The Kraken

Quite easy to be one of the best in the country when Cardiff are the only opposition

Depends what the criteria is really. "Most successful" manager, and he's not yet close and won't be until he emulates what Lawrie did for us in the old first division. But "best" is a little more subjective, and our progress under him so far has been pretty remarkable, so under that remit alone he'd definitely be quite high up there.

If you can't get your job done in your allocated hours (without the occasional few days here and there for work peaks) then you're either not good enough at your job or being asked to do too much. Expecting employees to work 10, 11 or 12 hour days while being contracted to work 8 hour days is a complete liberty IMO. As a business owner I would never, ever impose such a demand on my staff without compensating them for it through overtime payments, and even then I'd consider working that many hours over any extended period of time to be an unhealthy arrangement.

I disagree actually; maybe it was that the standard of opposition last year didn't test us to the limit, but last season I would have described us as "functional" and "effective". This season we've carried on with the excellent form but I think we look so much better as a team and play much better, more flowing and more creative football. We were certainly getting there by the back half of the season, but this season is like night and day as far as I'm concerned.

"We arguably have the best players in the division. The game last night showed we don't have the best "team" in the division. But that's no surprise to me, as it takes time to go from a collection of individual players to an established team, more time than Sam has currently had at West Ham. There is lots of room for improvement in terms of the "team", and I'd expect a slow and steady improvement throughout the season." A degree of parallels between us and Brighton from the first half of last season.

Or just send the coach tickets out and not make it needlessly harder than it is right now. FFS. With all the restrictions in place and the game on TV I can't see us selling anywhere near our 3,200 allocation, think we could end up with around half that making the trip.

Pretty sure it's already been confirmed that they will have exactly the same procedure for our home fixture.

With it being a bubble game I'd be very surprised if we sell out our allocation.

Discussed here. http://www.saintsweb.co.uk/showthread.php?33212-The-downside-of-economic-boom...

That's the nature of football supporters; it's not unique to Saints and will keep on happening. Personally I don't know why people moan about it so much; if you enjoy going every week then go every week. It shouldn't be used as a badge of honour to criticise others who don't want to in this league, but might choose to in a league above. I've said all along that an average attendance over the season of anywhere around 25,000 would be a really great achievement, and it would seem we're pretty well on course for that, so no reason for complaints here.

"You can stick your f*cking bubbles up your arse". Try blowing this, Fat Sam? "Top of the league, we're having a laugh" Any of those is fine with me.

You've been looking foolish for months, but never mind that.

I'm with Dalek, we'll never finish higher than 17th.

Considering the whole idea of the justice movement has been to ensure that all evidence related to the day is released (to which the Government have now agreed) then one would assume that the complete opposite would be the case. And you try to deny being ignorant or ill informed? Jesus...

Pap, I'd suggest what is even more worrying has been the flat-out refusal by some to believe the findings of a thorough investigation and report into the disaster, in favour of scurrilous and blatantly incorrect newspaper allegations made nearer the time, just to seemingly continue a laboured point and entrenched viewpoint. Seeing some of the completely ignorant accusations made in this thread such as "If thousands of fans had not turned up ticketless trying to force their way in then this whole disaster would have been averted" and "the gates were rushed by a large number of fans", it's just incredible how entrenched these opinions are with the baseless newspaper allegations at the time (yet thoroughly disappointing that the posters that chose to make those remarks haven't retracted them since being made aware of just how wrong they are). I've said it before, but my biggest hope from all of this is that, finally, the truth of the whole day will out. That in my eyes will constitute justice for the 96.

Frankie Boyle's description of him always makes me laugh. "He looks like someone shaved a monkey and kicked it through Top Man".

If he could manage to not get himself sent off once in a while, and manage to not be a complete bell end, that would be a good start.

Well, we'll have to agree to disagree on that one. But, rather than rely on one third hand report as you are happier to do, I think I'd probably consider it more prudent to rely upon an official report that had access to all evidence, including: Witness evidence from police officers at the game. Witness evidence from surviving fans in the stands and around the ground. Television evidence and CCTV footage. Witness evidence from stewards and emergency services personnel at the ground. Separate reports (including projections of crowd numbers from all video footage) from a separate HSE investigation. Crowd numbers from Hillsborough own computerised turnstiles records. To each their own I guess, but I'd probably be more confident that the methods I support might be more accurate than yours.

Exactly this pap, I thoroughly agree, it alone makes the notion of releasing all information seem the only sensible course of action. Then everyone will have the means available to make their own appropriate judgement of what happened in full posession of all evidence to hand.

It doesn't read particularly well, granted. But Taylor interviewed a huge number of officers for his report, many of whom offered only an opinion of the day, not facts. He therefore had to make a judgement on how accurate he deemed their statements. The HSE of course are an independent body, and that their numbers corroborate what those police officers suggested should also be taken into account.

I feel we're still going round with this accusation, so I've included the relevant section from the Taylor Report that dealt with this. Were Fans Without Tickets a Major Factor in the Build-Up? 200. It has become a fact of football life that fans do turn up at all-ticket matches without tickets. It is not possible to give an accurate figure or even a reliable estimate of the number without tickets on 15 April. Police estimates varied from about 200 to about 2,000. There were certainly frequent requests for tickets or "spares" during the hours before the build-up. Many of those warned off by the police were seen to return to the area. Some were hanging about on the bridge. Again, however, the police witnesses who most impressed me did not consider the number of ticketless fans to be inordinately large. This accords with two other sources of evidence. 201. First, there was a wide range of witnesses who observed inside the ground that the Liverpool end was at a late stage well below capacity save for pens 3 and 4. The north stand still had many empty seats and the wing pens were sparse. The match being a sell-out, there were clearly many ticket holders to come and they could account for the large crowd still outside the turnstiles. Had the Liverpool accommodation been full by 2.40pm, one could have inferred that most or much of the large crowd outside lacked tickets. 202. Secondly, such figures as are available from the Club's electronic monitoring system and from analyses by the HSE suggest that no great number entered without tickets. They show that the number who passed through turnstiles A to G plus those who entered through gate C roughly equalled the terrace capacity figure of 10,100 for which tickets had been sold. The Club's record showed 7,038 passed through turnstiles A to G. However, the counting mechanism on turnstile G was defective, so the HSE did a study using the video film and projecting figures from the other turnstiles. This gave an assessment of 7,494, with a maximum of 7,644 passing through A to G. Again, using the video, the HSE assessed the number who entered the ground whilst gate C was open at 2,240 with a maximum of 2,480. Accordingly, the HSE's best estimate of the total entering through gate C and turnstiles A to G was 9,734 with a maximum of 10,124.1 recognise that these can only be rough checks because, for example, some with terrace tickets were allowed through turnstiles 1 to 16 and there would be other similar factors which have not formed part of the assessment. Nevertheless, the figures do suggest that there was not a very significant body of ticketless fans in the crowd which built up.

I maybe agree that any cover-up was at the behest of senior officers (and there is certainly enough smoke to suggest that was certainly the case). I'm not sure how much further up the establishment it went; there is certainly an enormous amount of criticism of the manner in which the inquests and judicial reviews were conducted by senior judges and barristers, but whether there was influence brought to bear on them from within Government, I just don't know. It'll definitely be an interesting one to see either way. I think the biggest wrong that can be put right, though, is the sensationalist press reporting, particularly from the inquest, which re-opened old wounds and laid a huge amount of accusations at the victims (and indeed the survivors) with absolutely no recourse or opportunity for rebuttal. And the press swarmed all over this, seizing on one-sided accusations from senior officers of a boozed up unstoppable army of fans being at fault, resulting in terrible headlines yet again. Any clarification in public perception as to exactly what happened throughout that whole day can only be a good thing.

I truly don't believe that to be the case. The interim Taylor Report (the final report only dealt with recommendations for stadium safety) was actually well received by the families and those associated with them; there are a few holes and minor criticisms of it but overall it is still held up and considered as an effective investigation of what led up to the day and why it occured. The subsequent inquests, however, stopped well short of a full analysis of everything that happened trhoughout the day. There are far too many unanswered questions for me to list here, but questions such as why were 40 odd ambulances outside the stadium refused entry to help the injured/dying? Why did the coroner assume all 94 inside the stadium who died had perished prior to 3.16pm? Why therefore was no evidence from 3.16 onwards heard at the inquest? The release of information is so that a full picture of the whole day can be pieced together. I don't believe it looks to blame police any further than the Taylor Report currently does, laying the cause of the disaster at their feet. It's just a thirst for information from people who've loved lost ones, and want to know exactly why.

We can only currently rely upon the Taylor Report, as it is the one document that relies upon a wealth of information none of us have been privy to. Is that in itself not even more justifcation to have access to the unrestricted documents? Which is what this whole campaign has been about.