Rayvin

What on earth is the point in taking away the car if you're going to appeal ffs... how does that help anyone? It'll just sit in a lock up at their end until the whole thing is concluded anyway. Sorry to hear this mate, totally agree that this is willful victimisation, the purpose of which is entirely driven by ideology and misconceptions about the realities of many people's lives.

I bet whoever thought that up is very smug right now.

:lol:

If they don't pursue charges immediately while they have the window with the Sweden issue, what chance would they stand later. Plus, he'll go to Russia first chance he gets, you would think.

This is like a high stakes game of chicken. The US, if it actually cares about him at all, could have viewed the decision to commute Manning's sentence as a gambit to at least discredit Assange in the whole Russia/hacking/control of information battle that's going on. Now Assange makes clear that he will martyr himself as offered, which means the ball is back in the US' court. If they take him, Assange immediately gains the moral high ground (and may fancy his chances of an early release with Trump in power anyway). If they don't, then he still gains in credibility based on that tweet, and you'd have to say that he could take that as a sign that he should be ok to face charges in Sweden without being extradited. Sounds like he really does want out of that embassy now, I'm impressed with his resolve tbh.

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.