Rayvin

Congratulations mate.

taking away the rivalry, it is pretty fucking pathetic like.

Brodgers is the new Celtic manager.

I have, somehow, been roped into a fishing trip tomorrow - one that involves leaving at 3.30am... I need to work until about 1am, so I guess I'm not sleeping.

Um...can we just take a moment to acknowledge that someone in Man Utd's commercial department thought the below was a good idea... What the fuck are Man Utd even doing these days? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ4WhNl5Fgk

Well, this thread became quite grim...

This is from the Ft today... looking like it's going to be a standard Villa affair after all: The Chinese business group which has agreed to buy Aston Villa football club admitted on Friday that it controlled only one listed company, not the five previously claimed in a press release. The admission raises questions about the due diligence on Tony Xia, the businessman behind the deal. He is chairman of the Recon Group, a Beijing and Hangzhou based private holding company which controls 75 per cent of Lotus Health Group, a large producer of the food additive MSG. On the website of the Aston Villa football club, a biography of Mr Xia — posted on May 18 when the sale was announced — reads: “Recon Group is a privately owned holding company that owns the controlling interest in five publicly listed companies on the Hong Kong and Chinese stock exchanges.” The Recon Group website appears to show the group has several listed subsidiaries, however stock exchange filings show that Recon Group only has a significant stake in Lotus Health. A Hangzhou-based spokesman for Recon reached by telephone on Friday, who identified himself only as Mr Jin, admitted the company “currently only has controlling share in Lotus Health”. Meanwhile, he said: “The acquisition deals for the remaining four companies are still being finalised and should come out soon.” He declined to name the companies. The Recon Group said the mistaken information contained in the press release had been the result of a “miscommunication” with Aston Villa, and they would ask the football club to change the wording of the statement. The information raises questions not just about the truthfulness of the claims surrounding Mr Xia’s business dealings, but about the financial health of Mr Xia’s business group, which agreed this week to pay an undisclosed sum for Villa. Last month, Lotus — Recon’s only verifiable asset — announced it had made a net loss in 2015 of Rmb508.5m ($77.6m) on revenues of Rmb1.7bn, compared with a net profit of Rmb23.9m the previous year. Lotus produces 150,000 tonnes of MSG, exporting to more than 70 countries every year, according to Shanghai stock exchange filings, as well as other food additives. Recon Group’s other revenues were unclear as the group does not appear to have ever published an audited financial statement. In addition Mr Jin denied an assertion by Steve Hollis, Villa’s Chairman, who was quoted on Thursday saying that Mr Xia had helped to build the Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium in Beijing. “Again, you need to ask him but he is responsible for the Bird’s Nest in Beijing and some of the other major iconic developments in China” Mr Hollis was quoted in an article in the Birmingham Mail. “Xia was never involved in the planning or designing of the Bird’s Nest stadium. Xia’s expertise is in urban design” said Mr Jin. A spokesman for Aston Villa confirmed that Mr Hollis was accurately quoted, but said he was not sure what information Mr Hollis was citing.

Ah... presumably it's back next season though? You could do a Euros special maybe? Has anyone on here followed it? I'm actually kind of curious.

Not sure it's a statement on his ability so much as how little difference that ability made to us in the end. Apart from a few wonder goals his impact on the team, from memory, was negligible.

What the fuck

Interesting, bet that's going to chafe when it goes through. The Championship is going to relegate 8 teams presumably...

Aye that's true. I reckon it's time to move on from Carr, if nothing else due to the fact that he seems to specialise in France and we're having no luck whatsoever in that market presently. We could arguably do with a wider scouting network full stop. Wouldn't mind if he continued in different role - even specialising in France tbh, as long as we had more coming in from elsewhere.

I thought about asking how you even survive on Twitter, but then I remembered you have the podcast to spill over into...

Dunno but I guess it's possible. Twitter seems hard to debate anything through though, it seems to lend itself more to attention seeking and inane and furious cries of protest. That very probably has eaten into some demographics of forum users, but I'm not sure we'd be glad to have those who can only discuss things through 140 characters.

Balls that's not good. Although hopefully the total revamp they'll need to do will be beyond them for promotion next season. That club needs a lot of work.

Essemmbee has stepped his game up in the past few days, none of us are entirely sure what's going any more. At this point the reference to Danny Murphy could mean literally anything.

I don't get why the wider footballing world keeps defending Mignolet. I don't think I've ever seen him do a single noteworthy thing that justifies people standing up for him. Klopp mentioned he was really intelligent but how does that translate into the game? Does he read it really well or something? He's definitely a flapper.

Was there a mass exodus of a lot of these people or did they all just phase out over time? I know some manner of shit went down with Stevie (some reference to him getting banned in there) - just wondering if it became Game of Thrones style stuff. I love how SEW wades into that particular thread and basically draws the ire of the whole forum btw

This place is a lot more fucking civil than it used to be, like I've given up going through it now but fucking hell...

Ok that's an 81 page thread. I've gone through the first 10 pages and it seems that the guy posted once to quit the forum and then someone called Ashley's Skid Mark and toughguymick both started verbal fights with pretty much everyone on the forum

Does the original thread still exist?

I've read this whole thread in an attempt to make sense of it and just fucking can't. I gather that some guy called Wyn may or may not have been a character of disrepute, and that separately to this, other people were accused of being him on the forum. At no point was any solid evidence that anyone was a character of disrepute brought forward. Is that it?