Rayvin

I wondered about the terminology, but apparently clemency in the legal sense can also mean a commutation of a sentence - and he asked for clemency in that tweet, not a pardon. Not sure he can argue his way out of it through semantics.

I don't think so but his entire premise for being where he is was that he faces the death penalty in the US if Sweden extradite him. Plus, Hillary did threaten to kill him in 'jest'.

Agree with Gloom, Rafa is our last chance with respect of trading on our past success, to have a manager of his calibre. That said, this all has a disturbing ring of plausibility to it. I think ewerk makes a good point about the summer transfers mind, it's not like players such as Gamez and Murphy have been particularly well involved - good cover options, one of which is certainly proving his worth now, but hard to argue as having made financial sense from Ashley's point of view. Ultimately you'd never expect there to be entirely no friction between the board and the manager as they're always going to have slightly different concerns, but I think Carr is the problematic figure here. He's 72 ffs, can't he just retire?

Either way he doesn't strictly have to do anything until May. His concern with going to the US was that they'd kill him though, which makes me wonder if he'd settle for prison with a guarantee that they won't execute him. Why would he have made that offer if he didn't intend to see it through, though? He must have considered that there was at least a chance that this would happen.

Um..?

Fully agree on Krul's distribution. Really poor. Elliot was much better at that even in his early days. The advantage with Krul was that he could be unbeatable on his day.

I get the point but they're not lower mid table atm.

But presumably lots of lower PL clubs would be in for him.

Don't worry though, Donald Trump has our back!

Why is McCarthy even available and/or interested?

Well, seems pretty inevitable. Hard Brexit, no trading deal and the UK setting itself to become even more of a pro-Oligarchical state than it was previously with the tax haven status.

The thing is though, they need their national side to be better before they take the WC. The Olympics was a no brainer because they perform well in that, but their public has a similar level of disparaging hatred towards their national team as we do to ours They consider them to be a national embarrassment, and the likelihood is that the team would lose crushingly at the tournament to everyone they came up against, and would ultimately have to issue formal apologies to the nation. In short, China would lose face on a large scale.

Bloody hell, that would be something to see. If he goes though, it'll just cement the idea that he's a busted flush.

Would be funny if Rafa's take on the injury problems were that we needed to replace Anita

At least he's actually earned that I suppose.

Roll on benevolent dictatorship.

Yeah but he'd signed up by then, hadn't he? He signed up with City back in January, before it was certain that Leicester were going to win it. Moreover you could just as easily look at that and conclude that all teams in the PL are equally shit. Which might be true, but now also includes his own side.

Yep. I genuinely don't think he expected it to be this competitive.

On current form you'd have to fancy Spurs for that I think.

Yeah, that's true. It'll be interesting to see what he does, especially when the press turn on him (which is imminent if their 'poor' form keeps up).

Suspect this is true, but he has left when it got tough previously, I think. Didn't he go the year Barcelona were evicted from their position of dominance in La Liga?

On the other side of this Brexit stuff mind, it's starting to sound as though we have a negotiating position/plan. It's very negative, but that stuff about corp. tax, the US deal and so on are the most coherent things that have been said.

Fair points I guess, their recruitment has been questionable for some time. Begiristain or whatever his name is doesn't seem to be all that good at picking players.

You're suggesting the only possibility is that he doesn't see it intellectually though. The other, more likely scenario, is that he's too much of a purist, too stubborn, to actually want to adapt. Hence the situation with Bravo and Hart.