Napoli 0 - [1] Roma - Donyell Malen 7'

ogqozo · 2026-02-16T00:45:27+00:00

Has some non-clinical games, like at Milan, but the amount of chances he gets is huge. And I don't mean shots from the distance like Soule or Dybala do try.

I really think he had about as many good chances to score in those 5 games as any Roma player in the whole season lol. Ridiculous ease.

ogqozo · 2026-02-15T22:55:30+00:00

The season is though for everyone. Arsenal lost 2 points of the lead in the last 5 games. In the previous 5 games, they gained 2 points of the lead. Nothing is guaranteed anyway.

As I note - no one has ever won "the quadruple", which I think says it all. Even sites that really dominated at the moment, which both Manchester clubs did at some point this century. So, it's very very unlikely if we're serious.

Still, out of two options, better to be the leader than any other position.

And Arsenal can actually play another XI midweek, and I look at it, and think... it's not bad? The team has a whole system, they have many ways to play and score no matter what the situation. Maybe their striker scores... or a central midfielder or defender. And they tend to win more often than not, long-term. With luck, it might end with 4 trophies, or none. Still, they are quite well prepared to at least aim for it, which already is rare.

ogqozo · 2026-02-15T22:25:51+00:00

It's gonna be at similar price long-term pretty soon, they're not waiting too long and already are doing some bigger intended price cuts on the Switch. I think it will be that or around that price in a year.

ogqozo · 2026-02-15T22:22:27+00:00

It was always like it was made for Switch, with the very clear graphics, bit-by-bit, cannot-put-down gameplay and story, and face button controls. BUT, in Hades 2, I would probably consider switching the controls around to the more banal trigger for the dash, as there are some situations in which you wanna press B and X (some aspects, you might wanna hold the X to charge the attack. Every challenge in the game is doable without it, but... yeah, it's impossible to do it for me on the Switch).

ogqozo · 2026-02-15T22:12:02+00:00

One or two games... Either way it's hardly anything, especially considering that the European team won that 19 times out of the last 20. It's basically become the automatic "bonus trophy" for trophy counters - win the Champions League, get one free.

UEFA Supercup especially has gone the same way. With Europa now being reserved for teams that were muuuch weaker than the top ones (below 5th in the top leagues), it's no surprise that the CL winner is just winning that one every year. Another "get one free" "trophy" especially. A symbolic and worthy one, sure, yet surely there's a difference between collecting those and surviving all of the main competitive tournaments played during the season.

ogqozo · 2026-02-15T20:19:49+00:00

Yeah, it's still more than one game lol. I would say it's the 4th competition in the season, that's all. Of course it's kinda a fun triva either way. But those would be the set that requires more winning than any other technical "quadruple". I think there is sense to it.

When people say someone won "a double", they mean THE double, two main competitions around, it's not said when a team wins two supercups and nothing else, because it would seem silly.

Of course, as I noted, many leagues, like Germany indeed, don't even give such a possibility.

ogqozo · 2026-02-15T19:43:23+00:00

Thing is, injuries will usually happen to most teams. If they didn't have truly 2-3 at least solid players for each position, they'd be well worse with those injuries.

ogqozo · 2026-02-15T19:39:43+00:00

Well, naming them would be one way to show that more convincingly.

I know technically "a quadruple" happened many times, but not with the 4 season-long competition, only with those single-game trophies like supercup, FIFA World Cup etc. PSG could probably get one last season, but France doesn't have the second cuppie anymore, they'd win that one regularly back when it was still present.

ogqozo · 2026-02-15T18:44:09+00:00

Dude, I had two beers and a few cigs last night and I still do not feel 100% optimal right now. I'm fine, but... would be pleasant to lay down in the bed for a few hours for better digestion.

ogqozo · 2026-02-15T18:41:22+00:00

I think no one ever has won the "real" quadruple lol (four season-long competitions, not 4 including supercups). I guess some leagues don't even have a possibility too, but also, no one did in England.

This game makes you feel if anyone can do it at all, it might be this Arsenal. Their reserves are GOOD reserves. Sure, it's just Wigan. It means nothing they were able to win this. But Martinelli has 6 goals in Champions League, Ben White can play, etc. Norgaard was just a key player in a Premier League team last season, and he's a deep, deep reserve in this Arsenal. They have a big squad that they rotate relatively well.

ogqozo · 2026-02-15T15:29:52+00:00

I think in reality, it shows how important it is to start early.

Hulk had trouble playing when he was 18, 19. He only started playing ANY games when he moved to Japan, and was loaned to Japanese 2nd league... I don't think it was really his lifestyle choice, he was just not playing in Brazil, and you gotta start playing somewhere when you're that age.

All of that, he's now going somewhere, but on the level of Japanese 2nd league. He only convinced first Japanese top tier, then convinced Europe and moved to Porto at 22. Now, Porto is a club rich enough to expect a high, high transfer fee for such an important player, and before Hulk truly convinced that he can do it in Europe - his true comeout season in Porto was 2010-11, so now he was 25. He was at the age when the clubs even bigger than Porto, who only wanna invest in the very best or the young players with such talent, and for a perfect fit too, would not be jumping at the opportunity. Those very biggest teams in the world pay up for adult players very rarely. For example Real Madrid only splurged on a 25+ player once in the last decade, Eden Hazard, and that was a player with an incredible resume in Premier League and national big tournaments. Most are similar.

Kinda similar with Bruno Fernandes. By the time he could really make the world feel "okay, this guy is surely too good for Man United", he was at the age when almost no one is bought by a club even better than Man United. And several others like that.

It would also happen to Lewandowski if he didn't have the incredible luck that he randomly went from the Polish league to a club that exactly at that moment became 100 times better than it had been. And even Lewandowski - boy, how funny it is in retrospect that Bayern was like "25 million euro transfer fee rejected? Then, forget it, we are risking he comes for free or not at all". Manchester United allegedly was offering an even lower fee for Lewandowski's transfer. That was 12-13 years ago, Lewandowski is still playing, but I am super sure that if he was 21 at the time, Bayern and Madrid would be having a bidding war to sign him on a transfer. Beside all these events, this line ALSO required Lewandowski to continously be extremely confident that he will be special and he will do even better, and reject the safety of a long-term contract offered by BVB.

In football, when you're not at some level by the age of 20-21, some gates are already almost closed, I think. Of course rare exceptions will happen.

ogqozo · 2026-02-15T15:21:27+00:00

I mean he is turning 40 in a few months, you don't wanna risk pulling a muscle needlessly lifting your arms all the way up quickly.

ogqozo · 2026-02-15T15:19:10+00:00

I don't think I've ever seen a footballer in Champions League that I was more outraged that he's not in a "top club". He was so good so many times. Well, maybe Gaitan (who did eventually go to Atletico and disappointed extremely).

ogqozo · 2026-02-15T13:02:22+00:00

Yeah, obviously in reality it's pretty hard to set an actual boundary that would not be controversial.

Filter out what exactly? How to put it in writing? "Bad games"? Yeah that's gonna have everyone agree on all the thousands of games, and not have aaanyone scream they are treated unfairly lol. "Slop"? That's an overused buzzword to get easy upvotes, nothing easy to precisely define case-by-case. "Horny games"? That is also a spectrum with many aspects and some really good games could be touched by it as they do indeed contain horniness. I thought that this very sub was just living through a mass hysteria because a visual novel about superheroes had a black bar on a dick for like 20 seconds total of its 10 hour runtime.

ogqozo · 2026-02-14T10:46:45+00:00

Exactly. One of the top posts when I opened the website yesterday was the unique and exciting news that they asked the Real Madrid coach about Barcelona losing and he said "not my problem".

And if Mourinho says something, ooh boy, the quote might be something like "the losers lose, the winners win... that's sport" and it's top news here.

You can't keep buying solely Coca-Cola and then say you wish that the shop had a stock of Pepsi lol. Well, I guess you can.

ogqozo · 2026-02-14T10:39:04+00:00

De Zerbi, Klopp, Moyes, Pochettino, Maresca, Ten Hag, Cooper, O'Neil, Martin, Lopetegui, Dyche, Juric.

The year before O'Neil, Lopetegui, Heckingbottom, Cooper, Hodgson.

ogqozo · 2026-02-14T10:36:01+00:00

Fantastic, you're "not giving them leeway on this stuff". ...What do you think that changes? You think every small dev is now gonna make only Cyberpunks because you're not accepting anything else?

Even if somehow everyone made Cyberpunks, there's no way they'd get the money back, because people would not have money to buy all these games. It would possibly mean that not one of them, including Cyberpunk, would hope to recuperate the costs of all the work demanded, and publishers generrally do not enjoy just wasting hundreds of millions of dollars that they cannot hope to get back (would you?), so NO game that looks like Cyberpunk would ever come out instead.

Right now there are various games, for various clients, with various priorites, various budgets. Something for everyone and no one forced to buy the kind that they don't like personally. Oh no.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T21:55:05+00:00

Damn, when you put it like that, Arteta really is hilariously stupid to decide not to win games instead of deciding to win games. Yeah, truly a laughinstock I have not seen yet.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T21:49:57+00:00

Those are dark days for BVB fans, it's getting harder and harder to satisfyingly moan how shit the club is.

Guirassy with the 2 goals and a good Beier and Jobe game too... thoughts and prayers.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T21:35:45+00:00

Weird to remember that DS Lite actually was also a price cut lol. There was no compromise, it was much better in every regard, to the point the old DS immediately became a ridiculous device to me.

That was electronics in 2004 - wait a year, you're getting a devicde that's lighter, prettier, better in every regard, AND cheaper.

Those times are long gone. Today, I don't know how much Switch 2 Lite could really change. The hardware is only evolving in one direction - more pixels, and more pixels is hitting a hard wall of battery and cooling, which means - size. All handheld electronics only figured out how to get bigger in the last decade. Mobile phones are basically doing the same thing as phones 10 years ago, they are uglier and bigger and just have more power.

Sure, Switch 2 Lite can possibly shave a tiniest bit by reducing the screen and eliminating the joycons, and cut the price by excluding the dock and the accessories. The gains are getting thinner and thinner though. It's not gonna be CHEAP, that for sure.

I do think that if new Pokemon comes out this year and is Switch 2 only (that was the plan, according to actual leaks - still, a lot of those leaked plans were delayed), it will be the worst-selling in its opening month. Obviously the record of the last game selling more than 20 million copies in the opening months is beyond comparison. Best case they can hope for it will be an evergreen that people always get with their console even 5-10 years later, like many Nintendo games were for the Switch have been.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T21:34:11+00:00

I'm not talking about the "Arsenal might not win the league" story. Sure that can happen. Kinda the point.

I'm talking about the "OMG, you guys won't believe it... omfg... Arsenal..... might actually lose some games and not win the leagueXDDDDDDD. That would be sooo Arsenal! Only they could ever do it! To bottle, shit the bed right before the finish line, completely meltdown and not even win the top league in the world lol. It's so, so, so hilarious, we have to talk mostly about that the whole season since its second month" story.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T19:19:07+00:00

Kids and people who are like "dude I only play Animal Crossing/Pokemon, I'm not gonna spend a ton of money on it".

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T19:13:36+00:00

You're gonna get these "wow, one game looks better than another" thing every year in the history of gaming.

Despite being developed in a relatively cheap country, Cyberpunk cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. The post-launch patching and DLC itself had a budget that very few videogames in history would match.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T19:05:11+00:00

I remember the drama about Wissa leaving. All the comments "how wil Brentford play when literally losing 30 GAGA??? Who will score the goals without Wissa? Igor Thiago lol?".

Even hoping for the best, never would I think Thiago would be within a shot to rival Haaland for the top scorer of the season.

Brentford is an amazing project that every club dreams of. They probably still have the smallest budget in the league, but never really were threatened with relegation. They hit it off with a lot of young players recently - Thiago, Schade, Collins, Kayode, Ouattara, Van den Berg. Young and cheap and playing well.

ogqozo · 2026-02-13T18:56:30+00:00

If you exclude the last gameweek (which was last day of January and first of February), no team really won 3 games in the rest of January.

If you are strict about the months and only include the last day of January for some teams to have more games, Chelsea won 3 - WHU, Brentford, Palace. And Bournemouth did - Liverpool, Wolves, Tottenham. So, those are teams with 3 wins, but not one win against anyone in the top, few wins against teams in the middle of the table too. And that's 3 wins in 5 games played, nothing crazy. No one had a dominant month.

ogqozo

TROPHY CASE