bluebruce

Anybody know how long his contract is? I haven't seen it anywhere. I wouldn't want another 1-year appointment like last time, I think it's the kind of role you need to bed in and do your thing for a while.

I haven't seen the player whatsoever, and I doubt many on here have. But I'd have to say 16 goals in Serie A probably trumps 22 in the Championship.

The remaining length of contract does weaken our hand though. Especially with foreign clubs lurking who could pre-sign him for free in Jan. If he had 2+ years left his market value for his profile would probably be about 20-25 million. With a year left, 15 is probably about right unless there's a bidding war. Come January we won't be getting more than about 10 at best.

Oh look, the 900th rumour about West Ham wanting BBD... 😴

No need to apologise, this thread is huge.

Nope, it was being spoken about on here before then. Originated from the Blackpool side.

Ok, thanks for confirming it was just because you were being pedantic. We talk about the club as 'we' all the time on here. We need players. We should have fired Mowbray sooner. We got promoted from League One. None of those are the fans, we vicariously experience them or want them for the club. You knew what I meant, and you knew I didn't believe I was wiring Pears 3k a week.

And a competent CEO should have been the one saying 'No Tony, that will put an excessive financial burden on the club for players who will have no market value soon.'

(Not to mention, in a roundabout way we do pay them, as we put money into the club...same as taxpayers pay politicians in a roundabout way)

Cool. Good thing too, I can't afford it. Were you just being pedantic, when you know that by 'we' I mean the club I'm a fan of, or did you have an actual counterpoint there?

Not gonna lie, I really want us to sign Styles...that's usually when it doesn't happen!

I'd be OK if I only had to sit on the bench. We don't pay these pro footballers thousands a week to sit on the bench, we pay them to be up to the task when called upon. Pears isn't.

Didn't say otherwise, just that a WB has less defensive responsibility in a 3/5 than in a 4.

He will be exposed less not more, if it's wingbacks in a back 5, which it likely would be as wingbacks in a 4 is too cavalier. That's the whole point of the 3 CBs, to compensate for the fact the wingbacks are fully expected to spend more time further up the pitch. The WBs defensive attributes become less important and we would mostly judge him on his attacking output, whereas a fullback I'll mostly judge on their defensive contributions. Both still matter for both roles, but the balance shifts.

Him being a young player with minimal appearances doesn't mean he's on a par with Vale.

True but also may be a sign our move isn't either.

He definitely doesn't write well. I was writing better than that by the end of Primary School. The articles are littered with grammatical and other errors that rile me no end. The editor should take some flak for that too though. If you mean his footballing opinions, I think they have merit from time to time and he occasionally writes interesting stuff. I think he is keen and has a good work rate, but his writing is technically shoddy and his sources appear to be highly limited most of the time. Unless he hears loads he doesn't report because the club don't want him to and he's just too soft to be a real journalist about it.

One of his teammates is here now, might help. Hope they get along...

Nobody should ever bother asking Mowbray what position a player plays.

It was also him that scored the winner in the reverse fixture, wasn't it?

True, but City are a bit prone to not caring as much as other clubs what fee they get when a player they don't mind losing wants out.

Definite difference of opinion there...

I'd take that. Lower chunk to Forest too if we are clever about it.

Think I can discuss this a bit without really going onto religion. The structure of things is astonishing and beautiful, and does give me pause for thought at times. However there are experiments that demonstrate how order can arise from chaos, in fact it becomes inevitable after enough time. Richard Dawkins wrote about it in one of his books. As for love and hate, we can't measure them (currently anyway 😛 ) mostly because in the strictest sense, we made them up. We define them ourselves, they're not really a scientific quantity. In a slightly broader sense, they do exist, as we define them, but they are the result of incredibly complex biological interactions, which would likely be calculable if we had sufficiently sophisticated technology and understanding. But taking our current level, just because something can't be measured doesn't mean it's not real, and doesn't mean it can't be explained rationally without the need for...let's call it a supernatural explanation. Love, hate, all other emotions, evolved along with us and our complex brains. They serve survival purposes. Love helps breed unity in communities and just, ya know, breeding and child-rearing, and hate helps us crush our enemies. Both very important as humanity started to rise. I think it's our modern world, so different to the world we inhabited during most of our evolution, that sometimes doesn't mesh with these emotions very well.

Calculating whether complex alien life should or shouldn't exist generally uses something called the Drake Equation. It depends on things like how many stars there are, how many planets are around an average star, how many of those planets could support the conditions for life, how likely life is to emerge when the potential conditions are there, how likely it is to evolve into complex life, and if we're talking about contact with aliens, how likely complex life is to become intelligent life and survive long enough to develop interstellar travel. We know very little about...pretty much all of those. We don't even have an exact count of stars in the Milky Way, and are probably a long way from even that. But the more we know the more we can narrow it down, and we are finding many stars have planets in large numbers, we're not a freak in that sense. Anyway Bazza your two scientists seem to differ from the majority of the scientific community who care about this. Most conclude it's inevitable there is life, and a large study a few years back determined there were likely to be something like 50-60 alien civilisations in the Milky Way at a given time. Most think other life exists in our galaxy, and it existing in one of the other potentially trillions of galaxies becomes almost inevitable with most data you could input to the Drake Equation. You can actually have a play with the Drake Equation yourself, here is one version but you can find others with different factors to input: https://foothillastrosims.github.io/Drake-equation/ Remember on this one you're putting the percentage that applies to the factor above, so when you pick a percent for 'Fraction with habitable planets', you've already eliminated the stars that have no planets in the one above, so it's the percent of stars with a habitable planet from amongst the stars that have any planets at all, rather than the percent of stars that have habitable planets altogether. Hope that makes sense...so on mine just now I decided half the stars which can support life have at least one planet, then decided 1% of THOSE have a planet which is habitable. I just entered: 250 billion stars (the default on this, and a feasible number), 50%, 50%, 3%, 20%, 10%, 2%, 0.1%. Quite small percentages, and I got 'there are 750 high-tech civilisations in our galaxy right now'. Although I'm probably being very generous with that last figure (what percent are still around) due to the massive age of the Milky Way, and probably under-estimating my first percent (how many stars have planets). The question of 'Why, if advanced alien life exists in our galaxy, we haven't met it' is called the Fermi Paradox, and has a ton of valid explanations, of which I reckon a bunch are genuine factors. We probably wouldn't ever meet life from another galaxy btw, as apart from our own satellite galaxies, they're VERY VERY far off. Even Star Trek technology (many times the speed of light) wouldn't be good enough.