sandwichsaint

Just need to get rid of Pelle now and then we can install the wet-dream team of Austin and JRod, not sure who would play in the other 35 games though.

If these were the only three clubs we could buy players from then 'yes' to Redmond and Townsend. Ruddy CDAJFU in the Stek role, personally I would rather have Darlow at third choice and move Gazza on, no thanks to Wdam, I can't stand players that only play at home, though obviously he's Dutch and therefore guaranteed to improve his effort/attitude under RK. But being as we are not restricted to buying from just these three clubs I seriously doubt we will get 50%-plus of next year's stock from the three relegated clubs.....

This was the single best piece of the whole night! Totally deluded ... !

Mitrovic is an utter thug, hopefully that's the last we see of him in our football.

Yay! I opened mine a couple of weeks back and thought, nice, they've used the view exactly from my seat to sell STs! A couple of slow thinks later and I realised that they had probably personalised them! Nice touch by the club, got mine on the office wall.

Au contraire there's never been a better time to expand, and that window may never come again. 6-year upward trend, massive feel-good factor, new TV money , stable and well-run, excellent succession planning (we've hit the jackpot with our last FOUR managers), we have demonstrated that we are able to sustain and in fact increase footballing performance at the same time as running a financially sustainable model. We have an ageing fanbase that will need supplementing by another generation that has the habit of going to live and affordable football. Not saying I necessarily agree with all that and there's a bit of devil's advocate in there but I do think if you look at other clubs and project forward 5-10 years we risk being stuck in a modern equivalent of a 30,000 seat Dell while all our rivals are playing in 60-000 seat stadia. 'Risk' being the operative word, not sure there's an easy answer either way.

Slightly torturous logic, we need to expand the stadium in case football becomes less popular at some time in the future? I think you'll have to run that one by the bank manager again.

Agree with the above, this does happen occasionally, at the moment they just put the free kick a couple of yards in their own half, presumably under this rule they would take it where the 'offside' player played the ball or interfered with play.

Maybe the ref/lino did take all this into account and decided that Forster hadn't been disadvantaged? He clearly had time to get himself into a position where he could have gone down with his hands and collected the ball a stride ahead of Son. The fact that he was caught in several minds and didn't do much of anything isn't really any fault of the ref, or of Kane (unless Forster could prove that his failure to make a fairly routine-but-brave piece of goal keeping was that Kane had got in his head). I thought it was a goal, and I'd be unhappy if we had a similar one chalked off on Sunday.

It wouldn't be the end of the world if De Boer took over in the next month with a full pre-season, as opposed to keeping RK into his final year and him becoming a bit of a lame duck as we are battered by constant speculation as to a) where he is going next, and b) who's coming to us next. It could be a bit of a bloodless coup/perfect succession planning by Les if you will. FWIW my preferred option would be RK to sign an improved contract, keep Mane and VW, buy a couple of starting level players (improvements on what we've got); if we did all that we could have genuine aspirations on the top-4. Will be interesting to see how it all pans out but De Boer is a pretty decent Plan B.

Maritinez and de Boer looks a bit 2+2, let's hope RK's not the answer.

Iconic pic, you will be seeing this for the next 20 years. A muslim women and child are rescued by a couple of NF/BNP/UKIP/WHU types who forget their prejudices and remember their humanity. The authority figure is totally clueless (or uncaring?). Look on the left and everything's for sale. This is England, on several different levels.

Who's getting the keys to a new Ford Cortina before kick-off? TBF it will probably be upgraded to a Focus ST in today's money - my money's on SRL.

Utter joke.

What's David Connolly doing nowadays?

Charlton have just been relegated to Div 1, club in turmoil. They have a well-organised boycott (6000+) fans refusing to renew at early bird rates and demanding regime change. I heard yesterday that up to a 1000 Charlton fans have bought cheap STs at West Ham. They can go to the 'big games', they can go to PL football when Charlton are away, and it's a bit of an insurance if their club goes tits up or they need to boycott next season, and of course they can always pass on PL tkts to family and friends or even sell them on. Bit of a no-brainer at £200-£300 a pop, makes you wonder when we are going to see a class action from Millwall/Palace/Charlton/Gillingham/Orient alleging unfair competition? The answer is almost certainly never but clearly those tkts are being sold at well below any recognisable 'market value' and the tax payer is picking up the difference.

Not sure what your point is here? It was a textbook example of how the rule should be applied and the referee got this one spot on. I only saw it on TV but I'm not sure he got much else right. For anybody that was there, Shane Long's yellow card? Danny Rose appeared to have his hands on Saints players on at least three separate occasions? Vertongen's slip that nearly put Long in on goal? Fantastic win and from the above posts it would seem no one is much bothered about the ref when we win but I thought he was shocking (tho he did miss at least two corners for them in the last 10 minutes so not all bad then).

Seriously fluffed his lines today! Oh well, looks like we've got him for next year, which is awesome, and hopefully another one beyond that. If we get CL in the next two years that changes everything but I would suggest it's very unlikely that he will be here for the next 6 years.

Incredible stat, think just how good he'd be if he could defend! But then he wouldn't be playing for us!! Out of interest how many starts do these three have over this period? It looks like we could be secretly deploying the most creative player in the league!

If it all goes tits we could always loan him to Middlesborough.

Surely not beyond the realms that he will be asked to stand down though; does he have a game this weekend? Would suggest he will have zero credibility with the players if he refs this weekend. While clearly he won't be suspended in any formal sense (unfortunately) it is entirely likely that he could be rested until the dust settles.

TBF they're still waiting for the ref's 'report' (LOL!), Clattenberg's probably a jibbering wreck somewhere having locked himself in his room and refusing to come out. Rather puts me in the mind of John Major when we exited the ERM, I don't think we'll be seeing him again this season.

Shocking performance from Clattenberg, he'd lost it by half time. There's always some sort of case for saying he 'managed the game' and that any red cards would have inflamed the situation more but rules are surely rules? Unquestionably Pochetino should have gone to the stands for entering the playing area and man handling a Chelsea player. Two footed tackle by Lamella in the first five minutes of the second half was like something from the seventies, he deliberately played the player, no intention of playing the ball at all, ticked every box for a straight red. In the context of the whole game Lamella's 'stamp' was about 10th on the charge sheet. Well done Leicester, winning it with two games to spare, bloody football eh?

I was there that day in those very same pens right behind the goal and I can clearly remember it being somewhere on the wrong side of the exhilarating/terrifying continuum, in fact it was pretty much the embodiment of 'unsafe standing'. I always have a little shudder at the memory whenever this comes up and I find it really difficult just imagining what those people went through, victims and rescuers and survivors. Clearly major strategic mistakes were made and it rapidly deteriorated into a total clusterthing with those in charge seemingly powerless to react or coordinate any sort of plan to limit the damage. Inter-weaved with the major parts it's the detail that really gets you, father and son, boyfriend girlfriend, the police eating chicken and chips in the morgue, parents unable to comfort their dead children with all bodies being declared property of the coroner, police officers more concerned with covering their own backs and getting their story into the media than providing facilities for the relatives of the bereaved. Massive respect to those in the groups and the journalists with them; these people have laid down 27 years of their lives in the pursuit of truth and justice and they have exposed massive lies and corruption within the police and media and the establishment. I'm sorry that some people had their radio and television programmes interrupted yesterday but this is probably one of the biggest domestic news stories of the last 30 years.

2010-2011, 28 goals in 58 for Reading and Rep of Ireland, but yeah, Vardy has scored 56+ this season.