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Reply | Frey / Celar V Dykes / S Armstrong
at 13:01 5 Sep 2024
Everything about his approach to pre-season, how he fits into the team, and how he's been on the pitch this season suggest the bloke's really committed and desperate to show how good he is now he's fully fit. Looks like a positive story after a tough start in January.
Thought it was interesting that when he's talking about the unicorn celebration it's Jimmy who's kicked that off; he seems to be the heart of this team in a lot of ways. |
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Reply | Tyler and Sints cam comms at Luton
at 12:59 5 Sep 2024
I've really enjoyed Tyler's commentary since he joined, I think he does a great job and in particular his style strikes a good balance of working for the audio-only stream too. It's interesting to see him switch on and off on the comms cam - you can see him turn on professional mode for the immediate seconds post-goal, then relax and start celebrating once he stops talking. I think he's a Leicester fan outside of work but he's clearly having a great time here and enjoying being at our club. |
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Reply | Charlie Austin ADHD
at 18:16 28 Aug 2024
I think there's two separate trends. There's definitely a group for whom the point seems to be to define themselves by their diagnosis and then use it as a shield for accountability. They're very vocal online, though undoubtedly they also exist in the real world. I don't think they're really new, but the language of mental health and therapy is just the trendy way to make excuses for themselves. Some of them will grow up and some of them won't.
On the other hand there's a much broader trend of people getting diagnosed later in life because of better awareness. The thing with ADHD is that the understanding of what it is has changed over time (or put another way - been better understood). I was in school when it started becoming a more common diagnosis but it was strongly associated with kids (and almost exclusively boys) who acted out a lot, couldn't sit still, class clown types who needed calming down and generally were failing academically because of it. If you didn't fit that profile it wasn't thought about. Women got it even worse because girls are much more strongly socialised not to be disruptive. If you're now in your 30s and 40s (or even older) and seriously thinking about it for the first time, it's likely that you'll look back at your school years and think wow, how did nobody notice? And the answer is you weren't ADHD in a particular way.
The problem for me, and I suspect a lot of similar adults, is that succeeding at school and succeeding in real life aren't the same thing. I'm very good at exams; the pressure engages my brain. I'm rubbish at consistently delivering work over a period of time. If you're "bright but lazy," as I was often described, you can cruise through all the way to degree level as long as you pick subjects correctly. Work's a different question because most employers expect you to deliver day in, day out. Sometimes you're lucky and the job suits how your brain works, or the work isn't very hard and you can deliver what you need to with short bursts of maximum effort accompanied by a lot of non-committal looking busy, but if you want to go anywhere in a lot of careers you need to be able to manage consistent output, even though your brain is insistent that it wants to do anything but work on this boring thing that doesn't need to be done immediately. That's where the diagnosis - and the drugs - kick in, because what they basically give you is the same tools that non-ADHD people have in terms of executive function.
Covid accelerated the rates of people seeking diagnosis a lot for one obvious reason - a lot of people who were in office jobs were suddenly working from home. A big part of coping with ADHD, knowingly or not, is creating structure. If that structure gets upended, particularly in the way it was in covid where the outcome was you spending a lot more time at home where all the fun stuff is that your brain wants to focus on instead of work, then it becomes a lot more difficult.
Elsewhere in the thread someone talked about pathologising symptoms and the spectrum we're all on - at what point are we just taking collections of ordinary traits and turning them into diagnoses and medicating them? To an extent I agree with that and I do think we ought to be cautious. That said there is a clear distinction in my mind between regular behaviours - most people find work a bit tiring and boring and would prefer not to do their job if they didn't have to - and neurodivergence. I can't remember the exact definition of the latter but it's something like when the behaviour is so difficult to manage that it seriously impacts your ability to engage in ordinary tasks; in the case of ADHD, that's mostly around executive functioning and making choices about doing something. The other big point of difference is that it often impacts things you DO want to do as much as things you don't. Think about making decisions with ADHD as being like driving a car; we both know that we need to turn left, but you have power steering and I don't. That's the gap the medication (and/or therapy) is meant to bridge. |
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Reply | Celar
at 08:52 28 Aug 2024
While you're on the lookout for people shouting down the opinions of others, may I suggest investing in a mirror? |
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Reply | Celar
at 21:56 27 Aug 2024
Bloke was whinging about Celar 60 minutes into the first game of the season as well. Some people are just desperate to be unhappy. |
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Reply | QPR preseason training/games in Girona
at 12:34 1 Jul 2024
Somehow it hadn't previously occurred to me that Marti has done a Warnock and booked pre-season somewhere close to home. Do we think he'll give the lads a barbecue or will they get a chance to sample some paella? |
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Reply | Transfer rumours 2024
at 09:47 19 May 2024
Yeah, it's pretty standard social media strategy. You get much better results by posting something small every 24-36 hours or so. |
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Reply | Players we should have got rid - way before we did
at 12:58 16 May 2024
Didn't someone at the club tell Clive that directly at one point - every time a new manager joined they'd see this brilliant Niko kid in training and wonder why the idiot before them never played him and then they'd try it and find out for themselves that he was crap? |
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Reply | Scottish Leagues
at 12:51 16 May 2024
If you think Scotland's bad, don't look into how Belgium does it... |
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Reply | Departures in the development squad
at 12:44 15 May 2024
Not really having a go at you but your post did make me think about development squads a bit so apologies for that!
I think it's honestly really difficult when you're talking about such young players and it's easy to accuse a club of getting it wrong when you have the benefit of knowing which ones didn't work out. To my view the club is getting it right by releasing them now at age 21 or so. The ones older than that are definitely where mistakes have been made - Hamalainen, Shodipo, Drewe, probably Duke-McKenna and Kelman as well - and we ought to avoid giving out such long contracts to such marginal players in the future, but the ones just released are a class or two behind those and it looks like they were basically signed up for long enough to see how they went and then were let go when it didn't work out. That feels about right - at 18 you're going to have a lot of lads who might come good or they might not; they have the ability but will they grow another 2 inches to have enough physicality, their work ethic is good but the raw talent just isn't there and they might overcome it or they might not, etc. etc. For fans wanting to see results it's easy to say X should have been binned off or Y was never going to be good enough but in reality you're talking about a couple of years from 18 to 20 or 21 where there's the biggest margin for error. We'd be equally upset if we were Millwall and let Eze go at 18 and then watched what he turned into later.
As has been repeatedly said elsewhere too, QPR aren't necessarily getting to bring through all their best youth players - by the time they get to 18 or 19 there's a good chance that the obvious best talents have been picked off by other, bigger academies in the area. If someone's good enough at 18 to be starting in a Championship first team they're probably not coming through our academy, they're on loan to us from a PL club. We're left with either the very rare ones that were desperate to stay at QPR or the ones that other clubs didn't think were worth paying compensation for and those are always going to be the bigger risks and you're going to end up releasing most of them. What we've arguably seen more success with recently isn't developing our own players from primary school age, it's bringing in young players from lower down the food chain, or picking up cast-offs from other academies - again Eze, but also BOS, Sincs, Paul Smyth, EDB, Larkeche, Chair. That's a lot of what the development squad is really for - your Deon Woodmans and Trent Rendalls make up the numbers in a team for your EDBs and Armstrongs and Kollis to play in. Since they're youth graduates coming through the academy rather than being picked up from the PL or from first teams in smaller leagues, you're probably paying them a lot less, and it's much easier to release them when they reach that critical point at age 21 or so (as long as you remember to actually release them, and don't QPR it and give them a new 4 year deal instead). Having the squad means you're not so reliant on sending players out on loan to develop them - you probably still want to do some of that so they get to play competitive men's football, but if you've got a player who's on the fringes of the first team squad that you want to actually play in the league, you need them to be available to do that, not spending the season at Stevenage.
Final thought is that when it comes to youth development player evaluation is very hard, especially if you're trying to bring them all the way through to your first team, and QPR are far from the only ones where most players don't make it. To pick one example just look at some of the players that have been on loan here over the years from the Man U academy who never made the slightest impression up there - Will Keane, Sean Goss, Ravel Morrison (via West Ham), Federico Macheda (sort of - he went there from Lazio in his teens), Ethan Laird in more recent history. Keane, Goss, and Macheda have made decent careers lower down the pyramid or in other countries, Morrison has the kind of apperance record that makes you wonder how he keeps getting signed, but none of them ever did anything at United. Our own Jake Clarke-Salter made a single league appearance for Chelsea in 6 years of technically being a senior player there. Arguably the model at that level is different and there's more of an angle of planning to pick up kids cheap that you can then loan out for a bit before selling on for modest fees (and also hoarding talent away from others), but you're still talking about a PL club investing potentially a decade or more in developing players whose level is no higher than getting sold on to Hull, and there's vastly more examples of those kinds of players than there are Classes of 92. |
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Reply | End of Season Review - Live Now On The Patreon
at 10:08 12 May 2024
Even for the free ones we're all really paying by listening to the same awkward ad reads for NordVPN or whatever slapped into the middle of every episode. |
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Reply | Chris Willock
at 18:10 4 May 2024
He totally ignored the fans while the entire rest of rhe squad was over applauding. Eventually wanderered over after the rest had gone and gave a cursory little clap before disappearing off. Clearly got one foot out the door already. |
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Reply | Richard’s awol ?
at 22:15 1 Feb 2024
Footballers are more like fixed term contractors than normal employees. You can't just fire them or hand them notice, as long as they're meeting the minimum performance terms in their contract you're contractually bound to see out the term you signed them up for even if you don't fancy them any more. The contract can only be terminated unilaterally if one side or the other breaches it - for players that usually means if they aren't training or physically fit enough to play (barring genuine injury). This is why you see players the club doesn't want around but who won't agree to an unfavourable transfer sent to train with the reserves - if the player is showing up to training every day, then they're holding up their end and you can't get rid of them, and stopping them doing so might be interpreted as you deliberately making their performance impossible, so the compromise is that they go and train away from the first team and you hope they decide they've had enough and agree to go on loan or be sold somewhere.
In Richards' case that might sound simple enough - apparently he isn't turning up to training, so great, terminate him, but it's not as straightforward as that. Obviously players want to be (and are) protected from contract termination in the case of genuine injury, and he might argue that. Also the clause might not be as blunt as "must attend training 5 days per week" but will be more open to interpretation, and anyway he does supposedly show up sometimes. If the club tried to terminate his contract then he'd likely immediately sue and they'd end up having to fight it out in court, which might drag on and cost as much if not more as just seeing out the time/wages he has left - and that's assuming the club wins.
As for why would the PFA object, and side with Richards - because it's in their interests to do so. It's much more tactically sound for them to have a blanket policy of supporting players any time a club tries to terminate, because it means that clubs stop thinking of termination as an option. From their point of view, it's much better if clubs see unilateral termination as a bad and difficult thing that they want to do as little as possible, because while you get the occasional Richards who exploits it to steal a living for a couple of years, you also protect the lads whose clubs might otherwise have messed them about or treated them unfairly. |
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Reply | Tillies v Lionesses match thread
at 10:46 16 Aug 2023
Ad campaigns are bought well in advance, a sending off three weeks into a tournament will have no impact on it at all. |
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Reply | Naughty boy Ivan Toney
at 16:15 19 May 2023
It's because it's not just betting, but illegal betting - and the organised crime element that comes with that. If you're trying to do a bit of match-fixing, then trying to approach a PL player or team is expensive and dangerous, since they're already well-paid and their games are typically televised. Paying off a group of lads playing in the Finnish 3rd division to get the result you want is much easier and safer.
Any teams anyone can think of that had a sudden massive collapse in form and looked determined to lose every game no matter the circumstances recently...?  |
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Reply | name and shame
at 09:47 15 Mar 2023
Drewe was getting totally overrun for the first 15, and the Kakay switch did a lot to shore that up - not much help when you're already 3-0 down though.
Not massively surprising for a 22 year old on his third ever Championship appearance, but hard to watch when it was so disastrous for us. |
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Reply | Chris Martin - That difficult second album
at 12:39 14 Mar 2023
I've been thinking the same. Always fit when needed, never had pace to begin with so he's not likely to lose it, made a clear difference when he came in - he's a communicator to the lads around him, and going the other way he clearly relishes getting up in people's faces and causing them problems. Very Ainsworth player in that way, someone you'd want on your side to slug it out in this division.
Also think he'd be good for Armstrong's development - Sinclair's already shown some fire and willingness to throw that weight of his around, Martin surely will be able to help with that side of his game. |
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Site Scores| Forum Votes: | 24 | | Comment Votes: | 0 | | Prediction League: | 2 | | TOTAL: | 26 |
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