The9

I'm still voting for those.

From the Play Off defeat until Swindon away in 2009, and then September 2010. Agreed regarding loyalty discount being a cheaper renewal price. Would be nice if renewals held firm and the JCLs got utterly wallet-raped.

Plus a 12% reduction in matches. 27% in real terms...

Maynor Figueroa (Stoke v) Wigan 12/12/09 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2Q4Wlu5xkg Dennis Bergkamp (Leicester v) Arsenal 27/08/97 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEZQzGGFQl0 Eric Cantona Man U (v Sunderland) 21/12/96 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjQwIqkYDeo See how many of those make the list . Clearly you wouldn't be asking for "20 seasons" if you didn't mean every team from the duration of the Prem, because we were only up there for 13 years... also, Chris Baird's was from the Championship... What's that ? Didn't explain the criteria in the OP ? Whoops...

All overhead kicks are shinners to some degree, it's not possible to get your foot at the right angle to keep the ball down and get enough forward power whilst hanging upside-down otherwise, because you don't have the floor to push off to get the power to transfer to the ball that you do when you're shooting normally. I knows it, cos I scored this (props to Minty for the assist), which is definitely a teeny bit of a shinner, but awesome nevertheless. Amusingly this was last linked on the "Was Danny Wallace/Rory Delap's overhead better" thread on here last September. Not as good as Rooney's, but I did scored one from 45 yards similar to Cisse's once which was miles better than his.

How are these kids going to get any experience if they DON'T go to lower league clubs and get an extended period of playing against real professionals in competitive leagues ? We've got even less chance of drip-feeding them into the side at Prem level than we had in League One, and the likes of Gobern, Doble and Reeves didn't get a look in then either - but (and I suppose this supports your view a bit) Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain did. It'll be interesting to see what happens with Harlee Dean, James Ward-Prowse, and Luke Shaw, who have had 3 different stay/go experiences. I suppose Jack Stephens' lower league experience (albiet a handful of games for a bottom League One side) and the fact he's not gone anywhere since we signed him also supports your theory.

Funnily enough not often something Dan Harding had a problem coping with.

Also, the article could really do with a graphical "pendulum" image...

Probably because that's not his job.

Yeah, around January was when someone said it, too. The players who'll be moving on are going to be the ones who haven't featured much in the second half of this season. That includes any senior player out on loan: Ryan Dickson (D) to Leyton Orient Lee Holmes (M) to Oxford and Swindon Jonathan Forte (F) to Notts Co Plus non-regular starters - IF we can find a buyer for the ones whose contracts aren't up. 21 Bartosz Bialkowski (G) 31 Tommy Forecast (G) 3 Dan Harding (D) 15 Radhi Jaidi (D) 25 Danny Seaborne (D) 28 Ben Reeves (D) 29 Ryan Doble (M) 42 Jason Puncheon (M) 9 Lee Barnard (F) 22 David Connolly (F) For no apparent reason I think Sam Hoskins and Harlee Dean will stay with us...

I'd be quite pleased if we sold him, we could find a much better replacement for the sort of money we'd want, and it's not like he defends much.

Well a reason for not using one of Gemmel's pics is that the second one features 4 people in Crystal Palace training kit... Can't quite believe the utterly vapid nature of that article. "Can you write something quick, sh11t and pointless with absolutely nothing of interest in it about Southampton and Portsmouth?" "Yes boss."

I should think at the time it was a sum of money intended to keep the club alive for a little while longer, some people seem to forget how dire the situation was back then. No matter what the ins and outs of the administration were, we ended up in a fantastic situation, and I'm certainly not going to complain about the administrator who oversaw it all congratulating the club and getting themselves a bit of cheap publicity in the meantime.

I can answer the second question : Sweden.

We are not a Premiership team, we are a Premier League team. The competition changed its name in 2007, so that's only FIVE YEARS AGO. FFS.

QPR only have them for the home team, bunch of JCLs.

How dare you actually comment on the player's abilities ! Can't you tell this thread is for arguing about whether this thread should exist ?

My favourite thing about that Ryan Smith video is that on the face of it, it shows a player ripping Man U apart repeatedly, but if you actually look at the end product, even after he's sold his dummy, banged it into space and run past the right back which any mong parks player can do, he only completes one cross to a team mate in the box. The other highlights are two 5 yard passes (one on the half way line and one on the edge of the box), and one corner he takes which they (dubiously) score from. Even from that clip you can see he has absolutely no right foot whatsoever from the time he fails to shoot on the edge of the box, though a season of seeing him run sideways across the edge of penalty areas has somewhat coloured my judgement of his ability. In other words "Big whoop", and point about YouTube nicely made. I would also like a new thread for every non-Twitter rumour, as I cba to go to the HCDAJFU thread already, and there's another 10 weeks of this.

Bedwetter.

I don't understand this argument when we were clearly not financially sustainable in League One or the Championship already, with wages at 93% of turnover and losing £11.5m in League One. Getting to the Prem gives you a wodge of cash, but it does usually get eaten up by wages due to the need to compensate players in line with their equivalents at other clubs or risk losing them. All I'm bothered about is that we keep funding the losses from the Liebherr pot and that we manage to do it within the Financial Fair Play rules. If we're making losses which are covered by Markus' legacy, we may as well go all out to be as good as we can get, it's not like the Skate Cheats who kept spending when they knew they couldn't pay it off. In addition, the parachute payments now allow two shots at bouncing back before having to trim the infrastructure anyway. Prem player contracts are usually 4 years max, or they've left to go to Prem sides. If we go back down we'll either still be propped up by Liebherr's money, or we'll be able to cut back on costs gradually. If the Liebherr money THEN goes, we're probably screwed anyway.

Especially as we'd been dire in the previous 3 matches and already played MK Dons 3 times in the previous 9 months.

That would depend if they're better than the ones who've been starting. There are a few reasons for not blooding kids too early, the contractual status of U-16s being the main one. I can't see Adkins "plugging gaps" with anything except players who are better than the ones we have already, so no concerns there. It's not like we've signed "squad players" in the past 2 years, is it ? Forte and Dale Stephens aside, and one of those was a short term loan to address an injury crisis.

So you were counting that then ? Or just misrepresenting your point about how much Championship experience we had ?

To be fair, Lambert was on poor form and had been injured, only playing 6 minutes in the first two matches, Lallana was injured (his last match before this was the 4-0 win before Pardew got sacked), and we'd just had weeks of caretaker manager ineptitude which coincided with Lallana's absence with a 2-0 defeat home to Rochdale, a 3-0 thrashing home to Swindon and a 1-0 league loss at Swindon (who ended up relegated). We weren't anything like as bad as the league position appeared to show anyway.

When announcing the FFP regulations specific reference was made to ensuring that all sponsorships were legitimate and reflected the market rate. They basically stated outright that just chucking money at a club in that manner wouldn't be accepted, and wouldn't be within the rules.