing else takes such a risk, teeters so dangerous on the edge of sentiment, fights its way back from that, then rises. It is perhaps best heard first, young. I heard it in on a grey day in 1985, through an AM radio in the front room of a ratty share house in Carlton, mission brown walls, seagrass matting, milky-mildewy smell throughout. As the third verse came round, the sun came out of the clouds and suffused the room, blinding me for an instant. Or so I recall it. So it was with the next dozen or so songs heard. He seemed to reinvent the song with each one: Sisters of Mercy, a repurposed Christian homily, the sung novel of The Stranger Song, the mordant folk-punk of Avalanche, Famous Blue Raincoat a 4am letter, the Ballad of the Absent Mare, kitsch as a painted cowboy shirt. There’s First We Take Manhattan (Then We Take Berlin), Kraussian satire, Lover, Lover, Lover, a pop-psalm, the manifestos Everybody Knows and The Future, the late plain style of Boogie Street, the hymns If it be Your Will and then Hallelujah, the song that became something wonderful and then a little terrible. Between any two of these songs, another song, exemplifying both those qualities and others. And so on, back through the whole oeuvre, a regress, like the trompe l’oeil ranks of arches around the great mosques, that suggest infinity. He had, at the centre of his work, a way of summoning transcendence through the minutiae of pop culture — “everybody knows what you’ve been through/from the bloody cross on calvary/to the beach at Malibu” — and of smashing a hole in anything too entire and holy by the same measure. Anthem, his other overplayed work, put it simply: “there is a crack in everything/that’s where the light gets in”. Through the vessel of a half-century of pop, our great way of forgetting being, he drew an austere Judaist theology, a Christian ekstasis, a pagan worship of the deliverance and deliquescence of sex, a zen hunger for nothingness, shadowed by Holocaust memory and a deep ambivalence about what the ’60s hath wrought, he found the ground in all that is. Sixty great and singular songs? A hundred? No one else in our time — not Dylan, not Orbison, not Brel — comes close. All finely made, exhaustingly so, poetic working, dozens of verses discarded from each, each uniquely joined and finished. Jesus was a sailor. Leonard was a carpenter. His voice was not suited to the times, at first; soon, the times remade themselves for his voice. He had flourished at the end of the ’60s, into the ’70s, as, say, the loyal opposition to Woodstock (Melanie Safka’s Candles in the Rain is another, more literal, equally extraordinary, example), a reminder that the flowers weren’t going to stay open for ever. Son of a doctor, from a prominent Montreal Jewish family, he was a protege of the poet Irving Layton, a Romanian-born Jew, whose poetry has more than a touch of Chagall about it, kaleidoscope images, drawing on east European myth, erupting into the present. There’s an awful lot of Layton in Cohen, especially the volumes of poetry, written and published in the early 1960s, when there was no suggestion that he would become a songwriter, much less a singer — despite a couple of teenage years spent in a Montreal Canadian Jewish country and western band. The divide between high and low culture had not yet come down, and by the ’60s Cohen had ventured to London, and then to the Greek island of Hydra, where he became part of the bohemian set of Australian novelists George Johnson and Charmian Clift. He named Johnson’s most famous novel, when Johnson couldn’t (“what’s it about?” “my brother, Jack” “there you go”), and he flits through Clift’s Images in Aspic, as one of the dark-haired young men, jealousy of whom drove Johnson to a frenzy, such that he ceased writing jointly with Clift, which, in turn, appears to have driven her to suicide. Such is bohemian life. By the mid-’60s, he was at an impasse as a poet, for the plain reason that he was no better than all right at it. A pleasant enough autobiographical novel, The Favourite Game, had been followed by a surreal and extreme work Beautiful Losers, whose ambitious scheme, reflections on the Holocaust mediated through pornography, was beyond Cohen’s talents (it has since become a classic of sorts, but a lot of that is seen through the semi-precious stone of his later works). His impasse was financial, artistic and existential, a broke, blocked poet, tending to melancholy who had fallen into the abyss he had opened. He returned to the US to launch a songwriting career, performing in small clubs only as a way of drawing the attention of singers needing material. He got it, from CBS’ John Hammond, the great repertoire man who launched the careers of everyone from Count Basie to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. The explosive and very folky, first album, was followed by a patchy second effort, and two more, Songs of Love and Hate and New Skin For The Old Ceremony, whose songs were darker, more bitter and ironic than what had gone before. Amid songs like Famous Blue Raincoat, Love Calls You By Your Name and Chelsea Hotel, his affaire-memoir of Janis Joplin, were semi-deconstructed items like Why Don’t You Try and Field Commander Cohen, and a bizarre chant called Please Don’t Pass Me By, all measure of a deep resistance to the role he had stumbled into. His early ’70s tours were of that genre, chaotic, drug-fuelled wanderings (albeit with a detour to do dozens of concerts for the Israeli army during the 1973 war, having been refused permission to enlist; Cohen was also in Havana during the fall of the Batista regime, wondering whether he should join on either side), amidst the birth of his two children. The era culminated in his most bizarre production Death of a Ladies’ Man, made with “wall of sound” producer, and now convicted murderer, Phil Spector. Later, rediscovered as brilliant retro-kitsch, and generating one classic Memories, (“Frankie Laine, he was singing Jezebel/I pinned an iron cross to my lapel/I walked up to the tallest and the blondest girl …”), it was eviscerated at the time. The poems he wrote at the time were anti-poetry, rejection of the entire act of creation. By 1984, when he recorded Various Positions, with Hallelujah buried, unnoticed, in the middle, he had been dropped by CBS from their US roster. Cohen’s collapse could be seen as nothing other than the individual crisis, of a human, a man and an artist in the middle of the journey. But it was of a part of the wider collapse of the era, the transcendent and utopian hopes of the era, burning out in the aimless violence and disarray of the 1970s, then the vacuum and the rise of Thatcher and Reagan, promising not a world of people touching each other’s perfect bodies with their minds, but morning in America, and a return to Victorian values. With a new cold war, talk of winnable nuclear conflicts, something called acid rain, and a condition called GRID suddenly becoming AIDS, the age of Aquarius was yielding to the age of Thanatos. The times had caught up with the man. Cohen became the poet laureate of the children of the dust. Having turned to zen Buddhism to deal with a deep and persistent depression he resorted to a more prosaic drug — Prozac, just on the market — and from his one period on it (“it never worked again,” he said) came the Leonard Cohen of our era, and a very different album, I’m Your Man. Short-haired, besuited, having turned from the guitar to the tinny synthesisers of europop, I’m Your Manwas an anticipation of war, disaster and darkness, an affirmation of life as resistance to the adversary. From the opening couplet — “They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom/for trying to change the system from within” — you knew you were getting an account of the era, and of the feeling that you had come too late, too late to the great party. Everybody Knows, a verdict on the age, sits in the middle of it (co-written with backup singer turned collaborator Sharon Robinson): That album was followed in 1992 by The Future, a near-perfect political-mystical collection, which saw preceding events — the collapse of communism — not as a new dawn, but as the final collapse of any form of grand meaning or great hope. The personal joined to the political, and the general condition of humanity, disabused of a few decades’ hope that we could buck the human condition. By the time that was released, Cohen was back. His take, which found the world a fallen place, capable of yielding occasional love and beauty, had come, across a quarter century, from being a quirky hahaha, to the best account of the way things were. The voice’s imperfections had been done away with by losing all timbre whatsoever; the songs were a breathy, throaty sprechstimme that now seemed to come from inside the ear, rather than out of it. “Let’s get married baby/we’ve been alone too long/let’s be alone together/let’s see if we’re that strong” — my god, I have suddenly recalled discussing marriage with a woman in London in a Hackney bedsit in 1998, as that song came around on the, yes, CD shuffle, the voice pouring into the cold night. Not a welcome contribution. It was the voice of the era. It never again went away, though Cohen did. His continued search for a relief from deep melancholy had led him to a zen Buddhist retreat on Mount Baldy, behind Los Angeles, run by the enigmatic Master Roshi. Cohen lived there for years, essentially as a monk, conducting menial tasks, still writing songs, for the albums that would come in the late 1990s and 2000s. Their style was plainer and more conventional; his extraordinary ability to fuse form and content had faded with age, to leave accompanied poems, which had lost none of their acuteness: Back on Boogie Street, A Thousand Kisses Deep. But these were all overshadowed by the rediscovery of Hallelujah, the deceptively simple pop hymn released in 1984, after a decade’s on-and-off work on it. It had appeared, in a version by John Cale, on an album of Cohen covers, in 1991, and began to take off, before Jeff Buckley (son of Tim) released a version in 1994. Spare, pained and in a young man’s voice, the song became not a record of acceptance for what had been, but a hope for what life might yield — made especially poignant when Buckley died, drowned, only a couple of years older than his father had been when he died, at 30. From there it has been so ceaselessly covered that Cohen himself thought a moratorium on it might be a good idea. There is no surprise that its success came after 9/11, and in the teeth of neocon supremacy, the beginnings of the Iraq disaster, and the unravelling of the world. It is a hymn to sexual love and the possibilities of the world, but it is also a prayer to something whose existence the singer doubts. It is the distilled essence of Cohen’s pursuit, to combine the deep religious and mystical traditions of two millennia, with the ephemeral but utterly present spirit of pop, and to have each inhere in the other, body and soul, soul and body. It could do with a five-year ban. It is a song one wants to unhear, so as to be able to hear again for the first time. Cohen himself walked back the idea of a ban, and performed the song himself, on the tours he undertook in the 2000s, after he found he’d been cleaned out of all funds by his ex-manager. They became his third revival, vast undertakings crossing continents, three- and four-hour performances, something of a communion across the decades, a final summation. By the end, and for some years before, by all accounts, he was a man utterly at peace. In the rounds of interviews, publicity, the thousand tasks of touring, he was universally said to be unceasingly polite, without arrogance, or even temper. His musical collaborators, gathered over a half century, stayed till the end. I heard him on a long BBC radio interview once, years ago, a half-hour thing. “Thank you,” said the interviewer, “thank you, Mark, it’s been wonderful,” he said, without a touch of formula or condescension in his voice. It sounded like it was being said about more than the interview. And his final message to his great love of the ’60s, Marianne Ihlen, dying in Norway, went round the world: “… I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine …” — the phrase we will all reach for, for a dying love. He was well aware what he had fallen short of, in poetry; he believed he had fallen short, too, in music, claiming that Hank Williams lived “a hundred floors above [him]” in the “Tower of Song”. His great opposite is Dylan, the sprawling raw, ragged man whose moments of genius occur among material that was half-finished at the time and it is even less than that now, counterposed to Cohen’s overexact, ironic refusal to take anything at face-of-God value. Each needs the other. God knows what history will make of either of them. Cohen is a gateway, or should be, to poetry beyond, to Shakespeare’s sonnets, or Tennyson’s In Memoriam, or Donne, stuff that will blow out the top of your head. But even if you’re already there, he does something few others can: song that does not need the sweetener of nostalgia to stay a lifetime with you. If you’ve grown weary of the birds on a wire, and the hallelujahs, there is minor Cohen worth checking out: Lady Midnight, from the ’70s, a celebration of late-night negotiations, The Traitor, a bizarre mini-Edwardian novel done Van Morrison Astral Weeks (now, there’s an album, man) style, which is about as opaque as it gets, Take This Waltz, an adaptation of a Lorca poem, Dress Rehearsal Rag, a song so scrappy and despairing Cohen left it out of his collected lyrics, Paper Thin Hotel, from the Spector collaboration, a perverse celebration of jealousy, Roberta Flack’s Tropicanaesque version of Suzanne, Madelaine Peyroux’s version of Cohen’s collaboration with Anjani Thomas, Blue Alert, and Jennifer Warnes’ and Rob Wasserman’s “cowgirl” version of Ballad of the Absent Mare, and if you don’t lose it over that one, well you may be lost. Well out beyond all sentiment, cracking at the edges, but that’s where the light gets in. And Leonard Cohen, now, after a private service and cremation, has hopefully found the extinction he was seeking, love like smoke/beyond all repair … gone like smoke/and gone like this song.

A truly depressing week just got worse. Vale Leonard.