trousers

Is that your new nickname for Wotte?

Tough love never hurt anyone. Apart from Ulrika Johnson (allegedly)

Mods/Admin....serious question from me (just this once).... How much longer is this experiment with re-directing RSS feeds to the 'main' board going on for? Whilst it's probably not in the top 500 of most important issues in my life right now I think it's quite clear that it was a 'nice idea, not so good in reality'. Please? Thank you.

Mods/Admin....serious question from me (just this once).... How much longer is this experiment with re-directing RSS feeds to the 'main' board going on for? Whilst it's probably not in the top 500 of most important issues in my life right now I think it's quite clear that it was a 'nice idea, not so good in reality'. Please? Thank you.

Mods/Admin....serious question from me (just this once).... How much longer is this experiment with re-directing RSS feeds to the 'main' board going on for? Whilst it's probably not in the top 500 of most important issues in my life right now I think it's quite clear that it was a 'nice idea, not so good in reality'. Please? Thank you.

cheers Morph. Have cut and pasted the article below too so that we can quote from it if needs be.... The Last Word: 'Five clubs will follow us into administration' Dire forecasts from Darlington as even high-profile outfits like Southampton consider 10-point penalty By Michael Walker Sunday, 15 March 2009 It was the sort of night to make you question your existence. It was not simply the sheets of Siberian wind and rain sweeping westwards down ill-lit Neasham Road that battered the strugglers, there was also the burden of pilgrimage. Neasham Road is the too-long artery that connects Darlington town centre to a 25,000-seater white elephant stadium that has been home to Darlington FC since 2003. There has never been a human flow along it, more a trickle, and that is a major reason why, 12 days ago, for the visit of Notts County, the Darlington match programme had a new red stripe on its cover. "Admin special," it read. This was Darlington's first home game since the club were placed in administration the previous week. News that the club were in the red did not come out of the blue, but administration did. Darlington have been in administration before, as recently as 2004, but this latest development was unforeseen, and the subsequent rumour compounded the shock: it was that by the third Thursday of March as many as nine Football League clubs would follow. Darlington rarely set trends, but after Notts County had been beaten 1-0 in front of 2,450 hardy souls the talented but world-weary manager, Dave Penney, spoke about the bigger picture. "I've had contact from people not just in this division, but the division above," Penney said. "There's a cut-off date, 26 March, and I know a lot of clubs that are close to administration. From talking to people, we might be the first but we won't be the last. I'd say five will go this year." From nine to five: that reduction supports the theory that some observers are prone to exaggerate the economic state of Leagues One and Two. Patrick Nelson, the chief executive of Macclesfield, made a key point that, with the vast majority of players on one-year contracts at this level, and with player wages the largest club expense, "each summer offers the chance to reset the compass, to adjust. You can be prudent. We will be". On Tuesday night, with Liverpool and Chelsea both live on ITV, Macclesfield's game against Accrington Stanley was marketed as "Credit Crunch Tuesday". Tickets were £5 and 1,800 attended, when Nelson feared it might otherwise have been half that. The significance of the "third Thursday of March" is also disputed. It is a date set by the Football League by which clubs considering administration must enter if they are to take the 10-point deduction this season. Cheltenham Town, said to be on the brink financially, are bottom of League One, 16 points off safety. They look certain to be relegated so 10 points would make little difference but, if Cheltenham were to enter administration after that Thursday, the 10 points would apply to next season. Cheltenham would begin 2009-10 on minus 10 points and in administration. That would concern prospective purchasers. But for a club on the cusp of relegation, and in financial trouble – Southampton in the Championship, for example – Thursday week is a date of resonance. If Southampton move into administration after Thursday week, and stay up, then the 10-point deduction will be applied in May regardless. That could relegate them post-survival. If Southampton move into administration after Thursday week, and go down anyway, then the 10 points will apply next season. Administration cannot be viewed in bureaucratic terms, even though some think it is part of a business process; that while it spells the end of one era, it signals a new beginning. David Hinchliffe, of the Leeds firm Walker-Morris, sees it differently. Hinchliffe is one of the administrators at Darlington. It is his "16th or 17th" experience of insolvent football clubs. "There is an acceptance," he says, "that all clubs in administration are going to survive. But maybe quite a few won't." Darlington would not have, he says, but for £300,000 pledged by the owner, George Houghton, to see them through this period. Otherwise a club founded in 1883 would have folded in 2009. They still might. Being in administration means Darlington are denied the quarterly central payment from the Football League of about £130,000. That money arrives in late April and is vital in helping clubs handle summers without gate receipts. Hinchliffe is not keen on melodrama. His priority is the nitty-gritty. The Darlington programme lost £2,000 an issue; no longer, its production has been outsourced. He is hopeful for Darlington, because of the willingness of staff to take a 50 per cent wage deferral; he was in talks with an interested party in Sheffield on Thursday. But Hinchliffe's general wariness chimes with John Beech's. Beech, from Coventry University's Centre for the International Business of Sport, has been researching insolvency in English football and spoke of "some form of insolvency at more than half the clubs in Leagues One and Two. I'll eat my hat if no one goes into administration in the next week". Another voice, who wishes to remain anonymous, says that a League Two club will fold "this season" and will not be able to fulfil their fixtures. Questioning existence again. Yet set against these warnings is the experience of the past 125 years. Lower-League clubs just keep going. In case you were watching Manchester United and Liverpool, League Two Grimsby Town took 12 busloads of fans to Chester City yesterday. For 90th versus 91st.

Well, he got the "mild spring day" bit right....

....who never worked together as a duo.....apparently....

I prefered your other rumour in January to be honest.... "Southampton FC will be bought by a team of Middle Eastern Businessmen for 21 pence per share, next week. Source is a bloke who knows the guy brokering the deal, an ex-Spurs player, now “moneyman” . "

You walked into that one Duncan!

Hitler had a soft spot for Blackpool. Fact

A family Tartan crest?

Didn't Jan do that a few times too? Hmmm....perhaps Poortvliet and Wotte were part of a seamless management team afterall and those airbrushes are just a figment of my imagination....

If if Wotte 'undertakes' Pearson in the 'stats race' between now and the end of the season, I'll still stand by my verdict that we can't compare the two on a like-for-like basis. Trousers stands up for Wotte (sort of)..... Now That's What I Call Balance 74

"I won't use tiredness as an excuse" Mark Wotte © March 2009

Pope is Catholic

You could almost say that we have a selection dilemma for Blackpool.......almost

When are the Echo going to suss that the "Wotte" play-on-words isn't amusing 'anymore' (granted, it was hilarious the first 17 times...) It would appear their sub-Editor isn't on a performance related pay scale

How would it look if the form in our remaining 8 games matched our form in September, October, November, December and January?

Expected a draw? At home? To one of the weakest sides on current form coming into the game? Actually, so did I....

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ #51 Today, 01:06 AM trousers Full Member Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Maggie Philbin's coal bunker Posts: 4,551 I feel a 0-0 in my waters [/url] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I shall be selling my bodily fluids in 100ml bottles on EBAY from Monday onwards. Will post details here in due course.

Yeah, I did find that a bit odd!

http://www.clubfanzine.com/QPR/v2.showNews.php?id=18597 Losing is a tough routine to get out of and at the moment the QPR players, bereft of confidence and commitment, look like a losing team from the moment they come out to warm up. We need to nip this in the bud now or risk it carrying into the start of next season. Still, it could be worse, we could be Southampton. Five minutes on Southampton In a division where seventeen of the twenty four teams are former Premiership teams in various states of despair or recovery few would want to swap places with Southampton. Playing in a half full soulless bowl of a stadium with an unknown manager, a hated chairman, debts up to their eyeballs and with a team made up almost entirely of their senior academy graduates only a recent run of three wins and a draw in five matches has given the Saints any hope at all that Bury and Hartlepool does not beckon for them next season. Now second bottom of the Championship, it is just six years since Gordan Strachan led the then top flight saints to an FA Cup final. As an outsider looking in the reasons for this swift and dramatic demise always seem to come back to the current chairman at St Mary’s Rupert Lowe. It was his decision to appoint Plymouth manager Paul Sturrock to replace Strachan in 2004 and then sack him ridiculously early in the following campaign. I still maintain that Sturrock would have kept Southampton up that season - they certainly would have stood a better chance than they did with Lowe’s next madcap scheme which saw Steve Wigley promoted horrendously out of his depth and then left in the job just long enough so there was not enough time for his successor, Harry Redknapp, to claw back the deficit. A remarkably similar farce to the one Charlton repeated three seasons ago. Redknapp initially stayed on as Southampton embarked on their first season outside the top flight in twenty seven years but controversially returned to Portsmouth in December 2005 to be replaced at St Mary’s by George Burley. Lowe had also turned to former England Rugby World Cup winning coach Clive Woodward and everybody’s favourite football visionary Simon Clifford (must have had a big dressing room to get the egos in) to work in the background. Burley did what he always does with teams in this league - spent lots of money, built an attractive team, took it to the play offs, and lost. If you enjoy heartbreaking knockout defeats then George always has been and always will be the man for you. Off the pitch Lowe left, and then returned, as Michael Wilde and then Leon Crouch had a go at running the club only to then step/be moved aside. Burley left to take over as Scottish national manager last season although in truth the budgeting restrictions being imposed on the playing staff was never likely to be Burley’s taste and the Saints were sinking alarmingly close to the relegation zone. Another harebrained scheme to appoint former player Jason Dodd and John Gorman as managers to the end of the season fell flat on its face when the pair failed to win a single match, QPR won 3-2 at St Mary’s, and so in February Nigel Pearson was given his first chance as a number one after years of being an assistant at clubs like Newcastle. Pearson has never inspired me very much, I think it’s the voice, but he is showing now at Leicester what a good manager he has the potential to be and indeed at Southampton last season he kept them up with a last day of the season win at home to Sheffield United. So they sacked him. Naturally. Despite the Premiership parachute payments and transfer fees received for Theo Walcott, Gareth Bale and Kenwyne Jones topping £20m the Saints said they were skint - a bigger case of financial mismanagement you would struggle to find in the Football League - and as a consequence Pearson went as a cost cutting measure. Lowe and the board then turned to another crazy plan - to run the first team and academy side as one under the guidance of a coach with a record for developing young talent. That man was Jan Poortvliet, a Dutchman whose knowledge of the Championship last summer could have been summed up on the back of a postage stamp with a thick pen. First team players like Marek Saganowski, Stern John, Grzegorz Rasiak, Nathan Dyer have all been sent out on loan while Poortvliet was left to struggle on with the kids. The idea is admirable but flawed. Even at a wonderful academy set up like Southampton’s you can only ever hope to bring through two or three first team ready players a season at the absolute most. To rely on it for the entire team is madness. Southampton could easily have won at Loftus Road earlier this season with the addition of just one or two senior players - they actually left Chris Perry and Stern John on the bench that day as Oliver Lancashire was sent off for a naive tackle on his debut. There’s little wonder Southampton fans have been marching on St Mary’s before games this season demanding answers and heads on sticks. I bloody would be to. With the money that has come into this club since relegation, the facilities they have, the academy they have and the support they can potentially pull in it is absolutely criminal that they find themselves in their current position. Money lashed out with little forward planning, one poor managerial appointment after another, one harebrained scheme after another. Southampton make QPR look like a normal and well rounded club. Poortvliet resigned six weeks ago and was replaced by his alarmingly orange assistant Mark Wotte. Southampton now have Saganowski back in the team, Jason Euell and Rudi Skacel are getting a game, as is Chris Perry. They have Adam Lallana and Andrew Surman, another two super products of their academy, and just lately they have looked capable of pulling off a miracle escape. Having only won one home match all season until last month they have now beaten Preston and Cardiff on their own patch and lifted themselves to within two points of safety. Their survival at this level both short and medium term remains highly doubtful though. Men to watch The two latest hot properties to roll off the Southampton production line are Adam Lallana and Andrew Surman. South African born England youth international Surman has been around a little longer but both are highly regarded and sought after by clubs higher up the ladder. Lallana you may recall scored a wonderful goal at Loftus Road earlier this season, running from his own half via a one two to equalise for the ten man Saints. The goal and Lallana’s performance deserved more than the 4-1 result he eventually went home with. Up front Southampton have been persevering with David McGoldrick for most of the season. Another youth team graduate and very, very raw. He’s quick, no doubt about that, and a foot race between him and Damion Stewart would be an interesting spectacle tomorrow, but he misses a lot of chances and has a long way to go before he could justify consistent selection in a Championship team. Southampton have recently turned to jason Euell who burst onto the scene in the premiership as a junior in the old Wimbledon side around the same time as Carl Cort but has since struggled to make an impact at Charlton and Middlesbrough while sturggling with injuries. He scored twice in a recent 3-0 win at Ipswich Town. As previously stated the return of Marek Saganowski in January from a loan spell with Aalborg in Denmark has provided a much needed boost to the Saints forward line. The Pole burst onto the scene in this country when initially arriving on loan from Troyes in France. he scored ten goals in the final ten games of the 2006/07 season as George Burley’s side made a late run to the play offs. That unsurprisingly prompted the Saints to splash out on a permanent signing during the summer ahead of competition from, Burnley. Saganowski has never hit the same heights since though, and scored just three times in the whole of last season. Nevertheless he has returned refreshed in 2009 and has six goals to his name already including a brace in an impressive home win against play off chasing Preston. Further back left footed midfielder Rudi Skacel has always looked prettyy good against QPR. he almopst joined Ipswich last summerand has suffered with injuries this season but is back in the team now and must be watched closely. Morgan Schneiderlin, another midfielder, was a £1m capture from Strasbourg in 2008 - Southampton’s last significant outlay. At the back former Wimbledon and Tottenham defender Chris ‘the rash’ Perry needs no introduction. neither does goalkeeper Kelvin davis, superb in heavy defeat at Loftus Road earlier this season but normally good for a howler a game against us - the one against the back of Paul Furlong’s head at Portman Road springs to mind, as does Ray Jones’ wonderful goal at St Mary’s two seasons ago. Worryingly despite that Davis was linked with a January transfer window move to Loftus Road by some papers. Prediction A game we are well capable of winning but in our current state it’s impossible to see where the next maximum point haul is coming from. Southampton are desperate for points and I think a draw is probably the most likely outcome, though I’d back Southampton to win this before I would us. Southampton 1 QPR 1

They don't have a no.35 in their squad.....