sandwichsaint

We have this at our cricket club (but several still get in every year, including me), careful what you wish for and all that.

Where's 'Flyer' when we need him?

That's my new shirt: l,a,l,l,a,n,a - he seems quite a good player!

Highlight of my night ... queuing to get out of Ipswich ... local Radio on in the car (BBC Suffolk I think?) ... '...and in Chopra we probably had the Best Player On The Pitch ...' LMFAO !!!! Did anybody else hear this!!!!! Commentator had obviously missed: Kelvin, Dan, Deano, CORK, Lallana, Connoly, Lambert ( to name but seven who were better than Chopra).

Despite two goals and ripping them a new one Lananna had a quiet game! I thought Seaborne was excellent and even covered for Fonte' ocaissonal errors .... Connoly was different class .. didn't see anyone lay a (legal) foot on him all night. Who is this new player 'Deano' Hammond? I think we should give him the arm band now .... first class. Jack Cork you say? Looked like a Premier league midfielder who had turned up at the wrong game. Only one man-of-the-match tonight .... (and I'm not his biggest fan) ..... R-I-C-K-Y L-A-M-B-E-R-T just played his best ever 90 mins in a Saint's shirt! Awesome .... I doubted if he could play in the CCC .... can I raise you ... 'I wonder if he could do it in the Prem?'

That name will always be reserved .... the Dalai Lallana will do for me.

Cash admission is available. Tkts for collection will be at the matchday tkt office on portman road (diagonally opposite the away fans section) sauce? ITFC tkt office this morning. .

Mess with my boys and you mess with me. I hope Ken Bates checks his hotel room tonight; we wouldn't want the old 'horse's head on the bed' gag would we?

Debbie Harry, Kate Bush, Kirsty Wark off Newsnight.

A whole year? Really, who's counting? To know a man is to walk a mile in his shoes etc. (FWIW, I liked him ... )

Random problem, does anyone else get this? I have been using Windows Mail for my home email in Windows 7 quite trouble free for a couple of years. In the last few weeks every single time I enter it I get a pop-up asking me to confirm my user name and password, annoying ... much more annoying once I'm in it I get the same pop-up every time I go to send an outgoing email. I have not changed anything on the home computer to have caused this to happen but I did add the same email account name.name@btinternet.com to my iphone a while ago (though I'm not aware that the pop-up situation coincided exactly with when I started running the same address on two different places). Thoughts? Is this pop-up generated internally by Windows or Externally by BT? Is there any way to by-pass it, it's starting to get on my wick a bit now!

Unlikely to be us; for once we seem to have plenty of options in attacking mid - Lallana/de Ridd/Gully/possibly Cork if he plays that position. Much more use spending 1.5m on a decent CB.

Well that's pretty unanimous, I will be signing up this afternoon.

Once and for all, and possibly with a poll too, 'Is Saints player any good'? As an 'exiled' / occasional fan I would love to see the extended highlights of games I miss etc and it appears that all the decent content on the OS is only available via the Saints player. On the surface I am the ideal candidate to subscribe yet every time the club put a juicy offer to me the siren voices of Saints Web loom large; it's a load of rubbish / it crashes on match days / they give you commentary of B'moth v Carlisle / the commentators are gimps (or yam yams) / etc / etc Is Saints player worth a few pennies a day or is it complete rubbish ... I need to be told, now!

Would everybody be happy if we had diagonal red and white stripes?

Sod the name, have they expanded it to 45k in the close season?

Surreal all round. Why use Saints footage when we don't normally take part in these promotions?

Now you've got me! I haven't got a clue *****il I went outside and counted); I ride a standard road triple which I think is 30 or 32 on the smallest cog and on the back I have 25-12. From my experience people ride the big mountains on all sorts of bikes (road/hybrid/MTB/tandem!) and all sorts of gears - big double - compact - triple. The only hard and fast rule appears to be to make sure you go about 3 gears lower than you think you need! I assume this is your first 'real' mountain so no amount of training can really prepare you for it - if you are fit you will get up no problems, if you are half fit you will find it hard and will get between 75% and 95% of the way - if you aren't fit forget it! The mountains are long (if you include the run-in you may well be climbing for nearly two hours), the mountains are steep (Tourmalet prob averages 8% and several kms go into double figure gradients), it is probably going to be hot (this year wasn't, which was an exception; at home you do most of your cycling at somewhere between 16-24 degrees, in France in summer you can expect to cycle in temps of 28-32 or higher), there is also a slight altitude affect in the proper big mountains. But don't let me put you off - if you cycle regularly you will be fine. I am 49, 5'10" and 13-plus stone, I cycled 6 mountains in 6 days this year. For the last couple of years I have cycled at nearly 15 stone which put me at a serious disadvantage speed-wise! This year I noticed a measurable improvement - I still couldn't get anywhere near hard-core amateurs and proper club cyclists but I did move into the coveted best-of-the-rest category and experienced the thrill of regularly passing occasional riders, some older riders, and generally the weak and the lame. I guess this is where your gearing thing comes in - I regularly passed MTB amateurs who were struggling up in their very low gears. In terms of the gears I try and ride wherever possible in my second lowest gear (keeping one in reserve for emergencies); a fine plan that lasts for about 20 minutes - the first big ramp you hit you will be in your lowest gear and if you are anything like me you might be in it for the next 4 or 5 kms depending on gradient. I would say I rode two thirds of AHD in my lowest cog which gives me a forward speed of between 6.5 and 9.5 kms per hour - obviously depending on cadence which can fall below 50 on the steepest sections and goes up to 70 on 'easier' sections. Obviously it all depends where you are in the cycling pantheon - I am a very keen 'weekender' but have never been anywhere near a club or a race (alas, I only really got into it in my forties, i would have loved to have ridden these sort of bikes in my teens and twenties!). For comparison I tend to ride most of my home riding in the middle cog, only using the big cog for downhills and wind behind situations, and I don't tend to use granny very often for local riding. I average around 25/kmh for a 2 hour ride and can travel comfortably at 28-32kmh on the flat at a cadence of 90-94 - anymore than that and my knees start complaining! Good luck next year, you will absolutely love it, let us know how you get on!

Tony Cascarino's biog is excellent, as is the Damned United, and I would agree with those who have recommended Tony Adams. Also check out Matt Rendell's compelling biog of Marco Pantani. I have just read Ned Boulting's 'How I nearly won the yellow jumper', a sideways look at the TDF and an excellent general sports book for anybody interested in the relationship between the media and 'sport'. For a bit of fun holiday reading you can't do better than something by Tim Moore, a genuinely LOL travel writer/everyman. As a sports fan you would love his French Revolutions in which he tackles (and pretty much completes) the whole of the 2000 TDF route; I also read his donkey pilgramage one on the Carmino (?) and that was equally as good.

It's surely: ToKnights gonna be a good, good knight

What a fantastic TDF! Thrills and spills all the way, Voekler was just awesome, the Schleks didn't quite do enough, and Evans a worthy winner. I was lucky enough to go out and see some of it and i guess it's only up close that you get to see the scale of the beast. We rode Isoard last Monday (from the hard side, same way as this year's tour) and it's got to be up with the toughest climbs on the tour. Very long (35 km from Guillestre), very pretty, and very steep over the last 5kms. Tuesday we rode from Guillestre towards the Agnell and rode over 40km of climbing before being hit by some seriously bad weather, we were over 2000m when the weather turned to torrential rain and sleet and we were lucky to get out without anything worse than mild hypothermia after sheltering in a mountain village cafe for a couple of hours. Wednesday was our first day of TDF and we rode Briancon to Montgenevre which was a relatively straightforward 10km at 6.5%, We had a great view but it was the first climb of the day and the racing was very uneventful. Very rapid decent and into the car to beat the traffic across to the Galibier for the Thursday stage. Thursday morning we rode up fromFenny L'Oisans to the top of the Lauterate, absolutely monster crowds. Unfortunately Galibier was shut to bikes so rather than stand for 5 hours to see them turn from Lataurette to Galibier we hacked back to the team car and shot down to Bourg on closed roads, lunch in Bourg then up to a very agreeable Pub/Auberge on the Vaujany road to watch the stage on the big screen with about 200 others .... what a stage to watch in a group .... Andy's attack on isoard, Evans getting no help at all with the chase .... Voekler's heroics ..... Frank mugging everybody at the finish. Then to cap a great day, back into Bourg and we rode Alpe D'Huez in the evening heat. Riding ADH was the highlight of the week, monstrous first 3km, then pretty big in the middle, and a very long steep finish too. Awesome atmosphere all the way up with whole villages and fan clubs camping out, each with their own van-sized sound system. Nipper up in 1 hr 10min and I was delighted with my 1hr 33min too! Another awesome decent (top speed 68kmh). Thursday night we partied in Bourg, Friday morning nipper rode up to Dutch corner early doors; Mrs Sandwich and I walked up to number 19 and spent the whole day people watching, eating, sunbathing and chilling. A really great week if you like bikes, beer, great wine, great food, big mountains, and ogling the wall-to-wall Euro-totty .... highly recommended!

Hoogerland was massively lucky to miss the concrete posts and 'only' land on the barbed wire. Back on his bike in under two minutes .. who says footballers are over-paid Jessys?

This .. Leeds, West Ham, Millwall, Cardiff, Battery Chuckers, add in Forest and Brighton; I for one will be disappointed if the 'netting' isn't featured at least once on the Nine O'Clock News.

Burnley = proper football club. Howe was never going to jump from Bompey to PL; suggest he's at a decent club now and that he may well end up in PL (if Jonny Foreigner doesn't get there first). Saints fans (on here)... so much bitterness ... just enjoy what we are doing ... are people really sooooh eaten up by what Bournemouth and Boscombe's ex manager may or may not be doing? I rarely give him a second (or twentysecond) thought.

Of course it has .... and you think people who were dealing in the sort of stuff they were dealing in couldn't get round a simple internet band?