ADP

Would have liked some more stats in it like, but can't argue with the knobhead detection in the article.

Ah reet, well in that case I third that opinion.

I'm not sure, I'd need to see more from Carver. If he continues the current tactical trajectory, we'd need more than a good striker and a CB to make the top 7. Our problems extend way beyond individual areas. That's not me saying that we don't desperately need better players in those areas, especially CB. But Carver manages like a child on a sugar rush. I have little confidence that he would be successful even if he had better players at his disposal.

Aye, perhaps. But the best players, the ones who are at the 'top' clubs that Lukaku is referring to, are the players who can adapt to several different systems - so that the coaches don't need to take them off or bring them on to alter the system, they will just adapt to it. Lukaku has the potential to be a great player, but he is raw and needs to work on his game intelligence imo. Aye would also give them CL qualification, which is why I think that we could see some clubs taking more seriously this year.

The big difference is that Chelsea and Real Madrid use counter attacking football as an option, rather than their default game after game. Counter attacking football places the control of the game in the opposition's hands, meaning that they dictate the overall pace of the game. Chelsea and Real are able to play possession football when it is required. Dortmund are having an identity crisis because of this exact reason (and the fact that their defence has been woeful). They don't know what style of football to play, as counter attacking football can be safeguarded against quite easily - i.e don't play with a high line, have some pace in your defence and have at least one holding midfielder sat in front of the back four at all times. It's interesting to see what is going on with Everton and Martinez, because in a way I think he is a very progressive coach. But in other ways I think he is incredibly naive if he thinks that one formula can succeed no matter who the opposition are. That's why Chelsea are so good imo. They don't play to their own strengths, but the oppositions weaknesses, which fluctuate from game to game.

His movement up front hasn't been the same I've thought. He looks lazier than last year. Not offering enough, and not making the selfless runs that open up space for other players in the team.

I haven't got any stats to back it up, but from what I've seen on general observation when watching them last season to this season is that Martinez's system of play has been found out by a lot of other teams this year. Up until recently where they have resorted to a much more direct style of play, Everton did not have any plan B. I watched them play against West Brom when Pulis had just taken over and while WBA were really impressive defensively, Everton seemed to be out of ideas after 30 minutes. I think Martinez is a decent coach, but he could do with being a bit more open minded tactically when the time calls for it. Possession football and a tight passing game is all well and good, and looks great when it succeeds. But the diversity of systems in the PL means that unless you have a team of incredible players in every position, that style will only get you so far. Lukaku was great last season, but I remember Mourinho coming out with something when they sold him about his attitude. A lot of the press thought that he was being a bit harsh, and portrayed Lukaku as the unfortunate, talented young fall guy who wasn't given a chance at Chelsea. Perhaps his comments today vindicate Mourinho's assessment. Plus the fact that he he has largely been dogger this season. It's not like he hasn't had the chances either.

Lukaku has some brass coming out saying he wants to move to a bigger club less than a year after signing for Everton, and in the current form he is in. I kind of enjoy Everton being brought down a peg in recent weeks though. First Mirallas saying he wants to move if they don't get champions league, now this. Kind of been found out this season on the pitch an arl.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/row-zed/paul-scholes-really-doesnt-like-5143209

That was absolutely abysmal, and I echo everything which everyone has said about it. Carver is fucking shite and a coward. We got bossed by Crystal Palace tonight and were lucky to leave with a draw I thought. It was the perfect continuation from the Stoke game. Let them control the play, dictate and dominate us. We are set up to play counter attacking football, but the transitions aren't quick enough. But more worryingly than that is that none of the players appear to know where to position themselves on the break. It's just gung ho. There is absolutely no tact in it. That said, you could perhaps survive on this in the PL if your players didn't give the ball away EVERY 10 seconds. Our possession and passing has been absolutely shocking recently. The only thing we create is our own problems. We will stay up, just. But I would be shocked if we won more than one game in the run in. Also, Wilkinson was horrific today. A sports direct bargain bin version of a Premier League defender.

All the best dude.

We will definitely get beaten and the media narrative in the aftermath will definitely be horrific.

@@aimaad22 get yourself to Berlin while on your trek. Best city in the world

Wilky's fucking shite man.

Every time I hear Henry speak about sky sports football coverage it sounds like he is eulogising a close member of his family.

Louis Van Gaal is a bit weird isn't he? Allardyce trolled him Wolfy style.

aw here man what the fuck?

The Liverpool Spuds game is great. Kane again Didnt realise that he only started his first game in the PL in November He is superb. Sturridge looking sharp as well. If Hodgson could get them two working together in the same team England would have a cracking front line.

I agree, and I admire your logic, though I'd need to be pretty high to subscribe to it! I thought that was a dire match. The reason we drew that game was because apart from the first 15-20 mins, we never controlled or dictated the play. We played reactionary football: compact defence with the aim of counter attacking football. This works away from home against teams like spurs who are going to attack you, but at home, against a team like Stoke... we simply gave them too much respect. There was yet again no authority in our play, and when we went 1-0 up we continued to press too far on the counter, and left a gaping hole in the middle of the pitch way too often. We invited the pressure, and It was only a matter of time before they scored, and they probably deserved the point on the balance of play. Carver is like a kid who has had too much sugar. By default, I don't like him (due to away support altercation and him being happy to work as Ashley's new bitch), and he was just naive today in his tactics. Not a premier league manager/head coach/whatever. Mike Williamson is fucking shite. I can't give Oberspeedbump too much criticism about his chance. He should have hit it rather than passing, but the initial pass from Sissoko wasn't great. As someone else said, he seems to suffer confidence issues a lot. Yes he could have done better (and so should Perez when he spazzed out after doing those defenders with some lush footwork), but he wasn't the reason we drew today. The atmosphere in the stadium sounded utterly wank. What a sad state of affairs Club has been robbed of its soul. I just want this season over with. Meta deja vu style. Special mention goes to Sky's commentary re: Colback and the red card he should have been given - If that is the best narrative you can come up with for this game, Mourinho was right to sulk about the sensationalist over dramatic cunts that you are. Embarrassing.

Harry Kane is a really good footballer.

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/massimo-cellino-is-turning-out-to-be-too-weird-even-for-leeds-united-ben-machell-909?utm_source=vicetwitteruk The Owner of Britain's Most Dysfunctional Football Team Is Too Weird Even for ThemJanuary 30, 2015 by Ben Machell Just before the football season began I wrote about the perennial shitshow that is Leeds United and asked a simple, open-ended question: could the club's latest owner – a Sardinian corn magnate by the name of Massimo Cellino – be the man to finally drag United back into the pillowy bosom of the Premier League after a dozen years spent scrubbing around the flinty second and third tiers of English football? The story of my club's financial meltdown and subsequent fall has been told a million times over – I honestly don't have the heart to go through it all again here – suffice to say that the whole thing today seems as morbid, darkly funny and generally hard-to-believe as some well-worn urban myth. You can actually imagine all the sensible, inoffensive chairmen of all those sensible, inoffensive Premier League clubs holding torches to their chins and scaring the shit out of each other at sleepover parties by recounting the tale of Leeds United. "And when the auditors finally checked the accounts, they found the club had been spending thousands of pounds a year just to rent... GOLDFISH!" one of them would boom, to the delighted shrieks of whoever the fuck runs Swansea or West Brom. Anyway, the point is that back in April, Cellino was able to buy 75 percent of Britain's most dysfunctional football club™ and install himself as both Chairman and President. The 58-year-old, we quickly learnt, was stubborn, superstitious and outspoken. We already knew from his time as owner of Sardinian club Cagliari that he had a serious hard-on for sacking and appointing head-coaches. We also knew that The Football League weren't totally crazy about rubber-stamping his takeover in the first placeon account of the fact he'd previously been convicted for financial dealings best described as "bent". Plus there was a lingering issue of a yacht he had been found guilty of evading paying import duty on back in Italy (hint: this will be important later on). On the plus side, though, he was in a rock band, drove a hard bargain and promised to do cool things like buy-back the club's stadium. And yet in a weird way, the most enticing thing about Cellino was that he seemed to exhibit the same kind of demented nihilistic swagger Leeds fans have always secretly (ie, not remotely secretly) loved. I concluded my original piece by suggesting that perhaps a club as mental as Leeds United might actually benefit from a chairman who was also totally fucking nuts. Then the new season kicked-off and everything almost immediately went to shit. The first issue the club ran into was the one that everyone apart from Cellino knew the club would run into. After sacking manager Brian McDermott upon acquiring Leeds, the Sardinian had appointed as Head Coach a man called Dave Hockaday, a virtual unknown who was to all intents and purposes the "confused shrug" emoji in human form. He lost four of his first six games and Cellino didn't hesitate to pull the trigger. Hockaday had to find a new job and he is now the assistant manager of Southern League Division One South and West side Swindon Supermarine, who play in the eighth tier of English football. This sounds like an elaborate lie constructed for comic effect but it's actually totally true. Getting involved with Leeds United can fuck you up in weird ways. Next, Cellino promoted Neil "Redders" Redfearn – the man responsible for the club's youth academy – to the role of caretaker first team coach. Under the granite-faced Yorkshireman Leeds promptly won three and drew one of their next four games. Only, by this point, Cellino decided he absolutely definitely knew for sure who he wanted to manage his team. Step forward Darko Milanic, the former Slovenia defender and manager of Austria's Sturm Graz. Cellino described him as "a very cool guy" although when asked to elaborate on why exactly he had appointed him, he confessed that he wasn't entirely sure (his precise words? "I don't know"). "The coaches are like watermelons," he continued. "You find out about them when you open them. His [Milanic's] particular qualities? He's good looking, what can I tell you?" This was the point, in late September, that a lot of Leeds fans started quietly thinking "I'm scared." And, not that this is even the main issue, but it wasn't like Milanic was even that good looking anyway. Not unless you have a real fetish for men who look like weary Balkan detectives with haunted eyes that seem to say "I saw some awful things during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia". Regardless, just like Hockaday Milanic didn't win in six and Cellino binned him after just 32 days. "I made a mistake with this guy," he then told fans, as though he'd been a calzone that hadn't risen. By the time Cellino decided, actually, yeah, maybe best to just go back and give Redfearn the job after all, he had made four different managerial appointments in the space of five months. It sounds a lot but to those who knew him best, it wasn't a huge shock. "This is not a record," stressed his son, Edoardo Cellino, in The Yorkshire Post. "I remember in Italy, my dad sacked seven coaches in one year and one before the season had even started." The Cellino children deserve a special mention. Edoardo and his sister Eleonora are like these hyper-euro Rich Kids of Instagram, albeit Rich Kids of Instagram who have developed a pronounced taste for Leeds United training gear, phone cases and other club shop tat. They were responsible for the occasion on which celebrity dwarf and Austin Powers star Verne Troyer showed up at Elland Road in a Leeds kit. I mean... OK, fine, why not, he seemed to have a good time. But it only added to strange fever-dream atmosphere building around the club, a creeping weirdness that seemed to permeate everything. During Leeds' away loss to Brentford in September, Cellino tried to watch the game from the home stand and had to be escorted to the other side of the stadium to join his own fans. In one of Eleonora's Instagram shots, she poses seductively in a bikini on a lilo beneath a scorching Miami sky. Amidst all the typical fawning comments you expect to see when a pretty rich girl posts pictures of herself on the internet – emoji hearts and kisses and Snapchat requests – one Leeds fan typed out a simple, from-the-heart message. "Sign a defensive midfielder". Have Cellino's transfer dealings really necessitated this kind of blunt intervention? Well, put it this way: as Leeds sunk steadily towards the relegation zone (we're currently up to 20th after two draws and a win) he observed that, actually, the Championship is much tougher division than he'd expected... certainly a lot tougher than Italy's Serie B where – whoops! – he continues to source the majority of our signings. Our current top scorer, Mirco Antenucci, is the kind of bearded, horn-rimmed glasses-wearing frontman football hipsters cream themselves about, but beyond that? Players like Tommaso Bianchi, Dario Del Fabro, Brian Montenegro and Gaetano Beradi seem to have been signed for the sole purpose of fucking up my Leeds United Sporcle scores. So, to quickly recap: within a few months of buying Leeds Cellino has managed to destabilise the club via his addiction to managerial Russian roulette, splash-out on a team that isn't far off the bottom of the table while also delaying his promised repurchase of Elland Road. Course, because it's Leeds, other weird stuff's been going on as well. After selling the club to Cellino, United's former MD, a financier called David Haigh, was arrested in Dubai where he has been held without charge for the last eight months. Nobody is entirely sure why. Not many Leeds fans seem to really care. There's only so much you can focus on at any one time. Like I say, getting involved with Leeds United can fuck you up in weird ways. Cellino poses with boxer Josh Warrington (Photo via Terry George) But just when you were thinking the season couldn't get any odder, The Football League announce that they are going to disqualify Cellino from being owner of Leeds United. They actually said this in December – his import tax evasion rap finally caught-up with him and provided sufficient grounds to bar him from his role – but when Cellino appealed, they effectively just said no, seriously, you have to stop being owner of Leeds ASAP. I don't mind admitting that this is all really confusing, not least because Cellino is allowed to return to his old role at the club on the 10th of April, when his tax evasion conviction becomes spent in the eyes of the British legal system. Problem is, he has a couple of other legal cases pending back in Italy, about dodging import tax on a Range Rover and a yacht – another fucking yacht! – so who knows what will happen down the line. Cellino said he felt like he was "a guest at a party where he wasn't wanted". If anything, he's more like a guest at a party where you have to pay import duty on your yachts. At the time of writing, his last meaningful act at Leeds was to decide that he was going to cook the squad's pre-match meal before they played Bournemouth at Elland Road. Video footage shows him entering the club's spartan kitchens in a blazer and cream cashmere roll-neck whilst providing a running commentary as he prepares what looks like a very salty pasta dish. The whole thing is like some gonzo cookery show filmed in a prison. "I don't give a fuck!" Cellino exclaimed on at least one occasion during the filming. But watching the footage back, you realise that the problem is that he does. He almost gives too much of a fuck. Part of his problem is that he wants to be involved in absolutely everything, at absolutely every level. He needs to chill out. He needs to pay some import duties. "Why is this club hated so much?" Cellino asked, despairingly, after his latest run-in with the Football League. There used to be a million reasons why. But the sad truth is that, with each passing season, rival fans are starting to forget them. These days, when you tell someone you're a Leeds fan, you no longer face vitriol. You actually get sympathy. And that's so much worse.

Santon leaving is an absolute disgrace. Yet another punchline to this joke of a club.

Total Recurl.