The9

No, perfectly fair. All ST holders are being treated equally. It's people who show loyalty by going to away games who are then getting priority within that group. You can just as easily make the argument that ST holders who don't go to aways shouldn't have priority over non-ST holders who do.

Would have been nice if the ball hadn't been too high for Rodriguez to head it in, of course. There were some much weaker headers from certain other players than Rodriguez's skilful redirect when he was stuck well under the ball.

"Daylight" and "benefit of the doubt to the attacking player" are no longer current interpretations of the Laws, both having been shelved a couple of years ago when they introduced the stuff about "any part of the body which can play the ball being ahead of the penultimate defender". With that in mind, Rodriguez was marginally offside, and the lino was right - he was also absolutely in line to make the decision. He might have been guessing, but it was a good guess. Mason, in contrast, made a lot of bad guesses, and missed a couple of blatant offences by Osvaldo as well as a few potential penalties for Saints - and a bad corner decision in front of the Northam. Whilst I'm thinking about the Northam and corners, I do wish the idiots around me would stop saying "the ball's not in the arc, hurr hurr" when we take corners with the ball barely touching the outside edge of the line. The ball doesn't even have to touch the bloody line, it only has to appear to be overlapping the line from any of the many possible angles you could be looking at it from to be legitimate. You can even see daylight between ball and line from some angles, but if the edge of the ball is over the edge of the line, that is absolutely fine.

The one about surgical spirit works, if you rub it onto your feet before the match it reduce blistering (as well as sterilising it), and if you already have blisters, whip the dead skin off, rub some of that on it (burns like hell) and it seems to harden much quicker, I had some huge blisters build a new hard skin within a day just by putting surgical spirit on them, really handy on rock hard pitches with midweek games early and late in the season.

Sorry thickoes, but that's how it is.

Not being funny, but Schneiderlin seemed to have spent most of the first half on the shoulder of their centre backs and in no way shape or form was playing as a defensive midfielder of any kind.

If you bet on Saints to lose, you cover yourself with an insurance bet and will get money to cheer you up. If they win, you won't care about the bet. Other than that, I don't really understand the question, as you're requesting bets which will cheer you up win or lose, which isn't really possible. Unless you lay against the draw...

I think the idea is that you'd expect the manager to have a logical and justifiable rationale for his decisions. He's already outright come out and said Lambert's 3rd choice behind Sturridge and Carroll without even considering Welbeck, Rooney and anyone else, but his thinking seems to be based on the belief that Lambert's just a hard-working 3rd tier player who's a bit better than he was in 2008 when Fulham played Bristol Rovers. You'd hope his enthuasiam and effort alone, as noted repeatedly, would be worth inclusion in the squad just to remind the regulars what it should mean to them, but not sure that's what he's thinking.

You mean in the last 18 years ? Which is the entire lifetime of some of England's fringe prospects at the moment. How is two decades not long enough to cause a load of kids who might otherwise be playing regular top division football to not get those opportunities ? It could happen practically overnight if a club signed a few established foreign players ! The supertalented are stockpiled by the top clubs and often don't get a look in due to established internationals ahead of them, and the less super-talented can't get a run in teams because it takes time that clubs and managers don't have to develop players at the first team level. Look at Chelsea trying to move on their aged core of Terry, Lampard, and Drogba - they brought Villas-Boas in to do that 3 years ago, but due to the instant demands of modern football they're 4 managers down and 2 of those players are still regularly playing.

I actually don't mind that - I thought the "Welcome to Anfield > " things were a nice touch last season up there, proper solid, not an afterthought and actual "nice of you to be interested" kind of hospitality without being either patronising or just an obvious marketing ploy. As opposed to Brighton's trumpeted half-assery in particular.

It'll be Sturridge, Welbeck, Rooney and Lambert if they're all fit, I think, but he probably won't get on. Carroll would need to score a few in a limited timescale before being considered fit enough and Defoe just isn't playing. Always the possibility Bent starts scoring though...

Do you not think the club should be maximising their sponsorship income to enable them to spend more under the Financial Fair Play rules then ?

I HAVE been to the Amex, and it was utterly crap. Concourse was too small and too rammed to get near the bar, so the local ales were irrelevant. The lighting was rubbish, and amounted to something like two spotlights making part of the concrete slightly pink, and the tv screens showed some photos of about 20 Saints players on an endless irritating loop. As for "no closing time for bars", they are legally obliged to close them at certain times during matches, and if you wanted to have a pint after rather than getting into the queue for the trains, more fool you. Good in theory, rubbish in execution. As for the £200k, they can just give it to me if they like.

The # and the FC are new, the rest of it was already there.

And how dull must the lives be of the people worrying about telling other people what to worry about? And so on.

Seems reasonable. Though the only gay person I've discussed it with couldn't care less about it and didn't find it humiliating in any way, because he was fine rationalising that it's only thickoes who say stuff like that anyway. FWIW I don't think there's anything remotely offensive about "we can see you holding hands", but it's about as amusing and original as singing about sheep****gers has been for 20 years (i.e. not at all).

Nicolas Anelka's brother Claude used to be his agent, years ago - certainly in 1999 : May 19: Anelka's brother and agent, Claude, guarantees that Nicolas will stay at Highbury next season.. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sport/football/fa_carling_premiership/405221.stm Manasse was NOT his brother, but is one of his current agents, who worked for the company that represented him. Sounds a little too convenient and a little too much of a personal response to a business relationship to me, with my cynical head on, seeing as the original rumour was that he stormed out of training and announced he was retiring...

No, but the main board is.

Alongside Gareth Bale...

Who's asking for them to be harder ? I just want them to be "the same" and be marked in the same way, that's completely in line with what you would expect from a historical benchmarking system of ability. Just introducing A* made a mockery of the whole system, unless they go back and re-evaluate the grades of the people who took the same exams and were only given As for getting what are now A* marks. And frankly, exams are meant to be a measure of ability, they're not meant to be bloody easy. Completely agree with you regarding vocational training though, there's not enough of that for people who aren't academically gifted - in fact there's not enough of it for people who are, either.

You are just wrong. Says the former Lotus Notes System Administrator.

I struggle to get past the misuse of "complimentary" in the title, or the use of "less" rather than "fewer" for the number of games played compared to others. Really basic written errors which make me question the value of any of the rest of it.

Luddite.

I'm on twitter. I just think 99% of it is a waste of time, including at least 90% of the things I follow. And there's still no reason why saints would promote a hashtag ahead of their own feed when it'll be full of slander and Skate-started rubbish. I'm also not sure how having a hashtag which is not visible even to people who are in the ground is of benefit to anyone. People will either already know about it or they won't know from Saints doing this.

Seems somewhat unlikely, given that the latency of satellite or cable broadcasting guarantees they'll be transmitted slower than a simple 140 character message even if you don't take the rebroadcast into consideration. Listening to the radio or monitoring twitter ruins watching live tv.