The9

As we're only 0.2% likely to go down I would suggest that they are awful odds and you'd have to be a right mug to bet on it.

To be fair this is only post number 87401, maybe we need to restate the answers to these questions ?

The scary thing is had I not being doing... something or other... last week, I'd have had a look as well.

It was on this thread a page or so back.

Careful now, the FL themselves have clearly stated the -10 will be THIS season, without qualification.

I know they have history, so what though ? You still have to be some kind of massive loser to actively interrupt a trip to Wembley for a ruck with a bunch of people who may not even be there from a club with whom there is no remote interest.

You want to try believing anything they write after you've been even vaguely involved in a story that gets published. We had a girl I knew and a male work colleague die in a car crash when I was working for my previous employers, they worked on the same team and were heading to our Titchfield office for a meeting. The local paper, based all of half a mile from our offices, in the space of two paragraphs misreported that he was "a local businessman" (civil servant in an admin role), that he was her boss and she was his secretary/PA (they were doing the same job), and also, based on the knowledge that they were driving in the evening for a morning meeting, managed to imply there was something seedy going on between them because they had an hotel booked. It was hard enough for the widow and the family of the girl without the paper making up a load of crap as well.

The bit I don't get about this is that in order to get into any kind of ruck at Waterloo Station, all the Millwall fans taking the Jubilee Line to/from Wembley would have to actively choose to get off their tube trains and come out of the Tube on the off-chance that there might be some other teams' fans around, bearing in mind that their game kicked off in the evening, and Portsmouth were at Brentford for a 3pm kick off and have no need to go anywhere near Waterloo to get to and from Brentford anyway. This is of course, not allowing for sizeable quantities of thickoes on both sides.

Warning, this link will annoy : http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/4506132.stm "He said: "It was a bad mistake to go to Southampton and that's not being disrespectful to them, but really I shouldn't have done it for the sake of the fans. "I know how people must have felt when I left. When I left I genuinely never thought I would go to Southampton.""

I was sat in my nan's lounge watching Grandstand like I did every Saturday, having been to Anfield the week before to see Liverpool play Sheffield Wednesday (11:30am kick off due to the Grand National). Somewhere in my garage at home I still have a poster from a news-stand with the (albeit Wales on Sunday) headline on it about the number of deaths. Still dunno why I did that, even less why it's moved house with me about 15 times since, but aged 16 I knew it was a massive big deal in how football was going to be perceived. My dad actually turned down tickets to the semi-final and decided not to go for some reason. We'd both been to see Liverpool in the FA Cup finals of 1986 and 1988 (as well as the 1981 League Cup final) and he used to go to Anfield a few times a season when we weren't at Somerton Park watching Newport County. There was a hell of a crush outside the turnstiles in 1986 at Wembley as well, I got carried forward with my feet off the ground as a 13 year old. Amazingly, I believe Wembley actually built some crush barriers to spread the crowd after that - that just didn't happen at football grounds in those days. Like everyone else, at first there was that familiar "they've stopped the game ? Must be hooligans" feeling at first, but it pretty quickly became clear this was something else. The police response to people trying to climb out of the cages being hooligan containment, not a response to a large-scale medical emergency underpins that. Having re-seen the Grandstand footage verbatim on a BBC memorial programme a couple of years ago, it's surprising how little footage they showed, not knowing the magnitude at the time, but then the match wasn't on live tv. Grandstand were only cutting to radio reports/commentators and weren't allowed to show the live game - so there wasn't much to show and I recall we mostly got a still picture of a terrace at Hillsborough with the Grandstand logo, and (I think) Gerald Sinstadt talking. Everyone of course has retrospectively seen the footage of the surge when Beardsley hit the bar in the 4th minute and it's just harrowing to think what that would have caused in the crush. Strange to think MotD actually showed the first 4 minutes of the match that evening. Justice campaign aside, a lot of good came out of it in terms of being a football supporter in the long run, but how much of that was the response to the disaster, how much was down to Thatcher's reign ending within 18 months, how much was due to Gazza and the 1990 World Cup, the money to be made from all-seaters after it was lifted out of context from the Taylor Report, how the suddenly safer environment was highlighted by Sky coverage starting, is all lost on a lot of people nowadays. There are so many people who just don't know what it was like to be a football supporter in the 1980s. It was not a life-affirming state, I can confirm that. Literally none of my school friends were football fans who actually went to matches - and I think I only got to go cos my dad got me on Saturdays and that's what he did. My mum wouldn't let me go to midweek matches for years. That all came from the perception of "what football was like", from someone who went (and even he wouldn't take me to some games because of the potential for trouble), and someone who didn't. Things are a lot better now, and at the very least we owe a debt of gratitude to those who lost their lives for enabling the rest of us to be treated a little more like human beings.

Or if Schneiderlin gets suspended...?

Even so they should still beat Wigan at home. Heavily, to scare the crap out of them for the Cup Final.

He wishes he had my experience and knowledge.

That's a fair point, he doesn't go into hiding, hasn't got himself an attitude, and he's always trying to make things happen. Can't say I really saw much of the defending side of things through the rain on the far side of the pitch, but he has previously shown he will work back. I just think when we've used the pressing game that the team has been working better without him recently - but you could say the same of Lallana to a point. I think they both have a role to play in the next few seasons.

I thought it may have been some kind of plan to get Allardyce to have a heart attack over all the wasted set pieces or something.

Neither of those IMO. He did score a goal, finished it well, but only after a spawny deflection and their defence committing two players to the same block.

Just for the record, I was in New York last week and they singularly failed to mention North Korea on their news broadcasts for the first 4 days I was there. Now the Rutgers Basketball coach, him I knew about. I was also staying in Koreatown, so they'd have known even if the others didn't.

You simply cannot defend those free-kicks. The first one was inside the post and easily saved, the majority of the others were played outside the far post, too quickly for anyone to be onside and get to them, but too slowly to be shots to worry the keeper (and outside the post anyway). They were uniformly rubbish, and he shouldn't have been still taking them after the second one. The rest of his game after the first 20 minutes I thought he was all the same flick and the same "trying to control it 3 yards away from himself to take it on the run" stuff that Guly was getting slated for all last season. He needs to work on his strength, his hold up play and a couple of new moves to get past people, because at the moment he does the exact same flick with the outside of his boot in trying to roll his marker, and he gets caught or muscled off it 3/4 times. I still think he'll come good, but he spends too much time not getting past people and on the floor appealing for stuff you just don't get in the Prem, at the moment.

It's not just a little out of date, it's also missing a few notable crests - Chelsea had a plain CFC in the 70s, the current lion without any kind of circular surround in the mid 80s, and a different circular badge design prior to the current one which has also been amended since 2005 to add more balls/flowers to represent their titles. Could be better designed as well, the re-use of the Burnley crest from the 60s is barely a footnote and they've been using it for the past 3-4 seasons. Good site though.

"Rubbish design from the 1970s" replaced by rubbish design from the 1970s ? Probably not. But actually, yes, that was exactly what I was picturing, which is why I was hoping someone would produce something different.

It's just a more corporate type styling of the logo, also being used all along the Itchen above the executive boxes on a black background, it probably has nothing to do with changing the badge - why would they keep the shape but remove all of the information like team name and so on ? How many other clubs have a monochrome nebulus shield-shaped blob as their club crest ?

We signed him as a right back and had converted him to a centre back by preseason 2012/13. I vaguely recall we may have played him as a DM for a little while as well, but could be wrong on that.

Wouldn't the reason that good, young centre backs are hard to find be that if they had all of the skills they needed to be a top young footballer, they'd be playing somewhere else on the pitch ?

I'm expecting him to pitch up somewhere like Sunderland soon, his ship has sailed and he's not getting near having games for City any more. 3 league appearances all season and 25 by the start of next season. He also hasn't played centre back for years.

Coutinho was probably Liverpool's best player against us. Excellent touch every time he had the ball and a range of quick and longer passing no-one else on the pitch had, excellent dribbler too. Took him a while to get going though, and he was the best of a bad bunch. Clyne had a hell of a job on his hands that day and did his best.