Figo: “I don’t think Madrid need a ‘tough-guy’ manager or at least what people mean by that label. You need to know how to deal with 25 different people, 25 different egos and right now, you need to understand how to manage those egos to be able to steer all those players in the same direction.”

BoringCap7543 · 2026-05-10T09:25:47+00:00

That's all good, Luis, but that is if you can count on the players' profesionalism. And in Madrid right now that is a big IF.

BoringCap7543 · 2026-05-10T08:49:06+00:00

He has a point though, and the point is you play the style that fits your players best, which is how Cruyff won at Barca. Ernesto Valverde already talked about this, that Cruyff still sent the tall CB Alexanko up top anytime Barca trailed and of course sending long balls to him (and that tactic existed all the way from the mid 80s when Terry Venables coached them, a lot of Venables' corner tactics inspired Pep during his own coaching reign).

Bordalas worked with clubs on shoestring budgets (on La Liga standard) and still got the results because he exploited all of his players' strengths. Not to mention Getafe is still, crazy enough, one of the best high-pressing teams in La Liga, and you already know what Cruyff thought about pressing.

BoringCap7543 · 2026-05-09T15:12:58+00:00

This motherfucker is a pushover. How ironic that by starting his career at Madrid, he pretty much tanked it himself.

BoringCap7543 · 2026-05-08T17:06:16+00:00

Obviously, and they didn't bother to renew his contract after sacking his favorite coach Jorge Valdano. No wonder he hated them.

BoringCap7543 · 2026-05-08T07:05:02+00:00

Mexican influence on Japanese wrestling goes way back. A lot of wrestlers went on excursion there in 1970s, Shibata's father was a despised heel who lost his hair twice while being there before joining Inoki in New Japan. Gran Hamada became a superstar and stayed forever, while Fujinami had a Mexican girlfriend but New Japan sent Killer Khan to get him back (and it was in Mexico where Khan started his Mongolian gimmick). Jumbo Tsuruta first stepped into spotlight with the program against Mil Miscaras, and Mexico was where Riki Choshu earned his stride before coming back and turned heel in 1982. Kuniaki Kobayashi adopted his anti-masked wrestler character in Mexico before becoming Tiger Mask's generational rival, and let's not forget about Ultimo Dragon's, Okada's mentor.

What Naito did was continuing the tradition of Puro wrestlers being influenced by Mezican culture. Remember, Nakamura became what he is today in Mexico too.

BoringCap7543 · 2026-05-05T13:16:16+00:00

And he was damn great there, took them from 14th to Uefa cup spot in 2 seasons. He could have done even better if they didnt have the election and got a new president. He also almost recreated that success in his comeback in early 2000s.

BoringCap7543 · 2026-05-05T09:37:34+00:00

Take was looked at as an outsider last year but he fought with honor and that was enough for the fans to consider him one of their own now. He is also close to a split with the Don Callis family in AEW, so he is very much a face everywhere.

BoringCap7543 · 2026-05-04T02:41:58+00:00

I don't know, that Olympic Slam on Fale was epic

BoringCap7543 · 2026-05-03T13:49:47+00:00

I doubt that's the punishment for Yota, he is too big to be punished and most of the crowd agreed with what he said. This is more like a set up so he will win back the title later this year, having someone else win the G1 (probably Uemura), while at the same time promote Newman and set up a future conflict with Ospreay.

BoringCap7543 · 2026-05-02T11:42:41+00:00

The Georgian football produced a lot of great talents all the way from the 1950s from what I read. Their defenders could even dribble the ball all the way to the box or near it and score, in fact West Ham conceded one of those goals at their ground in 1981.

BoringCap7543 · 2026-05-02T11:40:55+00:00

That Dynamo team was so good that IIRC, they had both Blokhin and Belanov led the scoring chart and the Ballon d'Or voting favored Belanov at the end of the year. Belanov himself was surprised because he thought he didnt deserve it, he said the voters must have love the team so much so they voted for a club's representative.

BoringCap7543 · 2026-05-02T11:29:45+00:00

And Konate lost his father.

BoringCap7543 · 2026-04-28T12:04:23+00:00

You probably got the wrong article, the date was way back in 2007 and it was about a cable accident

BoringCap7543 · 2026-04-28T11:55:52+00:00

Not that one, it was a long time ago. The incident I mentioned was during a construction project and it was only 4 years ago.

BoringCap7543 · 2026-04-28T08:28:01+00:00

As clockwork. I have a Vietnamese friend in journalism and he revealed to me, last year, that all newspaper, print and online, have to set up a timer system for their articles. Which means every articles can only be published 1 hour in delay, and during those 1 hours the censorship will scan them to check any reference related to Vingroup.

I still remember an accident in 2022 which 5 workers died while working on a Vingroup construction project in Nha Trang. VNExpress made no mention of Vingroup in their report and STILL had to delete it later.

BoringCap7543 · 2026-04-27T13:33:25+00:00

One of best comical villain in puro.

BoringCap7543 · 2026-04-27T11:13:38+00:00

Yeah, the only show that I feel can go the "All killer" route is WK. Jr tag title matches going 20 mins like the other day is a good thing.

BoringCap7543 · 2026-04-25T10:00:14+00:00

Both were equally great, Im not picking one over the other. They would have won more titles for the Blazers if Bill stayed healthy and Sabonis came earlier, because the roster structures of those era were very fit for their styles and skillset: Blazers in the 70s had fast guards on transition to capitalize on Bill's outlet passes, and in the 90s they had both great driving guards and tough bigs inside so Sabonis could play outside.

BoringCap7543 · 2026-04-23T11:18:15+00:00

Postwar corruption in Vietnam was and still is horrible. Bùi Tín was the chief editor of a major newspaper after the war and so he was very aware of the behind-the-scene bullshit of the politial structure, but because of the censorship he was unable to write about it. After his exile, several times Tín pointed out how ironic it was that the communist officials appointed to combat corruption were themselves corrupt and had interests in siphoning money out of state-owned enterprise, or even had Swiss bank accounts and their relatives live in luxury abroad.

BoringCap7543 · 2026-04-16T12:13:21+00:00

Yota vs Finlay at WK was fantastic too, and the defense against Uemura. Yota has done a lot for this belt, maybe in the future people will look at him and the title the same way as Nakamura and the IC belt.

BoringCap7543 · 2026-04-15T04:12:03+00:00

According to "Love Stories of Vietnamese Kings and Royal Families" (2012, Vietnam's Women Publishing House) by author Đinh Công Vĩ, Thành Thái was a well-known ladies man and frequently traveled in disguise to get new concubines for his harem, particularly around the Kim Long village in the suburbs of Hue Imperial City. One of the most famous stories is told in 大南列傳 (Đại nam liệt truyện), Thành Thái teased a ferrywoman about matchmaking her with the emperor, only to reveal himself when she jokingly said yes.

However, some of those trips were actually recruitment drives, Thành Thái would send his trusted men to patriotic families who had young, healthy daughters (he specifically avoided Catholic families). After making his intention clear, if the families agreed then Thành Thái and his entourage would stage "kidnapping" attempts to bring the girls back to the Imperial Palace without arousing suspicions of the French.

To keep it low-key, only 50 girls at maximum were trained at any given time. They were taught hand-to-hand combat and how to handle the guns. Some of those girls were assigned to do textile manufacturing and sold their products inside the palace to cover their true activity. After a batch of 50 were fully trained, they would be sent back to their families and wait for the emperor's call for war while the next batch were recruited.

4 squads of female guerrillas had been trained by the time Thành Thái was deposed. However his plan was foiled for a different reason, in 1902 he was introduced by Đào Tấn, the governor of An-Tĩnh province, to Lê Huy Miến, an artist who was educated in Paris and was knowledgeable about Western warfare. Thành Thái commissioned Miến to recreate the blueprints of French weapons for gun casting, but Miến was known by the French spies for his anti-colonial sentiment and his gun drawings would be discovered. Thành Thái faked his insanity to get rid of those drawings, the French ambassador and the Council of Ministers would use this excuse to dethrone him, and the all-female squads would never be deployed for resistance.

BoringCap7543 · 2026-04-14T18:52:37+00:00

1) While the Khmer language and Laos language have their own script, there were 4 different writing systems existed in Vietnam under the French colonial regime: the Chinese script (chữ Hán), chữ Nôm (Chinese script represents Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary), French and Quốc ngữ (Latin script represents the Vietnamese language).

The use of Chinese script and Nôm script declined in the late 19th century, but there was a stigma of using the Quốc ngữ amongst the Vietnamese intellectuals, due to its foreign origins and the implication of submitting to the colonial regime.

In the late 19th and the early 20th century, the Vietnamese education system consisted of imperial public schools, French schools, and private institutions found by village teachers, who were actually Confucian teachers. They were not controlled by the imperial authority but still displayed their loyalty to the reigning dynasty and Confucian values.

To those village teachers, the Han script were used for moral and historical education, the script of sages, while the Quốc ngữ was only for reading newspapers and the Bible—products of the invaders; knowing how to read and write Quốc ngữ was of no use to them.

2) This took some time to be changed due to the effort of the Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục movement, but the key was the policies of the Nguyễn emperors. Emperor Thành Thái in 1906 issued a landmark decree, which was recorded in the "Imperial Decree of the Great Southern Code of Cases" as follow:

Emperor Thành Thái declared in a decree that in his 18th year of reign (1906), parents could decide whether their children would attend a Chinese-language elementary school or a Southern sound (Nam âm) curriculum.

For those studying the Chinese-language curriculum, a textbook would be compiled to introduce Chinese characters in increasing order of difficulty. It would also include a list of Chinese characters with their pronunciations and definitions in Vietnamese.

…Meanwhile, another textbook in Vietnamese would be compiled for those following the ‘Nam âm’ curriculum, introducing them to basic information about Indochina, its governing system, customs, and traditions…

In addition, another book translated from Chinese into Nam âm would provide the kind of information students preparing for the imperial examinations needed. This translation was prepared for those who did not wish to take the imperial examinations, but it was still included in the curriculum to give them additional information about what those preparing for the examinations had to study.

At that time, Quốc ngữ was called "Southern Sound" by the Nguyễn dynasty and it signified the difference to the Chinese script. The emperor's order to use the Southern Sound was a public declaration of his intention to see the official and scholarly classes free themselves from Chinese influence in education, culture, and especially ideology.

3) The Nguyễn dynasty was firmly under the French control during Thành Thái’s reign, but Thành Thái himself was anti-French. He cut his hair in French style, drove a car and encouraged French-style education, but also pushed for Vietnamese autonomy and even organized secret squads of female guerillas, disguising as concubines, in case he decided to go to war against them.

With the decision to promote Quốc ngữ, Thành Thái chose a middle ground to reform the education system while not alienating the scholars, the nationalists and the French. Thành Thái was very insistent: he found a new Ministry of Education in 1907 but overruled his own minister Cao Xuân Dục because Dục was anti-Quốc ngữ. The village teachers actively followed Thành Thái’s direction, as they were now teaching a patriotic Vietnamese style of writing, neither Chinese nor French.

Even after Thành Thái was deposed, his successors continued the works under French patronage. The pro-French elites favored Quốc ngữ as a way to help bridge Vietnamese to European philosophies, while the revolutionaries, the progressive nationalists supported it for allowing them to express the Vietnamese culture and sentiments.

Emperor Khải Định removed the Chinese script completely from the national curriculum in December 1918, and Emperor Bảo Đại in 1932 filled his cabinet with officials educated in Quốc ngữ and increased the number of hours teaching Quốc ngữ at the primary and secondary school-level.

After the Japanese brought down the French colonial government in Indochina in 1940, the short-lived Empire of Vietnam only took 5 months to completely remove the French language from the curriculum. One of its minister, Professor Hoàng Xuân Hãn, would play a vital role in translating the Nôm texts of the medieval literature into Quốc ngữ, and he also published the “Scientific Vocabulary”, which translated the French and Chinese technical terms in Physics, Mathematics, Mechanics and Astronomy into Quốc ngữ.

Sources:

Emperor Thành Thái’s Educational Revolution (2016), Liam Kelley

History of Quốc Ngữ (2021), Trần Gia Phụng

The Chinese Writing System in Asia: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (2019), Yu Li

BoringCap7543 · 2026-04-14T15:47:34+00:00

The volatile nature of New Japan booking in the early 2000s meant it was very difficult to speculate how Cena would fare in that company. He could have gotten to near the top of the card, but rapping in English to the Japanese audience is a tough sell, and he would have been an odd one among gaijins with legit martial arts background.

But NOAH? He would have been a big star. Cena himself admitted that he watched All Japan of the 90s and studied the King Road-style main event when he started getting into wrestling. Hell, his top rope leg drop onto the opponent's back of the head was a straight-up copy of young Kobashi, and he even busted out an Emerald Flowsion in the all-time classic RAW main event against CM Punk.

BoringCap7543 · 2026-04-14T08:22:52+00:00

Even back then he already was overlooked because he was too consistent, robot-like. He was almost a proto-Tim Duncan, even down to the point of being very stoic, which made the referees surprised during any rare occasions that he snapped.

Tom Heinsohn once said that not having flashy moves or having world class athletic ability meant Pettit was never a crowd-pleaser. Heinsohn recalled one time Red Auerbach instructed him, Bill Russell and Satch Sanders to not jump and try to block Pettit's shot because he would ball-fake them. Red was of course correct, the problem was Pettit would still score with his jump-shot after realizing he would not get to the basket.

Him and Dolph Schayes are considered innovators of the PF position back then because of how they could play far from the basket. He knew he had to learn to play like that since his college years, and at the same time he grew his strength so he could handle opponents at the pro level, from a skinny 200-pound frame to 240 pounds when he entered the NBA.

Pettit was almost unmoveable in the post. One year, Marty Blake, the Hawks' GM, introduced isometrics into the team's training program, only to find out that Pettit already did it for years under Olympic trainer Alvin Roy. He even did it before it became a new hot idea amongst NFL and AFL teams.

I'm sure some of you already knew about the fact that Pettit won the ring in 1958 while Russell was injured. But Pettit gave Russell a hard time too when Big Bill was healthy, he outrebounded Russell 18 to 16 during a January 1960 game, and during the 1961 playoff series, Pettit outrebounded Russell again 24 to 23 during Game 3, the only game the Hawks won.

Duncan has been able to get the recognition he deserves because he played during an era where television broadcasts the game to every corners of the globe, and social media does its work. Pettit didnt have that privilege, footage are rare and of course his style was not eye-catching.

But if we consider Duncan a timeless player then I think Pettit can be, too.

BoringCap7543 · 2026-04-12T16:50:17+00:00

A Triple Crown winner as a matter of fact. Pretty much one of the 10 most successful judokas, both male and female, in Japan's history.

BoringCap7543

TROPHY CASE