The Kraken

Yep, he's got a ridiculous shot alright. Odds on to take you out in Row Z 9 times out of 10.

So there we have it; the system is much more open to abuse than last year. Brilliant work SFC. And now some poor bastard has to work through making 12,000 phone calls! Well done indeed.

Someone has updated his wiki page to say he's signed for us. Yes, I know, it's Wikipedia. About as reliable as, well, something pretty unreliable.

To the knuckle-dragging elite, I'm not sure which is considered worse; the fact that he's probably not gay, or that he used to play for a rival team. It's an absolutely senseless mindset that we can have players like Crouch and Chamberlain respected in one way, while Taylor, Fuller etc get derided for previously playing for the same team (they've got no other formal ties with the city either). So small minded.

You may find it boring; I'd suggest Umbro are enjoying an enormous amount of revenues right now for basing their entire product range on previous (old) kits.

Brilliant. So for all the hoop-jumping fans have been made to go through to avoid the possibility of abuse of the system, we're quite possibly in a worse position than last year? Hats off to SFC; you couldn't make it up.

Oh, I knew there was a certain level of stupidity, absolutely. I just didn't think there were people whose knuckles dragged so low that they'd be prepared to give up £500 of hard spent cash and refuse to enjoy a pasttime they clearly enjoy just because the club have bought a very good footballer.

Alan McLoughlin

Dear God, I didn't think we had fans this thick.

IMO you've just described two players who are completely inadequate as backup. Holmes has consistently proved that he is made of glass. Great on his day, but has been injured for more than half his career. Can't really be relied upon just yet. And Forte, well the jury is still out but from the times I've seen him play I just don't rate him as good enough, I think it was a rather strange signing. I'd love to have Taylor on board, he's a class player and would absolutely improve the side immeasurably. Him on the left and Lallana on the right would work well, assuming AOC does the offski.

It's a well researched piece; we're interested in Boa Morte or Andy Roberts from Huddersfield. It takes 10 seconds to google it and find out his name is really Gary, lads.

Hope it's not any of those mock ups; they're nice enough in their own right but I cannot find anything about them to identify SFC. The ideal away kit for me is based on the 1976 FA Cup kit. If not that, the old dark blue / light blue Rank Xerox kit. Anything else just disinterests me.

To qualify as home grown, a player will have had to be registered for at least three seasons at an English or Welsh club between the ages of 16 and 21.

I would agree, were it not for this absolutely classic effort.

Check out post 10, in reply to my original post. By far not the only one I've seen when discussing this previously.

I always said the stadium was over-rated, and its really just a bit of a dump.

MerceSaint, good post. Just because we are in the midst of a 5 year plan, I don't see why so many people equate that to aiming for a mid-table finish. We had a 2 year plan to get out of League 1; despite the -10 in the first year we know all about Cortese's ambitions to achieve promotion in 1 year if we could. Some people seem to expect the club to go into an almost dormant state for 2 years, stating that is "consolidation". Cortese has never IMO seemed the type of person that would accept that. He's a realist I'm sure, and thinks it may take more than just one year to get promoted. But the best way, surely, to improve year upon year is to be up amongst the mix of the promotion zone. Not sitting around unpressured in mid-table.

Who's panicking?

Have another read; I suggested we didn't need 7, but we did need 5. I did outline the positions on the other thread, I can't be bothered to type it out again so I'm just C&Ping. Since then the AOC bus has rumbled on, so if he leaves I think we need a replacement.

Why is it 7? I've never mentioned 7 for us. That was Norwich. For us I think we need less. At the risk of repeating my post on the other thread about Norwich; there are many, many similarities between us and them when they came up to the Championship. Points per game throughout the season (Lambert v Adkins) was extremely similar. So there's an argument we had similar strength sides. They then bouth 7 players, 6 of whom became regular first teamers throughout the season. And they earned promotion off the back of it. So there is a benchmark of how it CAN be done. Ours may well be another way for it to be done. I just have less faith in our approach, as I said on that thread I believed at the end of the season we were 5 players off of being a promotion-capable team. Cork is a great signing, but I still think we're looking for 4 more to challenge. If mid-table is accpetable then fine, we don't need any more players. I just don't think adkins or Cortese is targetting that, and I don't think you neccessarily have to "do a Leicester" to achieve success in this league. Lambert is a good manager and did it his way, Adkins is also a good manager; time will tell how successful his way is.

Calm down dear. And go and ask Cortese if he thinks we're not aiming for promotion this year. Or Adkins. I'm yet to see an interview where either of them say we're aiming to just finish 12th.

This is the weird thing I guess. There is the obvious 5 year plan, I completely recognise that. But that doesn't mean the aim is to just sit around for 2 years and then go for it properly in year 5, does it? Building a team for 2 or 3 years time is very dangerous; look at AOC right now to see how quickly a side can be destabilised by having key players turned to other clubs. I doubt Cortese is happy to say "yeah, we're going for mid-table consolidation this year". In fact I'm sure he has hinted before that we're aiming for promotion. I'm not advocating spending millions either, before that gets levelled at me. In the other transfer thread I highlighted how Norwich had gone up, by signing 7 new players relatively cheaply but still significantly improving the side and sqaud.

It's still opinion though, isn't it? Besides, I don't think adkins has said "we only need 1 or 2 players then we're good enough to win the league". He's said that we'll be bringing in 1 or 2 more players. It's all opinion. S-Clarke may be right. Adkins may be right. Or I may be right. We'll know one way or the other in 9 or 10 months whether this squad (plus whatever additions we see) can make a challenge for the league. Just becsue I have a different opinion to how good our squad is, it doesn't make it invalid.

That's not a fact, that's your opinion. Some (including myself) feel we need more signings than that; for a shot at promotion, anyway. Still, there's a perfectly good transfer thread which this could easily have gone into....

I'm not in posession of one, so I don't know. But it would make sense that the ticket wallet gets sent out with tickets 1-8 and all the promotional gubbins. Then just the 9-23 tickets are sent out in November. But that's just my guess, maybe someone who's paying by installments will be along to clarify it.