Whitey Grandad

This is the trick that they have pulled on you. It’s paid by the employer on the employee’s behalf but it’s part of the employee’s salary. You’re looking at it from the employee’s viewpoint. Try looking at it from the point of view of the employer.

No, and this is one of my bugbears. The employers contribution is just as much a part of your salary as what you eventually get in your pocket. It's part of your remuneration as all the rest. The fact that the government creams it off before you see it is irrelevant. It makes your marginal tax rate higher thab they would like you to know. It's a payroll tax but it's your money beore it gets stolen from you. Other countries vary. When I had a company in France every month we had a payroll to approve and on top of the net salary there was a long list of enforced contributions, maybe 10 items incluing various insurances and even a perecntage that went to the local chamber of commerce which is why these are seen there as government bodies rather than local trade associations. When I was in Denmark however I ws told that the money that the employer paid all went to the employee without deductions and it was up to the individual to settle up with the goverment. This is one of the reasons why you have to be careful when comparing international salaries.

I Blame Baden-Powell

That's the problem with this pass it across the back system. One mistake and they're through.

Yes. Just throwing players in at random is never going to create a team and is going to get us nowhere. Which is exactly where we are now.

And the longer we persist with this the harder it will be to change.

It's not one or the other, they're the same thing. Employers' contributions are part of the employees' remuneration.

Can we really afford to experiment?

Dead beat

Clutching at straws. And grabbing hold of thin air.

Soon we shall be two years in and back where we started but in a worse position.

It’s a load of balls.

Agreed. My heart sinks when we pass the ball forward to a midfielder in space who doesn’t even turn and have a look upfield. Every time the ball is pinged back first time somewhere in the world another butterfly dies and the game I love turns into the game I loathe.

He only knows one thing.

I dragged myself along even though my heart wasn’t in it. The Kingsland was fully closed and hence fully empty which gave a weird feeling to the game with no chance of any atmosphere. I sat in the Chapel and whilst the view of my end of the pitch was ok in the other half it was difficult to really see what was going on. In the second half I had unfortunately a good view of our linear one dimensional football with the ball going from left back to right back via the two or three players in the middle. Defensively this is a shit way of playing because as soon as the opposition has broken through our thin crust they are bearing down on our goal in numbers. There are no layers to our defence. Good to get a win. It might be the last I see this season. James Bree is a very good player. Adam Armstrong was lively and inventive. Took his penalty well. Why did we sign Cornet?

He has killed my love for football and for that may he rot in hell.

We drew.

Last time I looked they were above us in the table.

One goal. It was enough but only just. If you base your whole footballing style on scoring just the one then you'd better make sure that you've got a rock solid defence. Oops. I think your adoration for Martin has elevated that goal to the transcendental. In the circumstances it was a good goal but one that could and easily should have been snuffed out. Just like all the other goals that we didn't score.

There you go again. That was in a different league and even there it wasn't Russball that got us promoted. There were three teams that finished above us in the table without playing it. Had we achieved automatic promotion then we would have had a longer summer to get prepared.

I think that’s mainly because he is adapting to a different league with a different style of refereeing. In his early games he seemed to go down a lot expecting to win a foul.

You cannot make a team out of a mixed selection of individuals. “Nothing beats a settled team”. Even when we appear to have made progress during a game he upends that by making wholesale substitutions. The Ipswich game in particular but also the Leicester game.

The problem is that Russball will never work. He’s taking us up a dead end road with no turning spaces.

Sometimes some rough sums on a scrap of paper can be very revealing.

And we are being mugged.