chinapig

Turns out a minimum of 2 games per round will be free to air. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2024/feb/15/tnt-sports-agrees-four-year-deal-for-live-fa-cup-coverage-from-2025-26-season

Palace had already agreed terms with Oliver Glasner who won the Europa. League with Eintracht Frankfurt. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2024/feb/15/crystal-palace-roy-hodgson-oliver-glasner-manager

"Eh, what's up ref?"

TNT Sports is part of Discovery+ which is in turn owned by Warner Bros.

Bulk buy out of date chocolate coins and you'll make a killing. Though on the down side they'd clear them off the pitch and sell them from a wheelbarrow in the alleged concourse.

He always comes across as vain but going to greet his adoring fans before the game is another level of cringe.

They were never the same after their drummer died in a bizarre gardening accident.

I've said the same in another thread though you have put it better. If Liam is showing flexibility and a willingness to adjust his approach that's to his credit. Better that than someone who has a fixed way of playing and tries to shoehorn players into it whether or not it suits them.

It was said that when Nigel and his staff saw him in pre-season training he was even better than they expected. When you look at the squad Liam inherited it shows that recent recruitment has been unusually successful, Roberts being an example. Compare and contrast with the Ashton/LJ era and you can see how consistent it has been. I expect Max Bird to continue that trend.

There is no cult other than in your head. Being pro Nigel doesn't mean being anti Liam. What happened was nothing to do with Liam so most of us can judge him on his merits without comparing him to anybody. Our performance in the first half on Saturday and the whole game tonight makes me wonder if he's concluded that our players' strengths lie in being energetic and aggressive rather than playing a possession game. If so it's beginning to pay off perhaps. Long may it last.

He should be good at orchestrating the play then.

Yet you passed up the chance to keep Chris Martin, now leading Bristol Rovers to a glorious promotion.

This is the kind of question we need answered. A job for the Former Players Association I reckon.

Yep, heard that this morning. Football Cliches is very funny and an antidote to taking the game too seriously. After all we need to know why some teams are given their full name in league tables and others not, which players in what positions are allowed to wear long sleeved shirts or what the threshold is for saying a team hasn't laid a glove on the opposition. Work of national importance.

Thanks, he did coach the youth team for a while, I'd forgotten that.

Wasn't it financed with a high interest loan though? Fortunately they can meet the repayments thanks to the massive increase in attendances.

Well I did say it was a stretch!

A stretch maybe but Dave Merrington played for us and was later Saints manager.

Absolutely deserves our thanks. She stood firm against pressure from the Premier League throughout and saw through measures that have led to them acting seriously on FFP for the first time (unless anybody believes no club had ever breached the limits until now). It's a little out of character for a Tory MP to want to regulate the rich and powerful so good for her for going against the grain also. On the down side Kieran Maguire will be heartbroken.

I believe Ben Jacobs is a sports (i.e. not just football) journalist but I'm not sure he is any kind of financial expert. I give more credence to Swiss Ramble as quoted in the article I linked above, specifically this: For 2023-24, though, they would appear to be in big trouble, with Swiss Ramble estimating their losses for the three-year assessment period at £201m – and that was on an assumption they would finish sixth, which now looks extremely optimistic. So they're going to have to generate an awful lot of transfer income to spend £200m. This is going to have to come mainly from home grown players as pure profit. Spurs are keen on Gallagher but knowing Chelsea's plight may drive down the price. They're said to want £50m for Broja; no chance of getting that.

Point 1 misses the fact that the independent commission makes the decision not the PL. We're used to fans not getting this but you'd think Dr Wilson would. Point 4 ignores the fact that the PL Board proposed such parameters but the clubs voted against, including Everton.

Given that we can't replay the second half without changing the shape we can't draw a firm conclusion either way. Which is why I posed it as a question rather than a conclusion. Maybe we would have won more comfortably if we had not changed or maybe we would have been too open and lost. We can't know so neither of us can claim to be right.

Some people get irritated when managers say they focus on performances over results but your post shows why they do that. Saying we won therefore it was the right thing to do doesn't necessarily follow. Though we deserved to win the game on the excellent first half performance alone it's worth considering whether we made it harder for ourselves than we needed and maybe learning from that. I'm sure Liam and his staff do exactly that after every game anyway.

People's views often tend to be results based - either we won therefore we played well or we lost therefore we played badly. The reality is often somewhere in the middle. I don't see any problem in pointing out things we did well despite losing or pointing out things we didn't do so well despite winning. It's certainly better than the binary happy clappers vs moaners nonsense.

Given the vast amounts of information available to clubs these days I doubt you can keep any secrets. Southampton will have analysed our games in detail and will be prepared for a variety of scenarios.