Bobfoc

Eddie Howe deserves a lot of credit. Newcastle are challenging for Champions League football and they haven't even brought in especially high-profile players yet.

According to Variety, HBO is considering making a series focusing on Aegon's conquest. It's not surprising as, like with House of the Dragon, the whole plot is already laid out. It would surely have to be years away, though. I'm hoping they don't feel as though they absolutely have to have dragons in all their Game of Thrones spinoffs. Obviously, this particular one has to have them, but I think they could get a lot of mileage out of a series on the life of Aerys II. That wouldn't have any dragons, direwolves or White Walkers, which I'd prefer. And yes, I do realise how odd it is that the fantasy elements are my least favourite part of a fantasy story.

I saw an online recap that said the first two episodes of this Succession series were among the weakest the show has had. I seriously have no idea how they came to that conclusion.

Sounds like a comfortable win for AJ, but not a performance that should worry the rest of the division. A fight with Fury would still make a mountain of cash, even without the added appeal of the undisputed championship, but I think AJ would be the definite underdog.

I hear Busted are being supported by Hanson. That's a far bigger deal.

I was right to always believe in its soul.

I think it's for the best. Developers and publishers had to pay to show their games and the ESA is a poorly run organisation, as evidenced by the time they leaked the personal details of all E3 2019 attendees. Smaller games also tended to be either pushed to one side or lost in the avalanche of big-budget game reveals. In the last couple of years, most publishers have moved towards a system of showing games set for release in the near-ish future, rather than spaffing out dozens of CG trailers for games that haven't even entered development yet. It might generate fewer talking points, but it's more focused and easier to digest. While I miss seeing the on-stage gaffes and ill-judged celebrity cameos that made E3 fun to laugh at, I'm glad that, Game Awards aside, we can now watch reveal showcases without all the whooping and whistling from the attendees.

What's the main selling point of Ted Lasso? By the clips I've seen, it looks like a crap comedy about an American who doesn't understand football in England ("Sheffield Wednesday? But they play on Saturday!"). I'm sure there must be more to it than that.

I'll put this in spoilers in case people want to go into the game without knowing anything.

What I took from that is that Adam and Eve are part of the Game of Thrones religious canon.

I'm quite surprised about that. I thought they'd keep everything under wraps until the game released.

Conte has gone. Who saw that coming?

Good stuff at Meadow Lane today. Over 16,000 people were in attendance as Notts beat Scunthorpe 4-0, with Macaulay Langstaff scoring his 39th league goal of the season. He's only one goal behind the National League record now, which is even more impressive when you consider that none of them have been penalties. It's funny how things turn out. Paul Mullin was the top scorer in League Two the season before Wrexham picked him up, and yet he's being outscored by someone Notts signed from Gateshead.

Regardless of the performance, that's a good result for England.

This will be quite a disaster for Italy if they don't get at least a draw.

England can't complain about the score here.

As an outsider, I think it's more the case that if you're supporting a smaller club, there's a very real chance that nobody will do anything to save them. There was just no way most people could have seen Liverpool not getting a buyer. Leeds paid the price for overspending and didn't have the international reputation and fanbase to keep them going amidst poor management. Rangers, despite their status in the Scottish game, also didn't have the benefit of the big television deals the Premier League clubs were benefiting from. Liverpool going into anything like those kinds of crises would have been another level entirely. That's not to say that Liverpool fans had no right to worry, of course. Local community support from football clubs is an often understated boon of the game, so to have that threatened is always concerning, especially if you're being run by owners who don't care about it.

I can sympathise when a club is close to administration, but it's also worth remembering that, outside the top few Premier League teams, there are very few clubs who haven't been in that position this century. In their cases, their existences were on the line in very serious ways, whereas I can't ever envisage a scenario in which Liverpool would have come close to going out of business. I'm not meaning to totally dismiss the fans' bad memories. As said, it's all relative. With that said, Liverpool's worst era would have been a golden age for the vast majority of clubs.

Because I'm not a supporter of a top club, I feel as though I come from another world sometimes. I'm not aiming this at anyone here, but when your club's darkest age of the last fifty years still involves finishing in the top half of the highest division, I can't really feel much sympathy.

Ben Foster has come out of retirement to join Wrexham. Sounds like more of an opportunity to shill his podcast than anything else. The end of this season is going to be a bit unusual. Notts are virtually numerically guaranteed not to finish lower than second, but I also don't see much chance of them catching Wrexham to win the league. Potentially not having anything to play for until the playoffs is going to be interesting. I have a bad feeling about the playoffs, in no small part because Notts have lost in them for the last three seasons. The prospect of getting over 100 points and still not getting promoted would be a real kick in the teeth.

I know Liverpool fans won't like to hear it, but I've always quite liked Hodgson. He did great work at Fulham, West Brom and Crystal Palace in the Premier League, as well as Malmo and the Swiss national team. I always found it refreshing to see an English manager working in several different countries and learning the languages.

I doubt it will make a difference to the final table as Wigan probably wouldn't avoid relegation anyway. I hope they get back on a stable footing.

I used to quite like playing Universe Mode back on WWE '12 because of how it would work a bit like an old-style season mode. In more recent entries, I've noticed that it has options to choose who wins and it makes me wonder if it's possible to just let things play out according to the whim of the AI. Is it just EWR without any management gameplay now?

Aerys looks like that baddie from Pirates of the Caribbean.

It was quite an even game before that. Ireland ought to breeze to victory now.