METAL ON METAL

Only the more expensive ‘Deluxe’ early access version is out now. General release isn’t until Friday.

And as you said, the press only got their copies yesterday. The embargo is lifted today, so more reviews will follow. Early reviews I’ve seen from the media and fans have been relatively positive, not a perfect game but a big improvement on the previous instalment in both visuals and game play.

11 hours ago, air_raid said:

@METAL ON METALDon’t deny it.

Sadly not, though a Milton Núñez 3:16 shirt would’ve been fitting for the occasion.

3 hours ago, David said:

Well, it does matter what happened with Parkinson. He may have believed the choice he made was right, but was it really? What insight does the results of his actions show? Did he suspend McGeady for eating a McDonalds and then see the squad pull closer together and go on to achieve success? 

Or did he get sacked just over a year into a two and a half year contract?  While the Big Mac-scoffing McGeady is still at the club? 

No, the only way any player could call into question Moyes actions would be if he personally decided to drop a player who had not been disciplined by those who run the club. Any player in future who does something serious enough to be suspended will have their punishment handed down by the powers-that-be. 

That's the difference here. It's actually the opposite of what you're claiming. If Moyes had taken it upon himself to drop Zouma then he'd have been opening himself up to potential problems down the line. Where would the line be that the manager makes the personal decision to drop a player?

By leaving disciplinary matters to the club hierarchy he's making sure that he can't be accused of favouritism, thus maintaining dressing room harmony and the status quo when it comes to the relationship between the playing squad and the management team. 

In fact, Moyes approach is probably something that Parkinson could have considered. He may have gotten a little longer out of that contract he had with Sunderland.

Zouma will be dealt with by the club. He'll likely face a sizeable fine and possibly a suspension. Moyes may have created a bit of a stir by playing him as far as some fans and the media are concerned, but I guarantee you that his squad of players opinion of him today will have risen. Zouma will know he owes Moyes a great deal of gratitude for not throwing him under the bus. He's shown that he'll continue to back his players to the hilt.

That kind of currency will serve Moyes a lot better than the respect of some moaning journos and opposing fans. 

And bear in mind here that I 100% believe Zouma should be suspended for a few games, fined, and made to donate to animal charities or something. I just believe it's something that should be mandated by the people who run the club, and not left on the shoulders of the football manager.

Parkinson was sacked because he played dreadful football and was tactically inept, so nothing to do with this situation that you’re constantly trying to mate together. Despite McGeady being one of our best players at the time, the large majority of fans at the time weren’t in uproar about him being disciplined or when he got loaned out as it showed consequences for his actions - he’s a notorious bad egg in the squad and that culture is still alive at the club, hence our self-destructive tendencies alive and well.

It’s a failure of Gold & Sullivan too for not being proactive with it, but their cuntishness doesn’t absolve Moyes of any responsibility or power in the matter. Literally all they had to do was not select him for that game citing a pending bullshit investigation and they could’ve brought him back by the next game with so much less bad publicity. Trust me, Sunderland fans know all about mishandled cases, we fucking played Adam Johnson while he was awaiting his court date and we rightfully still get shit about it to this day.

You’re talking absolute rubbish and zero understanding of HR by saying they could suspend him in the future instead. Tell me David, if you did what he did or anything to put your employer in a bad light, would your employer let you keep coming to work for a week before then investigating it? No, they would suspend you immediately pending an investigation as to not compromise proceedings.

Moyes has gained more respect from players for allowing abhorrent animal abuse to go unpunished? Christ, Dave, you’re not even fucking trying to hid your wind up anymore.

4 minutes ago, David said:

And how did that work out for Parkinson? The "authoritative" approach? 

It's probably not the best thing for squad harmony for a football manager to make those kinds of decisions unilaterally. Like it or not, the managers job is to keep the squad onside and all pulling in the same direction. That's what he's paid to do. He's not paid to be the moral police when it comes to incidents like the one Zouma was involved in.

What should have happened is the owners decide the player has to be suspended. That way Moyes can carry out their instructions without being seen as the bad guy.

As an aside, let's not pretend that Moyes record up in Sunderland is any real reflection of his abilities as a manager. He's taken West Ham into the top four of the premiership while Sunderland, a complete basketcase of a club in recent years, were losing 2-1 away to fucking Cheltenham. 

It doesn’t matter what happened with Parkinson, he still made the choice he thought was right and showed that he would discipline anyone if they did anything wrong, even star players. Moyes hasn’t done that, so what happens now when another West Ham player in the future gets suspended or fined? They will query why the same thing didn’t happen to Zouma and you’ve got potential dressing room mutiny on your hands over something that could’ve been avoided first hand.

Zouma was the one who has caused all this but Moyes has now indicted himself by his own choices and words.

For what it’s worth, we’re hardly the only club Moyes failed at.

18 minutes ago, David said:

Would that kind of action usually be determined by the football manager though? I always assumed such actions as suspending a player would come from higher up the foodchain, and the manager would have to react accordingly?

Depends on the club and how authoritative the manager is. A couple of years ago Phil Parkinson banished Aiden McGeady (one of our best players at that time) to train with the U18’s for 6 months for getting spotted eating a McDonalds with Chris Maguire.

Doesn’t surprise me that Moyes is sackless, never had an ounce of leadership when he was up here.

We've re-signed Jermain Defoe and the exclusive was nabbed by a local 60 year old matchday male stripper, Wee Phillie, who trespassed onto our training ground with incredible Partridge-esq footage and is now the no.2 Twitter trend in the UK. I fucking love my club sometimes.

Wee Phillie with more journalistic prowess than Sky Sports' Keith Downie.

We’ve got Steve Cram and Faye from Steps, such is our worldwide appeal.

I agree. I saw the directors cut last night and, although still good, the original is infinitely better to me.

Far too much messed around with the intent of ‘fleshing the characters’ but ultimately made the film less coherent and less fun. Bar maybe Duke’s big speech scene and a little more Drago, I don’t think the new footage added much and for the most part was rightfully cut the first time around. Some very strange editing choices that took me out of the moment somewhat, made certain big moments feel very abrupt without letting you process it.

It was my missus’ first time seeing Rocky IV (she’d loved the first three after I’d introduced her to the Rocky films in recent weeks) and she refused to believe there was ever a robot in the film until I showed her on YouTube.

On 11/22/2021 at 5:34 PM, PunkStep said:

Michael Keane is the only one I can really think of. LVG threw quite a few of them into the first team, but they mostly seemed to end up at Sunderland and by default went to shit. 

edit: specifically, Paddy McNair, Donald Love, Tyler Blackett,Cameron Borthwick-Jackson

Whereas, these days it’s Man Utd signing youngsters from Sunderland - Logan Pye and Joe Hugill. The latter is going to be a cracking player.

To be fair to him, Paddy McNair was looking to be a really good player but rupturing his cruciate (and being out 12-18 months including concurrent injuries relating to it) at such an important stage of his career development just really fucked him. He came back to be a solid player and the only bright spark of the second half of our disastrous Championship season (Netflix S1).

Donald Love was just a perennial local TV competition winner who was given a free kit.

Werewolves Within

The ever lovable Sam Richardson is given the lead role in a film, finally. He stars as a newly arrived Forest Ranger of a small rural town hit by a snowstorm. Strange occurrences lead to the locals realising there are werewolves err…within the town, causing havoc and killing locals. Horror/Comedy (primarily the latter).

Obviously Richardson is his usual amazing and endearing self, but I absolutely fell in love with Milana Vayntrub (who plays Cecily) in this. There’s one scene where she dances, good god! Her character is so cute and likeable, basically female Sam Richardson.

Not going to be remembered come award season but I had fun with this, some fun dialogue and a compact little cast (including Michaela Watkins and, more importantly, Danny from 30 Rock). It’s a daft and easy way to spend 90 minutes.

I saw someone say it was Knives Out with Werewolves - don’t get me wrong, it’s nowhere near as good as Knives Out or even in the same league…but yeah, I get the comparison.

Just give Sam Richardson every leading man role, please. 

Doyle is going to be a cracking player, surprised me how big he looks in person - when he fills out he’s going to be incredibly imposing. Fantastic confidence to bring the ball through the middle several times. Had Wyke in his back pocket with ease for the whole game.

So happy to see Gooch have his MotM performance. Faultless. Before kick off, I  had said to my brother that we’d need him to step up as not to over rely on McGeady this season.

31,000+ fans today, staggering support for our 4th season in League One. All in all, I’m just so happy to finally get back to a football game after 500+ days. Anticipating my arteries clogging any second now via ungodly amounts of processed cheese on my pre match burger van double cheeseburger.

4 hours ago, tiger_rick said:

It's a shame it's crossing the line because it's a great act. It has to be somewhat edgy, he's a fucking rapper for crying out loud, but they're right to decide where their line is and ensure they don't get dragged across the coals for it.

I don’t think they should be allowed to get credit for deciding “where their line is”, considering this was taped the same night as their Fight for the Fallen show - a show literally in aid of sexual assault/domestic abuse survivors.

Someone signed off on him doing that, sat on the footage for a week, edited and produced the show - all whilst never removing it until after broadcast when they didn’t get the ‘edgy’ reaction they hoped for. It’s reactionary bollocks. It’s an example of no real authority behind the scenes giving push back for it to even have gotten this far and it’s not even the first time this has occurred with him.

10 hours ago, tiger_rick said:

The fake sound they added to "enhance" Drew's entrance still had Michael Cole's commentary in it. This fucking company. Not only desperate control freaks but incompetent ones.

 

Someone on Reddit has figured out that the Cole audio was actually from a Reigns/Cena Summerslam ad that was played during the previous ad break on Raw. Seems it was legit just a production fuck up.

On 7/25/2021 at 12:39 PM, Cod Eye said:

I've heard about Parkinson being a coward and a pushover before.Also heard a very similar story that Davies tells on the podcast about him fucking about and changing tactics up on a whim because he didn't want to tell a player he wasn't playing, and it went on to cause a big rift between two players who were best friends before.

Parkinson is the reason we’re still in League One. The bloke is clueless, barely has a plan A and hates to be challenged by anyone. His brand of football is an absolute slog to watch.

He sent our best player, Aiden McGeady, off to Charlton on loan to make his own life easier rather than actually man-manage the situation like a good manager would. Then upon McGeady’s return, he had him training with the U-18’s for half the season with no game time.

As soon as that footballing dinosaur was sacked, Lee Johnson brought McGeady back into the team and he ended up being the most lethal player in the league for that remaining latter half of the season.

On 3/7/2021 at 9:44 PM, IANdrewDiceClay said:

Did Ally McCoist shag Sue Barker or am I thinking of someone else?

I asked him that very question around 2004/5 when I saw him coming out of the Stadium of Light, after he’d been a pundit at one of our games. 

I was met with a very swift “fuck off, lad”.

I went to school with Gary Bennett’s illegitimate love child.

Bennett never even acknowledged him, to my knowledge.
 

He’s an absolute bellend is Gary. He also provides truly turgid commentary of our matches on BBC Newcastle now.

1 hour ago, Kfogg1991 said:

I am going to reluctantly go for Cena to win the men's rumble tonight. I just saw the poster on twitter and he is on it so I'm thinking he might be who they go for. I fucking hope not but this is WWE they aren't exactly breaking records for out of the box decisions with the current product.

Cena won’t be in it. He’s currently filming the Peacemaker TV series in Vancouver.

Anyone entering the US from Canada currently has to quarantine for 7 days.

3 hours ago, Kaz Hayashi said:

Me: *hangs up phone 

Daily Mail: *hacks into phone

Agree with neil, just absolute trash.

Two and a half hours of tediously bland scripting, truly awful CGI, villians no one couldn’t give a fuck about and making your supposed ‘badass’ female lead nothing more than a love-struck damsel in distress.

Supposedly, you can instantly just learn to fly a fighter jet. Said jet is definitely quiet enough to have whisper-like conversations and can also seemingly coast at 30mph through some pretty fireworks because visualism...

Why go out of your way to have a film set in the 80’s and use pretty much no music throughout the film?

First time in a long time I’ve actually been angry after watching a film. The amount of time they’ve had to work on this due to multiple delays and this shit is the best they can put out?

Woke up at 4am, opened Twitter and saw the hashtag trending, my heart sank reading it. I never saw any of his indy work but when he debuted in NXT, I was hooked - his discus clothesline will never be topped. An absolutely huge loss to the business. He was a tremendous wrestler, but more importantly he seemed like a great humble person, a devoted father and husband. 41 just so incredibly young. His poor family.

The tributes from his friends and fellow wrestlers got me teary-eyed more than once. Reading Bray Wyatt's post is just utterly heart-breaking.

Bourne - 3, Legacy, 2, 1, 4

Not to defend Triple H or WWE but to be fair to them, he literally just addressed it two days ago in more detail and likely just wanted to keep discussion on point about Takeover given that is what the conference call was regarding.

His response two days ago:

Quote

HHH

“You know, in this day today, accusations are made and you take them all very seriously. You look into them the best you can, and you find out what is there and what isn’t. In this situation, [Clark] was also involved in a car accident. That’s what took him off TV. In the moment, all this other stuff happens and you look into it and you find that there is a situation that people bring to everyone’s attention, you look into it and find that it is what it is and there’s nothing there.

“Everything that we have done, we are comfortable with him continuing to do what he does and everything else. But he had a car accident. It stemmed down to people thought we removed him from TV for different reasons. We didn’t. He was in a car accident.

“Once he was medically cleared to be able to return to the ring from his car accident, we continued forward the way we did. We looked into what was there and we didn’t find anything.”

 

@Cod Eye Oh, I totally agree the leagues need a salary cap of sorts, but as you say the % of turnover idea is the smartest and most logical solution - which isn’t a surprise that the EFL didn’t think of it. 

Implementing it under 5 weeks before the season starts is also indicative of the idiots in charge.

God, I miss standard of refereeing being my most loathed feature of being in League One.

So the useless EFL (who brought you such gems as telling teams ahead of time what their finishing position would be if they chose to end the season and postponing the vote on said decision until literally days before their return to play deadline so a restart would be impossible) have passed a new ‘salary cap’ for League One and League Two.

This salary cap means that the likes of ourselves, Ipswich and Portsmouth have to have the exact same wage bill as the likes of Crewe and Accrington - despite the former clubs having a much larger income and a better wages/turnover ratio than the latter clubs and crowds of largely 20K+ for home games (Accrington get the likes of 2K per home game).

But that’s not all, teams coming into the league from Championship relegation aren’t required to comply. So all that is ever going to happen is the recently relegated teams will go straight back up again and any team that does manage to go up will come crashing back down because they haven’t got the wage budget to compete to stay in the division.

The PFA are considering legal action as they deem it ‘unlawful and unjust’.

33 minutes ago, Fog Dude said:

Poor choice of example. You already played league games at the Priestfield in 2003-4 and 2004-5.

Some great googling there, hoss.

Sorry to upset you that personal circumstances meant I never went to two particular away games 15/16 years ago.

I saw us get beat 2-0 away to Tranmere in 1996 when my brother was the child mascot, does that make it up to you? Hopefully I get points for Peter Reid trying to chat up my mam in the reception area pre-game.