Rayvin

I think for a lot of people this should be filed more under "depressing and real" than "funny" mind you

Merry Christmas lads. Hope you all have a lovely day.

Don't think we were remotely arsed about Europa, it was CL or bust. We tried, just didn't quite have the experience or penetration. Ugh, it's sickening, we were 35 mins away from an amazing night. Sincerely grateful to this side for getting us into the thing again though - great players, great team. Standing ovation from me. Thanks lads.

I think this depends on the extent to which one believes that there is a spiritual dimension to the universe. I am not religious, but I do believe this - there are enough signs of it to convince me. So I have thought to myself at times, what would the 'rules' for a spiritual component to reality look like - and I think I sort of settled on them being likely similar to the physical universe. So when we die, our physical body is broken down and transformed/recycled into other materials or lifeforms, they continue to be 'used' as part of physical reality. I think I believe that the same would therefore be true of our spiritual energy. It is broken down and returned to the 'whole', whatever that is. I do not believe we would retain consciousness or any real sense of ourselves as an individual, but I do think there would be a great peace in the restoration of our spirits with the wider sea of energies. I also feel that the decisions we take over the course of our lives influence the flavour of energy returned. If we are broken people with significant damage, we return energy that carries that damage, thus harming the overall whole. We therefore have a responsibility to work on ourselves and our pain so that what we return to the sea is as pure as possible. Sorry for being late to the thread on this, I do appreciate it's moved on a bit.

Rough result but we all know why it happened. Absolutely no criticism of Trippier for me despite the goals, we all know why those errors happened too. Pickford celebrating is fine IMO, he will know these moments will be few and far between against us and most of the time he's being humiliated - watch out for the return leg at St James where he sprints down the tunnel in tears at full time. Aa for the rest of this month, it's gonna be rough. I think the position I've landed on is that even if we lost every single game until January, I'm going to struggle to blame the players or the team. They're working so hard and they've got my support either way. We know this is a very good team, we know the try, we know the system works.

This is going to have to be some game to beat 5 which was IMO an absolute masterpiece. Such a huge studio though that you'd think they have the resources to do it.

Alex and I on the same wavelength as usual, love to see it

If you were more informed and invested in that conflict than he is saying then you'd be reeling stuff off about it and making some sort of actual case around the issue. You're not though, you're just getting annihilated all over the thread. So my money is on him having got you bang to rights.

We don't need De Gea, Dubravka is a perfectly competent keeper and it's only fair he gets a crack at this anyway.

You know, I can't think of a better explanation than this. This is quite literally what happened Maybe I really do have a problem.

Wow. Actually it is sorry of hard to think of an alternative.

It is what it is, and we would have had to go out to try to beat Milan in the final game either way tbh. It's not like we could have gambled on PSG getting a draw in Dortmund. I'm still just really proud of the team as my main emotion following that. If we end up in the Europa League, fine. If we qualify despite this, great. In the end I still never thought I'd see days like this return, and as unfair as that penalty was, at least we're here in the first place. Getting screwed by VAR at the highest level of the game

Well fucking done lads, absolute heroes. Genuinely proud to have this team representing the city.

Just need to hold as much together as we can until January. Probably need about 3 players in somehow in order to turn it around.

A few people saying this but I'm sure I recall reading on either here or elsewhere that only 2 or 3 of our injuries are muscle problems that you might expect from training intensity. The majority are impact damage issues, I.e. from challenges and so on.

How is Willock injured man fuck this season.

Israel exists, so there is no reasonable question to be had now around whether it should or not. It does. All I want is for people to stop dying.

I am both too. I consider wanting Israel to relent to be a pro-Israel position on the basis that what they are doing makes this neverending. We don't disagree on outcomes, or the value of lives, we just disagree on why this is happening.

I'd rather not debate it. As I said, I understand why Israel feels that the destruction of so many innocent lives is necessary.

You have once again missed the main thrust of my post and zeroed in on something that bothers you. I am going to stop engaging with you on this both out of respect for your closeness to the issue, and out of respect for my own point of view which is getting lost in translation.

I would find a way forward driven by compassion but that is because I understand the issue as one of oppressed vs oppressor, whereas you view it is a race/culture/religion war. I am not saying you are wrong, just highlighting the difference in our views. In my view, it obviously becomes possible for the oppressor to take steps to redeem the situation. If I viewed it as a an existential race war (or however Israel sees this), I would do what Israel is doing. I have stopped judging Israel for this, I have accepted their view is what it is, and that is why I have said that they must continue to destroy people until they are safe. What I won't do of course is stop putting it this bluntly. I think it is important that we understand what we are accepting.

It hasn't had any strategic success against Hamas that I am aware of, but if you read my posts I indicated that this was why, if Israel is committed to "wiping out Hamas", it cannot stop here. If it did stop here, then all of those deaths would be for absolutely nothing. It has to keep burning, razing and destroying until it has defeated Hamas. It is the only way it can justify the loss of life we are seeing. It cannot just 'stop'. However I did not at any point say it was lashing out at the Palestinian people, which is how you phrased it. It is lashing out at Hamas in the same way the US lashed out at the Taliban.

I haven't suggested this.

I think the point is that there is no logic to this though. This is a case of a government lashing out because it feels it needs to be seen to be doing something, no matter how horrific it is. See also Afghanistan.