Rsdio

Being a fan of a club with the joint most playoff appearances I'm nervous on everyone's behalf today I hate the playoffs as a concept but there's nothing quite like winning one.

Webber played a big part in us getting to the Premier League - finally getting the club to break out of its comfort zone of boring 'usual suspects' type managers by appointing David Wagner, but he came across pretty badly in his interviews and the manner in which he left made him seem like an absolute snake.

It's really been total preference for a long time, there isn't an advantage across the board for one or the other. Some people find certain characters easier or harder depending on the input device but even then you're not realistically going to be hitting a ceiling all things being equal - there'll be examples of the best players in the world playing all characters using whichever input device. It's probably easier to get going on a pad than ever before due to modern controls but really the same applies to stick as well. Personally I only use a stick for fighting/shooting games because I can play them for hours that way while my hands start to feel fucked on a pad pretty quickly.

Loads of our fans keep saying they want Warnock to stay on as DoF as well, despite the fact those roles are a thankless task at the best of times and he can make vastly more money doing two months of work a year and bagging a massive bonus on top if he rescues someone. He'd be absolutely daft to go in that direction and he's too big of a personality anyway, it'd be like when Moyes took over Man Utd and Alex Ferguson was there sitting in judgement every week. The first sign of a bad run and the speculation about him sacking the manager and taking over would make the whole thing untenable. I will pray on your behalf that you don't end up with Nathan Jones. Weird little man. Southampton paying millions in compensation to get him was one of the most bizarrely misguided decisions by a team in trouble that I can recall.

Three matches in under Warnock and we'd just lost 4-0 away and 4-0 at home, leaving us 7 points away from safety, with the threat of administration hanging over us and having looked utterly abject all season. If you'd have told someone at that stage we'd end up being safe by 9 points, they'd have told you to go have a lie down.

Here's a weird stat for you: over the past nine games Town have played on every day of the week. Obviously the headlines will be about Warnock but I'm so pleased for Ronnie Jepson who won't get much attention. He came back in 2008 with Stan Ternant and that period.. didn't exactly go well. He's a real cult hero here from his playing days so it's great to see him have a fitting farewell.

It's incredible, time catches up with everyone at some point but I'm sorry for ever thinking that point might've been now. With all the chaos and ineptitude behind the scenes, along with how abject we'd been on the pitch all season and a lack of obvious battlers/leaders, it's absolutely staggering that he's got us to 5th in the form table over the past ten games. Total miracle worker. Things would obviously have been different across the board without Reading's points deduction but it'd be nice to make that a bit more academic on Monday. Even with their form I'd have been shitting it because Andy Carroll loves scoring against us. Any of their fans who make that journey Monday want medals casting.

A (perceived to be) broken grappler in the first year feels like a fighting game tradition at this point. Imagine how much Japan will hate Zangief if he's actually good.

Looking at the Xbox site, the £49.99 version of Repentance will get you everything, the £16.74 version is DLC which requires Rebirth. It's a mess on all platforms to one degree or another, it could really do with consolidating into a neat package that just lets you choose which version of the game to play from the main menu. But you just know if that happened something would get added again afterwards.

Yeah, first season we dropped some typical bollocks recruitment wise (we've been masters of the 'false economy' approach to transfer dealings for as long as I can remember) but for the most part it was sensible enough, with players who on paper at that time should've stood us in good stead to consolidate at the top of the Championship, like Ince and Pritchard, along with no-brainers like Mooy. Cracks were certainly showing beforehand but staying up that first season definitely turned out to be the worst thing that could've happened. It would've been interesting to see how it would've gone had Stuart Webber not left, I imagine we'd be on the steadier yo-you route Norwich have taken with someone possessing half a brain cell making football decisions. Then again, there's no accounting for the Dean Hoyle variable in all that so maybe not. I guess the point is, we went up with very low expectations across the board and were seen as one of the more 'sensible' clubs around but even without spending much in Premier League terms we came down a total basket case with an owner who'd had a complete personality transplant. It's not hard for it to happen up there.

This always sounds great on paper but it rarely works out that way in practice, does it? Getting up there changes everything. We fucked ourselves spectacularly and still haven't recovered on or off the pitch 5 years later* by being rank amateur behind the scenes and due to the egos/greed of those in charge so we're an especially bad example but still, the Premier League can end up being a poisoned chalice for a lot of clubs these days. It doesn't help that some are blatantly just 'not wanted' up there either, which I'm sure you know all about! It'll be interesting to see the different tone in your coverage this time as you seem to have transitioned into Premier League media darling status now due to Kompany so maybe you'll get the 'Bournemouth under Howe' treatment from the media and officials this time around. *Despite last season, which was a total freak from a manager somehow figuring out how to get absolute maximum effictiveness from a squad which should've been worrying about relegation.

If I had to guess, I reckon modern controls will start off being way too good in the initial 'bringing new players in' period then after a year or so of complaints they'll nerf them to the point where they're very obviously a poor choice for most. I'll be amazed if they're still good a couple of years in because balancing a game with one control scheme is surely enough work without having to try and balance two, plus the accessibility you're adding on one hand is also leading to an increased mental load for players on the other. Imagine how messy it'll be for them to tweak if there's still two viable control schemes once 50 characters are out.

Yeah, I was wondering if I'd imagined all the time you were a fixture up there for a minute. I'd like to see you get back after all the shite you've had to deal with over the past few years. I've got time for Robins as he was the one who tried the hardest to play decent stuff out of the parade of boring one-note managerial appointments we made for a few years before finally trying something different with Wagner. It ended a bit weirdly for him here when he handed in what seemed to be some sort of protest team sheet on the first day of the season, promptly got pumped 4-0 at home and resigned immediately after the match . It seems like him and Coventry is a combination that works though.

Torturing myself by looking up the value of games I used to have is one of my favourite/least favourite things to do. I had a mint, complete US Chrono Trigger for one, which seems to have doubled again since the last time I looked with some sold items on eBay globally hitting upwards of a grand. I think I sold mine for about £70 along with all my other retro type stuff and put most of the proceeds into a new PC, which would be worth about £15 by now . Brutal.

We only need a point! Maybe Sheffield Utd will do us a favour for another Warnock love-in..

Kind of glad of that result, I think. Better to have you to play when you've got nothing to play for.

Well that's Sheffield Utd up. Normally I'd be hoping for them to put the under-8s out against us but I guess they might not now, lest we complain about it afterwards.

It's always a pretty futile gesture but I think it's fairly bog standard for someone to go through the motions of complaining (sorry, 'asking for observations') about these things at the end of the season, I think it was your mates at Blackburn who did it to us in 2016 and we had the excuse of wanting to rest players for the playoffs. I imagine it's done mostly in the hope that you might get done a bit of a favour at a later date a bit like managers talking about officials after matches, but I won't be holding my breath on that one. Still fully anticipating getting relegated by something like the David Hopkin handball we had 20 years ago then getting a "Soz." from the EFL, to top off being denied two obvious penalties in the playoff final last season.

It's so wearying the energy we have to expend in football, as in life, explaining and engaging with behaviour that all ultimately just falls under the banner of 'could everyone just stop acting super obviously like cunts, please?'

I've no idea if Ainsworth is worse really but that post reminded me a lot of when we had the Cowleys in charge. They performed a minor miracle arresting the freefall from the Premier League with the club in absolute disarray and keeping us up that season but their constant shithousery still managed to do everyone's head in despite that. It wasn't on the pitch so much as them having this blatantly rehearsed routine of putting pressure on the officials - for the entire 90 minutes one or the other would be at the fourth official constantly and when one had got to the edge of pushing it too far, they'd just tag in the other. Their antics painted them as absolute bellends to the extent made it completely laughable when they'd then go on about their wholesome values in press conferences and such.

Easy for me to say but I wouldn't be overly worried as a Cardiff fan at this stage, another point from three games will probably see you alright. A horrendous final day of Town vs Reading always felt written in the stars. I'd have bitten someone's hand off for that not long ago, mind. WIgan winning today was probably a decent result since they've still got a faint glimmer of something to play for and they play Reading next.

I've been mildly displeased with Burnley for the past week or so but now I'm getting very close to falling out with them completely.

Yeah, I think that was just like Liz Truss pricing or something. Surprised they actually lowered it once the pound got a bit stronger though, doesn't generally seem to happen when companies do that.

I'd be surprised, a lot was made of the apparently poor sales of the 4080s to the point where people like Gamer's Nexus were putting out videos talking about pricing and prefacing them with 'this video will probably be out of date by the time it's published because we've heard a price drop is imminent' and then.. Nothing. They're going pretty all-in on raising prices across the board and seem happy to deal with slower initial sales until people get used to the idea that this is just the way it is now.

Yeah, our last match before we play you on the 30th is on the 18th. You've got three games in that period and the last one you'll be back home in the early hours of Friday morning to play again Sunday lunchtime. Brutal. You'll probably end up turning us over! I hope you don't find yourselves talking about the fixture pile-up caused by the Rotherham thing the same way we still talk about David Hopkin's handball for Palace that helped send us down in 2001.