The Kraken

Cry me a river. If you want something for free, at least be prepared to get off your arse and actually go and get it.

So you want the club, who make zero from away ticket sales, to send you something at their own cost rather than you go down there and pick them up?

Pardew did better than a good job here, it's folly to suggest otherwise. Especially so considering he had less than half a summer to completely rebuild a whole squad. Some of his achievements: After a slow start to season 2009/10, our form from October 1st to the end of the season was championship winning (we averaged 2 points per game). Subtract the ten point penalty and we would have made the playoffs. Subtract the ten point penalty and for two years of the previous five we would have gained automatic promotion (in one year we would have gone up as champions). We won our first trophy for more than 30 years. The signings he made (Fonte, Harding, Richardson, Hammond, Guly, Lambert, Connolly) still provide the spine of the current side. No-one knows just what would have happened if he had stayed, so there's no point speculating. But his achievements with us were excellent, particularly for season 2009/10 when he completely turned us around and set up a team of players that is now competing at the top of the Championship, and to deny that does a disservice to the actual job he did.

The run down from the top of the Ahorn into resort is an absolute beauty; a proper leg-burner, but makes you earn your beer in the umbrella bar at the bottom. In fact, with the 8 man lift and huge wide open piste, the top of the Ahorn is a perfect place for a beginner to get going and build up confidence. I also went up there for the Snowbombing Arctic Disco, a party in igloos at night; fantastic evening.

Opening day of the season, I thought Richardson (against Gradel) and Harding (against Snodgrass) were absolutely superb, and barely gave them anything. Hopefully Richardon will be back, jury is still out on how good defensively Fox is.

Depending when you go, you might time it be there when Snowbombing festival is in town. It's a music festival that pretty much takes over the whole resort, it's a heavy bias on dance music though 2 or 3 years ago they had Madness headlining the main event. All the clubs open up until 5 or 6 in the morning, the best thing about which is if you just fancy going for the skiing, the slopes are pretty much empty in the mornings. Its a brilliant festival and you'll be sure to see many famous faces around town as it's really starting to gain some mainstream popularity now. But it does make trying to go for a quiet beer after a hard day on teh slopes a practical impossibility as the bars around resort get packed from 3 or 4 onwards, so it's not exactly your typical skiing experience. Edit: completely ignore that, just saw you're going in January.....

I had to go and have another look at that; here's the video: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/14872249.stm, from 1m 20s onwards. I'm not exactly sure what the linesman is signalling for; he seems to pat his chest a few times with his right hand. But he's not quite indicating a shirt pull IMO.

Please God, no. The last thing I would want introduced to football is video technology for playback of incidents during the game. The only exception to this I would make would be for goal-line technology, which I think is a must and can be achieved without calling for a significant break in play. Anything else would IMO completely ruin the game as a spectacle. As I said, my proposal for retrospective analysis is far from ideal but I just don't see a better option. You make valid points about what is a foul and what isn't, again I've briefly referred to it but pundits and managers really need to be driven away from the notion that "contact", no matter how slight, is justifable to send a player crashing to his knees to claim a foul. That is as much the fault of current referees for being too leniant than anything else, and we've allowed "exagerration" to be an acceptable part of the game now. There will always be some element of human error in refereeing; that should in no way be used as an excuse for players to think that simulation is acceptable. And I think a retrospective video panel should be able to judge what is in actual fact a foul and what isn't. And if you introduce this system you (theoretically) should be encouraging players not to go to ground unnecessarily, therefore there will be less potential for referees to make major mistakes. As for your cricket analogy; my opinion is that if a batsman edges it and doesn't walk, yes, he is cheating. But cricket (and tennis) are sports which have natural breaks in play and therefore afford the perfect opportunity to have a video review. Football by its very nature doesn't have that, which is why I think the next best thing is to review it all retrospectively with harsher penalties than we have now.

I think you miss the point a bit with this part, though you'll obviously have seen from my post above your one that I agree with the sentiment. Referees are entirely restricted in the action they can take to simulation by the letter of the law; it is a yellow card offence. So the referee did not "fail" in the slightest; he applied the law to the very letter. What needs to change is the culture of cheating in football; of trying to cheat and deceive the officials. Other sports such as golf and snooker see the participants actually call a foul on themselves; that'll of course never happen in football, but in football the punishment must become much harsher so that the first instinct of the player is no longer to try and cheat rather than stay on their feet. And the only way to do that is two-fold; firstly, make the punishment much harder, a one or two game ban (multiply it for further offences); and secondly, introduce retrospective video analysis and punish all acts of simulation according to those guidelines. It's far from an ideal solution, but IMO it's the only way to fix such a prevalent problem in the game.

I was extremely worried about the sceptre of administration. Not so much that we would go out of business, that concept never really registered as a genuine concern. More to the point, who we would get as potential owners; there was a feeling on here of "anyone is better than Lowe", and we had a lucky escape with the Pinnacle debacle. Thankfully we ended up getting fantastic owners after going through all the motions.

I thought the regular TV pictures were pretty conclusive that it was a dive; Kelvin was hardly moving fast, barely touched Derbyshire yet he just threw his arms forward, lifted his legs in the air and fell to the ground. The TV pictures were a bit obscured by davies, thankfully the lino would have had a perfectly clear view of it and made the correct call. I'd still prefer to see a much harder punishment for stuff like this; a booking for Derbyshire is well worth the risk to Forest for the potential gain of conning the ref and getting a penalty. Chuck in a retrospective one or two game ban and we might actually see some results. But so long as there are managers like McClaren who claim its a definite penalty because "there was contact" (despite any contact being utterly minimal and insufficient to cause the reaction from the striker that it did) then we'll always have a diving problem in English football.

Indeed, this whole thread could be dedicated to some of his utter nonsense from the past year or two alone. I actually went and had a read back of a few threads from summer last year, just to see what idiocy I had come out with in comparison. Quite interesting reading really; just before the start of the season last year I was wondering if Alex Chamberlain could fill the void left by Michail Antonio.....

So lining up for a whinge that "our season is going off the rails" if we fail to win a record 13th home game on the trot on Sunday. Adkins out.

:lol:

Surely, by that rationale, no-one could have predicted that Huddersfield's run in would have been as good as it was? All we were doing was trying to usurp them, our run was amazing but all it served to do was keep us ahead of them. Anyway, back on topic. Me; "Chris Baird, you will never be a centre-back".

A shame others aren't really. I'm all for putting my neck on the line and making a prediction; I'm also more than willing to have it rubbed in my face if I get it hopelessly wrong. I'm with Saints67 above, when Burley was appointed manager I was absolutely delighted. That worked out well....

Why are there so many utterly terrible Chinese takeaways these days? Since moving to my house a few years ago I've tried many of the local take aways and, with one or two rare exceptions, most of the food that comes back has been absolutely shocking. Just gloopy, salty, tasteless muck for the most part. I've heard Pilgrim House is good, and I'm a fan of Little Buddha. Most other Chinese takeaways I give a very wide berth.

No, I'm not worried. He is still a class act, and will prove so this season. It must be especially difficult for him to command a brand new defensive unit when he has played a total of 0 games with any of his other defenders in those positions. I would say that he needs a series of games with whoever is going to be his central defensive partner though. And Cork is clearly no right-back, hopefully Richardon will have receovered from his injury by Sunday.

I got into a drunken bet with my Liverpool-supporting mate just before the start of the season; I told him that Kevin Doyle would score more league goals than Caroll and bet him £50 To be fair, I'm winning 1-0 at the moment

The expectation levels have risen so sharply since the start of the season that I think this is a genuine concern; many people's predictions of where we are going to / should finish are going up every game, whether those expectation levels are realistic or not, only time will tell. I still very much believe that reaching the playoffs would be a fantastic achievement, although I still have to remind myself of that after every game, there was a part of me that was inwardly critical of the side from Saturday before I realised that I would have bitten your hand off for that result at the start of the season. We're currently very, very reliant on Lambert and Connolly being on form and injury free, with no Barnard to call upon as an option we're looking very light in that department, and that would be my one criticism of the transfer window that we didn't strengthen there.

Indeed. I have no problems admitting that I was sceptical of the appointment, but more than anything I thought we'd made a mistake letting Pardew go. Very glad to be proven wrong. I still think Pards did a very good job for us (his forways into the transfer market have proved to be largely excellent and his signings still provide the spine of our team), but there's no doubting that NA has taken our form and our style of play up that extra few notches since his arrival.

Gorkss is not exactly young but he went to Reading for less than £1M. Would have been the ideal signing IMO. I'm still expecting Fox to be a much better option than Harding, hopefully just needs games to settle in.

Edit: never mind.

In much the same way as a Buy One, Get One Free offer, I'd imagine.