Hedgehog

No fucking way he actually used the word ‘asterisk’

Important to lead with the headline that Arsenal are the ‘villains of the title race’ and would be ‘unpopular champions’ as they go up against the team charged with 115+ counts of cheating to gain an unfair competitive advantage over the other premier league teams.

Ironically they’ve done as much damage to City this season as anyone

They know what they’re doing. Everything is geared towards influencing

Just inject it into my veins. Directly in.

Enormous

Long way to go.

Calafiori is excellent CB depth tbh

He will bring wolves back up and probably do OK

FPL managers - I need your help.

I’m working with researchers on a project into the psychology of FPL managers.

We’re first developing a measure of FPL motivations and need responses.

⏰ 5-10 mins
✅ No writing required

Please complete & QT/share!

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Really? If it’s ‘very simple’ a 300 word Bluesky post should be more than enough

Attacker stands in front of the keeper in the 6 yard box and doesn’t move. Blocking, or existing?

Defender or keeper comes over and muscles him out the way. Penalty?

How do you reconcile teams ‘blocking’ with a footballer’s right to exist on a football pitch?

Call it a ‘non open-play goal’ if you like

You’d know all about deliberately cheating being a Chelsea fan

I would say top of the open play GD and xGD, and top of the overall GD and xGD is title-winning fine

Probably 😂 but history has shown us that teams will do whatever they can within the rules to get an edge. Look at City’s rotational tactical fouling they’ve got away with for years for example.

Yep - people don’t realise what they’re asking for

You can’t stop what we’re doing unless you completely nerf set pieces by e.g having a completely different physical threshold for attacking vs defending

Yep, they should do that. And then you can’t defend set pieces in the same way - what do you think happens next?

This feels like something which sounds good in theory but would be a horrendous shit show in practice

I think City’s decade-old “innovation” with tactical fouling has been far more ruinous to the enjoyment of watching football than us being good at set pieces.

I don’t recall the rules book-changing outcry we have gotten over something actually against the rules/spirit of the game.

It’s weird.

You are going to get games that suck ass regardless unfortunately - they just turn into 0-0 games instead.

Counterpoint - Villa are actually shite and have been riding the wave all season to this point

Two isn’t it!

He was ‘walking by the studio’ and they pulled him in 🙄

Yeah I guess the point (as a response to your original point) is that the offensive fouling is a response to defensive fouling - if you remove both you still get a hell of a lot of set piece goals, maybe even more.

As I said though if you can’t defend on the edge physically it’s another advantage to the attacking team so you just see more set piece goals as a result.

The defending team benefits disproportionately from the reluctance to call fouls, imo

This works both ways though - if you start calling the offensive fouls you also call the defensive ones and we end up with a lot of penalties, or people stop defending physically and we have a bunch more set piece goals.

Pick your poison

Remarkable that Chelsea’s recruitment team spent so much money on the collectively the most braindead group of players known to man.

West Ham were more than competitive yesterday despite the scoreline

I think they have it in them to put something together. Forest I’m not so sure.