Jonny Vegas

England have an opportunity here to recognise something needs changed or they can do the most english thing possible and bury their heads in the sand and pretend everything is great.

I don't know that a manager who has won things is neccessary just someone who's identified as a top coach with a track record of improving players and achieving above their expectations. Eddie Howe would be the first name that I'd put forward.

For progression right now it's pointless looking or anslysing anything prior to Southgate's reign. When you break it down and look at the sides England have beaten at the major tournaments, there's a strong argument that Germany are the only side who they weren't strong favourites and expected to beat. Even then it wasn't a Germany side of old, it was a transitional team who were a shadow of their former selves and limped out of the WC groups a year later.

WC 2018 - Tunisia, Panama, Colombia (pens), Sweden.

Lost to Belgium twice and Croatia.

Euro 2020(1) - Croatia, Czech Rep, Germany, Ukraine, Denmark.

Lost to an Italy side who couldn't qualify for the World Cup a year later.

WC 2022 - Iran, Wales, Senegal.

Lost to France.

England have the most promising crop of youth talent on their hands arguably for the last 20 years and they need a manager who is going to appreciate, nurture and utilise that. Southgate was a mediocre manager at Middlebrough and achieved no more or less than was expected. He's done the exact same with England.

The stages he reached in tournaments is irrelevant, if the "luck of the draw" meant England playing the better sides earlier, they would have went out earlier. The reality of the matter is that he's repeatedly shown an inability to manouevre England past sides they weren't expected to have beaten.

Southgate is also in my opinion too reliant on people who have done him a good turn rather than people currently in form. 

He insisted on Stones & Maguire who struggle to get into their club sides and have less appearances this season between them than Fikayo Tomori has for an AC Milan side who won Serie A last season with him receiving rave reviews, sit 2nd in Serie A currently only behind a fantastic Napoli side and recently qualified from their Champions League group. He wasn't even in the 23.

For me starting Pickford who's not done well at Everton for about 3 years and has been fighting relegation for the last 2, ahead of Ramsdale who's been earning plaudits at a rejuvinated Arsenal side who are top of the league was also a silly decision.

If your national side is made up of players who are used to being in club sides who are winning matches every week it helps carry those winning mentalities into matches.

Bellingham, Foden & Saka are all elite players already. In another 2 to 4 years if they can stay fit and keep progressing imagine how good they could be.

Rice, Tomori, Reece James, Trent AA, Conor Gallacher, Harvey Elliott, Emile Smith Rowe are all under 24 and who knows who else might develop or emerge in the next few years.

Another key action would be to keep Mason Mount as far away from the starting squad as possible. He is fucking garbage.

LadBaby are the absolute worst. I remember years ago when they must have been first starting out my wife had shown me a video of the guy making a baby walker out of random stuff from around the house which was supposed to be funny and I thought it was utter shite.

It's always been abundantly clear that raising money for charity was secondary to advancing their careers and inflating their ego's/bank balance. 

12 hours ago, PunkStep said:

Massively underrated comedy, I don't think I've ever seen the Christmas special though. Does Don roundhouse kick Santa Claus in the dick?

Forgot about this! We watched a few new Christmas movies last year and this was enjoyable. 8-Bit Christmas and Last Train to Christmas were also pretty good. 

HNTLYL really underrated. I've seen Dan Clark doing a stand up/comedy songs show twice as well and he was brilliant.

The Christmas special is very much worth your time there's a few hilarious bits in it.

That's the one mate. I managed to find a torrent of it about 10 years ago but yeah never seen it on TV again.

EDIT

Just found it on YouTube if you wanted to see it again.

The Greatest Store In The World

Not sure whether the criteria here denotes it must be a Christmas themed episode of an otherwise ordinary TV show or whether stand alone TV specials created for Christmas qualify.

For Christmas themed episodes I'd reccomend How Not To Live Your Life's Christmas special. It's became part of my yearly viewing ever since I first saw it. 

For stand alone TV specials then one called The Greatest Store In The World. Fond memories of my brother and I randomly watching it Christmas Eve in the late 90s. The plot centers around a Mum and her two kids being made homeless around Christmas and moving into a department store. Reccomended. 

They had about 20 of them in my local Home Bargains for £9.99 each.

NWA died when Tim Storm left.

1 hour ago, RIDDUM_N_STYLE said:

No idea which way they are going to go for the Men’s WarGames match, part of me thinks Bloodline vs Sheamus and his boys, Owens and Logan but part thinks Judgement Day plus 2 vs The OC, a returning Edge and Mysterio

Bloodline absolutely NEED to be involved.

7 hours ago, David said:

Yeah, but we need to remember who we're talking about here. If it was an old-school proper tough guy then fair enough, but the discussion was centred around Punk supposedly being afraid of a former high school teacher called Steve who plays a cowboy on telly "shooting" on him.

The scenario you've described is EXACTLY what Punk was terrified of and actually a reason to believe that version of the story not to doubt it.

As you said yourself, if it was an old-school proper tough guy (who shot on him and made him look stupid & he could do nothing to stop them) then the perception is that's understandable as they're a credible hard bastard who took advantage of him off guard.

A large part of Punk's entire paranoia/insecurity/delusion centers around wanting people to believe he had an ounce of legigimate professional fighting ability and hard man credentials about him, despite knowing with every ounce of his being, that isn't the case.

If a former high school teacher called Steve who plays a cowboy on TV decided to shoot on UFC veteran and skilled martial artist CM Punk...he knows himself that he couldn't do a thing to have prevented himself from looking like an absolute wally.

I used to work with a guy who was similar. Always talking about MMA and his training and stories of all the street fights he had been in around the world.

He was absolutely desperate for everyone to think of him as a credible threat and it ate him alive to know deep down that every single of us were laughing at him.

One day he was mouthing off as usual about how much harder he was than everyone else and a 5ft 6, mid 40's, unassuming former driving instructor named Colin called him out. 

The guy backed down completely, stopped speaking to absolutely everyone at work, said he was sick of all of us and our attitudes, began looking for a new job immediately and left at the first opportunity as he knew Colin would have changed us from all thinking he was a deluded little weirdo to knowing he was.

CM Punk was the UFC's equivalent to those YouTube boxers.

Punk's two fights in MMA were a 134 second mauling and a loss (in what many have labelled the worst UFC fight in modern history) to a man who has only ever had 3 other pro fights, losing 2 and winning 1 by DQ which isn't really "winning" is it?

He trained at Roufusport because he paid them to.

There were large scale reports at the time that he had numerous "training fights" in the gym to try and help him prepare and lost every single one.

He fought in the UFC because it made them money and Dana White thought it was amusing to watch how shit he was.

If he didn't have the name value and intrigue he had at the time he would have been fighting infront of 80 people in a bar somewhere. Dana White amongst others said as much, repeatedly.

The idea that because he got punched in the face by actual skilled fighters during sparring makes him anything more than a deluded little weirdo who's highly unlikely to be any tougher than or more likely to win a fight against 90% of the locker room is absolutely laughable.

Daze Before Christmas on the Megadrive.

Years ago I had a Dreamcast and I don't remember exactly how it worked but I had a disc with a Megadrive emulator and a load of games on it that could be played.

I ended up with the flu and was stuck indoors close to Christmas and stuck that on mainly as I'd never heard of it before.

I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Unfortunately I saw the fall out of it directly effecting someone negatively.

I was at work with a gay friend and work colleague as the "news" broke.

They were genuinely excited about the potential that two huge names from the last 15 to 20 years of the game having apparently came out publicly could hugely positively influence not only the community but the game as a whole.

There was a feeling that this was the biggest step ever towards hopefully a gigantic step out of the dark ages.

A few hours later a horrid mix of disappointment and (entirely unneccessary) embaressment had replaced their optimism and excitement.

It's the sort of impact I probably wouldn't have ever considered the potential extent of if I hadn't seen it first hand.

Pair of cunts.

It seems to be that the Spanish media has been linking him with a slew of women since his seperation from his wife and this afternoon he has tweeted along the lines of "I hope you will respect me - I'm gay".

Puyol replied along the lines of "Now we can tell our story Iker ❤😘" which numerous mainstream news sites jumped on and reported without any hesitation that Casillas was coming out as a gay man and many speculated that Puyol's reply suggested they may have been a couple.

Casillas has since came out claiming that he was hacked however it appears what has happened is that he's thought it was funny/appropriate to say he is gay when he isn't incinuating maybe the Spanish media would then stop linking him to women.

Puyol has tried to make an equally shit and poorly thought out joke incinuating that they were a couple and could now be public.

An all round shit show really.

The Grand Prix moving from Dublin to Leicester has been utter shite.

A weeks worth of "*insert team name here* get battered everywhere they go" chants is enough to have me dreading the wankers who will be in the crowd at the worlds already.

Glad to see Aspinall make the final though  especially by beating Price. Very much enjoyed his little angry face as he walked off stage in a huff.

Apologies for my technophobia not allowing me to post the video into this thread but everyone needs to see Selby's lovely two cushion double en route to his 147 today.

I live on the same street as Aston Villa and Scotland footballer John McGinn's parents and see him up visiting sporadically.

I saw a tweet from the New York Times which was highlighting/questioning why the british tax payer was footing the bill for everything to do with the funeral particularly in the midst of soaring energy prices and inflation.

The top reply was a verified account where the user had then compared her death and its impact on the nation to 9/11 and suggested american's somehow owed british people a similar level of sorrow and grief.

I don't think I've ever seen something which better exemplifies my perceived lunacy of royalists.

2 hours ago, Vamp said:

To be honest, it would have been better all round if they'd buried her secretly (granted the royal family probably isn't capable of that anymore) and kept an empty casket on display. It's not like the casket is open. Nobody would know. Means the fake casket could be on display longer. Reduce some of the barmy queues. Anybody who questions how they keep the body from decomposing will be shouted down anyway. Plus the family actually get to have the funeral in private. 

 

I think that is exactly what's happened. I'm not having for one second that they've really paraded her corpse around for the poor people to have a gander.

They needed to create a spectacle of national desire and urgency to see her body and have people "pay their respects" to help continue to make any attempts at justifying why we're all continuing to pay towards these cretins.

Rangers fans getting walloped 3 nil at home, having now lost 3 consecutive games, conceding 11 and scoring 0 but their fans are all over social media celebrating their ability to hold up different coloured pieces of paper is the most Rangers thing ever.

Didn't love the queen enough for the original Rangers to pay their tax bill did they.

Sorry, I got carried away and made an arse of it in my shock at being told that me thinking people mourning the queen's death was weird and being a far right racist were the same thing.

I didn't watch it but I'm not questioning they showed that and it lasted for hours. I am of the opinion that its not beyond the realms of possibility that outwith the time period documented where they couldn't possibly have shown the entire UK that they weren't following the rules, that perhaps they didn't.

Or they showed a video of the parts the public were shown? 

I remember a PR photo being released of her being sat alone at the funeral. As neither of us were there I suppose neither of us can accurately know how many people were actually present but I'd certainly consider myself naive if I believed they were sticking to the rules stringently enough limit who was in attendance to the same extent as us peasants.

Let alone that if they were it means they sacrificed a spot for a family member to attend so the photographer could be there.

I've also seen a photo of Hulk Hogan being the first person to ever bodyslam Andre The Giant infront of 200,000 screaming Hulkamaniacs brother.

Each to their own but I think that you calling my confusion as to why people are showing or feigning affection for a total stranger who for 99% of the population has had zero actual impact or influence on their lives other than them being someone they've been told was important their entire lives, the same as far right racism is utterly baffling.

I'm not moaning at anyone for mourning, I have repeatedly said if people feel the need to mourn then do so but it doesn't change me thinking its weird or being against 60 million people having it rammed down their throats, millions of who will have family members whose lives were directly negatively impacted by the actions of hers and her ancestors.

I think people who don't like dogs, or have zero interest in football, or collect insects in little glass frames are weird but not as weird as people who love the royals.

12 hours ago, Butch2000 said:

I sincerely doubt it’ll be a release. They’ll more than likely have to buy his contract out.

 

If Tony K was a real man he’d send for Big Kev. He fucking destroyed Punk years ago and he would again.

This is the idea I like best.

Offer a mutual termination with a nominal golden handshake. If he refuses then job him out in 10 seconds to people over 60 until he walks away.