a run out of suljovic - wright/chisnall - van gerwen - anderson/wade/taylor is unbelievably tough

yeah, I've also bet Chizzy and tbh MVG will take all the beating, but Lewis is waaaay overpriced (or at least he was prior to this game)

Ya most of my action today was vs Max. Got to work and saw he was playing. Scooped up as much as I could with 2-3 m till game time. Knew he'd get wrecked today since his models would do poorly with all the rotation and such. He was drawing dead vs me going into the late set of games and that's with lukaku and mbokani hitting near their absolute ceilings.

all of the knob-gobblers can now be fully onboard and vindicated (in their own mind) for buying into jose's "how did i manage to do so incredibly well with this team last year" line

fraudinho believers can just say he tanked the team off to a level that takes years to rebuild. point to sales of schurrle, de bruyne, mata and purchase of cuadrado and failed filipe luis move. speculate on broken team spirit and alienation. job done.

everyone is a winner

I'm guessing that it's the foundations of the team. Can't be all the players even if it seems all the players are underperforming. Don't expect Terry, Ivanovic to be around next year, Mikel will be but we need better quality in midfield to actually control games not try and pick holes in games which we are doing unsuccessfully. No point in replacing the forward line if its the system that can't maximise potential of best players. I feel sorry for Hazard. I would leave if I was him or there wasn't a big improvement in team play by end of season.

Cool graphic. One thing that drove me nuts today was Kane dropping into the centre circle to pick the ball up when we were 11v10.

The system did work really well v 4-4-2 though. Always meant we had one spare CB and a spare midfielder

max is a joke at soccer. everyone needs to bet the house against him next time they get a chance.

who is it that hated fantasy talk again? i'm enjoying the thought of them breaking their monitor right now reading all of this.

I mean obviously the team are just too distraught after his tenure /s

People give way too much weight to managers, in the good and bad times. It's pretty understandable, when something is "wrong" it can be a lot of different things working together at the same time, and probably usually is. But being the simple apes we still are we generally can't comprehend all these various factors and have to find a single thing or entity that can be championed or blamed.
This is true in all walks of life, and in some way I think a scapegoat is necessary so that social structures don't implode, but I digress.

i'm often afraid of change, particularly when we have been so good this season, but today was a good illustration of how poch isn't just a button masher or a one trick pony. this was a system setup for watford specifically and there was little to no confusion about responsibilities and positioning in it. sure the performance wasn't great, but we have to accept that watford is a difficult opponent and every away game in the PL is a very lose-able game.

DS - yeah i would probably just start small and put a couple hundred up against him and track it for a bit and start upping over time. i would never put more than like 10-15% of my daily action against 1 player tho. well not never, but not against any reasonable reg.

Problem with max is he plays a very boom bust strategy. If you over leverage your roll vs him he can crush you if he runs good for a few slates. He got like 7 k off me one cl slate when I took more action than normal and I think I lost 12k total for my worst ever day.

I think 4 new players into the side - who they are? Not my job. Mainly defence / midfield.

Lewis beastmode

Can you play dfs in the UK?

eh, the focus will probably be on him being in charge when those problems were created.

Lukaku and De Bruyne scoring every week doesnt help him much either.

only manager who ever truly lost the dressing room was Clough, when he mistook it for the broom cupboard after a particularly hard night on the Famous Grouse

this Peter Wright guy is a good example of what my dad likes to call a "knobhead"

He didn't like Spycatcher?

scotland vs belgium

crowd: ENGERLAND, ENGERLAND, ENGERLAND

just taking a glance through upcoming fixtures, and noticed again how incredibly easy leicester's schedule has been. like you could hardly have an easier one through 18 games. the one team they haven't played is city and the only halfway decent team they have played away is plop. arse/city/spurs/chelsea/palace/watford/united all away in the second half. they are ****ed.

ours appears to be bang on average difficulty.

I am totally apathetic about Villa getting relegated. I accepted it even before Garde came in as manager, but holy christ the guy is far too defensive. He plays for draws as much as McLeish, and whilst it may be a long shot the team obviously need wins.

To be honest, Villa deserve to be relegated and have done for a number of years. Delighted it will screw up Lerner's finance once the big TV money arrives. Clueless prat has been pushing his luck since O'Neill walked out.

He was asking for £200m for the sale of the club. I am hoping someone is waiting until we are relegated before pursuing a takeover at a much reduced rate. That is the only bit of hope I have at the moment.

Top managers' value-over-replacement is largely down to their superior judgment in squad construction/management.

SAF rebuilt his squads several times, he had a good eye for when to get rid of a player regardless of their stature, like when he tried to pave the way for Moyes to dump Rooney. The counter-example is Moyes not only prostrating himself before Rooney but also failing to adequately shake up the squad, the core of that team had no loyalty to Moyes nor motivation to play for him.

Wenger seems to pay great attention to individual motivation/team chemistry, it's part of why he buys young and arguably has a thin squad: players hungry for success like Ramsey don't lose their spot to a been there, done that, now I'm just here to collect a paycheck Fabregas.

Mourinho is at fault for failing to perceive and fix the problems in his squad.

More runbad for fan :

they removed Arnautovic's 1st assist which also meant that he got one less bonus point and Ake had -1 for having 2 goals conceded despite not being on the pitch when they conceded the 2nd (i'm guessing thats fantasy rules)

Yeah, defences score as a unit so even if a player goes off, he gets the goals conceded of the overall defence.

lol

This is a pretty good quiz, difficult but still quite fun:

http://www.squawka.com/news/the-impo...of-2015/553609