ljkeane

I think tonight and Spurs away are the only likely prospects for City dropping points. So, yeah, City going in front isn’t ideal. ETA: Okay, so City aren’t dropping points tonight then. I’m not hugely confident about Spurs either. Bah.

Bloody hell mate, are you ever not complaining? Ffs. I seriously can’t remember you ever posting anything positive in this thread. Players miss chances, they have runs of bad form. It happens.

It’s not really. Liverpool, like everyone really, defend in a combination of zonal and man these days. I’d guess that’s probably in Van Dijk’s zone but he’s blocked and Alexander-Arnold is supposed to clean up any loose balls over the top. If anyone was directly picking up Calvert-Lewin it would have been deeper where he started his run. Szoboszlai also gets tangled up so it might have been him. Frustrating way to end the season. Oh well, still a better year than it was expected to be at the start.

I don't know, maybe. The problem with Nunez is literally just the ball going in the net. His all round play is excellent and finishing, while he does occasionally make some bad choices, he's mostly making the right kind of attempts. If you look at the underlying stats he's at the very unlucky end of the scale to have the number of goals he does. For example I've got no doubt Nunez is throwing himself at that headed chance Jackson had, with his luck this season the keeper probably pulls off a worldie save though. Jackson is significantly more raw than Nunez I'd say. He's got the raw materials to be a top striker but when you watch him he's frequently making the wrong run or his head goes down in games and he's not really offering for his midfielders. It can't be easy to be a player who needs to develop at Chelsea to be fair.

Looks like it's going to be Arne Slot for the next Liverpool manager. I don't really have any particular opinion on whether he or Amorim is the better candidate having watched exactly zero minutes of either the Dutch or Portuguese leagues this season. We'll have to see how it goes I suppose. I only watched bits of the Arsenal Chelsea game last night but watching the highlights this morning Jackson had an, er, interesting game. He genuinely had Saliba and Gabriel on toast by the look of it. He's left Saliba for dead in the first half, then Gabriel's very lucky not to score an own goal. In the second half he really embarrasses Gabriel before his big chance. On the other side of the ledger he basically bottles going for the header in the first half for what should have been a massive chance and his chance in the second half, come on, you have to shoot across the keeper there. Oh yeah, and he should have had a red card.

Heh, Gabriel’s rugby tackled Madueke before that third goal. The VAR is clearly a Luton fan. In fairness if you defend as badly as Chelsea did for that second goal you don’t really deserve for decisions to go your way.

No Palmer? Fuck’s sake.

I mean I'm pretty sure if a bunch of significant institutional investors wanted to invest in a fund that didn't include companies doing business with/in Israel there would be a lot of financial institutions offering one pretty quickly. It'd be pretty inconvenient but I very much doubt it's impossible.

I don’t know why he was ruling out Coventry goals then. Wahey.

You can see why Liverpool like Gravenberch, and why Bayern liked him before them, he’s got all the attributes to be a top midfielder, but it’d be nice if he was knitting it all together more often. It feels like a real lottery what’s going happen anytime the action’s near him.

Heh, Everton have spent all season spurning high xg chances and then in probably the biggest game of the season McNeil scores that. ETA: Beto did not look in a good way after that head clash.

City on Fire was good. I'll definitely give a few more Don Winslow books a try. Next I'm going to read Ithaca by Claire North. North's books are pretty consistently good and it seems fitting to go from one book roughly based on the Iliad to one roughly based on the end of the Odyssey.

So I actually think that’s more ‘deserving’ of a penalty than a lot of penalties. Was Jackson going to score there? Probably not but he could have got a shot off and Walker’s absolutely deliberately knocking him off balance to prevent that. On other hand does someone’s toe getting clipped while they’re running away from goal in the box deserve a 90% chance of a goal? Not really.

I mean he’s clearly shoved him and it’s not shoulder to shoulder. It’s a foul and it’s in the box. It’s not the kind of thing that’s usually given but the officials having just decided they’re not going to give certain types of fouls in the box does irritate me.

Fuck’s sake. Can we not at least have extra time?

As I said last week my opinion on goalscoring is that everyone misses chances and sometimes shit happens and the ball doesn’t go in the net but, bloody hell, Jackson could do with taking one of these chances. ETA: Er, decent shout that’s a penalty. ETA2: Er, not a bad shout that’s a penalty either. Walker’s shoved Jackson in the back there.

Chelsea are getting quite a few chances on the break here.

I don’t love heights but it’s not like a crippling fear or anything.

I think that's underselling Atalanta's role a fair bit. We were causing them quite a few problems in the first half then they've adjusted at half time and we couldn't get the ball through midfield. Same as last week really. A very impressive couple of games for Gasperini.

Can’t say I was overly confident with Rudiger there though. Whew.

Get in.

Heh, fair play to the keeper for having the balls to just stand there. They should do that at least once a shootout, someone always goes down the middle.

Tight tie between Arsenal and Bayern but Bayern pulled away in that last 45 to deserve to go through I’d say. We could really do with Real doing a Real here.

I read Resurrection Walk by Michael Connelly. Connelly's books are pretty consistently solidly ok reads, very airport read books. Which is actually what I intended this book for but I never got around to reading it while I was away. Anyway, another decent detective/lawyer thriller. Although Bosch is probably another character who the author obviously likes who's probably getting a bit too old for the kind of storylines he's being put in. I also read The Blighted Stars by Megan O'Keefe which was another of the cheap kindle books I'm trying to see if I can find a new author I like. I didn't like this one. There's what's effectively a side plot about an alien fungus which also didn't really work for me but it's mostly two characters, both of which I found fairly irritating, doing a lot of naval gazing. Next up I'm going to try another new author for me with Don Winslow's City on Fire.