zequist

4 of the 6 are ahead of away games. Official site also has the match dates for knockout rounds if we advance...2nd leg of the round of 32 is right before our away date at Arsenal, 2nd leg of the round of 16 is right before an away date at QPR, and 2nd leg of the quarterfinals is right before our home tie with ManU. Just the way it goes when you're playing in Europe. Only way to avoid this problem is don't qualify, and I don't think any of us would choose that option. Personally, I'm just happy to see us getting that Russian trip out of the way early. And I'm rooting for all the Ukrainian squads to go home in the group stage, because I don't want any chance of us getting drawn against one of them later.

Nope, was thinking of 1986. Y'know, the year all the English clubs were banned from Europe, and Steaua ended up winning the CL title that we would've been one of the favorites for if we'd been allowed to compete.

Done over by Steaua again, darn it!

Twente is out. 1-1 final. Unfortunately Sparta Prague (the last of our six best hopes) is up 2-0 at halftime at home - we still need them go out too, with the other three having already advanced. Unless either Grasshoppers or AEL Nicosia pulls off a miracle.

But my correction was correct - we are in 13th place. You're the one who said we were in 12th place and needed 3 upsets to stay in the top 24; my miscalculation was based off your faulty numbers. So there!

Correction. We are down to 13th - there are 12 teams already ahead of us. Sevilla, Napoli, Dynamo Kiev, Fiorentina, and Salzburg are locked into pot 1. Lille, Copenhagen, Steaua Bucharest, Standard Liege, Celtic, Besiktas, and Wolfsburg are guaranteed one of the top two pots. Of the 62 remaining teams in the Europa playoffs, 14 have higher ratings than us, so we need four of them to lose. 99% likely to advance: Inter Milan (3-0 up on some random Icelandic club) Villareal (3-0 up on Astana) Panathinaikos (4-1 up on a Danish club I'm too lazy to spell) Tottenham (2-1 up on AEL Limassol, 2nd leg at home) Borussia Monchengladbach (3-2 up on Sarajevo, 2nd leg at home) Very safe, but not completely safe: Trabzonspor (2-0 up on Rostov, 2nd leg at Rostov) Eindhoven (1-0 up on a club from Belarus, 2nd leg in Belarus) Club Brugge (2-1 up on Grasshoppers, 2nd leg in Belgium) Still in some doubt: Dnipro (2-1 up on Hajduk Split, 2nd leg at Hajduk) Twente (0-0 draw with Qarabag, 2nd leg in Holland) Metalist (0-0 draw with Chorznow, 2nd leg in Ukraine) Sparta Prague (1-1 draw with Zwolle, 2nd leg in Prague) PAOK (losing 1-0 to Zimbru, 2nd leg in Greece) Lyon (losing 2-1 to Astra, 2nd leg in Romania) Those bottom six are our best chance, but we'd need at least four of them to break for us. Agree with Mike that it isn't likely. Now you do know, of course, that regardless of whether we're the second or third seed, the draw WILL put us either in Napoli's (i.e. Rafa's) group or in Villareal's group. It's absolutely inevitable that we're going to end up paired with one of those two. If the soccer gods have an especially cruel sense of humor, they'll put Steaua Bucharest in our group too - ghosts of 2005 and 1986 all rolled into one.

Facts are absolutes. If I give you a correct fact (e.g., "Tony Hibbert has never scored a Premier League goal") that fact remains absolutely true no matter how much anyone might try to spin it ("but he scored in his testimonial game!"), justify it ("but they don't need him to score"), ignore it ("not important!"), or even pretend the opposite is true ("He has scored 50 Premier League goals, comrade, and you will repeat that as often as the party tells you to.") Opinions are not absolutes. They are rooted in personal point of view, shaped and modified by levels of knowledge, personal experience, personal biases, and individual maturity. They can (and frequently do) evolve and change as we learn more and broaden our perspectives. Therefore an opinion cannot ever be 100% wrong, nor can it ever be 100% right. Some opinions can certainly be more wrong than others, maybe even as much as 99.9999999999999% wrong, but which ones reach that level of wrongness is naturally a matter of opinion. Of course, that's just my opinion on the matter.

This is a good article on the work permit system - why England established such rules, how the system works (and sometimes doesn't work), the factors that are examined during the appeals process (when necessary), and of course the ways that clubs try to get around the criteria. Some good stats too (I found the graph showing how many players each EPL club loaned out to other clubs last season especially interesting). http://www.lawinsport.com/articles/competition-law/item/delayed-entry-the-fa-s-highest-calibre-standard-for-non-eu-footballers

Non-EU players need work permit approval every time they change clubs, even if it's within the same league. Seems like overkill to me, but whatever. Atsu's had 26 caps over the last couple of years, so there shouldn't be any issues with him.

I will also miss seeing him play. Not from his Galaxy stint, but from his stint with San Jose Earthquakes at the start of his career. There hasn't been much to cheer about over the years as a Quakes fan, seeing as they've generally been a mismanaged, cheaply run mess, and often as not treated not just by the league but even by their own management (when Anschutz ran them) as LA's second-class cousin. But for that run of four years and two championships, he gave us NorCal folks something to be proud of, and no matter how the rest of his career played out I'm still grateful for that.

Coincidentally, I was just looking at the Telegraph's fantasy statistics for last season's Everton squad a couple of hours ago. Rather than just assists, they have a category they award players fantasy points for called "key contributions," which encompasses assists but also other play that directly results in a goal - affecting goals, in other words, just like you said. By the Telegraph's numbers, these are the stats for our main wide players last season (all competitions): Mirallas: 36 games, 9 goals, 13 key contributions (22 total) Osman: 42 games, 3 goals, 10 key contributions (13 total) Deulofeu: 27 games, 3 goals, 6 key contributions (9 total) Pienaar: 25 games, 1 goal, 6 key contributions (7 total) McGeady: 18 games, 0 goals, 2 key contributions (2 total) Pro-rated, that puts Pienaar on pace to affect about 11 goals last season if he plays closer to 40 games. That's down a bit from his historic rate, but still not terrible. Just the year before in 2012-13, he scored 6 goals and actually led the club in key contributions (per Telegraph numbers) with 12, for a total of 18 goals affected, which meets your standard and then some. But he was also healthy enough to play in 35 games that season.

First edition, or revised edition?

He appeared in 25 matches in all competitions last year, started in 21 of them, and went the full 90 in 7 of them. Don't know how much of that was tactical and how much was fitness, but either way he must have been one of our most frequently subbed players.

I can see both sides here. I own two jerseys (one for ice hockey and one for American football), but they're not something I'd use for daily wear. I wear them to games, or to the pub on game days, but the rest of the time they're hanging in the closet. I'd feel a little silly wearing something like that when I'm doing normal stuff like going to the market or mowing the lawn. The football jersey has a name and number, the hockey jersey does not. I don't really care about names on jerseys because I root for the logo on the front, but as Joe said you can't buy blank football jerseys. So for that one I picked a player who I liked before he joined my team and who I knew I would still like even after he left my team, because if I was going to spend the money on a jersey I wanted to make sure it was one I'd be proud to wear for many years afterward.

Latest on Cleverley's status from the Daily Mail (insert joke here): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2715565/TRANSFER-NEWS-COLUMN-Everton-consider-Manchester-United-s-Tom-Cleverley-Louis-van-Gaal-trims-squad.html

I wouldn't mind seeing us do more of this - up to a point. A certain amount of overstocking on youth isn't necessarily a bad thing, because you don't always know who's going to blossom unexpectedly (Coleman) and who's going to plateau early (Vaughn). Now I definitely wouldn't be thrilled with us going the Chelsea route of having 55 U18/U21 players on our books who are never going to get a sniff of the first team and are only here for their re-sale value, but in principle I have no problems with us increasing our investment in potential beyond what we've done up to now, and if we end up making a few extra bucks off the players who don't pan out here, that's just how the game works. We've been behind the curve on acquiring youth talent for years anyway; no club other than maybe Ajax can replenish itself indefinitely on nothing but its own academy graduates, and buying finished products is way more expensive than capturing them on the way up. Used to happen in American college football too - colleges would sign dozens of graduating high school players every year, way more than they needed, just to keep their rivals from getting hold of them. Now the sport limits how many players each school can sign per year AND how many they can keep on scholarship, so that basically can't happen anymore. And the blog writer's point. Which I agree with - talent hoarding to the extent that the wealthy clubs are doing it isn't good for the players, the game, or anyone else except themselves. But as long as the players are allowing themselves to have their heads turned by the lure of the marquee name and care more about that than they do about furthering their own development by staying in an environment where they will actually play and learn and grow, nothing's ever going to change.

Thought this was an excellent blog post, examining the re-sale of Lukaku through the lens of a broader trend happening across Europe. An excerpt from the post: "In terms of football's traditional values, the story of Lukaku and Chelsea is a failure. The club signed one of Europe's most promising players, at some considerable cost, to be the heir to Didier Drogba, and it did not work out. But in terms of football's new reality, that does not matter at all. Chelsea will not feel any embarrassment about signing Lukaku in 2011. They will be delighted they did so. This is because player development, at the world's largest clubs, is no longer about football. It is about business. It is not about honing talent. It is about making profits. It is run according to the rules of the hedge fund -- spread your risk to ensure your reward -- with a mindset borrowed from property development. Nurturing young players is not a team's primary concern, just as a developer does not refit houses to live in them. Chelsea and their peers are not crafting young players. They are flipping them."

A three-hour firsthand crash course in the fine points of contract law and paperwork signing tends to do that.

Because they're an extremely well-funded worse team that could pay him a crapload of money?

No. When someone says "injury prone", that makes me think of guys like Vaughn, Rodwell, Van Persie, Ledley King, or Michael Owen, who rarely seemed to last two months without ending up back on the treatment table with another 3-4 week injury. I've never put Phil in with that group. He'll get dinged up occasionally, like any player, but not constantly like those guys. Incidentally, I am starting to lean towards adding Pienaar to that category among our current players, along with Gibson. Ol' Stevie's only managed to put in 25 or more league appearances once in the past five seasons while dealing with a whole raft of injuries (including three separate spells on the sidelines last year for hamstring and knee problems).

I don't think that stat page has been updated since the beginning of last season. It doesn't have enough appearances for Coleman either (it has him on 80, but after last season he should be closer to 120). Not to mention it seems to think that Fellaini, Cahill, and Heitinga are still part of the club, since it doesn't give their departure dates. The reason I gave averages both with and without 09-10 is because that was a one-time catastrophic injury - the question of whether someone is injury-prone is typically a debate over chronic/nagging/recurring injuries that a player can't seem to escape; catastrophic injuries are a separate issue. Like the way James Vaughan was always "four weeks in, four weeks out" and every time he showed a flash of promise he went right back on the shelf. That's a guy who was injury-prone. Gibson seems to be injury-prone too: he's played more than 24 games in a season just twice in nine years (33 with Royal Antwerp in 2007 and 26 with us in 2013) and he's constantly in and out of our lineup with this and that. The other problem with taking a games missed average as pure evidence of health is that it doesn't give us any details - like times when a coach may have held the player in reserve for strategic reasons, or because he was getting jaded from overuse, or because it was the club's third match in seven days and he just plain needed a breather. No matter how fit they are these guys are still humans, not machines.

Jags has averaged 29 games a season only in Premier League games (205 EPL appearances in 7 years with the club) - that total doesn't include European and Cup games. And if you take out 2009-10 when he only played 12 games because of the ACL tear, his average is slightly over 32 EPL games a year (193/228, or 85% of possible games) - unless a center back is made out of stone, it's hard to ask for much more than that. That's about the same rate of appearances as John Terry had for Chelsea over his healthiest seven-year stretch (86% from 03-04 to 09-10). By my count, Jags has played 240 total games with the club. 205 EPL as noted above, and 35 additional FA Cup, League Cup, and Europa League games - I don't know how many more of those games the club actually played, though, so I can't do any percentage calculations on it - someone else would have to figure out the math on that one.

It's not the formation that matters, so much as the tactics that you play out of that formation. I don't care so much if RM wants to use three center backs, but I would want to know how he intends to use them to gain/retain possession and generate attacks. The Dutch and the Costa Ricans both played 3-man back lines with two wing backs for the majority of the World Cup (and you can bet Roberto was watching both teams closely and taking notes), but they used them in different ways. The Costa Rican back three focused more on springing offside traps, and they were ridiculously good at that, while the Dutch back three were focused more on winning the ball and launching counterattacks. The key to any solid back line, though, is having guys who are used to playing together and communicating with each other and knowing where to go. The TV commentators talked about that over and over again with the Costa Rican defenders and how they were all perfectly in sync with the timing of their step-ups. I don't doubt we could play a three-man back line much more effectively than last year, especially if it's worked on from the start of training camp, but there would have to be a full-on commitment to it, not just some half-assed dabbling. If you're shuffling guys on and off the back line and they're constantly changing positions and combinations and shuffling formations around, then your defense is going to have problems no matter if you have two, three, or six center backs on the field. All it takes to bust a defense wide open is that one back who's too slow to step up on the last attacker or gets pulled out of position without a teammate ready to cover for him.

Second this. The American youth soccer setup has been fundamentally flawed for decades. We're trying to correct that now, and fixing it is one of the things that Klinsmann has heavily prioritized since taking over the national team, but it's going to take time.You can't just put a fresh coat of paint on a house with a bad foundation and call it fixed; you have to rebuild the whole structure from the ground up.

And now you know how I feel every time a cricket or snooker question comes around! Anyway, since there haven't been any more takers, here's the answer to my question: A fake free throw attempt is a rules violation by the shooter. If the free throw shooter commits a violation before or simultaneous to any violations by the opposing team, only the shooter's violation is charged - violations that occurred after it are ignored. So the lane violation and the goaltending are both irrelevant. The free throw attempt is lost because of the violation - no re-take - and when there's a fake free throw violation on the shooter's second attempt the defending team gets the ball on the sideline, even with the free throw line.