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It's so frustrating. We literally have to play every game like a non league side in the 3rd round of the FA Cup. We have to run twice as far and battle twice as hard as the other team to mask the fact we have a squad full of championship players. And 1 mistake over 90mins usually means dropped points. Its getting boring now and there's no hope Rafa stays beyond the Summer if Ashley still owns the club.

Aye, the frustrating fact is I think we all saw a Wolves side that were there to be beat, we should've murdered a very poor Burnley side and only just hung on. Cardiff were also there for the taking and I'm probably missing other games. We've got to run through a brick wall to get anything and even then there's no guarantee. The highs can be high when you pull it off but after a few years of being deliberately set up to fail it can just be a grind too far. The bastard has a genuinely world class manager yet would be happy to see him gone and us be a permanent cling-on club. It's soul destroying at times.

I will never understand how people from all sides of the discussion, after fucking eons of centrist rule, and the resultant chaos, can look at the situation and go 'you know what'll fix this? the same shit that we've been doing for the past 30 years'. It's absolute, unmitigated bollocks. And it comes from being in the position of having a relatively comfortable life.

Does a lot of work off camera though iyam.

Agree wholeheartedly, we played well today but it’s difficult for us to win a game unless everyone is playing to 100% and we’re incredibly lucky that Rafa is able to get so much from a limited squad.

Iffy decisions all round from our players at times to yet another ref who'll never give a Newcastle man the same benefit of the doubt he'd give to one of the glamour clubs at the top. Fucking sick of watching lads who really shouldn't be anywhere near a PL game constantly getting games for us because Mike Ashley. Every game's a nail biter. Sooner the cunt fucks off and we don't have to rely on at least a quarter of our side being championship cut price bargains or loans, the better.

You see, I don't agree Labour ever backed austerity in the way cameron and Osbourne did. Two things. After the global crash of 2008, it made sense to cut public funding to services and the welfare state, to an extent. Given the "narrative" of the time, Miliband rightly or wrongly went along with it, to appease the right wing media. Does that mean he would have enacted the extreme austerity we saw? Not imo. But if you think there is no difference between the tories and New Labour, go ahead. Secondly, cutting back services should have also been balanced with Keynsian infrastructure spending btw, which never happened. Never mind. You make massive broad sweep strokes calling everything "neoliberalism", and proclaiming it as all the same. It's not. To me neoliberalism means market capitalism, which really is the basis of western society. Scandinavian countries are neoliberal. There is nothing stopping us being having sound market capitalist structure but also proper taxation and social welfare. The alternative is communism, which I'm personally not keen on.

On replay, it's fucking kenedy's man. He jogs back the full length of the pitch, despite only playing 10mins

Cowardly defending, no one wanted to close your man down.

Which begs the question: what could possibly be the motivation for delivering a massive blow to that happy status quo by voting to leave the EU?

Lascelle's form has disappeared

Always Mike Dean isnt it

Not the worst thing a sunderland player has done to a kid.

I'd never seen this before. Incredible

It had a lot of renovation work done in 88

Trouble is, leavers voted for a multitude of reasons, many of them based on lies. How do you address a reason that was based on lies? Surely first you have to show it was a lie, but many leavers, like CT, are impervious to this. There's also not a member in this board, other than CT perhaps, who doesn't want an end to austerity and fairer redistribution of wealth. Where we disagree is how we get there. You believe Corbyn can deliver. I don't. I'm convinced a party led by a moderate could succeed. All hypothetical of course and it'll be interesting to see where this car crash is going this week.

Lasses are brutal

I saw that yesterday. Hard to read too much into it without knowing what has changed.

Portugal has gone quite to the left and is doing well. Spain is centrist but in coalition with socialists who have forced some decent stuff getting results. In France, Macron is massively unpopular as his help the rich agenda is exposed, Merkel has packed in after the CDU were decimated in state elections so I don't think its a stretch to say centrists are running out of time. Soubry said something interesting yesterday - I think she's full of shit but she said May hadn't reached out to the 48% at all which is true but on the other hand the FBPE and PV lot have been the same - we'll just undo the vote and everything will be okay - they have no interest in discussing addressing some of the reasons leave voters voted as they did. I do think ignorance, lies and racism affected the leave vote but you don't address those things by just telling people they are thick. If people in the north voted leave because they feel their lives are shit and nobody cared then maybe we should look at how 40 years of centrist/right wing governments have led to that instead of just sneering at them.

Only LM was ever right.

Went to see the Charlatans and James at Wembley last night. Charlatans were canny but his voice is a bit screechy these days - makes him sound more like the manc stereotype. They did do a great version of Ever fallen in love though. James were excellent - good new songs and the hits were great.

He had a great season but even back then, pre-injury, he was limited. He obviously had a good understanding with Gerrard but those long passes for Owen to run onto often resulted in the ball being given away. The frenetic nature of the premier league, especially back then, often meant possession was quickly turned over. Even more so at Anfield which has quite a small pitch. While this meant Owen would often get a fair few chances per match it doesn’t take a genius to work out why this was nowhere as effective at international level. Jonathan Wilson in ‘Inverting the Pyramid’ talks about Owen complaining about how for England, when KK was manager, the latter said all Owen did was score. Owen’s response was “Is that not enough?” Wilson’s conclusion was that, at the top level, it wasn’t enough. Ironically it was Keegan who recognised that, post injury, Owen could no longer play as an out and out striker. The only time he looked a player in the latter part of his career was when Keegan deployed him as a deep lying right sided forward alongside Viduka and Martins. Tl;dr He wasn’t as good as he thought he was and never worked on the bits of his game that were weak which is why he struggled so much when he lost his pace