The Kraken

FloridaMarlin, can't fault the effort!! I'm not sure if I agree with you though. You seem to be suggesting that the motive of the clubs is to restrict access to only club websites that can give out score information etc. Which is a similar motive to what SFC tried to do with the photo thing. I really don't think that's the issue here. i think the clubs are all saying that any website will still be free to post the information they currently provide, with no form of censorship or otherwise. It's just that a hefty charge will now be incurred. Your concerns are all perfectly valid, I just don't see that they're entirely relevant in this particular situation.

I was going to debate the matter, then you come out with the unnecessary Lowe comment, which is neither true nor realistic. You put your dummy back in and we'll choose to ignore each other. You offer nothing but ignorance and childish idiocy.

Unfortunately there are a minority of people like that on here; I'll thank you for not insulting my intelligence or willingness for rational debate by ranking me alongside them. Its a cheap and ignorant shot.

There is that argument. All publicity is good publicity, and all that. I think this is more an exercise in control. In itself, the fixture list publication fee that I mentioned is utterly ridiculous. That you can't publish a list of teams next to a list of other teams without having to pay a huge amount of money is just a laughable idea. Yet there it is, in law. This is just the very next step along those lines, making all websites etc have to pay for publishing live scores or any information from the grounds. If it passes you can expect massive crackdowns on individuals and websites reporting from matches. Not a good thing. As for your second paragraph, all I'll say is that it smacks of censorship, and is the potential start of an erosion of free press. At least with this current situation, there are no potential censorship issues, it's just making various news outlets pay up for the privilege of distributing their own content.

F*ck off telling me who to support you clown! You're so clueless, do you really have to resort to making things up?! As I've said, please feel free to identify where I continually slag him off. Unlike you seem to be, I am capable of being very grateful and complimentary about the many things Mr Cortese has done for our club. He has made some mistakes, but they are far outweighed IMO by the good things he has and continues to do. You are clearly an idiot if you can't or won't do something similar, or indeed recognise it in others. Go and support someone else. Are you 10 years old?

Please feel free to identify my negativity towards all those factors. I suggest you grow up a little if you're incapable of entering into a debate without throwing your toys out of the pram and polarising everyone into a pro-Cortese or anti-Cortese camp, which is a ridiculous notion in itself.

The "free content" motive, yes. That's where the motive is similar I agree. The methods though are vastly different. The clubs are not looking to restrict incoming photographers such that only medium that is allowed out is one that is effectively controlled by the club. That's what Mr Cortese was trying to do, no other photographers were to be allowed in oher than ones employed by the club. The current situation seems to be almost an extension of the rule whereby you have to pay to be able to reproduce the fixture lists etc. There's no restriction on who can access the ground and publish the information, the clubs just seem to want to extract a fair charge for it.

You are aware that, while there are some similarities with the motives, there are massive differences between what Cortese was trying to achieve and what the clubs are trying to achieve this time round? Right?

Oh dear. You really don't know too much, do you?

What a ridiculous statement. Wilde gambled all the family silver on getting back to the Premier League. That failed. We all know what a crippling, financial mess that left us in. Lowe then went on to make further mistakes with the appointment of the Dutch duo, but while his actual methods were flawed many could see that, given our state at the time, we didn't have too many other choices than to make huge financial cuts. As for your statement "at least he tried, and gave us hope", well I find that remarkable. Peter Ridsdale has tried at a couple of clubs; he's overspent and they've almost gone to the wall. Peter Storrie tried, and gave Pompey hope for a while. Does that make them good chairmen? No, it doesn't. Lowe did quite a few good things for this club He also made some very, very poor errors in judgement. But he always had a plan to keep the club on the financial straight and narrow. Wilde and his lot spent money they didn't have chasing a footballing dream, then woke up to a financial nightmare of their own creation.

Thurrocking good news.

John, its a detailed response, that's for sure! But I don't agree with you though that AOC's move is purely about money. It's a factor I'm sure, but I'm sure he's done it for footballing reasons primarily. I think it's primarily the way he's gone about engineering a move which has stuck in people's throats, rather than the actual move. First of all, you say that you've always seen out a job. You could argue that Chamberlain has done the same. He wanted to leave at Xmas, talked to the club about a move and was convinced to wait until the summer. So he's done that, he hasn't left us in the lurch, the club knew he wanted to leave, assumed he would, and had 6 months to plan for that eventuality. He's now moved to a club a league above us. We're 2 years into a 5 year plan to get to that league. So, judging by that plan, he could have just accelerated his progression to the top league by 3 years. Take Walcott as an example, there's plenty of parallels between the two. In Walcott's first full season with Arsenal he played in more than 30 games. If AOC gets that many appearances then he'll have learnt a massive amount from playing at Premier League and Champions League level. Not to mention the huge benefit he'll gain from working with Wenger and alongside the quality international players in Arsenal's squad. Also, look at Walcott. After signing for Arsenal, and without actually playing a game for their first team, he was called up for England and taken to a world cup. His exposure will be massively increased at a club like Arsenal and, whether you look at it rightly or wrongly, he's probably just accelerated his progression to the national team (Tom Cleverley is a point in case, not really noticed while out on loan but returns to Man U, plays 45 minutes in teh Communit Shield and gets called up for England). So there's a huge number of footballing reasons to take into account before you get to the obvious financial benefits he'll see from the move.

Darren Bent, Charlton to Spurs, £16.5M. Technically speaking though, Bent wasn't really a Championship player. Charlton had just been relegated from the Premier League and Bent went in the summer before the Championship kicked off. But then you could apply that logic to Chamberlain being a League 1 player and not Championship. So it's perhaps better described as a transfer from a Championship club. Semantics really.

Despite evidence to the contrary in the form of club accounts, I think some people still do, yes.

If only there was a three page thread on the first page of this forum devoted to the flag and it's whereabouts. What's that? There is?! http://www.saintsweb.co.uk/showthread.php?31625-ML-Flag

Yeah, I hate it when clubs put their owner and CEO in the squad picture. Oh...

If that's the case, I'd definitely rather not have that "incentive". You're effectively paying for a ticket (if you want to or not) for a game that may or may not actually take place. I'm still sure the away team must have input into the pricing; I remember either last year or the year before where the club wanted to cut prices but couldn't because of away team input. In fact, didn't SFC p!ss of someone like Shrewsbury through such an arrangement and then we slagged them off about it on the OS? EDIT: Here's the link to the article: http://www.shropshirestar.com/sport/2010/10/28/fa-steps-in-over-shrewsbury-v-southampton-ticket-prices/ SFC wanted to charge £10, away team wanted to charge full price, FA mediated a compromise.

You sure about that? So how does that work if Arsenal/Spurs get drawn away in the cup and only get an allocation of 3,000? They can't give every ST holder a ticket.

Being as I've used bookies in other stadia (and other sports) that are more up to date, I'm pretty sure it's not as complicated as you want to make out. Not simple I imagine, but for a larger company like Ladbrokes I'm sure it wouldn't involve a huge amount of logisitics. And why are you getting uppity about it?! "Don't like it, don't use it then" is a silly statement to make when there are valid criticisms to make. Please tell me what is wrong with wanting a service I've previously used to be better and more efficient. I assume when someone complains about the queues at half-time for beer and food being too long, you tell them "Well don't use them then".

I agree. I am surprised the club went with someone so tin-pot, I can only think it can have been motivated by extra money. As I said the queues were by far the worst factor with Ladbrokes, which weren't helped by the fact that the betting kiosks were all run with manual slips. As per the high street stores, this could be speeded up by using the scanners and pre-printed forms. Of course, The Betting Room don't have these; they don't even have the facility for online betting. And no other way to redeem a winning bet than wait for ages Or until the next game) at the ground, take your slip to a shop in Pompey, or mail it by registered delivery. Very poor options for the customer. The Betting Room will only justify their outlay if they can get customers served quicker, and not put them off by long queues and comparitively poor odds. Having a captive audience will only get them so far, they still have to perform.

No doubt; the problem is that QPR don't seem to have a spare million to spend. Not in cash anyway; which may suggest that Gorkss in p/x is also off.

It isn't a direct criticism of the club, more so the suppliers they use. In fact, these new lot may actually be paying more than Ladbrokes used to, as Ladbrokes apparently refused to meet the price demands of Cortese. So there's the possibility that it's actually a good move for the club, in terms of revenues. The down side of course is that, while the Ladbrokes system certainly had it's flaws, their biggest criticism (the waiting times for bets and payouts) has gotten even worse. And now the odds seem pretty poor in comparison too. In any case, the club shouldn't really lose out; they'll get their money from The Betting Room nonetheless. But having such an outdated system and untrained staff for an environment where speed of service is key makes little sense.

For a Man U fan you have an unhealthy obsession with Saints.

Blame the manager.