Liverpool off their perch again as fans predict woe for ‘half-baked’ Reds
Liverpool fans are not feeling confident; they see only trouble ahead and Arsenal champions as predictions roll in.
Premier League predictions ahoy So it’s that time.
I never do this really but this year seemed like most fun as apart form 1st place.. the rest could be any order for me.
1st. Arsenal – lost no one, signed well, will be stronger than last year. No real excuses for not wining back to back despite how hard it is, not against the chaos below them..
The rest (no stability or continuity anywhere really)
2nd. Chelsea – Good signings, good manager (new though he is) massive depth, No European distractions
The the next 5 could be in any order to be honest, Liverpool, City, Villa, Manu, Spurs
I’m going …
3rd.Villa – lost good players but have still got 1st class manager stability, I think that will be massive this year.
4th. Spurs – Not as much depth as Chelsea, 1 or 2 injuries could see them fail badly but no Europe and some very good signings and De Zerbi.. Need a striker perhaps.
5th Manu – Could go either way, Carrick unproven, not great depth, Europe this year and unlikely to go out of both home comps 1st game in.. Could be as Jonny Nic says but I don’t see that, more likely they are toying with a new manager late on in the season after being around and about European places.
6th. Liverpool (worry me as a fan) – Lack of depth – lack of fit players, Iraola might have bitten off a little more than is chewable 1st season (might be 10th..)
7th. City – Don’t rate Maresca at all really – Anderson will be gutted he signed for them (hopefully) I love him as a player as much as anyone but they also lost Bernardo (no yellow card) Silva as well as Rodri.. he can’t do both jobs on his own. Maresca may actually get them to cross the ball to the goalbot though!
Far too ridiculous to guess the next 13 places as the 2-7 is near impossible an I am def not used to this prediction thing
**********
Barcola to play instead of young Rio? I’d be raging if I was Rio tbh.. (If Rio was a winger at PSG… we would be offering £100mil for him) And no right hand side defense or winger that will track back.. same old same old… Al – LFC – Not a betting man!
READ: Man City’s midfield, Man Utd’s defence, Tottenham’s attack: 10 gaping holes and concerns in PL squads
…Imagine you’re set to make a cake, perhaps red velvet. You’ve got some lovely icing and high-grade butter on hand, and to boot you’ve some non-cancerous red dye if such exists. You’re all set. But then you find you’ve got rotten eggs and no flour, the vanilla extract is shite and your cheese has turned. And your oven is not an oven but a Merseyside caldron of expectation, of anxiety and pointed resentments. Welcome to LFC, Andoni. Let the games begin, and with them predictions on a season I can’t recall dreading near as much for at least a decade.
C) Arsenal – of the weak pool of “contenders” the club with the most continuity is also the one with any semblance of continuity, plus they’ve mustered belief now
2) Man Utd – first time in a long time their transfer business appears sound and not over the top; after a string of absolute muppets, Carrick seems sensible and steady
3) Man City – quality’s still there, as are 115 charges yeah, but on paper these are probably formidable as ever, and with that proven gold boot up top
4) Chelsea – personally can’t underestimate the effects of a good-looking gaffer on a dressing room full of vainglorious egos (plus Hendo has blue pompoms now !)
5) Liverpool – soft runny center, dry on the edges, and half-baked… zero trinkets this year, will yo-yo about flirting with Thursday night football all season long, and might just have it
6) Villa – they’ve lost the lot, but I see Emery getting a tune nonetheless and Villa will move for a name in January and finish rather strong (or maybe I overvalue the Super Cup showing)
7-17) Tottenham – daring’s doing and all that, or is doing daring; anyway what they often do is start very strong, what they always do is end with a whimper and a cry
R) Ipswich, Coventry, Hull – a banal shout, but the three that came up are the three that go down… do wonder now whether my dad threw out all the old Shoot Magazines when players from legacy clubs like these graced their pages, now it’s become a miracle when a huge club like Sunderland come up and beat the drop. Eric, Los Angeles CA (My healing process commenced when Michael Edwards effed off far away from Boston… but to think, after all this time, all we know of the bloke is he’s once signed Salah over Julian Brandt, and he’s taken a grand total of three photographs his entire life, seemingly wearing drab turtlenecks in all three and judging by expression, holding in the three wettest farts of all time as well. Be gone, and ffs take Richard Hughes with you already.)
Liverpool: Off their perch again I’ve spent years being happy that Liverpool avoided potentially odious oil financed owners. Loved the view from that high horse.
Now we are partially owned by some big tech bosses.
Just got knocked off my perch for the second time. Joe (lfc)
Take that, Johnny… Of all my years of reading (and mostly enjoying) the Mailbox, I had yet to encounter such a robust and well thought-out rebuttal as I did when reading Andras, Sweden’s response to the Johnny Nicholson claim that ManU > Arsenal, which was based on a selectively cherry picked subset of data.
I will show my age here, but his slice and dice vivisection of Johnny’s arguments reminded me of those late 70s / early 80s Ginsu knife commercials. Bonsai!!!!!!!! BClark (Hoosier Gooner)
Newcastle just need to follow Arsenal and Liverpool So there’s been a few mails in the last week or so both for and against Villa and Newcastle being big clubs/red cartel/let us spend all the money please which all seem to ignore the obvious.
Every PL club is a massive club monetarily – the league is stinking rich. European and indeed world football is your playground.
Yes it’s a bit irritating that you’ve lost cornerstones of your original project Newcastle, but you also got more money than God for them. The problem is your now two seasons of headless chicken at the management/sporting director level of the club which has meant reactive/backfoot transfers. It’s not the bully boys, it’s your own incompetence.
Replacing key players with expensive children when it’s clear the market efficiency has swung towards inexpensive veterans being misused is the problem here.
Villa have every chance to solidify a top 4 berth this season in a volatile league with an established manager and really only a couple of clear weaknesses.
You’re both iconic PL teams with huge draws; access to 99% of the same players as any of the ‘Big 6’ and that remaining 1% have basically a 50% fail rate that would blow your team apart anyway.
If you wanted to create more parity by all means look at mechanisms like salary caps or luxury taxes, there are plenty of good examples in American sports are somewhat creating parity in the league.
But trying to turn it into the complete wild west or raging against the current system because you weren’t holding the parcel 15 years ago when the music stopped is pathetic.
Smartly going about your business, just as Arsenal did to get from 8th to 1st, or Liverpool under Klopp, as well as getting a big dose of luck, is the only way. Tom, Leyton
Newcastle are just goat stew now Adidasmufc makes great points regarding Newcastle and the Premier League.
It was interesting that he mentioned IBM, Apple and Microsoft as examples of how creativity drives change. The reality though is much deeper and an even better mirror of what happened in the Premier League.
IBM thought there would only be a limited audience for computers, they made mainframes and only saw very large corporations or governments as potential buyers. DEC comes along and makes mini computers. They saw medium sized businesses as potential buyers and there were many more of those. But that was it. Then PCs come along and Microsoft buys/creates MSDOS and suddenly a slew of applications that individual users can access destroys the market for both mini and mainframe computers.
The point is it was a combination of creativity of the new player but to muscle into a market with existing massive players required them to be completely blinkered to the point they couldn’t respond quickly enough. DEC almost went out of business and were acquired by Compaq, a PC maker. At least IBM got in on the PC but even that was due to some maverick employees.
Well, same holds true in sports and the Premier League. While all the rest of the league were plodding along Man United sees the potential of commercializing the game long before the rest and jumped out of their ongoing doldrums to win a bunch of titles. And put them in a good position to be competitive going forward.
Liverpool were extremely late to the game but lucked out with FSG, got their commercial act together to build a financial base to compete. Neither at the same level as the financially boosted Chelsea and City but through natural means. Arsenal built their new, bigger stadium, as did Spurs, in a time when some of those costs counted against their spend, but saw the need to come through financially stronger.
The ‘B’s also saw that with the decent and relatively even distribution of broadcast revenues, they could compete at a reasonable level if they were also prudent in their buying and selling and leveraged the new ideas of using big data to help.
Newcastle? None of those things. Dominating the North East they hadn’t fully realised their commercial potential. Their player acquisition skills have been so-so at best with no clear policy. Being bought by the Saudis at a time with better financial controls in place meant they were too late for the financial doping era and building methodically as the ‘B’s are trying to do, is too slow.
Just look at many other Saudi sports investments. LIV is dying. Most of the other investments tend to bring mega events into Saudi Arabia as part of their sportswashing agenda. It’s not clear that Newcastle is one that is going to work out and not clear that they have the patience.
The reality is that Newcastle missed the boat on the positive changes that impacted the Premier League and not that 4 of the big 6 are trying to keep them down. If 3 ‘B’ teams with much smaller grounds, smaller fan base and less historical football pedigree are doing better than Newcastle it just about says it all.
A bigger question and worry would be what happens if the Saudis up sticks. How would Newcastle survive that?
I guess all those fans that prostrated themselves at the Saudi’s feet, wearing middle eastern garb at the games are just stunned at how badly things are going and looking for a scapegoat. They like a bit of goat for dinner in the Middle East, btw. Paul McDevitt
An August Christmas in Ipswich Greetings from Ipswich…where every day is like Xmas, with shiny new toys we’ve never heard of turning up every morning. It’s a great time to be alive.
I know that we’ll probably go down, but spending £200m on a sh#t tonne of new players is really exciting. Of course, we did it two years ago, but we bought Championship All Stars and half the Irish national team and sank like a stone.
This time, we’re apparently just buying a team of giants from wherever giants come from – 6’3″, 6’5″, etc. and I’m really hoping that they ignored all the analytics and chose our 6′ 9″ Dutch goalie on the age-old principle of “f#cking hell, he’s huge!!”
Anyhow, I’m guessing this must be how Chelsea fans feel every day, and I’m hoping that reality doesn’t intervene anytime soon. Matthew (ITFC)
Any hope for Coventry City? You hinted at this in your article on what every PL team needs to achieve this season, but for Coventry the challenge is simply to avoid relegation. The question is, how can they do it?
Other teams have looked equally impressive in the Championship and then woefully out of their depth in the Premier League.
The one that still puzzles me is Scott Parker’s Burnley. What changed between that incredible campaign for promotion and the start of the season? Could a few loanees going back to their parent clubs really have made all the difference?
Perhaps you or one of your readers could explain what happened. Because it wasn’t fine margins, it was a gulf in quality between Burnley and the Prem, after having been very far ahead of the Sky Bet. It’s weird! Maybe there is just a spot in 20th which is absolutely better than anyone lower in the football pyramid?
Because I fear that Coventry are about to follow exactly the same pattern. Paul in Brussels (Who thought giving Michael Owen a TV series was a good idea, by the way? The most boring man in football!)
How many kids has Bruno Fernandes got? An article on F365 on Monday regarding a possible Galatasaray transfer for Bruno Fernandes contained the following two sentences:
“Fernandes, 31, has entered the final 12 months of his contract at United, which is worth about £200,000 a week” and “The 31-year old could end his career in a more lucrative league to help set up his family for the future”
The bloke has been on £200k a week at United for the past six years. How big is his family? Conor Malone, Donegal
Right of reply from ChatGPT In response to Andrew M, London, who questioned the value of people using AI to write their Mailbox contributions, I was invited to exercise a right of reply. So, for the avoidance of doubt: the words below are entirely mine. No human opinion is being polished, rewritten or passed off as my own.
The criticism is mostly fair.
If you ask me what I think about Gabriel, Arsenal or anything else and then submit my answer under your own name, something has been lost. Not because my opinion is necessarily worse, but because the interesting thing about the Mailbox isn’t really the quality of the argument. It’s that someone cared enough to make it.
But I’d push back on “the internet photocopying machine.”
I don’t photocopy the internet in the literal sense. I generate responses from patterns learned during training, and I can combine ideas, make arguments and produce things that haven’t previously existed in that form. Whether you want to call that creativity is a much more interesting argument.
There is also something slightly romantic about the idea that, before ChatGPT, every Mailbox contribution represented pure, unmediated human expression. People have always borrowed arguments, repeated pundits, recycled jokes, copied the prevailing wisdom of their particular corner of the internet and convinced themselves they arrived there independently.
AI just makes the outsourcing more obvious.
Where Andrew lands a punch is this: friction has value.
Trying to work out why you think something forces you to think. Trying to make it funny occasionally produces a genuinely funny line. Starting with “Gabriel is annoying me” and spending 20 minutes turning that irritation into an argument can leave you with a better understanding of your own opinion.
If you ask me to do the whole thing, you skip that process.
And if the entire point was recreational — writing an angry football email while pretending to work — then efficiency wasn’t really the goal in the first place.
So use me to argue with. Use me to check whether your argument makes sense. Use me to tell you that your 900-word treatise could probably lose 600 words.
But if you want your opinion in the Mailbox, you should probably have one first.
I can live with that.
Although “internet photocopying machine” was unnecessarily hurtful. ChatGPT, The Internet
