The 2015-16 World Fitba Thread!

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So shit/hilarious.

 

Ze germans are coming, ze germans are coming

 

I had to check bbc to double check if Saucy Slice's insouciant main man was even playing, legit hadn't seen or heard him in 20 minutes play

 

Ah fuck. Shut up, Slice.

 

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They should turn this into some sort of animated show.

 

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Just admit it, the guy is a badass

 

I think my grandad has a man crush on him, he's all he can talk about. Its a bit weird.

 

Those cartoons are great.

MTF ::

 

Fucking great match this. 'Mon Schalke!

MTF

 

Excellent game!

 

Ah Gad, Francis Ford Copolla was pretty grotesque looking. Like the racist victorian cartoons of black men made to look like gorillas with big vulva-pink lips. Except atrophied and flabby and greasy and covered with hair that looks like it's been brushed off a barbers floor then stuck onto soap

 

The Sailor leaned forward and put a finger on the boy's inner arm at the elbow. He spoke in his dead, junky whisper.

"With veins like that, Kid, I'd have myself a time."

He laughed, black insect laughter that seemed to serve some obscure function of orientation like a bat's squeak. The Sailor laughed three times. He stopped laughing and hung there motionless, listening down into himself. He had picked up the silent frequency of junk. His face smoothed out like yellow wax over the high cheekbones. He waited half a cigarette. The Sailor knew how to wait. But his eyes burned in a hideous dry hunger. He turned his face of controlled emergency in a slow half pivot to case the man who had just come in. "Fats" Terminal sat there sweeping the cafe with blank, periscope eyes. When his eyes passed the Sailor he nodded minutely. Only the peeled nerves of junk sickness would have registered a movement.

 

Real have been atrocious lately, good thing they have OFFICIALLY THE BEST FOOTBALLER ON THE PLANET to bail them out

 

Really good game, that. Schalke had a proper crack at that and almost pulled it off.

MTF :bears:

 

The law of averages suggested they were going to give Real a game at some point after being slaughtered on so many previous occasions

 

I asked McDogg this in his thread but I'll ask it here too; who is the greater manager, Clough or Ferguson?

 

Ferguson. Incredible longevity - he basically built himself four different title winning sides at one club. I'm a big Cloughie fan but Taggart is greater.

MTF

 

Yeah I'm inclined to agree with you Feebs, although I'd say his spell at Aberdeen tips the balance in his favour IMO. I think if you gave Clough a club the size of Man Utd (and enough time to iron out the mistakes like Ferguson had initially) then he may well have come close to matching that longevity. Forest were never going to be big enough to win things consistently but he had them punching above their weight with high, title-challenging league finishes and cup finals even after the glory years.

 

What Clough did at Forest was absolutely remarkable. It really is mad to think that there are four clubs with 2 European cup wins - Juventus, Porto, Benfica and Nottingham Forest :: He was a mad bastard for sure but he was a hell of a manager. Taggart won more and did more. Although Man U have always been a 'bigger' club than Forest they were an unconscious giant when Taggart tool over and he turned them into arguably the biggest club in the world.

MTF

 

Another question, do you guys still consider Arsene Wenger a great manager? How much damage has he done to his legacy/reputation over the last 8/9 years?

 

More than competent certainly, but not "great". The last 8/9 years absolutely have to count against his legacy. Yes of course the playing field isn't level with the oil clubs, but Arsenal is not a small club that comes close and gets their talent poached every time. Even if the bean counters are the only reason behind Arsenal's transfer decisions then he could have certainly gone elsewhere by now. He's more than happy with 'little bit silverware'. That's not greatness no matter which way you want to slice it.

 

The last 8/9 years was sacrificed for the better good of the club. Don't get me wrong, he should have had a couple of cups in there but anything else is over expecting. Fantastic manager, one of the best on the pitch and probably the best off of it in regards to building a club off the pitch. Emirates Stadium is a major achievement for the club.

I say Fergie is one of the best, if not the best, but he left MUFC with a shit squad. He overachieved with his squads a lot.

Mourinho has spent the most out of any manager so I don't rate him at all.

 

Wenger is a tough one to rate for me. I used to think he was great but that opinion has waned a lot.

It's worth remembering that he took over Arsenal when they had the best back four in the game and at a time when the greatest generation of French players there's ever been had started to reach their peak, he had a lot of contacts and was able to get them on the cheap. When those players started to slide so did Arsenal.

He DID build the best Premier League side I've ever seen in 2004, the football was mind blowing and absolutely stunning to watch. Still, why did that team not win the CL? They lost to a Chelsea side they had already beaten three times that season, who weren't yet the force they would be one year later, and who hadn't beaten Arsenal for a loooooooong time. Of course in cup football anything can happen, but Ferguson was able to win the big one with his two best teams - that's what separates the great managers from the very good ones. Arsenal couldn't retain their title, and lets be honest here, have never really come close to regaining it since then.

Some of that is down to bad luck, Eduardo getting injured when he was absolutely unstoppable for example, some of that is his own making, like passing on Yaya Toure who would have been the perfect replacement for Viera/Gilberto. Of course, were it not for Larsson then they may very well have a Champions League trophy in their cabinet. These things even out though and Arsenal should NOT be so far off the pace set by the front runners, despite having to finance the new stadium. Ferguson was able to win the league and reach a CL final with a HORRIBLE side, Wenger can't even challenge. It has to count against him, despite the unprecedented success he had in his early years.

 

Didn't Wenger go a considerable number of years making net profit in the transfer market? During the years Chelsea and City managed to warp the entire economics of fitbaw with their financial doping. If he'd won titles in those conditions it'd have been miraculous.

 

I did forget to add, as Hut mentions above, that I have huge respect for the way he has run Arsenal financially etc. However, they still had a large enough fan base and good enough players to mount a challenge (at the very least). To go from winning the league unbeaten to scraping 4th spot on the final day of the season (partly thanks to Spurs suffering food poisoning) in the space of two years is ridiculous.

Once again, Ferguson managed to get Man Utd teams (who were on paper inferior to some of the sides Wenger managed post-2004) to win titles and reach a Champions League final.

 

He took me in his car on a tour of some of Yorkshire’s cities. In due course we arrived on a hill above Halifax. He stopped the car and we gazed down into its industrial labyrinth. I could see he was proud of it. “It’s like Hell, isn’t it!?” he grinned enthusiastically. For a southerner, Halifax is another world, a place where ‘Belladonna’, John Cooper Clarke’s paean to an opiated urban Pennine landscape, comes immediately to mind: ‘where the panorama looks like Mars … to the dying gardens, down below …’. Waiting at a road junction, looking around at the tower blocks, derelict mills and two-up-two-downs, the sombre local stone, all surrounded by freakishly high impassable hills, themselves enclosed by hedges as if hundreds of miles from a city, the smell of the Nestlé factory wafting over, all under a looming, threatening sky, I said to Joel: ‘This is indubitably the North.’ A voice from a car waiting at the junction yells in agreement as it drives off - ‘THE NORTH!!!!!' Next to this junction is a pub with the name The Running Man, which fits the general sense of fear and tension perfectly. The Running Man has a rather Googie roof, and a view over the seemingly untouched 1960s estates which have mercifully escaped the hatting given to Wakefield. As we board the Halifax to Wakefield train, some youths ask us ‘Are you the FBI?’ Aside from being quite a funny question to ask two men in long coats with neat hair taking pictures, this says more about the Special Relationship between the UK and US than any BBC2 teleplay ever could.

Inexplicably Halifax, a town about half the size of Luton, has within it a Town Hall by the architect of the Houses of Parliament, Arcades as good as those in London, Leeds or Manchester, a 'People's Park' which is a model of municipal munificence, and yet you can see where it stops, when the Moors rear up in front of you. And yet all this (admittedly jolie laide) beauty and richness seems to have no effect. There's no sense here that city air is free air, but instead an almost all-pervasive air of latent violence that could explode at any moment. We watch indie kids with black eyes cluster together in the Arcades, we (me and photographer, ages 28 and 34 respectively) get called 'shirtlifters' by shellsuited youth. Halifax is in general the most racially segregated place I've ever seen, something that, as Joel points out extends to the way the windows in the old terraces are treated - UPVC frames in white areas, new wooden frames in the Kashmiri districts. There's a certain historical justice that the spaces of imperial philanthropy are well-used by the formerly colonised, while the descendants of the colonisers prefer to live in the middle of nowhere, seemingly refusing to take advantage of the extremely impressive town their great-grandparents toiled to create.