goodrobotusses

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Really enjoyable read, that.

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Erroneous board error message lying to me. Ignore please.

Buffon, Casillas, Reina Maicon, D.Alves, Evra, A.Cole, Ferdinand, Vidic, Terry, Cordoba Xavi, Mascherano, Fabregas, Essien, Iniesta, Gerrard C.Ronaldo, Ribery, Kaka, Messi Torres, Villa, Eto'o Near misses: Drogba, Ibrahimovic, Robben, Rooney, Pato, Pirlo, Cech, Lampard, Alonso, Ramos

Skrtel wears 3 for Slovakia, maybe he'll go for that.

HAHAHAHA. And: f*** off Newcastle.

Short translation: "I'm thick"

No-one in Britain. In Europe I enjoy watching Barca and Milan. I also like watching Villarreal too.

And older.

Happy he got the goal and all, obviously, but he didn't actually contribute anything otherwise yesterday. The ball never sticks with him.

Xabi, Pepe, Alf, Masch, Fabio, Yossi, Dirk. Good fellas, I bet. I met him too, outside his flat in Manchester while I was absolutely hammered. I'd been doing some camera work for a production company backstage at the Versus Cancer charity gig at the MEN last year. We hit the free booze mid-afternoon, and after the show went back to the director's mate's place to stash all the gear. While we were loading everything into the building and blocking the access to the lift this bloke walks up and has to wait for us to move everything. The director says "oh, you're (friend's name - can't remember)'s neighbour, aren't you? You're a footballer, right? Sorry, I can't remember your name." To which he replied, "Mikel", and I consequently blurted out in drunken excitement, "you're Xabi Alonso's brother!" Because, yes, all that man wanted was someone to only recognise him based on his younger, more talented brother's achievements. Heh. My last memory of that night was talking absolute inane, drunken b******s to Andy Rourke (CLANG) at the bar of the Malmaison hotel at 5am.

While it is an insane amount of money, Ribery could be excellent with them. Personally, I'm going to hold off on the sneering just for now.

Aye. Unless I dreamed the likes of Keane, Bellamy, Pennant, Gonzalez, et al.

Chris Bascombe: Captain Logic Riera has been decent, but not great - let's spend more money on Stewart Downing instead.

Fulham play a deep, compact containment game, based on counter-attacking - much like we did under Houllier. Think it makes Hangeland look better than he is, given opposition will invariably resort to crosses and high balls into the box. I don't necessarily think he is a bad player (though he was s**** against us last season), but I don't know how he'd fare in our team being asked to play a higher line.

The Silva link (if we go nuts for a second and assume that something might happen on that front in the summer) kinda throws a cat amongst the pigeons in terms of the balance of our players for the wings. At the moment our four players there are Kuyt, Riera, Babel and Benayoun. Assuming we got in Silva, it would likely be at the expense of one of those guys. Kuyt is obviously safe, and I'm pretty certain Riera will be here next season too. In terms of pure form/ability I'd certainly rather keep Yossi than Babel, but if we were to switch Babel for Silva the squad would be accommodating two players of a similar ilk (Benayoun and Silva). Though that isn't an entirely terrible prospect on the face of it, we will have traded in our only pacy wide player for another wide player whose game is based on technique, not speed. So while I a) would like to get Silva, b) would like to keep Benayoun, and c) would not care if we dumped Babel, I do think we'd compromise the balance of our attacking wide midfielders by doing so. Will be interesting to see what Rafa does, either way.

Walcott is nowhere near the class of the other two he's bracketed with there.

Is it still okay to blame the Olympics? Seems oddly coincidental that both Masch and Babel have been way below the standards they set last season. I'll leave judgements on Lucas to the next 65894764985 page thread on him.

Garcia was capable of producing more spectacular moments, but was infinitely more wasteful and frustrating than Yossi. On balance I'd say Benayoun is a better all-round player, but Garcia's contribution over the 04-05 season was greater than anything Yossi has given us thus far. If that makes sense.

As I said last night, Arshavin's goal haul - in light of his contribution elsewhere in the match - was almost as bad as when Kevin f***ing Lisbie scored a hat-trick against us for Charlton.

And one of them was that hilariously shanked cross he kicked into his standing leg in the first half. This was almost as bad as Kevin Lisbie's hat-trick against us.

Don't even have to imagine that - there's a few of his Santander goals on there. Heh. But seriously though, think Yossi has been ace.

That's all I've been saying since full-time. Arsenal were there to be f***ed, but we've ended up f***ing ourselves.