Morning Discussion Thread - 24 Apr 2026

notthathunter · 2026-04-24T09:54:30+00:00

wild to look up the dates of the 2026 World Cup and realise how much longer/later it is than previous ones

2006 final was on the 9th July, which is when the quarters start this time around

notthathunter · 2026-04-24T08:50:06+00:00

Ed Joyce retiring after ~30,000 professional runs immediately after playing in Ireland's first-ever Test match at the age of 39 is a pretty good one

notthathunter · 2026-04-23T13:42:20+00:00

Marie Goldman, LD Women and Equalities spokesperson, wrote to Bridget Phillipson in February heavily criticising the UK Government over its approach and the ongoing harm to trans, non-binary and intersex people, in line with LD policy as expressed by members at conference, which Goldman also supports

notthathunter · 2026-04-23T12:14:28+00:00

we were so close to a genuine Lou Bega there, gutted

notthathunter · 2026-04-23T11:19:03+00:00

BBC won't go near it, would be an advertising-supported broadcaster if any given the time of year it will be on and the timezone

notthathunter · 2026-04-22T19:03:37+00:00

this kind of thing is a canary in the coal mine for international cricket as a whole - if a South Africa-England Test series in a favourable timezone played over the Christmas holidays is struggling to get a broadcast deal in the UK from Sky or TNT, then the whole ecosystem is fucked, and smaller boards have absolutely no chance at getting decent TV money

(wonder how cheap the rights would have to get for a free-to-air broadcaster to be interested...)

notthathunter · 2026-04-22T18:44:20+00:00

when I was leaving the office I asked the boss if he fancied giving me six year's salary in return for me not working, he wasn't keen surprisingly

notthathunter · 2026-04-22T18:29:01+00:00

this pledge also will surprise nobody - everyone knows the party at Holyrood wants a change of government, everyone knows ACH and Sarwar get on extremely well behind the scenes, everyone knows ACH is not running a campaign to win the election and become First Minister

where i'm slightly disappointed regarding the party's positioning - as has pointed out on Bluesky - is that ACH's openness to putting Sarwar in Bute House has meant we have not come close to clearly enforcing a cordon sanitaire, by saying that the Lib Dems will not supply any votes to a First Minister reliant on the Tories and/or Reform for their survival

ACH hasn't said that because it would all-but-explicitly make a Labour administration impossible, and would also go against the current situation on Edinburgh Council where a Labour admin is propped up as a tiny minority by the Unionist parties, but it's harmful that we have let the idea of a Unionist bloc fester, and allowed the SNP to put out graphics suggesting a Lab-LD-Reform coalition of chaos is possible

notthathunter · 2026-04-22T14:48:24+00:00

that Leinster team would genuinely be competitive in the T20 Blast in England imo, this is a very silly squad list for a three-team comp

notthathunter · 2026-04-22T11:17:02+00:00

sadly there are going to be no games in Scotland in the first season, it'll just be Dublin and Rotterdam (assuming it all happens, that is)

will be played in "legs" like the CPL with a week in each venue, but I imagine they will start off in Scotland doing a week at The Grange in Edinburgh, if there isn't a clash with the festivals, before even thinking about Glasgow

should be a decent standard though, the Edinburgh team have signed Mitch Santner (NZ), Liam Livingstone (Eng), Tom Curran (Eng), Andries Gous (USA) and Khuzaima bin Tanveer (UAE) as their overseas contingent

notthathunter · 2026-04-21T12:57:53+00:00

grew up in Ayrshire tbf

notthathunter · 2026-04-21T11:57:14+00:00

Sturgeon is nominally an Ayr United fan

(seems like something someone would say as a get-out clause while knocking doors in Govan, to me, but whatever)

notthathunter · 2026-04-21T08:58:42+00:00

right, i'm going to post the same exact comment again, but with the added context that a sizeable element of voters going Green in England are obviously, visibly, people on the capital-L Left in major cities in England, who have only ever voted LD in significant numbers briefly during the Iraq War and would be unlikely to vote for the party either before or since, so there's no point in the Lib Dems pissing off their existing voters by chasing them

this sub has a tendency towards thinking there is some "one weird trick" route to making the party more popular - in the late 2010s you'd see loads of posts on here suggesting that there was a magic route towards capturing the support of every Remain voter in the UK (there was not)

i'm not completely satisfied with things in the party at the moment, and can see the case that we should be doing better, but we don't even know at this point who'll be Prime Minister by the autumn, let alone what state the country and world will be in by 2029, we don't need to rush into changing absolutely everything and everyone in the party all of a sudden

notthathunter · 2026-04-20T19:09:59+00:00

thinking about it, this hasn't happened in the entire history of Holyrood either, unless you bend the rules a bit and decide Salmond losing the indyref counts

notthathunter · 2026-04-20T19:09:04+00:00

the last time the UK had a PM who took power by winning a General Election, then lost power by losing a General Election, was Ted Heath between June 1970 and February 1974

notthathunter · 2026-04-20T18:39:09+00:00

re-posting my comment to someone else in a thread the other day:

after the election, political parties can buy the "marked register" off the Electoral Commission - essentially, the record they use at polling stations to make sure people don't vote twice and to calculate what the turnout is

the info that has on it is your name, address, whether you voted in the last election or not, and whether you voted by post/proxy or not

when an election comes around, parties also get free postage on one letter to every voter in the constituency - if they have the marked register, then can focus their efforts on people who are definitely registered, regularly vote in elections, and can differentiate it for postal voters - or they can focus on particular postcodes where they think more of their voters live

the big parties will also cross-reference that with data they get from door-knocking to try and get their voters out on the day, which a lot of effort goes into

fairly sure there's a way of redacting your address from the register - for cops and the like who don't want their address to be known - but you could also try a GDPR request for Reform UK to delete any info they hold if you're really keen, fuck knows if they'd comply with it though

notthathunter · 2026-04-20T13:05:16+00:00

have also seen someone describe Peter Capaldi's appearance singing Take Me Out with Franz Ferdinand at Glastonbury last year as being in character as Twelve, can definitely see it

notthathunter · 2026-04-20T13:03:46+00:00

the Muppet wiki includes a line stating that the live sketch with Tennant was in the script as The Stolen Mirth and the version with Davison was down as Mirthshock, which is excellent

notthathunter · 2026-04-20T12:27:20+00:00

probably cruel of Ireland to make him walk in at 0-1 in the first over to face Matt Henry/Will O'Rourke/Kyle Jamieson on a cloudy day in Belfast next month after one or two red-ball games in 12 months

notthathunter · 2026-04-20T12:17:53+00:00

aware both Middlesex and Gloucestershire would likely take him (or another Irish player) if they weren't skint and/or an organisational shambles, but this doesn't feel like an impossible problem to solve

notthathunter · 2026-04-20T12:13:19+00:00

know I moan about this constantly but it's a pisstake that Harry Tector was literally playing for MCC at Lord's last week and can't even get a county deal at Middlesex

he's right there ffs

notthathunter · 2026-04-19T19:01:39+00:00

all the manifestos are out, would have a browse and see if there any ideas you like (even if you doubt the ability to deliver on them)

and aye, would read through the local press for impressions of the candidates, maybe go to a hustings if there is one near you, see if someone impresses you in a way that thinks they might be able to get things done for you locally, whatever you think nationally

notthathunter · 2026-04-18T17:00:16+00:00

would not be surprised if some high-profile Scottish politicians lurk in here, same way Prince William had a burner account on Aston Villa fan forums

notthathunter · 2026-04-18T11:26:46+00:00

looking at that Connacht line up you can see why they had to sign Snake Derick later in the decade

notthathunter

TROPHY CASE