I have to say, a challenge system (with referee’s calls for ambiguous situations) does create an additional strategic quality. But there’s no point in using a challenge system if you’re also going to deliberately compromise the ability of VAR to reach the right outcome. You’d just end up with a whole bunch of complaints along the lines of “it’s absurd and unfair that we’re getting relegated instead of them because the ref couldn’t spend long enough checking every possible offside and consequently they get to have an offside goal”.

Is this Newcastle’s season over? How many games do they have to struggle through before January offers some hope of reinforcement?

Manchester City are boring as hell to watch. And Guardiola wants them to be boring. Control. Control. Control.

Presumably he’d push up a CB, which he does anyway… but Stones is injured enough himself I’d guess they’d buy a CB as well.

I guess another option would be to just not have a winger on that side. Or Reece James would be the nominal winger.

Or maybe Reece James can invert.

Has Rico Lewis really been (a) getting enough game time and (b) demonstrating the kind of quality that suggests an international cap? (This is not a rhetorical question; I do not, as a rule, watch Manchester City games.)