Backbiter

It's truly pathetic.

Probably an old one, but a mate sent me this:

I'm a big fan of Hall but I think you're right. Besides, we badly need the £30-odd million. With that money and a deal for Maatsen, we should go some way towards coming up with the supposed £100m needed to FFP compliance.

I don't understand how a Chelsea fan does not understand the fans' antipathy to Benitez.

You underestimate Gilchrist.

Liverpool have cancelled the end-of-Klopp parade.

Just the 14 players out: https://www.premierinjuries.com/injury-table.php#google_vignette

How can he be sure Taylor wouldn't have made the same idiotic 'human error' Attwell made? He should be embarrassed that top officials are literally unable to process what the footage is showing.

It would be good to see him in the stands with Mason Mount urging us on and then celebrating against Madrid at the Bridge.

This is quality. Then turn the sound down and enjoy the second tribute:

Such a top pro. Truly world class defender who has been superb for us. Definitely the right time for him to move on, but we have been very lucky to have him with us for four seasons.

Good interview but unfortunately he sheds no light on why our injury situation has gone from being among the best to the very worst in Europe in the past three seasons. This problem pre-dates the takeover. Not defending Boehly and Eggy but it was clear there were big issues with the medical department under RA.

From the replies to that: The argument against the Grealish handball was somethiing like "You can't control your arms when jumping", but KdB and Alvarez are doing just that. Joke decision by VAR, made worse by the fact that the VAR KNEW Oliver had not seen the handball because he AWARDED A GOAL KICK. If ever there was a case to make a ref check the screen, that was it. On the subject of last night's disallowed goal, my son shared this with me:

Definitely one of the better 10-man displays by us tonight. Imagine what we could have done with 11.

The good has outweighed the bad. For once.

Just in time for the parade.

Having found the Monaco CB pairing not up to it, time to go for the Palace pairing. I actually like Anderson, too.

A scandalous frittering away of mega millions.

He showed flashes of real quality, but generally he ranged from underwhelming to massively disappointing,. To my mind that was largely down to the huge fee we paid and the OTT comments about him from Germany, which built up our expectations that he was unable to live up to. He's a strange player to watch, but he seems to be finding some form at Arsenal after a very slow start.

Oh dear.

I noticed he wasn't posting. What did I miss?

I know what you are saying and do not doubt that you're correct. I just don't think a situation where a player who blows a one on one because he fails to shoot should register as zero xG, when you would expect a goal pretty often in that situation.

He did have a chance though. He just didn't take it. So he underperformed the xG of that opening. My point is simply that, while I understand the idea of xG as a way of measuring how many chances a team creates and how efficient the team and the individuals in it are at converting chances into goals, and at restricting the opposition's chances to score, I really don't understand how a player's ineptitude reduces the xG of a situation to zero. The xG comes from the situation, not the player's ineptitude. Unless, of course, the people behind xG have a different formula according to who the chance falls to e.g.Haaland one on one 0.8, Sterling 0.0.

Anyway. To get back to how we blew the chance to beat City, win the FA cup and qualify for Europe... Came across this tweet just now, and am a bit confused. I might need Droy to explain things, but my understanding is that xG is determined from the likelihood of a goal being scored from a certain position. So a penalty is something like 0.9xG because about 90% of pens are converted. A one-on-one like the above must have an xG of a lot less than that but you'd still expect a fair proportion of such chances to be converted. So that opening would have added a certain amount to our xG that game (in which we had 1.27 to City's 0.85, apparently). So I fail to understand the wording of the above tweet. Jackson's ineptitude saw the chance come to nothing, meaning he (as usual) underperformed his xG. But what the hell do they mean when they claim he 'accumulated 0.00xG' from that opportunity? I know he didn't even get a shot in, but so what? Isn't the point of xG to measure the goals that should have been scored based on the chances created?

Maybe not garbage but by Prem standards very average. A hugely expensive mistake. A vanity signing.