FloridaMarlin

They're all the same height lying down. No matter how tall they are standing up, when they're on their back the target area is always 6 inches off the ground.

And of course, Liverpool and the approach via the Mersey is up there with Sydney, San Francisco and New York as dramatic harbours. Cranes, sheds and car parks are what you might exepct to find in a WORKING port. I presume he was also asleep when his ship passed up through the Solent and up Southampton Water, with the verdant New Forest on one side and Royal Victoria hospital chapel on the other. Crucial to this might yet be the release of information on the Hillsbrough disaster. Hopefully the current government will not feel obliged to compensate Liverpool for any shortcomings of the Thatcher government in the aftermath of Hillsbrough, in a desperate attempt to win votes in an area where they don't get any.

God Only Knows - Beach Boys Sea Of Love - Robert Plant A Little Knowledge - Scritti Politti Won't Let This City - Patrick Wolf Help Me Somebody - Brian Eno and David Byrne Book - The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler

"Are Leicester the next club to go back into admin if they fail this year? .. for the umpteenth time?" Fail or go into admin for the umpteenth time? Let's not forget it was Leicester's shameful actions when they went into adminstration that wrought the introduction of the 10-point deduction rule. A quick re-cap: Leciester went into admin in 2002 with debts of £30m (chicken feed compared to some clubs who shall be nameless) which gave them protection from their creditors, and more importantly, allowed them to keep all their players, so that when Gary Lineker's consortium took over, they won promotion back to the PL. Other clubs complained they had an unfair playing advantage, hence the introduction of the 10-pont rule. Some clubs have learned that lesson and taken it on board. Others haven't.

mARK Dennis. Well, at least it had animals in it.

I'm fully aware of what the issue is, thanks. But as I tried to point out in my long, meaningless rant, these things are usually the thin end of the wedge. The sticking point, as you correctly point out, is the provision of realtime updates. I fully understand and appreciate why clubs and Football Dataco would want to limit them, the whole idea is to direct fans to club websites, and drive traffic through them. That's a commercially-driven initiative that's hard to criticise as they attempt to utilise what they have, and I don't really have a problem with that. But it's where this whole thing eventually goes that is the issue. Both sides are avid envelope-pushers and having won one ' victory' they'll see how far they can take it. What comes next after telling papers they can't update in real time? An embargo on match reports appearing less than 24 hours after the game, to give club websites a clear run? Copy control, with all match reports submitted to Football Dataco for approval before publication? Vetting of pictures to ensure they all carry positive portrayals, and nothing that might harm the image of the product (remember that picture of wild-eyed, open-mouthed Roy Keane howling at a terrified Andy D'Urso? That didn't do the image of English football any good at all)? It doesn't need a quantum leap to see that what is essentially a piffling local dispute over twitter updates could develop into a major conflict over control of the media agenda. Look what Gavrilo Princip did when he took a pop at Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. It's not just football or sport. Wherever you look, organisations are doing battle with the media over who controls the agenda. Every organisation has a media operation whose task is to strictly control what is said about them. As a young reporter, police, fire and ambulance calls were an essential part of your job. You called in every day, looked through the incident books, chatted with the station sergeant/fire officer and built up a relationship which provided you with tip-offs for stories. Now, there are no incident books, no cosy chats with desk sergeants, who are forbidden to talk to the media as any official line has to come from the media department. The result is that all the media freedoms the UK holds dear are being eroded and denuded. Yes, even the freedom to abuse the freedoms by hacking phones (which patently hasn't done the industry any good). Investigative journalism is a dying art, which could fall under greater threat if MPs decide to introduce controls and privacy laws. One of the media's finest recent hours was the exposure of MPs fiddling their expenses, and this is exactly the sort of thing a free press in a democratic society should be doing. And it's exactly the sort of thing that will be halted if privacy laws are brought in by MPs who might just have a vested interest in doing so. So what's this got to do with football? Depends on what sort of coverage of their sport fans want. Last weekend provided some prime examples. With no first-hand reports, newspapers were forced to cobble together reports, mainly from club websites and other sources. OK, it was risible that the Sunday Mirror had Andy Lonergan making his Saints debut in goal. But because reports were culled from club sites, there was no mention that a David James howler gifted Ipswich their first goal at Bristol City. Small beer, perhaps, but you can see where this is leading. Do fans really want to read the club website version of their club's 5-0 defeat that they were really unlucky, dominated the game throughout but were undone by five lucky goals on the break? Or would they prefer a more objective view, that the team were defensively frail, lacked any offensive creativity and appeared to be poorly motivated? Dunno. Perhaps it might come down to what Jack Nicholson said in A Few Good Men; "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth." Then again, this might be just another meaningless rant.

And the media see it as the erosion of one of their freedoms to report objectively and without fetters. We've had this argument before, and could continue to go around in circles. There are those who will say: "So what? We'll get our reports and information from the club website and other outlets." Fine, but the reports you will see on club websites are hardly likely to be objective. Why should they be? The club/league/football in general has a product to sell, and to do that they will always project it in as positive a light as possible, even if that positivity hides some damning truths. If you are an intelligent, thinking supporter who values a neutral, objective viewpoint, and prefers to read a match report which paints an accurate picture, instead of one who just wants his views reinforced and prefers to put his fingers in his ears and go "la la la" when confronted with something unpalatable, you will be concerned about this. I suppose football could (and no doubt will, when it suits its purpose) advance the argument that football is not news in the same way that riots are news, but is an activity, essentially carried out in private, among consenting clubs and fans who give theri consent by paying to come in, and that the media is only allowed to report on that activity with football's consent. Fact is, since the game first started to attract attention back in the 19th century, it has sought and needed the attention of the media to bring its activities to a wider audience. It has been a mutually beneficial arrangement because newspapers sold copies on the back of football coverage, something that has always gnawed away at the heart of football, which is a pretty small-minded business, really. The whole landscape and relationship has changed down the years, and some moght argue that football no longer needs newspapers. That argument probably applies to the top clubs in the Premiership, whose media operations are now geared almost exclusively towards TV with little or no regard to newspapers. Papers are given little or no access to interview players/managers which they need. Instead, the only access is at staged media conferences, where players/managers are stunted up on a stage to trot out the 30-second soundbites beloved of TV. The clubs and fans who will be most affected by this are those in the Championship and FL, who rely on their local papers for coverage. When the PL kicks off this Saturday the national papers' interest in anything below will be kicked towards touch. With the PL back in action national newspapers don't send staff reporters to FL games, but rely on agencies and freelances to provide reports. If Football Dataco are going to make it difficult for them to operate, national newspapers won't be bothered with FL reports. Deride the Echo all you like, but if you value unbiased, objective reporting over sanitised happy-clappy coverage that club websites are bound to provide, then be concerned about this.

Might that not have something to do with filling their quota of home-grown players for the CL?

"Since June 1, £130,000 has been spent on relaying pitches at the club’s Eastleigh training ground." More spin. Yes, £130,000 has been spent on relaying pitches. But not by p****y. I'm told it was spent by King Edward's school as part of their refurbishment plans for Wellington. P****y did not contribute a penny to the cost. As usual, they not only freeloaded, but claimed the credit for the outlay. Presumably, they'll offset the cost they didn't pay against the tax they won't pay.

I used to know Neville. Good bloke. He is a p****y fan who supports his club, but doesn't hate Saints. He is a sound journo and his view will be pretty objective and not written with too-thick blue tinted specks on. If he has concerns, you can bet they are real ones.

So why haven't they done "the American thing" (according to one poster's comments under the story on The News website) and sued the pants off everbody? Any American lawyer worth his salt could easily cook up a case for incompetence against the catering company whose truck collided with the plane, causing the cancellation of the flight, delay in returning, inability to fulfil the fuxture, loss of earnings, etc. Plus a bit of compo thrown in for trauma, mental scarring, etc. Unless there isn't a very strong case. Perhaps the delay in returning was not caused by a clumsy food wagon driver, but was more to do with poor planning and logistics of their trip. In other words, usual tactic. Cock things up themselves, and then blame somebody else. As others have said previously. If they are that desperate for £2,000 off H&W, it doesn't bode well for their financial situation. It would interesting to know how much they had to pay Real Betis for the friendly. Then add that to ticket refunds = ouch!

Don't walk out on Milly Olde.

If the weatehr is good it's likely to affect the gate adversely. On a hot day in August, guys will be under pressure from families to make one last trip to the beach for the summer. Pray for rain, and a dull day.

He might love animals, but how does he feel about Lions and Tigers and other carnivores? In the natural world, there are food chains and food webs. Within them, there are natural predators and prey. Predators are there to keep the prey species in check. It's a natural order of things. I'm no expert but you only have to think of examples where insecticides have killed predators and as a result prey species have run out of control. Ladybirds and Aphids, anyone? Some species are there purely as prey. What other useful purpose does plankton and krill serve, other than as a food source for fish, whales, etc? Is Morrissey happy with what Lions, Tigers and other predators do? Or would he like them exterminated? I know the argument with human vegetarians is that as conscious animals we are able to divine that we can survive without eating meat, and that we can make a decision not to do so. But we evolved as true omnivores, and it's only the fact that now as a higher species we are able to think about predation that gives Human vegetarians that get out. I was shocked to see a TV programme not too many years back that showed Chimpanzees are not only carnivorous, but will prey on other species of monkey or ape. It shocked me out of my perception that chimps were just jolly consumers of bananas and cups of tea. As for linking the consumption of meat with what happened in Norway, he's just an insensitive knob, who has probably got an upcoming album to get publicity for.

Why should we blame Americanisation for strangling English when we do a prefectly good job of it ourselves? Have you ever heard Geordies talk, and how they mangle the language? "He's went and tooken it," and the use of "us" for "ours" as in: "What's for us teas, lass?" make me cringe. But that's accepted as regional variation. I still get riled by the difference between US and UK rivers. Mississippi River, Colorada River v River Thames, River Itchen.

Toronto - a city once described by Peter Ustinov as "New York run by the Swiss." Bata shoe museum, and you don't need a foot fetish to enjoy it. You have to go to a baseball game at the Rogers Centre, previously known as the Skydome, and hope it rains so they put the roof over. One of the great stadium wonders of the world. You can also get over to the islands in the lake, which are nice for a slow, relaxing family day out. Canada's Wonderland, way out in the 'burbs is a good theme park with some excellent white-knuckle rides, if that's your bag. Eats-wise, the Old Spaghetti Factory is a great palce to take kids, and if anyone is interested in sport, Wayne Gretzky's restaurant. He was The Great One in ice hockey parlance.

The Dalai Lama goes into Pizza Hut. "I'd like a pizza please" he says. "Certainly," says the waiter, "What sort of pizza wouls you like?" The Dalai Lama says: "Make me one with everything."

Off the top of my head, Ian Turner and David Turner. Ian, Saints 1976 Cup Final keeper of course, and David, aka 'Noddy', who was part of Hampshire's 1973 Championship winning side. Let's hope that's an omen. Cork - Dominic Cork, captain of Hampshire's T20 winning team, Jack - part of - (insert your own punchline here). I'm sure there are more Saints/Hampshire players at the same time with the same surname.

But it carefully avoids saying the club have spent £130,000. Chances are, King Edward VI school has spent that money for its own purposes to improve their facilities. You can bet p****y haven't contributed a penny towards the improvements. Not for the first time, the pikeys have let other people spend money and then ponced off the proceeds. But in order to attract the likes of Heskey, they'll tell them they have spent money upgrading their (their?) training ground.

I particularly liked these two bits: "As you are aware the Joint Administrators’ CVA proposal detailed that, as a result of a projected £15,000,000 in player sales, a contribution of £3,000,000 would be received into the CVA." "Unfortunately, the player sales did not reach the projected value and therefore the £3,000,000 contribution was not received." It does make you wonder how hard they tried to raise the £15m required through the sale of players. So, having failed to raise money through player sales to enable the CVA to be serviced, their cure for this is to SPEND money on signing new players. Two fingers, anyone?

And the other question that goes with that is why are the Football League not preventing them from paying out transfer fees without servicing the CVA?

I'll ask the question I have asked before whenever a mention is made of p****y paying any sort of transer fee. How does their ability to spend money on a player equate with their apparent inability/refusal/procrastination to service the CVA. If I was a creditor, I would be pretty brassed off if I saw them spending money on a player which should have been directed towards paying off the pathetic percentage I am owed.

Malcolm Marshall was back home in Barbados once and stopped to watch a scratch cricket match. What caught his attention was this white guy smacking the local kids to all parts of the boundary. When he looked closer, it was Boycott. At the time, Macko was in his pomp, and he went to the boundary and shouted: "Boyks, hold on man, I'm coming out to play." At which point, Boycott tucked the bat under his arm, made some weak-kneed excuse, jumped into his rental car and sped off in a cloud of dust. He came perilously close to being killed off by the BBC. When he was going through treatment for cancer (which, of course, nobody wishes upon anybody) they got word he had died. Like most personalities his obituary is already written and it was within seconds of going out when somebody thought they would make one last check call to make sure, and discovered that he was still alive.

"Get this bus out, McLaren"

So you're making a request stop?