OTF

Apparently doesn't matter.

No excuse for us not being faster to get to the follow up - Ritchie sleeping, though he had two men to mark.

We always look panicked defensively. Is that really a penalty?

Noone following in to clean that up... Willock would have loved that

At first glance I thought it may have been a foul. Terrible lack of marking at the back post.

Murphy you beauty, nice lead up play and good cross from Ritchie.

Nice save Woodman, out defense looks to be in all sorts.

What's with the god awful lettering on the match jackets?

We gave them so much time and space in and around the box there, terrible defense.

So much for talk about actual football....

Wonder how disappointed the premier league would have been when they told Newcastle that Willock hadn't been registered in time to play in the first game...

The only way we have him for the next 6 years is if he turns into the next ginger Pirlo.

Yeah shocking, they missed the boat and won't acknowledge their failures. They've shifted the onus onto the population to get vaccinated as a diversionary tactic and because they have nothing else to turn to. It's almost as if they're politicians. Embarrasingly they keep saying they expect cases to rise for a few more days, as though after that they will magically hit a wall and start dropping. In the meantime it's leaking to regional areas (and Canberra) because all it takes is a few self entitled cunts to fuck a whole community. WA has had a good run of it because you're so far from everything and basically said FU to other states and Aussies overseas leaving the east coast and mainly NSW to shoulder the burden of return travellers. It was working ok until the first Melbourne outbreak and once that was under control until the current Sydney one which the government absolutely butchered the approach to. Sydney being delta is the big factor that will mean the cat is out of the bag and all eggs are now in the vaccination basket. Plenty of people are doing it tougher than I am, so always have to think of that when feeling down about the whole state of affairs.

The fact that he's joining us with his exit plan front of mind tells you everything you need to know. Like the rest of us he's no doubt hopeful of a buyout.

Another day of record cases for NSW

That's what they're attempting to do now, but the damage that has been done with the previous mixed messages has really impacted on the general public's confidence in AZ. Once it's gone it's hard to get back especially when pfizer is around and championed as the superior option. They have been opening up more and more vaccination sites and offering walk up vaccination locations targeted at specific vocations which is helping. It's getting through the willing vaccine participants, or those who need to do it in order to resume work, the bigger problem will be once we start getting to the vaccine hesitant and those who outright refuse and/or on the lunatic fringe that don't believe in COVID. They're shortening the second dose to around 6 weeks for AZ. Personally I've had a booking in for pfizer from the start of June and the first dose is not until early September. I was not able to book AZ at the time as it was only allowed for those 60+. In fact I only just scraped in by a few months for being eligible for any vaccine at all at the time. I could have sought out an AZ vaccine earlier but I haven't for a couple of reasons - firstly I'm able to work fully from home so I'm very rarely in the community (maybe once a week for half an hour for grocery shopping), secondly when I floated the idea my other half shut it down. Agree wholly that it will be very difficult to contain, that's the reality we're living currently in Sydney exacerbated by the hesitancy of the NSW government to move quickly with a lockdown. As a result we're now seven weeks into lockdown with no end in sight. Not fun when you have two young kids doing remote learning.

Trying to stay on top of delta until the vaccinations are at a high enough level to prevent most hospitalisations and deaths. Biggest problem being that there are supply issues in particular for the favoured pfizer vaccine. The AZ has been the subject of plenty of negative media reports around the potential for serious blood clots and now with the virus back and spreading in certain areas there has been mixed messages from the goverment regarding eligibility for AZ - initially it was recommended for those over 40 only, then revised to over 60, then back to over 50 and now to over 60 as well as anyone 16-60 "where the benefits outweigh the risks, including in outbreak settings". Given that AZ can be produced in Australia it's much more readily available. Vaccination numbers are finally progressing at a reasonable pace with more pfizer around the corner and moderna now also approved and on the way. In the meantime Sydney has had cases continually grow for a couple of months now, now getting around 250 cases a day which has seen this delta outbreak bring the highest numbers of the whole pandemic for Sydney/NSW. The testing numbers are at record highs too, which is good. Other states and cities have been faster to implement snap lockdowns in the face of delta cases which for the most part is allowing them to stay on top of the case numbers through contact tracing and isolation of close contacts. But with the transmissibilty of delta the next case is seemingly always just around the corner so the focus has definitely shifted to vaccinations being the only way to ensure a future without lockdowns. That city you reference is Canberra which is wedged inside regional NSW, but not too far from Sydney where cases are spreading. Canberra had not had a single case of community transmission in over 100 days, and with this case being delta they're rightfully concerned and acting in proportion to the risk. Thankfully most of the elderly population has been vaccinated so the deaths with this wave have been much lower than the first. In total the entire country has had around 950 deaths attributed to covid, around 50 of those during this current outbreak. Getting to 80%+ vaccinations is only going to be possible by November, so it's going to be a long hard lockdown slog where it has not been nipped in the bud. Currently that's only Sydney but the second biggest city Melbourne has been in and out of lockdown and has been recording 20+ cases a day for a few days now. They've been most affected in the past so have been very quick to implement lockdowns with delta but even then it is proving to be a struggle.

Which is effectively pointless in the context of moving the club forward under current ownership.

TSFOAN. Too Shit For a Nickname. I'm sure it will catch on. My vote would be TIM - The Invisible Man.

I have a matchworn Jose Enrique.

That he'd want to go somewhere and play constantly where he is celebrated by the fans, players and management instead of rotting away on a bench not developing during key years in a limited career lifespan, yeah, clearly mentally deficient.

Never knew we were amongst such elite level athletes here, well done lads on choosing to use your considerable powers for other more socially advancing endeavours.

Imagine the calibre of team we could put together based on the Ashley era irons in the fire. Probably quite shit still, but my what a pleasure just to ponder on the mystery of it all.

Got to be super easy to wind up Bruce, he got a free ride with the empty stadiums last season.

Saying that the football under Brunce has "on the whole, been bad" is putting a positive spin on things. That said the hole that Bruce has been hardest on is his own after a big beef madras bender.