As we start looking ahead to Euro 2024, one reader would like England to remove Harry Kane after the organising stages. Also, emails about Arsenal, Man City and predictions.
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Generally speaking, a team only wants a world-class player who plays well in England. Teams with more than one of those players have almost a bye to the next round when they face England.
What’s infuriating is that this summer we’re going to have four world-class offensive players, but our offensive game plan will be based on Harry Kane, the “silver medalist. “
Hopalong Harry will go through the final third with his move as predictable as a win at Man City as England are sent home again. Mortally opposed to inferior players, he is absolutely neutralized by world-class players at the level. His atrocious record in the CL, WC and EC semi-finals show that he stands up to a glass ceiling that simply doesn’t have the intelligence, movement, creativity or cunning to break.
His failed consequences in an EC semi-final and a World Cup quarter-final mean that he is also missing the balls. He hasn’t managed to score in open play (sorry, hitting a missed pen doesn’t count) in the biggest games of his career. career and has “led” his groups to failure.
It’s almost a conundrum to have our four most sensible strikers in the same team, but I’m pretty sure Pep and Carlo would have no problem finding a solution. For starters, if Saka is playing, he wants to play on the right as the least adaptable of the four. We’ve noticed this season that Foden wants to play in the middle because no English player is better in tight spaces than PF. But we also want Cole Palmer’s laser-guided pass box and what about Bellingham?
Although Bellingham’s position is tenth, he excelled on the left when he played there through Madrid and would win more damaging free-kicks at the top of the field and be harder to suppress there. That would mean Foden plays like a false nine, with his clever and wacky xG. , as he did with City, and Cole Palmer is number 10. Kane can score goals against the minnows as we advance to the quarter-finals, but the Fab 4s of Bellingham, Palmer, Foden and Saka have to be our magic. A formula that is the opposite of the most sensible teams. But of course, this is England, we’ll be up against a “world-class” pub footballer in the number nine spot and we’ll be knocked out by the first decent team we face.
READ: A step-by-step adviser to prove Harry Kane didn’t score any express goals for England
Managed.
2nd, 3rd, 4th: United, City, Liverpool: United are in a similar situation to Arsenal and now have a goalscorer, but he may not be the finished article, in position to compete for a name. City have missed out on some in-form winners and so far look weaker than last season, and their motivation may also potentially be diminished. Liverpool are recovering, but still looking doubtful at the back, but it’s more than enough to put them in the most sensible fourth place. What City lost to Mahrez, they won in one way or another against Gvardiol. LFC stepped up and had a questionable defensive line. United signed a new striker, but lost out in other areas to the maximum.
5th, 6th, 7th, 8th: Chelsea, Newcastle, Spurs, Villa. No amount of European football deserves to bode well for Chelsea, but Poch has a huge task to do to turn those players into a team. Soccer Champions League, the groups know how they play, combined with some moderate improvements, makes for a difficult season. Spurs deserve to improve, but this assumption is based on Harry staying. Villa deserves, in theory, to be able to do more than last year, but like Newcastle, the groups will know what to expect this year. In reality, all of those groups are interchangeable/reversible. The last sentence was my saving grace with this selection, Villa was traded for United, the only wrong decision.
18, 19, 20: After today’s news and this summer’s transfers, I don’t see Wolves surviving. Could O’Niel do it again?Sheffield United don’t look strong and have recruited poorly. It looks like Luton is just there for the ride. Lightning has struck twice and Gary is the new Big Sam. Luton fought harder than expected, but they fell. I had too much hope for Burnley.
Relegation survivors: Forest, Bournemouth, Everton. No expected Bournemouth to be as good, but the rest is there.
Europe’s midfield/push: Brighton, West Ham, Fulham, Brentford, Palace, Burnley. This, too, happened with moderate accuracy. Glasner has replaced Palace’s luck and looks like he’s doing well now. As it turns out, I reversed the put options of Burnley and Wolves, as well as Brentford and Bournemouth.
Best signing: MacAllister. All he has to do is reflect last year’s form and put Liverpool back in the top 4 to make it a resounding success. It’s a smart deal if that’s the case. Cole Palmer is for me without a doubt the most productive signing. The recruit who has become the second-most productive scorer and the second-most productive passer is beyond phenomenal. That said, at the time of writing, it still hadn’t moved (not that I would have chosen it anyway). MacAllister is a savvy spirit and probably LFC’s signature of the season.
Worst signing: Havertz. Possibly not the CM they need, possibly not the backup striker they need, possibly not the CAM they need. Maybe it’s Veron’s 2023 edition at Chelsea. This seemed accurate as winter approached, but, in all honesty, it has done very well. I think Tonali was the worst in terms of spending and being banned for a year. Mason Mount was also expensive, for minimal performance, but more often than not he would injure himself and complain slightly.
Top scorer: Haaland. Nostradamus over here.
PFA Player of the Year: Odegaard. Se would give it to him and the center of this Arsenal team. Foden and Rodri are very serious contenders. I don’t think City would have done it without either of them.
First (second?) coach fired: Paul Heckingbottom. Nostradamus moves again.
Champions League winners: Bayern with Kane, Real with Mbappé or City. Maybe it’s a Madrid win without Mbappe.
READ: F365 pre-season predictions reviewed: How we were with Man Utd. . .
Proud beyond the words of my team (Arsenal). They were back in the naming race and it had been a long time since I’d been talking and enjoying the ups and downs that come with it.
FFP policy and potential infringements aside, congratulations to Guardiola and this ManC team. Although I wonder how Guardiola would fare in a team with fewer financial resources, everything tells me that if, despite everything, he decides to grow tulips on his 10-acre estate, he will even be considered the most productive manager of all time.
Congratulations to Emery! What he did at Villa is impressive. I imagine he was mistreated when he was sacked during his brief spell at Arsenal. Something that disappointed me a lot because for me Arsenal is not a club to shoot anything and at the time that was actually what I idea.
Kudos to Chel$ea for thinking that making an ever-increasing investment in his equipment would magically solve his problems. Hoping that next season they still haven’t learned anything.
Congratulations to Klopp on his departure on his own terms and appreciated by the most impartial fans.
Congratulations to the new coach. I hope it works for you, but I think he will crash and burn harder than Erik ten Hag at ManU.
Kudos to ManU for thinking this isn’t their place instead of realizing that this is where you belong because this is where you are. It takes time to build it, especially after an iconic manager like Ferguson.
Congratulations to Everton for staying awake.
And in the end, Stewie’s request. I’m pretty sure Football365 likes the reaction he gets. I wouldn’t be surprised if he did it on the goal just for a laugh or if someone at Football365 was “Stewie”. Here’s my request, either you give him his own column so he can skip this, or put his call on a letter call instead of the back so he knows it’s more silly that he doesn’t upload anything and I can skip that.
At the end of the day, Guardiola is the greatest PL coach ever seen, and he leads the biggest PL team ever.
The only explanation why Citeh is not in a CL final is because Ancelotti invoked the spirit of Pulis, in a performance reminiscent of Hodgson’s Palace’s 2-1 win at the Etihad in the PL (except that Palace scored in open play and controlled more shots than Madrid). Citeh are the anti-traffic jams, they seem in each and every one of the great games. I don’t think I’ve noticed that the Citeh “4-peat” team takes a beating in a big game, or doesn’t dominate one, even when they lose. They are competitive in each and every game and it takes an exceptional mindset to achieve that, given that their team is not huge. Even PL’s other top coach, Ferguson, staged matches in which ManYoo was beaten up and sent off in batches. .
The other strangely overlooked issue that naysayers mention is that despite all the tedious communication of oil money, Pep went to the Citeh, acquired an early and incoherent ability in local English in Phil Foden (remember the media reports that claimed he would never realise that potential?) – and Pep took care of him and turned him into a POTY PFA. How much did Foden get paid again? Exactly. Pep is flexible in his management, he doesn’t recruit players with the highest PR or FC24 ratings, but he does recruit quality players who have a compatible system.
Haaland would possibly be an “obvious” signing, but Akanji is not, Alvarez is cheap, Ortega is probably the most productive backup goalkeeper in the Premier League, Nathan Aké for £40m is a bargain, Bernardo Silva for £42m is one of the most signings sensatos. de the last decade, etc.
The question is, when, for example, did Arsenal last extend a high-quality local player?It was Ashley Cole, who then temporarily sold to a rival, where she won it all ?.
Once again, congratulations to Pep, a sensational coach.
I don’t need to kick Arsenal enthusiasts while they’re down (for a change) because here in London the sun is shining and there are more fun hobbies today. I repeat that Arteta and Arsenal have done very well this season. Far fewer complaints of “bottled jobs” this season, unlike last season (a real bottled job!).
The only caveat I’ll upload is that there have been plenty of platitudes and grandiose speeches from Arsenal enthusiasts throughout the year about their “best team in a decade”. That might well be true on the field, but at the end of the day. The reason why enthusiastic rivals take it regularly is because it’s a song for a “wonderful team” to have lost to Bayern’s worst team in the last decade, and while it’s no shame to lose narrowly to Citeh, the facts. They remain the same: 20 years of sterile desire, no league titles. Meanwhile, Leicester won a PL.
The big challenge of the Wenger years (and 365 earned the 2006 mailbox receipts after Arsenal lost the Champions League final and finished more than 20 numbers behind Chelski) is that they have especially lowered the level of Arsenal enthusiasts. Wenger did a great job of making believe that the chunks of excrement were actually truffle sausages. Arsenal enthusiasts were furious at the idea, but once you start lowering the bar, it becomes an institutional rot that takes years to remove and, before you know it, look at that, two decades without a title. Who would have imagined this was imaginable in 2004?But here we are.
Once again, thanks to Arteta because he seeks to instil in this club a criterion that has been absent for years. Even on Sunday night, as various Gooners wrote praise about how “proud” they were, Arteta made it clear that he was not satisfied with the season. Here is a parallel with Postecoglou at Spurs and the appearance that he turns out to be more ambitious than most of the club’s fans.
The harsh truth is that it has been five years, only about 700 million euros spent and nothing to show off in PL or CL. The challenge for Arteta is that there are other coaches who do more with less. Xavi, with Barca bankrupt, beat Madrid for a La Liga title in his first season. And now, Xabi Alonso: in a domestic league where Bayern’s wage bill is greater than the sum of the seven best teams in the Bundesliga combined!So it’s very, very complicated for Arteta, yes, but not (as Klopp has shown).
One thing Arsenal enthusiasts might understand next season is that a 2-2 draw at home to 10-man Fulham is cause for alarm. However, the attitude was regularly lax: “everything will be fine from the first days. “. In case you haven’t noticed, these are not general times and Pep Citeh is not a general team. Every stupid point that is lost will be punished mercilessly. Arteta can’t simply wait for Pep to leave before winning a PL, the aim will have to be to “beat the greatest”, as Klopp did.
Possibly it wouldn’t go into the publications that so notoriously want to be overtaken (?) and the scum that so notoriously wants to be moved/benched because even Stevie Wonder can see it.
Just like last summer, we’ll know quite a bit when the transfer window closes whether Arteta can win PL or not. It was clear that it would never happen this season (not an ambitious move, tbf lol), but if they get the 2-3 innovations in those starting 11, plus the extra 2-3 quality bench players, Arsenal can surely win the PL next season. But to be transparent, after so many years and so much money, Arteta will have to cross the finish line in PL or CL next season.
I think it came about around the time when we had the “It means more” and “More than a club” propaganda, as well as clickbait at full speed. Football clubs and their consumers feed a voracious fan base with stories about what their club is like. “For the greatest team the world has ever seen. “Added to this is the obsession of some media outlets that distort even the smallest data to obtain the angle at which their readers will interact mainly to get clicks.
What happened then is that you have an echo chamber where some enthusiasts think that the team they follow is better than everyone else. Rather than being the same, but perhaps with a slightly larger and morally more corrupt marketing team. These enthusiasts then head to the wider Data Superhighway (which shows my age) and I find that there are plenty of other people who don’t like you or the team you follow, simply because they’re the team you follow.
The enthusiasts then feel the need to tell everyone what they think and why they expect their most despised rivals to be praised before others for being the only thing between Man City winning the league and blowing up Alderaan.
I don’t subscribe to this sentiment, everyone hates us and doesn’t care, a feeling that lacks a certain amount of introspection. But it’s as strange to me as the “why don’t you love me?You deserve it. ” Love me,” a sentiment that turns out to have taken root in some fan bases.
Someone (maybe Peter or Paul) said something about the fact that sports washing doesn’t work and at the same time that those messages were too long. So I’m not going to explain how sports washing works, but I urge you to find out. But you probably wouldn’t because you’ve already made up your mind.
… The biggest idiot is back with the Man City owners’ defence which, according to him, only required a sixteenth part of a moment’s reflection. I can say it. Among the absurdities, we have “the fact that the UAE is a collection of states and has nothing to do with City. . . “, which is an incredibly stupid claim when the club’s owner, Sheikh Mansour, is literally the vice-president of the United Arab Emirates.
However, Paul’s general claim is that sportswashing does not exist and it is ridiculous to think that this is the explanation for Abu Dhabi’s takeover of his club. While he gives no other explanation as to why the sheikh would buy a football club in “Manchester’s ass” but has only attended one match in 15 years, the complex wisdom Paul seeks does not seem to come with the UAE government’s website, whose pages are committed to his soft power strategy.
Part of their strategy is to “establish their reputation as a modern, tolerant country that welcomes all people from all over the world,” which they do by deploying “other people’s diplomacy. “I don’t know if Paul knows what “people’s diplomacy” is. “It is, but it’s about co-opting average citizens as representatives of their country so that they unknowingly advocate for their goals.
… Once the season was over, I thought I’d take a moment to remind readers in the mailbox of the contents of the 115 accusations hanging over Man City’s head. There are emails, the authenticity of which is not disputed through Man City, in which club administrators explain how they will hide money from their owners in the form of fake sponsorships to circumvent Financial Fair Play rules.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that even if UEFA had the emails, it might not turn out that City had cheated, in the same way that locating an email explaining how I’m going to poison my wife’s breakfast sausages doesn’t turn out that I poisoned my wife, even though she dies the next day after having poisoned sausages for breakfast. (Honey, if you’re reading this, don’t worry, I love sausages too much to put poison in them. )You want more proof, CAS said: bank account statements, etc. But when UEFA asked Manchester City for those extracts, it refused to hand them over, just as it has refused to hand over those extracts to the Premier League for years. Nothing worked!Case closed!!
And if you were to give me a piece of the cross, I would like to sell it to you.
The difference between City and Lance Armstrong is that the latter had to keep cheating to win: every year, a new race, every year with new drugs. With City, the pitfalls came a decade ago: a huge injection of cash and banknotes into the club that allowed them to form the most productive team in the world. When Pep publishes (misleadingly, I suppose, since he can’t be that stupid) the net spending figures for the last five years and says: No one is spending now, he is right. They’re not cheating at the moment. (Net spend is a stupid metric, but other people use it; don’t touch me. )
But the truth is that everything that impresses about Manchester City – the most productive coach, the most productive players, the most productive academy, the record four consecutive titles, 6 of the last 7, last year’s treble, ALL OF THAT – is the result of the era of monetary doping that took hold from 2008 onwards.
Pep, who has jumped from one elite club to another throughout his managerial career, do you really think he would have joined City if they had struggled to make it into the more sensible four, like Villa (congratulations by the way) or if they had sought to identify themselves as part of the top four. The Big Six (hey Spurs fans!)? Would City have got Haaland, de Bruyne, Rodri or any of their other fabulous players if they had been limited, in their initial expansion period, by regulations that others followed?Of course not.
Look at Newcastle: the same assets (with the added advantages of being related to a regime that murders journalists) but a SLOW expansion because they stick to the rules.