metalman

Surely they could have just replaced the exclamation mark with a y?

Wishlist for FM 19: 1. Design the stadium like in Fifa Soccer Manager 97 2. Choose all the sponsors boards 3. Receive all messages by fax 4. Place bets 5. Have Gary Lineker read cup draws 6. Rig matches 7. Choose where all the hot dog stands go 8. Choose the price of food and drink 9. Choose to float the club on the stock market 10. Go to meet agents in a restaurant when you try to sign players like in Premier Manager 2003 11. Eurosport News channel 12. Trading card mode 13.Get the Mafia to put hits on opposing players and managers (and maybe also journalists if they say something bad about you) 14. Retire from being manager and start a new career in politics or maybe open a bar or something. (Maybe have your previous career affect your political career so like if you were a great Liverpool manager you might do well in certain parts of Liverpool but really struggle for votes in Manchester.) (or, like you can manage a club and country at the same time, have an option to manage a club and be Prime Minister at same time - this would be really cool, like if you had a good homegrown team you could increase red tape on immigration so other teams will find it harder to get foreign players to be better than you.) 15. Get the license for the Guardian football podcast (or whatever) and use advanced AI to generate an entirely new podcast for every week of gameplay. 16. Start game in 1860 (to take in the split between rugby union and association football - maybe give you the option which course you want to take) with every team and player ever appearing at the actual date they appeared in real life. (I suppose they'd have to do this for rugby too and have all the players for rugby union and eventually rugby league. I don't like rugby and would never play this option but I like my games to be complete.) 17. New shades of tie

Nah, Simple Minds have got a bunch of really good songs. I wouldn’t mind seeing them.

I've mostly played guitar and bass, simply because it's far easier to join a band with one of them. I'm not a great guitarist though - I'm far more proficient at piano, trumpet and trombone. Quite tough to find a band looking for brass though. Unless it's a brass band, obvs. 😕 I actually originally learned organ, because my dad ticked the wrong box when intending to sign me up for piano lessons. I actually stuck with it for a few years - and really liked it. I was eventually hamstrung by my lack of an organ to practice on when things started becoming a bit more complex and specialised and moved to piano, but organ was cool. I'd have loved to have been able to continue with it.

Oh, all of them really. This is a wonderful question; possibly the best topic ever created on EWB. I will give you a little trophy thing for this. Anyway, if I had to pick it would probably be Sergeant Wilson. I used to think he was so cool. When I was younger I went through a whole "What would Sergeant Wilson do?" phase and I should probably have stuck to it. He's just chilled out; doesn't make a fuss.

Yes sorry for being silly. 😕 Anyway, I think the interesting thing about this is that, really, when you think about it, the overwhelming majority of singers or bands are only known to the overwhelming majority of people for one song. Obviously, this might not work on us because I imagine we have a higher tendency to be music nerds, but to most people Alice Cooper might be no more than the guy who sang School's Out, Shirley Bassey no more than the woman who sang Goldfinger, David Bowie no more than the guy who did the Laughing Gnome. Even those who have sold hundreds of millions of records might be reduced to a handful of songs. The Rolling Stones did Gimme Shelter and Jumping Jack Flash, maybe Tumbling Dice and Honky Tonk Woman, but what else? When Paul McCartney performs on a TV show they'll generally get him to trot out Hey Jude. Songs that were huge back in the day - Je veux tenir ta main, Band on the Run, even his career peak We All Stand Together are, to most people, forgotten. To some, even an artist as versatile as Stevie Wonder may be no more than the guy who sang Superstition. Mozart the chap who wrote Alla Turca.

That would be really cool if it was 2007 and Spotify didn't exist.

Oh fuck I completely forgot the World Cup has a 3rd place match. When I used to get these on football manager I’d go on holiday.

He’s the missing Wink(s)

I don’t think Modric said it was unfair for the English to be cocky. I don’t think he was suggesting that it was morally wrong for them to underestimate Croatia. I believe the point was that the cockiness got under the Croatians’ skin and inspired them to perform against England. Lovren himself may well be cocky, but one’s own cockiness doesn’t invalidate the possibility of being annoyed at another’s cockiness. We are all motivated and rewarded by different things. Perhaps the English team were insufficiently inspired by Lovren’s cockiness, or perhaps - not having the same knowledge or access to Croatian media that the English speaking Croatians have to British media - they were unaware of it. But I’m a Scottish Kilmarnock fan so you’re probably wasting your breath.

I'm also glad that this World Cup has made a lot of English people happy. It seems to me that there haven't been a lot of opportunities for English people to celebrate being English. In Scotland and Wales we have a parliament and a government: distinct institutions that are a big part of our identity and play a big role in what it means to be Scottish our Welsh. These provide a benign outlet for Scottish people to celebrate being Scottish and the ways in which we are different (though still mostly the same and still friends obvs) from the rest of the UK. England doesn't have that. And as such, expressions of English nationalism have taken quite a negative shape in the popular mindset: the English Defence League is an obvious example. And this is obviously unfair and frustrating for English people who want to celebrate their country, the vast majority of whom are wonderful people. They didn't have much of a competing narrative - and those that they did have were coopted as British, not English. And sometimes this frustration can boil over. Brexit was a roar into the void from many English voters, frustrated at the political consensus and at their powerlessness (much as the independence referendum almost was for Scotland). This is why I think England's World Cup run is more important than just being a sporting thing. It gave English people a positive outlet to celebrate being English. Not only that, it was done in the form of a young, diverse team that showed a different story of England from the one that Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg had been telling us. And a calm, grounded, everyman manager that did a wonderful job of contextualising the exact thing that I'm posting about. Culturally, this cup run could be more important for England than 1966. This is a crucial time. There's now a mainstream, positive narrative of Englishness that the progressive majority can seize upon. And that could be a very good thing. (Although the sooner you get your own parliament the better #takebackcontrol - but properly, obviously.)

There was a lot to like about this England team. Commiserations guys.

Tbf Scottish people still go on about Bannockburn 1314

"We're 2-0 down in the World Cup quarter-final. We need a solution, and we need it now." *John Guidetti starts warming up* Oh Sweden... 😕 (Mind you I thought the same with Nacer Chadli in Bel v Jpn)