Ken Tone

Sorry to intrude in all the personal arguments going on on this thread, but as a genuine, no-hidden agenda, question ....do we know for certain he is now in the UK, and does anyone know any more about when he will actually sign his contract and be confirmed as our player?

But he'll have a few years on premier league wages. That's what the parachute payments system does: allow teams near relegation to carry on as if all was well, buying players, putting them on big wages on long contracts, knowing they'll be baled out by the parachute. So Maynard probably thinks ... I will do well in the few months and impress lots of other PL team who'll buy me when Wigan go down, and if not, well there's the ( trebled? quadrupled?) wages to console me till my shiney new wigan contract runs out.

Only for tax purposes

Even if we were to accept your figures (and clearly no one on here does), you still have to explain to me why anyone other than a money launderer would want to buy portsmouth FC. Given that CSI put c£10.6 million in to just cover the losses of part of a season, the club is obviously still leaking money dramatically. If you offered anyone sane the club for £1 with no outstanding debts, they'd still turn you down. Your expenditure far exceeds your income. Redknapp left you with this legacy of overpaid players on long contracts and to everyone else's amazement Lampitt etc have carried on with that. (eg £19 k a week for Lawrence! Madness.) With no income flow from outside of football, a stadium that costs money just to stop it falling down and is no use for other lettings (eg concerts , international matches, conference use or similar), no other assets, and crowds likely to be in the low teens or even below 10,000 as things get worse, PFC just isn't a viable championship club on a day to day basis, never mind having the debts to pay off. Your only hope is to sell Ward, Pearce, Henderson and anyone else that any club offers for, asap, to pay off the tax bill to stay afloat. Then offer to cancel the contracts of any other players on high wages so they can sign for someone else on a free. ..not that many will take the offer, but a few might because as a free they might be able to negotiate a decent wage. Then you need to stop this bleating drivel about having a small squad and promote some of your youngsters into the first team squad like any other club would, then lose lots of games, be relegated, and lurch on from crisis to crisis till you reach L2 or maybe the conference, with the rest of the expensive players contracts finally run out. Then, finall,y you can start to re-build back to about the L1 /championship borderline level, which is the natural home for a club of your size and support.

Yes, surely a ground share with Havant is the most likely? As to thiose bringig up the old "can't sell Fratton for houses" line, I've never seen a convenant on land yet that a big developer hasn't found a way round. If Tescos or a house-builder think the Fratton site is worth it, they'll just make an "amenity payment 2 or something similar to the council, nominally to be used to replace the 'loss' to the community.

Sadly I fear you're right. If guilty, then a fine and suspended sentence seem likely to me. Community service would be interesting, but I bet the media would soon be running a feature on how lovable 'Arry was coaching East End kids to stardom.

There is a third alternative: PFC could sell immediately Ward, Pearce and anyone else who might actually get a fee, and so pay the tax bill to avoid the winding up order, and then by giving free transfers to most of the rest of the first team squad or cancelling contracts by mutual agreement, reduce the wages to a level where the club might just scrape through the season financially, playing the youth team ... much as we did. It's called 'living within your means'. It would of course result in relegation, much as it did for us. It's called 'living within your means'. I felt perhaps I needed to repeat that , since it seems such an alien concept to pompey fans. Then in L1 if you still sell any player who looks half decent, you'd continue to scrape by, with even smaller crowds , still unable to pay for decent players and end up relegated again. Eventually you'd reach a level that matches your crowds and 'stadium', and your income will finally balance your expenditure. Then maybe Chainrai will be able to find someone at least almost honest to pay him some of the money he says he's owed (no idea who really owes what ..it's such a mess ) And then you'll potter along for the foreseeable future in L1, or L2 , or even the conference, competing with the likes of Bournemouth and Swindon in good years, or Havant and Basingstoke in the bad years. I think personally I'd prefer that to your being wound up. Have fun!

It amazes me how the media have been touting Redknapp as future England manager and Tottenham as possible champions , with no mention whatsoever of either this trial itself , or the slightly inconvenient possibility that Redknapp might actually go to jail ... and even if he were only fined, would the FA really want him as England manager if he were found guilty?

Yes. I don't think any of their first team would walk into a firm place in our first team, but Pearce woud be a useful addition to the squad. Only 23 and still improving. It is quite gobsmackingly incredible that they turned down a bid, reported as £1million, for Ward and Pearce from Ipswich only last week, whilst not paying their tax. They'll be lucky to get any transfer fees at all for their players soon, as other clubs realise they have to lessen their wage bill, even if it means losing good players on a free.

They can trun them down now, but maybe not on pay day. Brinkmanship all round I reckon. Pompey hanging on grimly till the inevitable and Ispwich trying to get players on the cheap. The day before pay day these players may well suddenly go, maybe for even less than £1million if no one else wants them enough to bid against Ipswich.

Who is a shareholder? Presumably all owned by CSI, put in admin by chainrai. So if admin for the football club would mean a real loss for chanirai ,he won't push for admin. Surely the only way forward is for PFC 2010 to default on some payment, eg to bank, and admin to follow from that? So I imagine the wage payment date will be the crunch time. It really irritates me that BBC and all the media keep saying that 'investment' is needed to cover their running costs. That's not investment --' investment' implies some hope of a return, preferably a profit. This would be a gift, or a loan with no security, at best.

How many books do you pack when you go on holiday? How heavy and bulky is the book you read on the train to London?What do you do if you've nearly finished one book but are going away for a few days? Etc. E-readers solve all those problems. You're right about the kindle and 10 years I'm sure, but because technology will have moved on again, to another level, not back to books. The situation is analogous to music. Several waves of technology have been and gone, but we don't still buy the LPs, or 78's that existed before those developments. "They'll never replace having your own minstrel" said King Richard. I just hope Amazon etc will make sure that the 'books' purchased and therefore stored in their 'cloud' will work on each new form of hardware that comes out.

He is Scilian isn't he? I think that as long as he offers them a free holiday in an underseas hotel, they'll all smile sweetly and agree to whatever he wants. Especially if he mentions concrete boots in the same context.

Ditto all this, and I agree with your point in your earlier post about reference books still being better in "treeware" form. The exception is the built-in dictionaries in e-readers, which are an excellent feature. My 'home library' hasn't stopped growing completely as I'm still tempted by second-hand books in charity shops etc. I still tend to buy CDs then load them onto my i-pod, so I've got the physical entity too. I'd probably do the equivalent with books if a) it were easy to do technically and b) e-books weren't cheaper than real ones.

I presume you only read for an hour or so at a time? If so I agree with you. If, however, you read a lot on the i-pad, your eyesight will suffer exactly as it does using any other backlit computer screen for hours on end unless you take sensible breaks. Get any headaches? Ever feel your eyesight is a bit blurry? You can also email yourself a pdf on the kindle btw, using your free kindle email account. Overall, from my experience of currently owning both sorts of kindle and an i-pad 2, if you read a lot and want just a book, get a kindle,.. and the cheapest one is fine btw. If you want to also access the web and emails, and read a bit, get an i-pad. (Assuming you can afford the extra cost).

"sound"? I have to admit the 'text-to speech' facility on the kindle is not great.

You're only risking the kindle itself. If you were to lose it, all your books remain available on your account at Amazon. I have an ipad, with ibooks and kindle software downloaded, and an actual kindle. Reading the kindle's "e-ink" is just as good as reading a book, and the battery lasts for weeks. The i-pad, being backlight, looks better at first glance, but tires the eyes after a while, and the battery lasts only 10 hours. It is a much more versatile device than the kindle, but is not a replacement for a real book IMO. I do still read paper books, but much prefer reading on the kindle. It is lighter, and easier to handle than most books ..no more bending back the spine on a paperback etc .. and of course you can effectively carry a whole library in your pocket.

When the Tories ran the iconic "Labour isn't working" poster ad in 1979, unemployment was 1.4 million. The figures shot up during the 80's, but still stayed well under 2 million. Now it's c 2.7 million. That's progress for you! What we thought was massive unemployment in the 70s and 80s is just normal now.

I suppose it might just be £5 million down, plus £1 million if we get promoted, and up to £8 million if he plays for England. After all most of our big transfer deals to other clubs have had such stages. If the Celtic board want to sell but are worried about fans' reaction, to have a headline that says 'fee up to £8 million' sounds good , even if there is little chance of the last 2 milion or so ever being paid. And if he ever did become an England player he'd be worth more than £8 million anyway, so a deal like that would sense for us too. Even the £36k a week isn't so much by premier league standards.

These poor souls were clearly demoralised and traumatised by the lack of respect shown to them by Adkins. If only we'd given them a guard of honour last season.

Maybe .. or maybe those overpaid young men can afford the best lawyers and have help from their club to wheedle their way out of trouble? Who can tell?

The captain has already changed his story (twice I think), and is now publicly admitting he went off his offical course (to 'salute' the ship's ex-captain who live on the island) and now admits he left it too late to return to his orignal course and so went into shallow water. The irony is that the ex-captain is quoted in some reports as saying he never really rated the bloke when he was his second-in-command. Meanwhile the BBC and others are running stories about crimes, including rape and even murder, on board cruise ships and the difficulty for the victims and their relatives in getting anyone to take any notice, with the cruise companies mainly being interested in hushing things u,p and the authorities not being sure which country's police are responsible for any investigation. I reckon if you have any shares in cruise companies, now might be a good time to get rid!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-16631651 For alleged sex assault.

Listened to Solent this morning. In short they know absolutely nothing, and AA would not answer their calls yesterday afternoon and evening. They even resorted to re-playing the interview with Colin Farmery (who seems to be one of the few decent blue few) from the night before. He is just a fan, who presumably gets most of his info from the media, such as Solent! It's now somehting like 14 days since AA said new owner in 7-10 days ,or even 48 hours, and also that money was needed in time to pay January wages. Does anyone know if the rumour about Chainrai lending even more is true? If so, was that to cover wages this month? Because the wage bill payment seems to me to be the big crunch time. If they can't pay, the FL will have to take action surely? I'm surprised the yhaven't so far. Compared with what they did to Bournemouth and even more so to Luton, they seem to be being surprisingly tolerant towards Pompey.

Well if the reports are true that we've offered £24k a week immediately rising to £36k if promoted, and if one of the more civilised Celtic fans that has posted recently is right in saying they don't pay anyone much more than £15k a week, then Hooper will want to come here. The question then would be more whether Celtic will take a reasonable fee, or just tough it out, since he is on contract and they are not skint.