Mark Armstrong

@The__1958 They absolutely fiddled it. When the survey of ST holders & members went out the options were (1) keep OT for women’s team & build new ground or (2) redevelop. Then keeping was taken off the table. They also included members who arguably have more to gain from a new ground….

🗣️Old Trafford: Stolen in Plain Sight Supporters asked to engage with a process that offered limited transparency and no meaningful opportunity to scrutinise key assumptions, financial models, or long term impacts. Engagement through pre selected forums without genuine challenge risked exactly what it became, a rubber stamping exercise rather than an open consultation. The club in full PR mode wheeling out all the bollocks when we all know this is nothing more than sacrificing our home at the altar of greed. Old Trafford is all we have left our history, our home, our identity and now even that is being chipped away, piece by piece. The Americanisation of the game, the dilution of fan culture, the pricing out of generational supporters. It’s not just change, it’s loss. The 1958 🇾🇪

@TNLUK @theoldmanfury Is it just Virgin media people? It errors when I deposit & when I try to buy thinks I’m abroad! No VPN

@theoldmanfury A small number of players are currently getting an error message when trying to complete certain actions on the TNL website/app. We're looking into this - please try again later, and apologies for the inconvenience. ^Kane

@TNLUK something is up with your app. Purchases of tickets cannot be completed

@TNLUK @ruthaggiss1 A big number. Newly updated app doesn’t work, safari login or safari incognito.

@ruthaggiss1 Hi Ruth, a small number of players are currently getting an error message when trying to complete certain actions on the TNL website/app. We're looking into this, and please try again later. ^TJ

@TNLUK sent you a dm

@FabrizioRomano All based on cheating.

🚨🏆 Pep Guardiola: "19 titles in 10 years at Manchester City, in the modern era, in England, in Europe… …I think it's a hats off to the whole organisation”.

@McardleTrevor How on earth can Robbie Gibb be a GB News editorial adviser AND be head of the BBC. No wonder we're seeing so much of Nigel Farage. He's not independent - Gibb needs to go

More than £47m of secret payments to agents, players, and even their families helped Abramovich’s Chelsea amass its trophies bit.ly/416ihAV helped by the secret British Virgin Island structures that UK govt refuses to tackle

@MyHeaven_1878 @R_o_M Similar, but way softer!!

@R_o_M The same Attwell gave a penalty for this only a month ago. Similar to the Amad one but softer imo. reddit.com/r/LiverpoolFC/…

Stuart Attwell getting a good look at this stamp from Walker on Dorgu in January and deciding there was nothing wrong with it. Hard to imagine a clearer red card offence. This ref is beyond incompetent.

@WayneSBarton They’re both pens or neither are. Officials always going to need more to give us a 2nd pen so soon after one!

Maguire complaining but can have few complaints with that. United though might well feel even more aggrieved considering their own appeal which was turned down.

Look at the easy ride posh establishment boy Tice gets from the press over a £600k tax dodge, compared to the misogynistic classist witch-hunt against Rayner over a measly £40k.

I am just chucking this out there: NCP has not collapsed due to Covid as they claimed. They collapsed as they were bought out by Macquarie Group, who saddled them with huge debt, who then palmed them off on the next vulture hedge fund to pick what was left bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

@AndrewBowie_MP It’s not closed. Reserves are 75% depleted. You introduced the EPL. Permitting private companies to extract more oil & gas to sell on the open market won’t deliver energy security.

@ClaireCoutinho @CCHQPress You must know this is bollocks?! Or are you just assuming you can lie easily to the ill- informed?!

Ed Miliband is killing off the North Sea. He is CHOOSING to leave £25 billion of tax revenue in the ground. That’s money we could use to cut fuel duty, or fund our army, or build more nuclear power. Mad.

@SkySportsNews Craig “charisma” Hope? Who’s he?

"Michael Carrick doesn't have the charisma to be Manchester United manager" 😳 Craig Hope looks at the future of Manchester United and doesn't believe Michael Carrick should be the long-term solution for the club 🔴

@MarkStretford @RealMKnighton You’ve got some idiots out of the woodwork with that rubbish. We don’t have “huge reserves” and thanks to privatisation we have to buy what comes from N Sea on the open market. Also the facts are it’s not net zero, it’s profits for suppliers causing £ high prices

Britain is sleepwalking into an energy catastrophe, and the architect of that is red Ed Miliband. As Energy Secretary, Miliband is pursuing a Net Zero agenda so detached from economic reality, that it threatens to do what no recession has managed: Permanently hollow out British industry and drive energy bills to levels that crush household finances and kill real world business investment. The infrastructure for his project simply isn’t there. You cannot mandate your way to a green economy. The logistics sector (rather important to all of us) has already said it won’t happen in Ed’s timeline. Green subsidies do not build nationwide grids overnight. Glitchy technology and Intermittent wind and solar do not keep the lights on. Meanwhile, we’re sitting on huge reserves of coal, oil and gas. British resources that could generate revenue, support jobs, and give us the energy security that every serious nation on earth is quietly prioritising while lecturing others about carbon targets. Miliband’s approach is ideological, not practical. It is economic vandalism which treats this country as a personal vehicle for a doomed political project - rather than the foundation on which people’s livelihoods depend. Every green mandate that prices out a manufacturer, every subsidy that distorts the market, every gas field left unopened is a choice to make Britain poorer. We cannot afford the Net Zero convictions of a mad man. The country needs energy realism, not green obsession. Britain needs Reform.

I worked at Epic Games for two years. This is real, and the strategy behind it is smarter than most people realize. Tim Sweeney has spent nearly two decades buying North Carolina forest land. 50,000+ acres across 15 counties. He’s now one of the largest private landowners in the state. The purchases started in 2008, right after the real estate collapse wiped out developers who had been planning golf resorts and luxury communities on biodiverse wilderness. Sweeney paid $15 million for Box Creek Wilderness, a 7,000-acre stretch in the Blue Ridge foothills containing 130+ rare and threatened species. Developers had owned 5,000 of those acres before the crash. He bought them for conservation prices when nobody else was bidding. He runs the acquisitions through an LLC called “130 of Chatham.” He buys the land, holds it for years, then either donates it to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, sells it at a discount to state parks, or hands it to land trusts. In 2021, he donated 7,500 acres in the Roan Highlands to the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy. Largest private land donation in North Carolina history. The part people miss: he told the News & Observer that since 2021, land got too expensive to keep buying. So he shifted focus to converting his existing 50,000 acres into permanent conservation status. He’s locking the land into legal structures that make development impossible regardless of who owns it in the future. A billionaire worth roughly $6 billion is spending tens of millions acquiring wilderness specifically during economic downturns, then giving it away or placing it under permanent legal protection. The land will outlast him, Epic Games, and Fortnite. That’s the part that separates Sweeney from billionaires who write checks to get their name on a building. The building depreciates. The forest compounds.

@ChrisMurphyCT I’m beginning to doubt the integrity of the FIFA Peace Prize 🏆

9/ All of this was totally foreseeable. Frankly, it’s why previous presidents weren’t so stupid to start a war like this. Trump has lost control of the war. His best course now is to cut his losses and end it. That’s the only way to prevent an even bigger disaster.

It’s crystal clear now that Trump has lost control of this war. He badly misjudged Iran’s ability to retaliate. The region is on fire. 1/ I’m going to explain to you in this🧵what I’ve learned - in part from closed door briefings - about the four biggest current crises.

@monstroso @JChimirie66677 Are Puffin’s woke now?

@JChimirie66677 They’ve only been on the notes since 2016.

Replacing Churchill With a Puffin: The Quiet Erasure of Britain The Bank of England has made its decision. Churchill goes. Turner goes. Jane Austen goes. Alan Turing goes. In their place, wildlife. A stoat, perhaps. A puffin. A hedgehog. The consultation found it popular. The anti-counterfeiting argument was sound. And so, without a parliamentary debate, without a public vote, without anyone in authority pausing to ask what it means to remove the faces of the people who built and saved this country from its own currency, it was quietly done. This is how erasure works. With a consultation and a press release. Churchill's face on the five pound note is not decoration. It's a daily reminder that Britain has a history worth being proud of. That the people who shaped and defended this nation deserve to be remembered. And that national identity is something real. Hand over a fiver for a coffee and catch a glimpse of the man who stood between Western civilisation and Nazi conquest. The man who refused to negotiate when every pressure was on him to do so. The man who defined British resolve at its finest hour. Replace him with a puffin and you have made a statement about what Britain now thinks of itself. You have made it to every man, woman and child in the country. Without a debate. Without a vote. Without asking anyone. That is the pattern. It's always quiet. It's always administrative. It's always defended on its own terms, as common sense, as progress, as a neutral technical decision. Statues fall to angry mobs and the establishment calls it a moment of reckoning. Street names are changed by council committees and it's called sensitivity. The curriculum is rewritten by academics and it's called balance. And now the currency is stripped of the faces that connect a people to their past, and it's called anti-counterfeiting policy. Individually each decision is defensible. Cumulatively they form a pattern that is not accidental. The institutions entrusted with stewarding British identity have been captured by people who regard that identity as a problem to be managed rather than an inheritance to be protected. The long march through the institutions that began in the universities and the civil service fifty years ago has reached the point where it makes decisions about whose face appears on your money, and nobody with the power to stop it seems minded to try. The consequences are not abstract. A population severed from its history, its symbols and its heroes loses the connective tissue of national identity. It cannot defend what it no longer recognises. It cannot demand loyalty to values it has been taught to be ashamed of. Lebanon's Christians believed their country was too civilised, too plural, too decent to fall. They were right about the decency. They were wrong about what decency alone can protect. Britain is making the same error by different means. You do not need armed factions to hollow out a nation. You need a Bank of England consultation, a university diversity committee, and fifty years of patience. Churchill understood what was at stake when identity and resolve were under pressure. He said so, repeatedly, in language that would today be considered inflammatory by the very institutions that once celebrated him. The irony of removing his face from the currency of a country he saved, in an era when the threats he warned against have taken new forms, is apparently lost on the people who made that decision. A stoat will never evoke what Churchill evoked. That is not sentiment. That is the point. The replacement of meaning with the merely decorative is not a neutral act. It's a statement about what a nation values, made quietly, by people who were not elected to make it, and cannot be held to account for having done so. If we cannot defend the face on a banknote, we will not defend what that face represented. And the people dismantling it, piece by piece, consultation by consultation, know that perfectly well.

‘Sorry to those who voted for us - but this is in the too hard box so I wish we hadn’t bothered’. So - he isn’t the man to have around as PM in a crisis is he…

@UtdArts1 @MUFC_ReTweet I was picking up on “Jimmy could see in a player that nobody else could.” They’d often go and give a 2nd opinion on each others finds: Jimmy, Matt & Joe.

@ArmstrongM @MUFC_ReTweet Sure, Mark. But I never said Jimmy spotted and signed Bobby 😉 I was just referencing his coaching skills. But I really should do a post on Joe Armstrong 👍

🇾🇪 A Tribute to Jimmy Murphy, the Man Who Kept the Red Flag Flying 🧵 Jimmy Murphy was born in 1910 in the Rhondda Valley, South Wales, the son of an Irish emigrant. He played the organ and piano as a boy before football took hold. He went on to play over 200 games for West Bromwich Albion, appeared in the 1935 FA Cup Final, and earned 15 caps for Wales. He was a proper footballer, but it was what he did after his playing days that made him irreplaceable. The story of how he ended up at United is one most fans don't know. During the Second World War, Murphy was giving a speech about football to a group of troops in Bari, Italy. Matt Busby happened to be in the audience and was so impressed that, upon his appointment as Manchester United manager, he made Murphy the first signing of his tenure. Not a player. A coach. A man Busby had spotted giving a talk to soldiers and knew immediately was different. From 1946, Murphy worked with every young player who arrived at the club, nurturing them, harnessing their talent, and preparing them for life as a footballer at Old Trafford. He set up the youth team structure in 1952, and for the first five consecutive years of the FA Youth Cup, United were unbeatable, a record that has never been equalled. Bobby Charlton is the clearest example of what Jimmy could see in a player that nobody else could. He had Bobby repeat again and again the instruction "Just hit the ball. Don't look up for goal. Just hit it." He would roll balls from different angles for Bobby to hit, again and again, until it became instinct, turning him into the most spectacular striker of a ball in his generation. Nobby Stiles, despite failing health, turned up for an interview just to talk about Murphy and said: "I'd walk a hundred miles to talk about Jimmy Murphy. England would never have won the World Cup without him. Bobby Charlton was the best player in that entire tournament and he would never have been that good without Jimmy's coaching." Then came the 6th of February, 1958. Murphy had pleaded to travel with the Babes to Yugoslavia for the European Cup quarter-final against Red Star Belgrade. It was Busby who insisted Murphy go to Cardiff to manage Wales in their World Cup qualifier against Israel instead. That decision saved his life. The man who took his seat next to Busby on the plane, chief coach Bert Whalley, was among the 23 who perished. Murphy heard the news when he arrived back at Old Trafford. A usually hard-nosed man, he broke down in tears when told by his secretary, Alma George. When he visited Busby in his hospital bed, the United manager could only whisper a few words to his trusted deputy: "Keep the flag flying, Jimmy." 1/2 #JimmyMurphy #mufc #manchesterunited