Farmer Saint

Good. By all accounts they deserve it.

Where's the poster that said his charity work and his foundation is also done to feed his ego? The hate is really odd.

Yup, seems to be that tactic doesn't it?

Happy to! I think the issue is more that some posters forget about it...

Literally never said there was no money - SR have consistently shown they are happy to spend money. What I said we don't have the headroom in PSR to give us a good chance of staying up. As I said previously, I think we needed to spend nearly £200m to revamp the squad ready for the Prem. What I didn't say was that we couldn't spend £5-10m (or £1-2m real term for PSR purposes) on low wage, high upside players for next year's attempt at getting re-promoted. In fact I expressly said it and that is the likely transfers we'd see. Quite funny that after I said it we started looking at young players. What a coincidence. Again.

What they probably won't be doing is chasing the dragon of staying in the Premier League and spending on players like in Jan 2023. Strategy allows relegation by the look of things.

"We spend £1billion a week on defence. Let's fund our NHS instead" Should attract approx 52% of the population. Could put it on the side of a tank. Or an aircraft carrier.

Don't you mean "That planet was explored..."?

Seem to be looking to invest in lots of young, high upside players. That's strange, if we wanted to stay up surely we'd be looking for players who are good to go now and can help us this season. It's as if it's part of a wider strategy...

I'm not sure who you're arguing against here - I don't think anyone thinks he's revolutionary or a visionary. In fact I think the overwhelming majority of people want him gone. It's just a case of who comes in to replace him, and that is more of an issue (and considering we made approaches after the Leicester game the board aren't unaware). No-one good is interested.

He also had much, much better players at his disposal.

Lower end farmers won't be affected, that's the point. £3m is a lot of farm, and tends to not be family farms.

Apologies, I misunderstood what you wrote.

The interesting thing is I would expect I am very close to you geographically and I would assume I know the farmers you are talking about. For instance I don't know any farmers who send their kids to private school - that is not a thing and in general farming children go to small country schools - private schools are frowned upon as you don't need them to go to agri college and most farmers want to keep farming in the family.

Only the fucking stupid ones, and it also depends on what you class as "farmers".

Considering I've said he should leave for the past 6 weeks I'm not sure that's correct. Who else have I found fault in? For instance I would happily take Moyes, but he won't come.

In general farmers are not well off - 100% - and people like Clarkson have done a few things which juxtapose the current issues, but also give a warped view of what farmers and farming is as an industry. 1. Farming is very high risk, and is very high turnover but equally very high expenditure. Margins are tiny and are subject to huge variances based on the issues with hugely variable weather and the price of commodities and animals. Half your life you are farming hugely long hours and the other half you are trying to be a trader. It's damn hard graft. 2. A lot of rich people invest in farms, and people like Clarkson has made those outside farming think they are all rich mega landowners which just isn't true. Most are taking home less than £40k pa, without an income from a partner, as due to the unsociable hours there is certainly still a thing as a "farmers wife". 3. Farming is not just those that own farms - there are huge amounts of supporting contractors and supply chain that don't own farms or land that the public would call "farmers". They are not, and some of these people make huge amounts of money (agricultural contractors for one - these are the ones you see with £500k combines). 4. Yes, farmers tend to have nice tractors, but there is a reason for that. Tractors break. A lot. A tractor breaks at the wrong time and it can cost you 10s of thousands in revenue due to not being able to do work when you need to. It is imperitive that your equipment is reliable. Here is a picture of what happened to one of my friends brand new Massey's last year when chipping - £140k:

I don't think it's going to be many family farms that are affected though - £3m is a fair old whack of agricultural land. What it may mean is that larger family farms get purchased by businesses if they cannot afford to pay it (these large farms tend to have more headroom). They also have 10 years to pay it.

Do I wade in on this issue or not? Hmmm... Ok, so I haven't travelled up to London today as I am on the fence as to whether I agree with this or not. I have let some of my workers go though. In general, for rural communities I don't. However there are many farmers selling off huge swathes of land for housing around us for millions. This is not right and is not the point of the agricultural land. It should be farmed, not built on. Secondly, the people that will be affected by this are those with "Super farms" - those like the Clarkson estate. Some of these farms tend to be underwritten by the businesses purchasing from them, and these are the farmers that do have money. However, I think the best option for this is that instead of paying inheritance tax on the handover, it should be levied as a charge against the agricultural holding for when any land is sold, so a further 20% on top of the Capital Gains is charged IF it is sold.

Have to agree to disagree here then.

Exactly - so you agree he is similar to Martin then, as I have been arguing.

I would prefer my next Manager to have managed more than 20 club games in the Championship, had a permanent club Management role and perhaps have significantly different tactics to our current Manager. Sorry for being so picky.

Blimey, that's what you call trying too hard? 3 sentences? You must be pretty darn lazy. Anyway, I'm just saying I don't think there is much in Carsley as a Manager, and that he is similar to Martin in hair-brained tactics and football style. The fact he has been managing one of the best squad of players in World football may have masked his abilities, that's all.

They were playing the Republic of Ireland, and it was 0-0 until they had a player sent off. England also had a team of players way above the quality of the Republic of Ireland. If we had those players and were playing a midtable Championship team I think we'd be disappointed to be 0-0 after 55 minutes, wouldn't you?

Exactly, he plays the same football as Martin.