The General Football Thread

It was on the Radio 4 news at 6 o'clock, and not in the sports section.

 

There you go.

 

Walter Zenga out after 87 days!! OK who is for the Wolves job? Brian McDermott would be a brilliant choice (I think our friends down the road should pursue him). Or how about Big Sam????? Of the others Nigel Pearson, Steve McClaren, Karl Robinson, Nigel Adkins!!!! Anyone else??? Ed Miliband???

 

Karl Robinson or Nigel would certainly be good.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/37760114

A survey was done of football fans about their attitude to gay footballers. 8% said they would stop watching their team. Do these people actually think there aren't any gay footballers? Would they stop going to work if a colleague was gay? Have to say that I agree with what Chris Sutton says in the article about being "dictated to by 8% of cavemen". I really don't care about anyone's sexuality (as long as it's consensual) and it's a real shame that some people still want to make a big deal out of this. If the media just said 'so what' maybe people would be more open about it but instead the media would make big headlines out of it. The survey shows the majority really don't care. Whether someone is gay really shouldn't be an issue in this day and age. It's a shame they feel they have to hide it instead of just enjoying themselves like their heterosexual team mates.

 

Glad to see it is as low as 8% to be honest, but the problem is how noisy that 8% could be. If ManU and Liverpool can chant happily about people dying in the Munich air crash and at Hillsborough, you can see what fans could be like. However, we made racist chanting unacceptable, so could do the same with gay chants. However, sexuality is private...you should be able to be open about it, but also you should be able to be quiet about it as well. I'm sure it isn't secret within the changing room....but most players obviously just want to get on with playing. Have to say well done to the press...they could easily have 'outed' players over the years, but have never sunk that low...have left the choice to individual players. Be a good day when everyone can be happy with who they are without fearing abuse.

 

They wouldn't be noisy because they have said they won't come to matches anymore. I would hope the 82% could drown out the stupid few from opposition teams fans

 

Marco Silva alledgedly. Was he the guy we were briefly linked with before we appointed Puel? Or am I thinking of someone else?

I'd be very surprised to see Adkins get another job at Championship level, think he will need to go to League One and rebuild some of his reputation there, our recent success has shown him up a bit and I think people are realising that he wasn't as great as many made out at the time and it is more the way the club is run that is key to our success rather than the manager.

 

Have you been taking Beddytare's maths lessons again?

 

No I'm referring to the 82% who said they didn't care.

 

Ah, OK. I didn't actually read the article as it would have made me too angry!

 

A whole team diving at once?

http://abload.de/img/pullf2rjs.gif

 

My other footballing hero growing up (Le Tiss being the other) Kevin McHugh will get his send off in Finn Harps last game of the season tonight against Bohemians. You probably read the story about him losing his finger a couple of weeks ago. It's been a successful season for us as our safety was guaranteed last week in our first year back in the Premier League! Thanks for the memories Kev

 

Looks like Rickie's injury isn't as severe as feared; he's up and walking:

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/cardiff-city-star-rickie-lambert-12091183

Vin

 

Good to hear.

Love that man.

 

A statistician turned up on more or less to talk about gay footballers. Here's his piece, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20801504 My favourite sentence is in red.



"We are just reaching the 20th anniversary of the last time an openly gay football player played in England's the top four divisions - Justin Fashanu at Torquay United.

I wanted to work out what the chances were that no league footballer in that time has been gay, whether openly so or not, assuming that there was no reason for the proportion of gay footballers to differ from the proportion of gay people in society as a whole.

Many surveys have tried to decide what proportion of British men are gay. Answers have ranged wildly from 1.5% to 6% so I took the lowest figure of 1.5%.

In those 20 years, 13,600 players have appeared in the league. The chance of picking 13,600 men randomly from the whole population and none of those being gay is one chance in five times 10 to the power of 90. That's one in five with 90 noughts. To make a slightly more understandable number, I then looked at Premier League players of which there have been 3,200 in the past 20 years.

The chances of there being no gay footballer among those is 1 in 10 to the power of 21, which is one and 21 noughts. To illustrate how unlikely that is - if the entire earth's surface was covered with drawing pins edge to edge, the chance of you picking up one specific drawing pin at random would be 200 times higher than the chance there being no gay player in the Premier League over the past 20 years.

No doubt there have been many gay players in the Premier League, but perhaps not as many as proportionally as in the country as overall - we don't really know."


Vin

 

Excellent news!

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/37834104

Who says that Germans don't have a sense of humour. After being called A German Team on a pub sign advertising their match v Celtic, scarves calling Borussia M (?) the same thing are selling out.