Pass me the sick bucket.

I raise you Martin Samuelsen 😜

Think we were meant to be at home on a Friday night v Leeds in April 2020, but then lockdown came along. But even that's over three years ago.

Were they? As expected with his cup record, I thought Inzaghi got his tactics spot on for a huge one-off game against City. Have you ever seen City have so few sights of goal? Haven’t seen many teams press City so high like Inter did in the first half in particular either. So yep I think Inter played it perfectly and had the game’s best chances, but you still need that little bit of luck/to take those chances to beat City.

00:25. How good is that from David Batty.

Beating them in the replay with McCarthy's late stunner after Fabregas had thrown his toys out the pram after the first game was immensely satisfying. Great times.

Love how that gets said whenever a foreign club or their fans do something 😆 nothing has ever happened to suggest that'd be the case. Mourinho's English teams were of course known for their sportsmanship and good treatment of referees. Anders Frisk 2005, Tom Henning Ovrebo 2009 (Mourinho was no longer there then but Chelsea again) - both very similar.

He was definitely tempted by Italy. In his 94/95 season diary (available to buy for a few quid online if anyone's interested) he mentions wanting to learn Italian a few times. In fact, from memory, one of the final things he writes is "Now for those Italian lessons" or something similar. Whether any foreign teams actually came in for him a year later in 96 I'm not sure.

Southampton 😜

If you only listen to what Sky Sports and TalkSport are telling you then you'll believe that no other leagues are good. Give Serie A a go Chadster, it can be pretty chaotic but the atmosphere and fans are great and it's currently the best/most interesting it's been in a long time. Great managers too, e.g. you'd have known about De Zerbi years ago instead of months ago. Back to the Championship, would rather Luton win the final I think.

Is he? You can't say Tony Mowbray's a decent manager but Rodgers is a shit one! His last few months at Liverpool and Leicester aside, he's got a good record. Question mark over his teams form at the end of seasons (Liverpool when they almost won it, Leicester twice dropping to 5th from comfortable CL positions late on) but I'm sure he'll rightly get another PL job no problem.

We'll no longer be the only PL champions to go on to be relegated if Leicester do go down.

Great player for us. Those two goals against Boro and then v Portsmouth were superb. Ah, that Spurs away game though. We were excellent that day. If we'd have got the win we deserved from that then who knows what could have happened that season.

Or his lack of technical ability will stand out like a sore thumb in a team and league where everyone's touch and technical level will be high. Despite his time here looking like it won't end well, I do wish him all the best - but I'd be surprised if he was a big success there.

He 'just gets it'.

Tony Parkes and Bobby Robson at the end, love that.

I thought he looked alright in the couple of League Cup games I saw him play in, and he was actually one of the better players v Forest. But there must be a reason that he'll be 22 at the start of next season and has barely kicked a ball in senior football.

You must have missed the Reading home win out - it's five points from six games/18 points since then (not that that's anything to shout about, of course).

The Sheff Utd home game at the start of last month felt like one at the time. But our form has been so poor since then that it definitely can't be classed as season defining now.

And he couldn't hang on to either of them.

He was like that in the Forest cup game too just before Christmas, which I'm guessing was his last senior start if his last league one was start of November. He looked like he'd rather be anywhere else. It's a shame as, if somebody had said at the end of August after the Stoke and Blackpool games that he'd go months without playing this season, you'd have been very surprised. I only saw the highlights from the Blackpool game but he was superb against Stoke when he came on - and was even playing well after that too, e.g. goal v Birmingham and lovely assist at Hull in October. Hopefully he'll get there eventually.

The current crop of players (not necessarily the team that played last night) are better than the period I mentioned, which does cover the failure to qualify for the 2018 World Cup under a manager that should never have been near the job (it'd be like England appointing somebody like Steve Bruce at his age now). Things are never as bad as they seem - that failure to qualify for the 2018 WC preceded something which would have seemed impossible at the time, a world record unbeaten run (not just the seven games in the tournament) where they deservedly won the Euros. You say England's failure but that's only the final. Italy had sailed through the group before knocking out the likes of Belgium and Spain. They were deserved winners of the tournament. Yes England won last night, deservedly so after the first half showing. But they've played each other four times in the last couple of years. Both teams have won one (by one goal) and the other two have been draws. Two played in England, two in Italy. "That's how low Italian football has sunk" is OTT. The domestic leagues are often separate issues, e.g. England's last failure to qualify for a tournament coming in the middle of the Premier League's last peak before now of 2005-2009. The decline of Serie A years ago from possibly the strongest domestic league there's ever been was indeed for the reasons you've given. But it's worked its way back up well enough to the point where it's very competitive at the top (Napoli are about to make it four different winners in the last four seasons), attendances are finally booming and no country has more representatives in the quarter finals of the three European competitions this season. That's all without having gulf or state-owned clubs and bottom half teams that can spend £30m on a player without anyone batting an eyelid.

The current Italy pool of players is better than around 2015-2017, which was masked a bit by an excellent defence and Conte squeezing every last drop out of what was overall a limited group at Euro 2016. Obviously it's not a patch on the team stacked with legends of 20 odd years ago, but that's the case for a lot of countries. That Italy team would be the best national team in the world if it were playing now. They did have a few injuries for last night, players that would surely have started (Bastoni, Chiesa, possibly Raspadori). Despite that Mancini got the starting eleven wrong IMO - and is possibly running out of credit after the Euros win. Picking a 35 and 32 year old to start at CB, none of which are even experienced internationally, is pointless when you've been talking about a rebuild. You may as well still pick Bonucci. It'll be Bastoni and probably a promising youngster called Scalvini there going forward, but there were still other options for last night. Tonali should be ahead of Jorginho now as part of the midfield. Pellegrini is out of form, though nice little through ball for the goal, whereas Gnonto is always a handful.

I had a look on there yesterday. Two of the first posts I saw suggested putting 'a screen up in Preston' and taking 7k there to watch the game instead (I've no idea either....) and the other mentioned putting a big screen up in a car park somewhere. Strange bunch to say the least.

Ten years ago today.