The9

I'm so glad a new thread was started for this...

Birmingham are in a Group with with Braga, Club Brugge and Maribor, none of which are particularly odious away trips, to Portugal, Belgium and Slovenia respectively. I'm in Andalucia anyway so it only bothers me if it ends up not being on satellite tv.

Another vote for St James' Chippy here, and an honourable mention for Codfather too.

What a load of shoite. They would still have won 10 of 11, hardly going to suddenly invoke feelings of utter failure, is it ?

There's a vague overview of a Nottingham Forest medical from the BBC Sports Academy pages here, though it's designed for kids and a few years old judging by the pics... http://news.bbc.co.uk/sportacademy/hi/sa/treatment_room/features/newsid_3083000/3083908.stm Just checked the age of the page, it mentions Gary Fleming as Forest physio "for 3 years", according to his Practice website he was physio there from 2001-2007 which dates that page circa 2004/5. http://thegaryflemingpractice.co.uk/ Forest were in the Championship then, but the tests mentioned certainly aren't big on sports science. They've always been a bit old school at Forest though. The Physioroom pretty much underlines the process though : http://www.physioroom.com/news/featured_stories/medicals.php Another one here which mentions aerobic capacity, sprints and jump testing in addition to giving more details to the flexion testing of the joints and injury screening. http://www.pponline.co.uk/node/42220 I'm surprised at how untechy it seems to be, but then maybe that's just what clubs are prepared to share. Interesting note about part of the purpose of the medical being to negotiate the price downwards...

Two things here. Firstly, Skacel was very good for us for the six months when he played at left midfield, leading assister in the division when he suddenly stopped getting picked and then reappeared after Bale's departure in the left back role, which only Bale could attack from. The other thing is that Rory Delap's "star" role for Stoke started and ended with his throw ins, and had no relevance to anything he actually did as a footballer. In fact there was one stat bouncing around the Guardian Football pages at one point a few years back which showed he had taken more throw-ins than made completed passes in once match the were monitoring... Ah, here it is, from Stoke v Wolves - it wasn't even COMPLETED passes, it was ATTEMPTED passes : http://www.zonalmarking.net/2010/04/11/rory-delap-throw-ins-stoke-wolves/

Surely just reflects the availability of money at the clubs they were previously at then?

I'm sure there are lots of teams that do it, there used to be lots of teams which had a drinking culture too.

Not sure I follow. How many bad signings did Pardew make for Saints compared to good ones ? One of the reasons Adkins hasn't signed many players is because the squad Pardew signed was basically good enough to do the job required already. Also, this reliance on the academy to fill out the squad - which academy products from the past 2 seasons have taken up places in the team for any amount of time ? There's Oxlade-Chamberlain, yes, then who else ? Lallana's in his fourth season in the first team - are we happy with say, one academy player coming through into the team every two years ?

I'm guessing it is, and it can't.

I don't. Footballers are used to not having to do things they don't want to do, with the exception of the specific things they get paid handsomely to do. I'm pretty sure being embarrassed in front of new work colleagues isn't high on anyone's list of things to do, and not wanting that to happen isn't a sign of being "difficult" or "not having the right mentality".

Fair points, all agendas aside.

You joke, but if you were a professional footballer who had a choice of clubs and deals, and the difference in money wasn't that big a deal to you, that kind of potential embarrassment is exactly the sort of thing that could put you off - especially if you happened to think it was irrelevant to your ability to deliver on the pitch. There are a LOT of good footballers out there who aren't detrimental to team spirit but wouldn't feel the need to go along with something like that - what relevance does it have to the effort they put in on the pitch, after all ? You don't have to be popular to be a top footballer, just a good footballer.

Lallana, Cork and Fonte, there's the 3. The rest are pretty much interchangeable with their likely replacements, with the possible exception of Lambert (Guly ?).

What a great article, nice to see Simon Kuper's not just about footballing rivalries (Football Against The Enemy) and unearthing unexpected trends in football (Soccernomics). Soccernomics (aka Why England Lose) is a fantastic book, noting stuff like "Brazilian players are generally over-rated and over-priced" and that clubs tend to overvalue certain types of players compared to their actual influence on matches. The stats about goalkeepers being cheaper yet having longer careers, and the impact of their errors, etc. are revealing. Funnily enough it's exactly the kind of stuff that's highlighted by that boneheaded comment about De Ridder not being proven yet and somehow Belgium's lack of recent international success being relevant to that. A total red herring (or no-one would have signed George Weah, Ryan Giggs, Gareth Bale or any Spanish players before 2008 ) but via some warped prism, influencing someone's decision-making.

This does somewhat ignore the huge number of pieces of corroborating evidence that Jemal, Gorkss and Fontaine have all been at the club for periods of time in various capacities, and the local and international reporting in line with some of this. Jemal's medical was the same day as De Ridder's, we know exactly when he left the country and what he said to the person who took him to the airport, and he "liked " a Facebook status about Saints in the week after the medical; there's a statement on here from Gorkss via a fellow Latvian which mentions his signing for another Championship club, and the Fontaine info was reported by Sky Sports and I don't think anyone's arguing with the "can't clarify" medical situation. In addition, we all had a strong inkling about Cork signing weeks before he did, and Fox probably signing was known about a good week before - in a thread alongside Jay Rodriguez. Only the Maynard stuff seems to have been without additional information. Our sources and knowledge about what's happening before it's validated by the "new signing" on the OS is a lot better than you're supposing.

Bloody good job we only signed George Weah's "cousin" then, not the Liberian himself. Liberia are not renowned for being successful on the international scene. Also, Gareth Bale was clearly cack, and we might not want to stuff the side full of English players either.

Smart move by Dean Holdsworth, 2-1 up away to a team 2 divisions above and he brings on the Ultimate Timewaster in injury time.

I'd only regard it as a problem if we weren't top of the league. Seems fairly obvious to me that Cortese decides on how much we'll pay and if that doesn't sit well with the club or the player then the deal doesn't happen. We seem to be mostly signing well when the deals do come off, but I have slight concerns that longer term it may affect our ability to sign some players who would significantly improve us, say if/when we're looking at signing Prem-standard players as there are so many other options available to the decent Prem-quality player.

It's Ягор in Belarussian, so I'm pretty sure any translation from Cyrillic text is going to be phonetic based on a local pronunciation that may use sounds that can't be recreated exactly in English and therefore spelling will be entirely at the whims of the custom for phonetic conversions at the time. As an example "Andrei" Kanchelskis (Russian : Андрей, Ukrainian Андрій) and "Andriy" Shevchenko : (Ukrainian : Андрій - the same) Same Ukrainian spelling of their first name, both born in Ukraine but different eras, and different spellings used. Though it's worth noting Kanchelskis may have chosen to use the familiar Russian to English conversion as he played for Russia internationally even after Ukrainian independence). The long and short of it is it's a phonetic conversion from a different set of characters, so you can spell it any way the people in the country you're in will recognise. Some Igor/Ihor/Egor/Igors : Igors Stepanovs (Latvian : Igors) Yegor Titov : (Russian: Егор) Ihor Belanov (Ukrainian in USSR) : (Ukrainian: Ігор, Russian: Игорь) Igor Biscan : (Croatian, uses the same "Western" alphabet ) : Igor

It would be possible, as they would just give him a squad number if there was ever a situation where he was needed to play. Exactly the same thing happened with Rob Lee (previously number 7) at Newcastle under Ruud Gullit - ostracised and training with the kids, no squad number and no future at the club. After Gullit got the bullet (!) Rob Lee got given number 37 and almost immediately got back into the team. Of course the differences here are that Lee was hugely popular and hadn't actually done anything wrong, whilst Gullit was unpopular, not entirely unrelated to his treatment of Rob Lee and lack of success - not the same situation as with Adkins and Puncheon at all. Nowadays Lee would have been out of the 25-man squad in the Prem so it would have been an issue - but in the Football League, you just add another player to the squad numbers.

Realistically I think we have an outside chance if we field our starting side, get a decent draw and beat a few Prem sides' reserve teams on the way. Once we get to the quarter finals we'll probably start to have a problem with decent Prem teams fielding full strength sides though.

There was a rule about having to field a certain number of the previous weekend's starting team (I think it was 5 or 6) in the JPT. Personally I think clubs should be able to field absolutely any side they want - provided the cost of attending the match reflects that you may be watching reserve team football.

£1600 for a return flight to Orlando ? I hope there are 4 of you.