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Pandemona
Charlie Sheens House51324 Posts
On January 10 2022 05:05 Jockmcplop wrote:Show nested quote +On January 10 2022 04:46 Pandemona wrote: Kidderminister Harriers a local club near me has been rewarded with a home tie vs West Ham! They play in tier 6 of professional football! I've been to Harriers' ground a few times when I was younger. I used to kick around with Nuneaton Borough back in the day and was their mascot a few times. I think they played Kidderminster a number of times back then in the 90s. From what I remember their ground was little more than a garden shed and a field at the time lol. Wow nice! Yeah im from Worcester and we used to be in Conference North alongside Kiddie (they have been as high as conference) and nuneaton borough have been in the conference north forever it feels like too i remember them coming to worcester.
Their ground pretty good now, they serve cracking pies too got awards for them iirc.
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51134 Posts
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Saw it and was fuming. Don't know what's happening with him, but he needs to take a rest and sort himself mentally. Not just for the club's sake, but for his own primarily.
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the guy needs to stop with the humanitarian bullshit and focus on doing his goddamn job. he gets paid to score goals, not engage in politics.
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Norway28261 Posts
Those two aren't in conflict with each other. There's absolutely no reason why a football player can't spend a few hours per week doing stuff that is actually useful to other people rather than playing fifa.
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you really think he only spends a few hours a week on the other things? i think its far more likely that he spends a considerable amount of time thinking about or actively participating in his charitable activities; time he could instead be investing in himself to make sure hes always in top condition for the club that gives him the platform to even do humanitarian work to begin with. now if he was performing just as well on the pitch then it wouldnt be a problem, but if youre as out of form as he is then its time to shift focus. his responsibility to his employer trumps his voluntary activities no matter how good the deed is. if he wants to prioritise charitable work over his football performance, his alternative is to simply stop being a footballer at a club that demands a standard of performance he currently doesnt seem to be able to maintain.
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I believe the decision if he pays enough attention to his contract duties is up to his employer... Which may also have better insight into those matters, but I guess this is not needed these days to come to any kind of judgment.
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That's a lot of assumptions based on zero information. You're assuming his lack of form is due to curricular activities. Maybe his voluntary work gives him that extra motivation to perform on the pitch and it might be that there's other factors that are numbing his performance.
There are always lots of players who play injured for months. I could make an assumption that Rashford is injured, yet still on the pitch with painkiller meds and that's why he doesn't perform up to his former standard. Might be that he's just young and insecure about his performance so he chokes. Might be something in his personal life happened that influences his performance. Kid is just 24 years old. I know that's not 'young' in the footballing world, but most people start actually maturing around the age of 30. I'm not a Rashford fan or anything, it just stings me that people like Rashford (or Messi for that matter) are always expected to be robots and perform to a usual standard. They're people and they go through certain processes. We have no idea what the reason is for his lack of form. Mind you I haven't watched lots of football in the past couple of years (raising two kids does that to you I guess) so I have no idea how good Rashford is.
The football world needs less opportunistic sentiments, not more. Football journalism is terrible for this reason alone.
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Norway28261 Posts
I'd be shocked, and impressed (also understanding the criticism), if rashford spent more time on his charities and voluntary work than your average comparable player spends on leisurely activities. Really doubt it though, way more likely that he delegates work and uses his name and recognition power while making some appearances.
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Meanwhile, Liverpool seems to had lots of fake positive covid tests so they could have postponed the game against Arsenal. Might get a hefty fine if this is some sort of manipulation.
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Northern Ireland20726 Posts
Rashford’s not at his best but so much of the United side is not performing to their best I find it hard to pin it on his extra curriculars. He doesn’t look sharp, but wasn’t he playing through injury at the end of last season?
Rashford strikes me as a very good player who’s been playing as one of the main men from too young an age and for too much.
It could be he’s mentally not quite on it due to his other stuff, but that’s hard to prove. In terms of time invested or any physical exertion there shouldn’t be any issue there.
He has issues he finds and cares about, and has the money to set up organisations to delegate a lot of the work, while being a public face where it’s required. Same as Lingard wasn’t personally assembling clothes for his business back in the day.
There’s also the matter that a lot of footballers do a lot of charitable work, or have business interests we just don’t hear about it enough, so Rashford appears more of an outlier than he actually is.
In an average week I’m pretty certain Ronaldo is doing more things that aren’t football than almost any other player, but he’s able to juggle it fine.
Or you have a player like Ben White at Arsenal who said in an interview recently outside of training/playing he doesn’t really watch football or have anything to do with it. He’s probably only notable in actually saying this. You don’t have to have it as your life’s focus to keep up a decent level on the pitch.
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On January 12 2022 00:26 gTank wrote: Meanwhile, Liverpool seems to had lots of fake positive covid tests so they could have postponed the game against Arsenal. Might get a hefty fine if this is some sort of manipulation.
Would that not be the fault of whatever group was performing the tests?
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On January 12 2022 00:45 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:Show nested quote +On January 12 2022 00:26 gTank wrote: Meanwhile, Liverpool seems to had lots of fake positive covid tests so they could have postponed the game against Arsenal. Might get a hefty fine if this is some sort of manipulation. Would that not be the fault of whatever group was performing the tests?
They are investigating if its just faulty tests or fakes to make it seem like they cant play because of too many covid positive players. Also they check if Liverpool knew that they are false-positives before the game got postponed.
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the reason im singling out rashford and his humanitarian work is because firstly, it was on topic in this thread and secondly because its an easy example of how footballers have too many distractions. if rashford were an average player, or even the average person, i would never demand that they stop engaging in curricular activities. however the reality is players like rashford are paid millions of dollars to compete against the best because he is one of them. we're talking about the absolute elite of elite in a competition against each other. you dont reach that level, nor maintain it, without having an obsession for football. nowadays the most common criticism of any team or individual performance isnt quality, its work ethic. a blatant lack of desire, hunger, aggression or even desperation, to succeed as a footballer. the clip above is just one example of that.
im not suggesting that rashford is the only culprit either and im not suggesting that his curricular work is the sole factor in his poor performances. also im pretty confident that he doesnt have any injuries since he took the start of the season off to have surgery and honestly player injuries are pretty well documented. however i dont think at all that players such as rashford should get a free pass by blaming poor team performance or any other hidden problem that may exist within the club's infrastructure. if there's any problem in the team, he is part of that problem. and if we take man utd for example, its been clear for a long time that the players are indeed the problem and the players should start looking to themselves to fix it.
compared to older generations that probably grew up in relative poverty and a lack of technological development, the current generation has the benefit of having so many things to enjoy that football is no longer their entire life. i dont think its a coincidence at all that we dont see players anymore of zidane, ronaldinho, ronaldo (r9), vidic, maldini etc's calibre. like i said, to be the best you need to be obsessed, and i think its extremely disappointing that players that are paid ridiculous amounts of money to compete can so openly show that they have interests or distractions that are bound to reduce the amount of time they spend focusing on their actual job. i remember fergies reaction to beckham openly showing interest in things other than football too and i think that reaction was and still is completely justified.
every second rashford spends contemplating poverty issues in england, writing letters to MPs, or speaks with his pr manager to organise the next charity activity, is less time he could possibly be spending on his body or analysing opponents, thinking about tactics etc. to be clear though, im not suggesting that he be willfully ignorant of these issues completely. however my point about having to be obsessed to be the best still stands and i would think that if players like rashford wanted to look at what they could do at a personal level to improve their performance, it would be to remove distractions that prevent him from actually focusing on his job. footballers' careers are short and to make things worse its not like rashford has actually accomplished anything in his field. humanitarian work is great, but if hes being paid millions to compete against the best, time to get his priorities straight and come to the realisation that he actually has time for those things after his career is over and it still wouldnt be too late. whether he likes it or not, hes not a humanitarian, hes a footballer for man utd and he isnt doing himself or the team a favour by giving anything less than his undivided attention to his career.
in response specifically to wombat; well, out of 4 players you listed 3 kinda make my point lol. rashford, lingard and ben white all have huge areas that leave more to be desired. its nothing to brag about to say that you have no interest in football despite your job being a footballer when youre getting smacked around by nottingham forest, or youre a sarcastic meme for the majority of your career. ronaldo is the only name you listed where he could say he does a bunch of things outside of football and no one could say a word and yet the mention of cr7 in your post also makes my point for me, because hes also one of the very few names where absolutely no one could dispute that he puts in the effort off the pitch to maintain his performance levels. the guy is absolutely obsessed
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On January 12 2022 00:26 gTank wrote: Meanwhile, Liverpool seems to had lots of fake positive covid tests so they could have postponed the game against Arsenal. Might get a hefty fine if this is some sort of manipulation. Not surprised if this is true. Liverpool is afraid of us since we're the biggest club in London (please ignore what happened on Sunday)
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Northern Ireland20726 Posts
Ronaldinho? The guy who lasted about 3/4 years at his peak and fell off a cliff? Zidane who smoked through his career?
Ronaldo is obsessed, to an imo unhealthy degree, he can pull it off though. Not unhealthy for him necessarily, it’s just not something I think most people can possibly emulate.
There’s plenty of players who have similar obsessive personalities for whom it never actually benefitted their game at all, or could be detrimental. David James the former England goalkeeper gave some revealing interviews on this topic and his rituals and tracking of stats etc.
I don’t think we know enough of how footballers live their day to days to judge what is or isn’t effective in helping them perform well, or not on the pitch. Diogo Jota is the equivalent of Grandmaster at FIFA, I’d imagine that takes a lot of hours but his form has been pretty damn good for quite some time now.
With Rashford maybe his charitable work is, or isn’t the problem, but who around him is really firing? Much less a Martial who isn’t even getting a look in. Greenwood’s been patchy, Sancho has shown only brief glimpses of his Dortmund form, Bruno isn’t having the best time of it.
Plus what works for one person won’t necessarily work for another.
The problem with 100% committing to anything and having it be the core of your being is, if you go on to do badly, it can be very psychologically damaging. If your entire being is being a footballer, rather than a rounded individual of which football is a big part, then having a bad stretch of form is essentially failing at life. There’s no soft landing pad to switch off or to fall back on, I know with my particular psyche I would not do well in that hypothetical.
Fans want to have their cake and eat it just because footballers earn decent money. They’ll moan that footballers live in an ivory tower away from the concerns of regular people, then they’ll moan if someone gets involved doing charity work to help out regular folk struggling with poverty. They’ll abuse people on Twitter then have a shitfit if someone does a ‘shush’ gesture etc. They’ll demand a commitment to the profession that very few of us in the real world come close to emulating.
Ffs people complain every time Paul Pogba gets a haircut as if that takes up huge amounts of his time.
Ben White’s a good player who’s enhanced the Arsenal back line, he’s not Maldini sure but few people are.
Very few people are insanely driven to be the utmost best at anything they do, there’s usually some level they’ll aspire to hit and that’s them. Eden Hazard checked out at the ‘one of the best players of this generation’ level and that was him, albeit I think his professionalism at Real should come under question, he was pretty open that he’d never be Ronaldo/Messi level because he didn’t want to make those levels of sacrifices to do so.
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So, has anyone else seen the absolute shitshow at CAF and the refereeing at the Tunis-Mali game? xD
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Pandemona
Charlie Sheens House51324 Posts
Yeah that is absolutely awful
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not sure how anyone can say which ever player is spending too much time on non-football activities or not enough time on football activities. unless u have some sort of proof or log of what the player does 24/7. maybe their non-football activities takes up 1% of their time, or maybe its 10%, how do you know? just because it "looks like it does", doesnt make it so.
even if they do, that's their choice, whats it matter to you? just because you're a fan of the club that they play for? they get paid to play football, make sure they attend the practices and team events, they dont get paid to make football their only thing in life. im sure 99% of fans think that they should, but sadly it is not in their contracts. i dont quite understand the argument.
if they become shit, well that's their choice (or maybe that's just the way it is, maybe the player just wasnt going to become any better), and the team will not pay them as much next time.
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What's going on with the africa cup? 12 games, only a single one with more than one goal?
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