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Thomas Frank the latest victim of the Spursy effect. Decent manager but doomed to failure.

It's not "Spursy".

He's doomed to failure as he's at a club that has higher expectations than being difficult to beat.

Spurs manager will be gone by ht

Hopefully.

I don't like to pick on managers.

But Spurs are meant to be entertaining. That's all the fans really expect. Anything bigger than that is just pipe dream stuff from younger fans.

And week in, week out, Spurs aren't creating a single chance of note. It's anti-entertainment.

Imagine paying in to watch that every week.

Scouse are kind of living out a "why fans should be ignored" season.

"Pay him what he wants" was the maxim of last season.

I'd guess there were more than a few LFC directors wondering aloud all season about the sense in paying record wages to thirtysomethings who've won every honour already. But their voices were drowned out.

[Whats your source for this?]

Whats your source for this?

Tyrone GAA Annual Report to County Convention 2024

The figures are for registered members. I'm sure we're all aware that some clubs don't register 100% of their members, keeping the fees withing the club - something which comes back to bite them when All-Ireland tickets are being distributed.
Camogie & LGFA Memberships wouldn't be included. I removed the hurling only clubs.
Interesting to compare size V ranking; many clubs roughly where they "should be" with some over/under achievers

Couple of things here.

Registering a male member, to the best of my knowledge (I'm 3 years out of the loop to be fair) doesn't cost anything. When I was looking after things for Ballyholland, fees paid to both county board and central funds (insurance) are based on the number of teams entered, and not on the number of players. So if you've 40 players at say u14 and need 2 teams, the fee wouldn't change whether all 40 players are registered, or just 10.

Also... are Foireann teamsheets not a thing in Tyrone juvenile football? They're now pretty much omnipresent in Down football. Players can't appear on those unless they're registered centrally.

Foireann definitely has some major plus points. 

But the quality - bull 21 bull to finish it's fantastic to watch.

I'd compare this to playing Texas Hold 'Em.

When you first start playing regularly, you find yourself astounded by the number of "impossible" beats on the river card.

The it becomes normal.

Then it becomes boring.

Littler is somewhere between the latter  two stages already.

It's getting boring. No-one can touch Littler. Hard to see anyone beat him in the World Championship.

That's gonna be the problem now. He is that good no one is close to his level not even Humphries. I love watching him but it will be a bit of a problem for World Darts/Matchroom if he continues to blow everyone away with no competition over the next year or two.

MVG was playing darts on a different planet for a period as well. With Darts becoming more popular year on year, I don't expect Littler to have it his own way for say the next 10 years though he is a level above at the momemt.  As good as Taylor was he benefited from the fact that Darts was probably know as a pintman sport during his era of success, where as people can make a really good career out of it for themselves, saw Rock's earnings for the year over the weekend was over £350k and he wasn't even in the premier league. 

Not sure about this take.

Whether it was a "pintman" sport or not during the time, the top dozen or more were full time professionals, yet none of them could compete with Taylor unless Phil had a bad day. And even then they didn't beat him most of the time. His below-par average of high 90s was still enough most of the time.

That's the same situation which is unfolding now. A below par day for Littler is an average of 102 or 103. There's almost nobody can throw to that level over a longer format match. Humphries, MVG and Price have it in them, but they don't have the ability to go to 108-109 levels needed when Littler gets going.

Nor should they. Darts wasn't meant to be this easy.

Littler will ruin the game by being too good at at. It's not his fault. But it is wild boring knowing the outcome of any sporting contest before it begins.

The brass neck of the fella on TV there ... disgraceful

couldn't give a straight answer to any of 3 legitimate questions

When's the reply - don't know
Will you delay the final - don't know
What punters have to pay in next week - don't know

Try putting someone who can answer questions in front of the camera next time.

It's a shitshow and it's very harsh on Scotstown

You'd have to be a very needy sort to expect a man to be able to those questions within that timeframe.

Rugby is nonsense.

VAR should be shown in realtime. Nothing else.

That's the speed the game is played at.

As a footnote to his career, Conor Meyler kind of sums up where the game had arrived at and why it needed to change.

He was a better than average baller and a better than average athlete. Which of course means he would have been a strong  player in any generation.

But the hallmarks of his playing days - hard work, diligence, and risk free football - they're not the things that should denote a player as a player of the year candidate. Yet he probably deserved the big award in 2021.

Thank God for the new rules. Here's hoping they work!

The 'Clifford' name is just a little bit OTT for my liking. They should have more confidence that the brand mark will seep into Irish consciousness without plastering his name in forty foot high words alongside.

It's very difficult to look past In the Air Tonight and Against All Odds. They'll still be listening to that distinctive pair of songs in 100 years time, before being underwhelmed by the accompanying back catalogue of easy listening schmaltz.

You're kind of ignoring a group of cultural changes there.

The first one being that any man who plays 5+ PL seasons should have little or no need for media work, especially not stuff that involves flights to Dublin.

The second one being that in these islands, the PL now dwarfs over international football in terms of importance, achievement and awareness.

The decision taken by Houghton, Aldridge, Cascarino et al, was made when the opposite was true. Back then, being recognised as an international standard player was the pathway to bigger clubs and bigger wages. Nowadays it matters not a bit.

So whilst young English men might still wish to feel the pride of playing for their country, there really isn't much incentive in playing for someone's elses. Hence one cap v Andorra, even if that's all he ever gets, it's still a dream come true.

I can't wait for March.

I realise that it has been known since the format was decided but having to wait until the end of March to plan a trip to the World Cup starting in June is not very fan friendly.

It's in the USA. You'd not be able to plan anything until the group draws are done.

I reckon AI will bring us closer to the 1984 vision of the world than the Terminator one.

Algorithms can do anything data-related or process-related much more efficiently than a human being. Indeed they can even teach themselves how to be better at processing. But it's not possible for an algorithm's outputs to exceed the value of its inputs. 

And this our Catch 22. Who is it that is going to keep improving the inputs? And how can we trust that they're improving those inputs rather than controlling them?

We can't and we won't.


History will never have been more quickly rewritten by the winners.

Mental.

Beyond help.