ljkeane

There’s been some cracking games today. ETA: Oh fuck off VAR, you can’t rule the goal out after that celebration. Boo.

A reprieve on the penalty front but it’s not looking good for Arsenal here. ETA: That’ll help.

I thought the midfield was completely irrelevant to be honest. It was Brentford bypassing the midfield and us struggling with Toney that was the problem.

I suspect we’re absolutely battering Brentford on the xg front here but if we don’t take one of those chances they look dangerous enough that we might regret it.

City are really fucking my fantasy team with this shit. Who cares about Gundogan’s hat trick? Give the ball to Haaland ffs. Also Lampard has once again avoided relegation by the look of it.

Brighton have a horrendous run in. If they finish fourth they’ll have definitely earned it. As funny as it would be I can’t see United dropping points in three of their remaining games. West Ham away’s a possibility but the rest look pretty straightforward.

Come on, it's definitely deliberate. Then it's a chance even if it's not a particularly good one. That's pretty much a textbook yellow card.

Deliberate handball to prevent a chance. That's yellow no?

Obvious penalty that one but, speaking of bottling red cards, isn’t that a second yellow for Shaw? ETA: Wahey.

This is a very Brighton performance.

Yeah, to a degree. The space is down the sides of the three at the back but we were playing with two at the back before so it’s less than it was. I don’t think anyone really plays with a flat back four in attack anymore so there’s going to be a sacrifice somewhere to get numbers forward. If we stick with this system you’d think it’ll get better with a full preseason to work on managing the transitions. The major issue for me is, as you say, it doesn’t particularly suit Robertson’s strengths or Tsimikas for that matter. ETA: To be fair you don’t necessarily have to play Robertson in the back three. We could, say, drop Fabinho into the middle of the back three, pick another midfielder to sit alongside Trent and use Robertson to provide the width on the left. It should be an interesting Summer.

He hangs his leg out and makes contact. I don’t know, looks like a penalty to me. Anyway, this is quite good. Definitely better than the FA Cup game so far.

Er, speaking of Wan Bissaka and Mitoma is that not a penalty?

Mitoma didn’t pass the ‘don’t kick it into the keeper’s face when clean through’ test early in the game anyway.

I didn't have any problems voting but, you know, since all it took for me was taking my drivers licence out of my wallet which is always in my pocket anyway I'm probably not the kind of person who's going to encounter any difficulties. I can't say I noticed it taking any longer than normal either. I didn't think to ask whether they'd had any issues.

Yeah, our squad's not well constructed at all to play with wingbacks. Firstly while Robertson would probably be fine Alexander-Arnold isn't really a great wingback. As Horse says we've got too many forwards as well and you'd probably want a real attacking midfielder in there too which we don't really have. It's also a formation it's hard to press aggressively out of, which admittedly we've been bad at this year anyway but what's the point of having Klopp as your manager if you're just going to give up on that. We'd probably have conceded less goals if Klopp had gone with that but I think our attack would have been significantly worse so potentially we're not better off. Largely our problems this year are just down to our pressing really not functioning well all season for a variety of reasons. So I think a lot of the focus for a lot of the season has been if we just fix that we'll be fine rather than making drastic changes. Ultimately that's probably been the wrong decision because it's never quite worked but I'm not sure a change to the style of play would have been a panacea earlier in the year either. I think this formation change has helped with our recent improvement but there's other factors there too. Curtis Jones has gotten fit and has been playing quite well, and being 22 he can actually run around. Fabinho has been playing better too, although that might be primarily down to having Trent alongside him. Jota and Diaz getting fit lets us rotate the front three so there's a bit more energy there too.

Pretty sure we started the Arsenal game with Alexander-Arnold tucking into midfield and reverted back to the old system in the second half but, yeah, overall it's worked out pretty well. I think you're underselling the potential downsides a little though. Yeah, it's not a surprise Trent would be good at dictating play from midfield but one of Liverpool's major strengths over the last few years has been having two brilliant attacking full backs. Playing as we are now in attack one of them is a deep lying midfielder and the other is a left centre back of three, I don't think it's and absolute no brainer to do that. I actually think Henderson is the type of player we want for the right midfielder role if we're going to persist with this, we need someone comfortable drifting out to provide width if Trent isn't going to be doing it. The problem is just he hasn't got the legs for it anymore. A 25 year old Henderson or Milner would be great. It doesn't really suit Elliott.

Chelsea being shit is funny and all but that dickhead in the crowd with a laser needs finding and banning from the ground.

Chelsea score a goal. Frank Lampard’s a genius!

In fairness I'd argue that the problem there was a significant proportion of the population's weird obsession with Diana.

I mainly just remember sequence set to Tusk in the first episode being really good.

It’s a local election. Things like that are probably the only actual policy issues people might care about. Other than that they probably just vote down party lines.

Yeah, you're right that dialogue in historical fiction is not actually going to be accurate and probably wouldn't be very readable if the author made a genuine effort to translate the language of whatever period you're talking about into modern English. I suppose it's about making it 'feel' right enough and that's pretty subjective. As I said there were enough instances I found jarring to stick out to me. Anyway, speaking of historical fiction I'm going to try a new author to me with my next read with Damion Hunter/Amanda Cockrell's Shadow of the Eagle.

He’s lived in the US for 40 odd years now. I’d guess it’s probably things he thinks he knows so doesn’t bother to research but is misremembering. I can’t say anything’s really stuck out to me as gratuitously wrong though.

The are quite a few of Bernard Cornwell's Last Kingdom books on sale for 99p on Amazon.co.uk for anyone who hasn't read them.