pash

Think Manchester United will rest any players in our game? My guess is that if RFS has clinched this, then they will play their strongest possible lineup against us. Lame.

Guy's got the clap!

po po poooooo let them have him!

Do we have a resale % as well? That's fantastic. So if they sold for, say, 25mm, and we had 10%, we'd get 18 + 2.5, that kind of thing? You could buy a LOT of washed up players for that kind of dough!

There are already rumors that even if they get promoted and can't afford him, they'll find another buyer and pull a Tzolis. Sad, but also expected - even if he came back and we lost every other striker, Lucescu would not play the kid. We'd just pay top dollar for a Turkey-based scrub that once had a training session for Wolves or something.

Absolutely insulting that Samatta gets any game time at all.

Michailidis 🤝 Red Cards

I'll only feel better if Chalov scores a few...

The worst thing about games this early is that I'm nearly guaranteed to be in a meeting during the game. I missed our boy's first goal 😭😭😭

Nice little poached goal, after Zivkovic hits the crossbar on a free kick

This season is going to be even tighter than last season, huh? Aris won't be able to keep this up. They are the most likely to implode once fatigue starts to become an issue.

Not only is your broadcast partner better looking than you, he's also smarter!

We're not talking about your mother here

Every single point counts. This actually brings us up a couple places in the standings, amazingly.

Watched the back half of Young Boys vs Inter match. Young Boys kind of unlucky to lose. They're a lot better than I figured they would be. Can't wait until we get drawn against them in a year or two and they smash us.

Feels weird to be able to flip that old story around

Even if we lose and can't progress, every win will still net us coefficient points. So the need to try is still there.

This season's league is going to be as close as last season's, huh

Exactly. Isn't it strange that Lucescu will run some players into the ground, fatigue be damned...while we have a clearly superior option sitting on the bench here? Normally I'd think Camara would BE the guy he's overworking, but for whatever reason Ozdoyev seems to have impressed him more than last season.

The difference between you and me, is I have a boundless appreciation for how dumb Greeks can be. The bar is so low that it'll probably be uncovered when they get around to sinking Toumba's pitch.

The performance of the stipiki over the past decade is a classic case study in organizational dynamics. The quality of the players is irrelevant when both leadership and morale are lacking. If you want to quantify this, you can think of it as "momentum" - I'm sure one could plot a regression of actual results against an expected outcome (expected goals, expected wins) for matches, and show the clear terms how and where our mindset changed. That's a fancy way of saying, we were sad and so played badly. Now we're happy and are playing better. I would also call your attention to a similar situation that our Balkan neighbors over in Bosnia are experiencing. As someone with a few Bosnian friends, I can confirm to you that their NT is caught in the exact same issue we've had for most of the past decade. I hear about it constantly. The main difference between our situations is that their downfall started about four years after ours, so they're only now starting their descent to rock bottom.

I've been actively hating on the stipiki for a few years. These last two games have solidified my belief that they're FINALLY back. This team has an abundance of talent, both offensively and defensively. And on top of that, they actually have some technical skill - something we never really showed off in the Santos era. While we had glimpses of attractive football over the last few years, they've always seemed mentally fragile and only half-certain of their own game plan. We may have turned a corner; perhaps their rallying around Baldock's death did it...or perhaps it's Jovanovic (though I doubt a coach can make that kind of a change in so short a time). Maybe it's just that a lot of these guys have now been playing with each other for a while. Whatever it is, I think they may now be "clicking" and could actually do some damage internationally. For what it's worth, this surprised me. Surely we can't be favorites to win against England again? This is probably assuming a substantial (50%?) chance of a draw, to get us to that number (considering the 31% chance of a loss this chart implies). Can't imagine we'll be troubled by Finland either way.

I'd bring Pelkas to your parents' home so that in nine months you could have a new, much superior sibling. I missed the first goal because I was so busy trash talking Irish people on group chats that I neglected to actually look at the score line until the 65th minute.

Very nicely done

I'd let Pelkas marry my daughter, if I had one.