Pace, movement and prepared to release the ball. Simple game.

first time I have seen England play a really good game. Quick and decisive. More often than not england have resorted to playing backwards and sideways. Players losing the ball, tapping the ball back and forth with no intent. One of my biggest gripes is the passing back and forth around our own penalty area and as a result ending up in trouble. England against Croatia today was a totally different side, although they did have one or two close calls when again the backs decided to pass back and forth on the edge of the area croatia could easily have punished us. Aside from those odd issues england were top notch. Croatia have good players but were made to look like amateurs. The early press and goal put Croatia on the back foot and instead of sitting back England continued to apply pressure and a good result was achieved. Let’s hope that level of performance is seen in future games.pickford did well when called upon and being there seemed to give more confidence to the rest of the team

What is a “nested “ reply? It’s bollox like this that frustrates the life out of people, speak English FFS

6-0 now, and Jimmy Garner on

The score line so far tells you everything. This is a very good English side against a very poor Croatia. Tuchel is very lucky to have such a talented pool of Englishmen to choose from. Hopefully one day they will be able to beat the likes of Spain and France in competitions like this.

John (in reply to me below), this is some of the best football I have ever seen England play. Gordon, Bellingham. Saka and Kane… very strong front line. It’s like they’re playing 4-2-4. Each of them has scored: H. Kane (8′) Goal 8 minutes J. Bellingham (21′) Goal 21 minutes A. Gordon (39′) Goal 39 minutes B. Saka (45′) Goal 45 minutes

Great finish Michael. Top player. Do England always play so high under Tuchel? I don’t watch them much tbh

Eric M. Likes and replies?

Such a good strike by Kane. Smashed high into the roof of the net in a situation where most players try to place it around the keeper… and usually fail. Wheeas Gordon has already had two chances, delivered both low down and too close to the keeper.

To David West’s observation below, if you sort by newest, outstanding presentation and breakdown of the issues, Michael. Unfortunately, as Mike points out, the format is undermining your good work here. Carry on, maaan.

We may have to collectively choose to not use certain functions in order to preserve what we can of our previous arrangement.

Without getting ugly about it, we are ultimately talking about ‘spend limits’ for the owners. Talk of salary caps is a rhetorical trick.

I cant reply to your post Tony,no option underneath to reply. He was pulled through because he is the best option to lead the Labour Party to victory in the next election. A very popular man who I think will bring the young people back into politics. Each to thier own mate

Possibly because a hell of a lot of probing or chance creating passes are not played directly into the box so you need a separate measure unless you want to ignore / exclude a significant portion of positive attacking play. I realised that you were working with whole circles rather than the semi circles that should be imagined Eric, which is why I made the point that a radius, by definition, is applied in an arc from a fixed point. So you get two quarter circles from the goalposts and just box in the area in between them to get the area of the pitch they are using for that particular stat. Considering you have to avoid massed defenders and offsides to make a successful pass that, in my opinion, makes it a significant stat for one of our players leading the league in.

Time will tell John, but just the way he was pulled through to become The Prime Minister, when he wasn’t even an active MP, tells me that a lot of influential men, are backing him. He’s got a difficult job, can’t do right for doing wrong, but like you can see he’s definitely not my cup of tea

And it would be nice to have a bigger box to type in, especially when you’re replying.

How is the ‘Best’ post decided on? I thought it would be the one with most likes but that isn’t the case.

Being able to copy and paste text would be useful to reply in the main text Michael. So the context can be maintained. Unfortunately it only seems to work in my own comment box. Oh, hang on, it’s working in other comments now!! Still can’t copy urls though.

There you go then Michael, ‘in the box’ as I said!

I thought he was a good teacher Dave, lessons were enjoyable even when you got a smack around the back of the head or the board duster to the forehead. A mate of mine had nightmares about him for years though. He did seem very old, probably past retirement age and a couple of the other teachers were taught by him when they were kids there. Breslin was one if that name means anything to you?

Impressive turn of foot. Text book finish across the keeper. Nice goal

Nah, 40 points for 5 years, that way they won’t qualify for Europe and may well get relegated, points loss is frozen if relegated, then kicks in again if promoted to PL, players leave and others won’t sign, proper long term punishment. 21 points each season could still get the in Champions league, given they regularly hit 80+

That Keane and Tarkowski combination in defence – deadly.

Grealish playing through the middle – who knew?

Welcome back Brendan. A short,self imposed, sabbatical from your good self there

There are undoubtedly bent politicians Tony. You only have to look at the videos of Farage doing the illegal sponsoring deal recently. The “ordinary man of the people who takes every opportunity to be photo shot with a pint of bitter and a woodbine, was filmed eating oysters, washed down with champagne. The likes of him will definitely colour people’s opinion. What form of corruption do you think Andy is involved in mate? Money changing hands?

I can’t reply to your other question John, because it doesn’t say reply, underneath, but I was personally okay with Andy Burnham’s words because I have been saying that I believe every single politician, has been corrupted by the money men, and that’s why I thought he let his guard down. The Manchester City, owners have obviously done a great deal for the city of Manchester, and Mr Burnham, just replied a little bit to honestly, imo John. Nothing about the thousands of people who buy tickets every week to watch a competition that has been getting won by alleged cheating, just a statement using the words, “I hope they don’t leave”. Burnham, did well for the hillsborough victims and i respect him for that, but I no longer respect Politicians, because my own views are that they have all been bought by someone, unfortunately.

It was just a practice game, it would be interesting to see what sort of squad played for Blackburn, nice to see Nsangou score that goal though and Jack escaping from the touchline, hopefully he can do it in a real game now and again.

Appreciate a friendly, but no one will be surprised by a central defence collapse of those 2 when together.

21 points a season over 10 years – equal to the initial deduction we were given. I posted a longer rant about this on another thread but the above would be the same penalty we got.

Tarkowski has a tendency to drop-off over a season – he’s good to begin with but fades later on when he plays every game. I would keep and play O’Brien at times to give Tark a break. Especially later in the season.

We need to sue the shit out of City, ala Burnley. If we’d made Europe those seasons, the extra revenue would have meant we didn’t breach PSR, didn’t get points deducted and didn’t get sued by Burnley which cost us £30m. I would argue it was a direct consequence of City cheating that affected Everton. Let’s not forget, we complied with the process and breached PSR through no foul-play and no fault of our own, whereas City have consistently cheated over a 10 year period and hidden it. We got an initial 12 point deduction for 2 breaches of PSR – my understanding is City have 35 breaches of PSR = 210 points by the same metric. Ideally this would (in my view) be applied over say 10 seasons (given this is how long they cheated for), so a 21 point deduction every year for 10 years which would see them battling relegation every year. A punishment to fit the crime.

I think “2 Viewing” is just the number looking at this thread, John. You and me!!! Haha. Happily, there’s a lot more looking at the football related stuff. I doubt that going back to the old system is even an option, to be honest. I can’t be sure but I suspect it was all built by Lyndon himself, and thus a pain for anyone else to maintain or modify. This way, we are supposedly using a dedicated software application to meet a specific need… but as seems the case, it’s just not what we’re used to, and it refuses so far to be modified to meet *our* needs. I think both Harry and I are as annoyed and frustrated by this as any of you, but we are at least talking to the people at Arena to see if we can get changes implemented. It really shouldn’t need to be this hard. Perhaps the price you pay for not having to navigate the utter shite that algorithms decide to jam into any thread I try and read on X or Facebook.

Also, Brian, the Comments count shown above includes *all* the replies — which are of course hidden unless you click on each ‘Show x more replies’. Now the feed we used to create the Recent Reader Comments pages also does not differentiate between a Comment and a Reply; they are all Comments (as per the count) which is a real pain when it comes to trying to find a specific Comment that is in fact a hidden reply somewhere on the thread. I’ve asked them to (a) increase the number of comments showing by default; (b) Include a ‘Show all Comments’ button; and (c) Include a “Show all Comments and Replies” button. Showing just 6 comments initially is simply ridiculous and extremely annoying.

Hi Brian, some great questions. Firstly. the Recent Comments is, sad to report, not perfect. It should be good when you open it up, but a few of the most recent posts may not have made it on there yet. And then, while you’re off browsing through the comments on the threads that appeal to you, it would be oh so nice if the page updated itself in real time. Simples? …. But it doesn’t. If you manually refresh it, that might show a few more that have been posted… but it might not be absolutely all of them. Seems that there will always be a discrepancy between the comments actually on each thread and the ones showing on the Recent Reader Comments page. My advice: whenever you go back to Recent Reader Comments, refresh the page. This should help. Second, and no-one seems to have spotted this: the timestamp on the each comment is wrong: 1 hour out! So showing GMT rather than BST! I would be tearing my haiir out at this point, if I had any…

Brian H. Only comments made using the comment box appear on the main thread. You can however also respond using the Reply option at the bottom of each posted comment but these comments don’t appear on the main thread and can only be accessed using the Show Reply option which then becomes available.

I guess that would be too simple and old-school, Eric: “in the box”, which is 18 x 44 yards (somewhat less in meters). That got me thinking… Back to this “20-m radius” — so that extends out to 20 m in front of goal; let’s call that the top of the dee. And 20 m away from each post along the goaline, or ~47 m measured along the goalline, including the goalmouth itself. So a bit wider than the penalty area. Now the corner of the penalty area forms an 18-yard isosceles triangle (not many people know that!), 18 yards along the goal line from the post. Bit more maths A-Level required here… my old mate Pythagoras: he says “Take the square root of 18² + 18²”, errr…. which gives us a distance of about 25½ yards from each goalpost, at an angle of exactly 45° incidentally. Ergo, your “deep completion” zone is really very similar to the penalty area — just a little bit bigger and a funny shape. Thank You, Calday Grange Grammar School!!

How come I cant see all of the 43 comments listed against this post. Am I doing something wrong.

Guys nice to see you have restored recent comments but how come I can only see 12 of the 43 comments and none of the last ones on recent comments.

Yeah, it has to be very discouraging for the lad, but sooner or later some manager will believe in him and deploy him to great effect. I just fear it won’t be any Everton manager.

Really? He must have been well past retiring age by then or maybe he just looked old when he was younger— nevertheless he was a very likeable character when he taught me and I enjoyed his lessons especially the laughs during them!

I have to disagree Tony. Hes a good man and dedicated politician. If EVERY politician is bent we may as well close the country. His dedication to the Hillsborough campaign saw the changes the grieving families needed to progress . What words of his did you not like mate

That £28M was spent on an injury prone past his best Yerry Mina not a new one!

us and Andy wanting to rejoin the EU. We will then have far more German and French electric ones. And don’t you just hate the maximum number of characters on the new system. Only happened since he became PM. So that is one worse thing under his watch. And if you don’t see that as tongue in cheek, then you need a humour implant.

Are you old enough to remember British Rail?? Dirty and late and awful customer service. £500m subsidies from government (£3,3bn today) for 800m passengers compared to 1830m today. Negatives now is overcrowding because there numbers have grown over the years and lack of joined up fares. Blue Flag beaches came in 1987 and we had 12 Blue Flag beaches. Water Privatised in 1989 and we now have 81. Sewage was worse under public ownership. Bit of rose tinted nostalgia from our Blue Andy. Problem was the desire of people in this country for a quick buck. We all bought shares in BT, Electricity, Water, Gas, BA and when there was a profit to be made we sold the shares and spent it. Then the companies sold out to foreign companies for another quick buck. Same with everything – we have no loyalty to our home made stuff but will always buy the cheapest so that is why China now earns so much from us. Check how many electric cars in France and Germany come from China (as a percentage) compared to

Re the bottom line of your post was helpful but still tedious going to and fro and you have to use use that code every time you want that information—technology should be faster than that!

I’m just reading that apparently, “the Welsh international has struggled to match the expectations he arrived with. “He’s featured in all five of the Toffees’ league games so far this term, only three of which were starts, with his stats showcasing his struggles within attacking areas. “Johnson has failed to register a single goal or assist during such a period — even failing to direct any of his four shots on target so far this campaign. “His lack of aggression and desire to get past an opponent has also been called into question, which has only seen him complete 0.3 of the dribbles he’s attempted this term. “Such a record has seen him rank in the bottom 15% of all attackers in the Premier League, subsequently demonstrating the tricky start he’s endured to life on Merseyside.” Hard to argue with much of that.

I don’t know enough about him John, but my guess would be yes, he his probably corrupt, basing it on my overall view of politics and politicians in general mate. For the good of the nation hopefully he proves me wrong, but getting back to the football, it’s an emotional game and regarding Manchester City, Mr Burnham, chose his words wrong imo.

Same here Mike, its tough coming into the PL first season but its obvious hes put the work in over the summer and he looks like hes coming to terms with leading the line, his hold up play has improved no end

This is blatant corruption, where does it end,Fight back Everton, we are a top four club ( historically) yes at present but with the right owners preferably ones with great intelligence, Everton can claw there way back to that top table we have always sat, I always felt they were leaving it late to do this but do it NOW Everton 💙