-A-

Moving on, or back as it were

BUT ALWAYS TWIRLING, TWIRLING TOWARDS FREEDOM

Difficulty: Amateur.

Fuck off, how dare they.

I think all replays have 'Amateur,' even if you're playing offline on Legendary difficulty.

He's not. :/

Whilst I am disinclined to respond in a similar fashion to that which "Mr -1" has, I'm not entirely sure as to the purpose of this post, especially if it were an attempt to "troll".

If it indeed were an attempt to troll then you are clearly one of the worst, judging by skill, trolls in the history of... well, ever. :/

I thought the point was that ridiculous hyperbole is a pretty shitty way of arguing.

What a spanner Murray is being. Awful body language and he's not even running for makeable balls. Good thing that Harrison has the potential for a meltdown at any moment.

This game is already a good read.

Know when people say 'you don't need to know about the source to play my game'? They're liars!

Next level outcome-altering manoeuvre!

Oh shit, is this actually based on something real?

It's because in football we use a very specific definition of 'support.' If I watch a random match between two Eastern European teams I've never heard of I might decide to support one or the other for some stupid reason. If I hate a particular team then I'll literally be supporting everyone they play. When asked who I'd prefer to win the Premiership title, I probably have some kind of preference between the likely candidates. It's impossible to expect every football fan to like one club absolutely and hate every other club equally.

EDIT: Like, in my case I never grew up supporting any club and wasn't really even into football that much. Never lived with my dad and didn't have any male relatives that lived in London so I'd only been to about 4 football matches before I turned 15 (two at Stamford Bridge, one at Old Trafford, one at Upton Park.) I don't have a good reason to passionately support any of those teams to the exclusion of everyone else and it would seem a bit fake if I even pretended to.

Had the best experience at West Ham so I wanted them to do well. Used to live right next to Stamford Bridge so I still have a strong soft spot for them. Went to Old Trafford and thought the fans and players were all cunts, so now I really want them to lose

Damn that Ruki!

EDIT: Sorry, I thought you said 'every 20 minutes.'

More on that Henrique line - Sao Paulo have already signed Jadson from Shakhtar to replace him. It'll be a 18-month loan deal with the option to make it permanent in 2013.

My man in Brazil () tells me he's a primadonna and looked lazy and overall pretty poor when he was recently sent on loan. His good U20 performances haven't been remotely matched in his club football.

I liked that a couple of guys tried tap tackles after the receiver accelerated away. Nothing else you can do if you know you're slower than the guy you're chasing.

Who the fuck taught that Packers safety (I think he was a safety) to tackle? A sumo wrestler?

I've done that. I've walked for absolutely ages, gone into dungeons and back out again, used the carriage - everything I can think of. If it's a problem which seemingly crosses save game files then I assume it's pretty permanent.

EDIT: I've also tried continuining on and completing more of the Stormcloak missions to see if that's the problem, but after an hour of play which involved loads of pointless walking I gave up.

My save is seemingly bugged to hell. I completed one of the later Stormcloak missions and suddenly found that I couldn't fast-travel. Wherever I went on the map it said 'you cannot fast travel with enemies nearby.' Very irritating, but I had plenty of saves so I reverted until I found one where the problem was solved. Then I tried running through the questline again, only to encounter the same problem. I decided to just leave those missions until I start another character, no big deal. I went back to an even further back save (about 10 hours and 3 levels earlier) and started doing the Dark Brotherhood quests. Completed the first one, then started getting the same message again

I could probably go even further back to find a save I can continue with, but I hate feeling like I'm spending hours doing something I've done before. Just gonna start a new character and skip all the quests I've done already.

I am excited for this game!

Alan Pardew is genuinely a good manager (I'm a West Ham fan.) This isn't to say that he'd be great in the England job, but that's just a nightmare position for any manager.

That first season in the Premiership under his management and the FA Cup final the next year were probably my favourite time as a fan. We played great football and he'd built that team. I think the behind-the-scenes shenanigans after the Icelandic owners took over were too much for him to handle and that's understandable. If he's left to quietly build a team I think he's in his element. Of course, that's the exact opposite of what the England job entails

Anything that includes a picture of that horrific Eduardo injury loses all humour it had in my view.

Apologies, I picked a picture that didn't actually show the injury for this reason but obviously once you've seen it it's hard not to remember it.

What mongs commentators are sometimes. Wilkins obviously got it into his head that Cabaye was being a filthy diver despite the fact that he quickly got up from that tackle and then obviously realised he'd hurt himself seriously. Wilkins keeps repeating his mantra 'just get up and get on with the game, it's a foul and that's enough.' Yeah, Cabaye was trying to do exactly that when he noticed he was hurt.

Wilkins adamantly refused to believe he could be injured and even when the stretcher came on, didn't waver in his belief. Said 'Why is he going off on a stretcher, there's no sub warming up so they obviously believe he's getting back on the pitch?' Then even as he was getting carried down the tunnel, not a single bit of contrition from him. Just got inexplicably angry at Ben Arfa, the sub, saying 'I don't know why it takes these guys so long to get ready to get on the pitch. Get your shin pads on and get on there - your team needs you!'

What a twat. So easy to see criticise other people when you're simply too stupid to see what's going on. Easy to just make assumptions that reinforce your stereotypes and even when you're proven wrong you can then just ignore your error and find someone else to rip into with no justification. Bet it comes out that Cabaye's broken a metatarsal or something and we'll probably hear nothing from Wilkins about the matter.

I was answering your "why can't they weigh in an hour before the fight" question.

I asked that question genuinely because I wanted to know the answer, not because I was trying to suggest that there would be no effect.

I have a totally different view to you because I believe that 11 pounds in cut weight is much more significant than 11 pounds in normal weight.

Do you mean in terms of having a 'fair fight?' If so, I think that 11 pounds in normal weight is far, far more significant an advantage than 11 pounds of cut weight. In one situation the guy has all the severe negative effects of cutting, in the other he's simply a bigger guy.

Has anyone standing on the sidelines ever been hurt by a player flying off the field?

I already answered the weigh ins the day of. If you are dehydrated you have less fluid in your brain (it's also what gives you a hang over). Fighters would still cut weight and would then be at much greater risk of brain damage since there would be less fluid to slow the brain when it bashes against the skull.

The ultimate way to solve the weight cut issue is to create a ton of weight divisions. It's the only thing that will work. Fighters would cut less weight and would likely rehydrate back to the same weight as the person they are fighting.

I still think you are greatly underestimating the toll cutting weight takes.

I don't think I'm making the points you think I'm making. I've specifically said that I know there are serious effects of cutting weight. My belief is that it is not dangerous or unfair sportingly for one fighter to weight 15 pounds more than the other. It's not a big deal. I'm not encouraging weight cutting or underestimating its effect, I'm playing down the effects of a 10-15 pound weight difference between fighters.

If you were to ask fighters to fight at their walking weights you would need a lot more weight division to get over the 10 to 20 lbs of difference that would still exist, I know weight cutting has health issues, but at the end of the day there is no system that would produce better results in my opinion.

I wonder what would happen if they kept exactly the same weight divisions, but had weigh-ins an hour before the fight. You'd probably have to split up the heavweight division, but what would the effects be?

I think it really is a case of there being no perfect solution, much like the perceived judging problem in MMA, and dreaming up other solutions is all well and good, but there are still problems with the possible solutions that are produced.

Yeah, the major problem with judging is that it's still essentially just an opinion. They aren't representing fact and people are always going to have different impressions of what's important. Now judges are seemingly more and more open to giving 10-8 and 10-7 rounds, I don't think there's all that much that can be improved.

I definitely agree that the weight difference is more significant at lower levels, that's why the divisions get narrower and narrower and it's certainly right. I also understand that cutting has its own consequences. So in this position - if Rumble weighs more today, then he cut more and had proportional drawbacks to stamina (for example.) If he cut less, then the weight difference is smaller. An upper limit of 205 has been made for today, so the maximum weight difference is probably 15 pounds (and that's assuming Belfort only put on 5 pounds since yesterday.) I don't think that's dangerous.

Belfort made the weight for the MW division, so he could fight anyone between 171-185. So the commission doesn't believe it's safe for a guy in the MW division to fight a LHW.

Belfort weighs 185 yesterday. It's judged safe for him to fight a guy that's 171 but it's not safe for him to fight a guy who's 200? The divisions are just invisible lines. If a guy weighs in 5 pounds heavy, they almost always still fight. If a guy weighs in 5 pounds under the weight limit, that's accepted as a fair fight. A 171 pound guy who doesn't cut would be allowed to fight a 185 guy who does cut. That's permissable. I don't think a 15 pound difference is big enough to influence the skill of the participants. Bigger isn't always better.

The Swiss Ramble - Mostly about the financial side of football but really interesting in understanding how clubs like Wigan work and the (ridiculously exaggerated) nature of Man City's sponsorship deal. This is pretty much the only blog I read, though the columns are always pretty long and sometimes quite technical.