The9

Oi, I was bloody good at sprinting and I'm definitely white. ...Though my great-grandad came from Trinidad and Tobago.

They got sacked because of bad results, to think anything else is frankly preposterous, especially when the same people that sacked them gave them the bloody jobs in the first place. Townsend is doing no-one any favours.

If you want a BLOODY good laugh, here's the goal they conceded to Macclesfield today:

I've never played in a parks match without something resembling a ref - obviously linos are done by the clubs, but the point is that the role still exists - you start making sin-bins a thing and giving the 4th official more to do, it either becomes a ref task at grassroots or it defines a difference between the game people pay to see and the game they play, which can't be a good thing. Same goes for UEFA's ridiculous goal-line officials really. A bit different with goal-line technology; I can't argue that it has been a success, but that's also a task the ref can perform with our without the tech so there's no difference in practical implementation of giving goals at grassroots.

Thin edge of the wedge to turning it into WWE...

He's got no chance there, they use line breaks instead of commas.

I assure you it doesn't.

That's "number of shot blocks by Targett" then: 2, in 496 minutes. He's also blocked 4 crosses and a pass. http://www.whoscored.com/Players/136776/

I think we'll need to make all the games Cat A for that.

"Adult members will receive the following benefits: Priority access to home tickets Priority access to away tickets (after Season Ticket holders) Priority access to the Ticket Exchange Official membership card for access to home matches Exclusive monthly members’ newsletter direct to your inbox Read more at http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/tickets/membership/index.aspx#2SXyKcEdMJHIGjEz.99"

Sometimes I do wonder if you're actually watching the matches. If there's a player guaranteed to get a booking early and pointlessly based on previous appearances it's Reed, who is clearly out of favour and around 6th choice at the moment and not even been near the bench. When we were beating Chelsea, he was about 10 yards from me in the front row of the upper tier of the away end. Jesus, I hadn't even noticed you'd picked Yoshida.

Unfortunately placement of the Saints logo there, don't let a Skate get hold of it, it'll be on a t-shirt before you can say "League 2".

Somehow I managed to miss my team's pre-season photo every single season despite playing for the best part of 30 years. It takes a remarkable ability to get injured or change clubs just before the season starts (or poor organisation on the part of the club to get someone with a camera there) to achieve that. There are team shots in existence, but they're either mid-season when someone pitched up with a camera, before a cup final, or non-competitive tournament type ones. In unrelated news, why's it taken until November to produce this?

That was confirmed on the OS earlier in the week, but it's still not a "con", it only ever bought priority over people who didn't have memberships. End of discussion.

Well, Kaboul and O'Shea will improve them - which is in itself an indictment of how crap they are. Ditto re: losing Cattermole weakening them.

Not sure what it's got to do with "lefties", she's clearly a prejudiced moron incapable of seeing the hypocrisy of her actions and benefiting from the usual level of un-nuanced knee-jerkist reporting for self-publicity that will probably get her to Katie Hopkins levels of notoriety. You'd think this genuine example of "political correctness gone mad" would make some people realise how little of the legitimate diversity agenda which they constantly rail against is actually "political correctness gone mad", but it appears self-awareness is pretty low on the agenda there too. As an aside, two black managers get sacked, apparently this makes it a "bad day for black managers". Does anyone else actually think of the two managers in question primarily as "black managers" other than the people compartmentalising them like that? Why is it not reported as "a bad day for white managers" when two of them are sacked in the same day? The reporting itself is hugely hypocritical, as is the refusal NOT to label people by their colour. Managers who happen to be black are almost certainly no more interested in others of their skin colour getting jobs than anyone else - i.e. practically not at all.

Which of course is ridiculous when you think how arbitrary refs often are with free-kick positioning in the rest of the pitch and the onus being on not punishing the fouled-against side.

I don't think the "respect from an early age" thing is really the issue - I played both as a kid with the same and it was only once kids turned into gobby teenagers there was a problem - and I actually stopped playing rugby at school precisely BECAUSE of the complete lack of control and respect. Even though playing football as a teenager was a completely nightmare, the biggest jump in attitudes for me was between school and adult football - suddenly everyone was arguing everything and it normalised the behaviour. Presumably the opposite happens when you get to play rugby with the "grown-ups", but I wouldn't know. There's a big difference between changing behaviours and changing laws. I'm not keen on sin-bins because of the impact on time management of games (basically more time-wasting until the sin bin period passes) and the need to shift the 4th official to an official timekeeper role - and making the game different AGAIN to grassroots. As for penalty goals. Just... no. There are plenty of possible sanctions which already punish goal-scoring opportunities etc. without giving the power to make up goals to officials.

We were 1-0 up then 3-1 down against Man U before scoring late.

Are you assuming that there are no socially-responsible Marines? Massive generalisation - the only reason "the left" is involved in more disturbances in protesting is because they happen to be the group at odds with pretty much everything the government has stood for since around 1979, and yes I include Blair's lot in that. So there are many more "left" protests than "right" ones to begin with. As far as "violence at protests" goes, there's a need to show strength in numbers to illustrate support for their cause, and I'm fairly sure every peaceful, organised group protesting attracts a pile of hangers on with their own agendas, some of whom are always going to want to have a pop at authority figures. Both far left and far right politics have anti-authority strands which manifest in different ways, but I'd be more worried about the far right paramilitary-wannabes kicking off than the smelly flowers-in-guns types.

Good grief, I used to watch that when home alone as a teenager on a Saturday night most weeks whilst waiting for MotD when there were only three channels, and I wouldn't have guessed that based on your description in a hundred years.

It usually has to be a sustained position for people to remember it - for instance I can fully accept people recalling I was over Lambert's usefulness long before we let him go, and as a result the "Sharp will score more" thing in the first Prem season is a fair piece of p155-taking, but you'd have to be some kind of mental to constantly refer to a throwaway joke comment I made about, say, singing about Yoshida being f'cking sh1111t despite my consistent questioning of Yoshida's decision-making in a top 8 Prem team. Ridiculous knee-jerk opinions are the thing that mostly keeps me off this site on weekends. I may venture on here on a Sunday night if we've won.

The only change of personnel was Yoshida on for Fonte, which is a big loss but given how little the centre backs had to do first half was probably expected to be routine. Difficult to say that changed the overall mindset of the side. 2) only happened AFTER the team showed they weren't at the same levels - Romeu was brought on to help absorb the pressure (and based on his midweek performance against Villa, try and put some pace and movement into our midfield passing, though that didn't happen). I suspect there are only so many times you can tell a group of people winning 2-0 to treat the game as 0-0 before you have to find other motivational techniques. Obviously as it was a second successive home 2-0 lead drop off (arguably third with the League Cup game, and we also slipped back from 3-0 against Swansea late on) the players may not have reacted as well in the second half as they did, for example, in the 3-0 win against Norwich. Having said that, it's still a good position to be in to begin with and as long as we're getting ahead I'm fairly sure we're managing the situation within ourselves most of the time.

It was removed from the laws about 5 years ago because "some countries didn't understand it". From my experiences if we got rid of every new law because other countries didn't understand it, deliberate obstruction would be as legal as one ref thought it was in New York state when I played there in 1994...

Mic'ing up the refs would be a good start, no-one wants to be caught sweary-swearing on tv. As a general rule all this "rugby players are so good" thing really annoys me - they have other outlets for their annoyance so they can repress it for a few seconds and channel it appropriately in the general direction of an opponent, footballers doing the same just get sent off immediately. So I think what I'm saying is football needs a life-sized tackling dummy at the side of the pitch and all players should be allowed to run over to it and punch it in the head when the ref gives a dodgy decision.