SaintBobby

That's my shout...

Still not wholly convinced by J-Rod. Seems to have potential - but I've been a tad underwhelmed so far. (Btw, just mentioned on Radio 5 that Norwich tried to buy him in the Jan transfer window apparently...must have missed that rumour)

Am I right that he gets suspended if/when he chalks up 10 yellows? Or is there an amnesty/reboot at some point in the season?

That seems to be the conventional wisdom - does anyone know if it's actually borne out by the stats? (i.e. is it generally the case that the weaker teams perform better in the last 1/3 of the season?)

Just had a glance at the table. Wigan's home form is pretty abysmal - W 2 D 3 L 7 (-10 GD) Worse than their away form of W 3 D 2 L 7 (-. In fact, their away form is better by exactly the 2-0 winning margin they had at St Mary's....

Norwich win please. I want QPR dead and buried.

Worse than that, I'd thought. I agree relegation is now a nailed on certainty, that's why I have put £10,000 on it at 13/8 with the bookies...which is basically £16,250 of free money come May. I think you're insanely optimistic to believe we can replicate Watford though. They are resurgent. The most likely outcome is that we will hover around lower reaches of the Championship, before dropping back into League One after a season or two. (Probably with a ten point penalty by then, as well)

I'd take a point. (almost always would for an away game in this division) Wigan are the bookies favourities, btw at 11/8. We're 5/2 and the draw is 5/2 too. I don't know why people think it will require 40 points to stay up. Yeah, it may do if the struggling teams perform much better in the remaining 14 games than in the first 24. But at the moment the bottom four are only averaging 0.83 points a game. If that continues, then 32 points would be enough to stay up.

The spat with the Sun got so embarrassing and OTT that I'm unsurprised Cortese intervened and met with them. I stand by my view that he doesn't really care, though. This doesn't mean he will do absolutely nothing if the country's most popular paper starts completely ridiculing him and the club. That's just about worth a few hours of his time to resolve. But that hardly means he has a remotely serious media engagement strategy. Far from it.

I'd actually prefer 2 draws rather than 3 points from losing to Wigan and beating Man City.

Cortese doesn't really care about the press. I think this is unwise, all in all, but that seems to be the position.

There is no prospect of PKF waiving their fee and leaving, say, £2m lying around for the Trust to rebuild the club. They may not claim their full fee - but only if there is no cash to meet their full fee. They aren't going to leave money around to sign up a tasty midfielder. Furthermore, if Chanrai loses on Feb 14th (or at the court date set on Feb 14th), he is almost certainly going to appeal and/or litigate against PKF etc. So, even if the verdict of the court is "yes, you can have Chanrai's charge for £2.7m", that is very unlikely to be the end of the matter in court. Finally, the amount in the Trust's bank account is only around £1m. A fair proportion of this (£150K?) will be "unrealised" pledges (the £100 was put down, but the £900 never materialised). The Trust's ability to use this money is deeply questionable. It's not just c. £1m for Farmery to shove on the table. The hoops they will have to go through to use that cash for any purpose other than that it was specifically pledged for are huge and horrendous. The £100 unconverted pledges are almost certainly not usable - even though they will be included in the Trust's c. £1m total. This is such a trivial, tied-up amount of money overall that the Trust are - at best - a bit player in any possible takeover.

I'd take a point. This is emphatically NOT a must win game. IMHO, even if we lose 4-0, we'll probably stay up.

Such "optimism" has a lot of realism. The % likelihood is that we will not pick up an enormous string of bad injuries between now and the end of the season. It's only a %, of course, it's like buying (or not buying) insurance. Additionally, compared with the start of the season, we have a far better idea of the players who can cope with Premiership football. (e.g. back in August, I don't think it was obvious to many that Fox would be so weak at this level and that Shaw would be so strong....Cork and Morgan have both shown themselves to be able to cut the mustard and don't need replacing etc). Obviously, were we to suffer terrible injuries to Lambert, Lallana (again), Ramirez, Clyne, Shaw, Schneiderlin, Puncheon and Cork, well then the starting XI looks very threadbare. But it's not obvious that we should (or could) spend, say, £20m seeking to completely mitigate this risk. With the possible exception of Lambert, we have good cover in virtually every position. So, any likely spread of injuries (say, losing 2 or 3 players for a total of 10-12 matches between them) can be pretty satisfactorily covered. Yep, the team might only be 90% as good as it otherwise would be, but that's livable with.

Not too surprised really. Glad we've got Forren in - that was always the key slot to add to. Slightly odd putting de Ridder out on loan with no replacement. Reeves to Southend makes some sense as he is unlikely to get any serious playing time here. Barnard and Forte are just shuffling players who won't play here again. All in all, quite pleased with the quality and even the depth of the squad. Of course, with a string of injuries we look weaker, but there are only 14 games left and we're not far from a fully fit squad. We have very acceptable cover for virtually every position, with the possible exception of left back. (but even there, we will probably play Shaw for all but c. 180 mins of the remainder of the season)

If we end up finishing behind QPR, we probably deserve to go down. Although their form has improved, they really shouldn't catch us. I am now starting to believe that at least 3 teams will finish behind us....

Not much movement for us...maybe one or two fringe players out and one or two "squad depth" players in. At most. That's my guess.

I agree that L1 wld have more integrity if the skates were just removed and all matches declared null and void. Their absurd overspend in the early matches has compromised the table.

It wasn't for nothing. It was on file already. It's part of the overall design work for the cathedral (which will be next to the corporate lounge in our new 80,000 seater stadium)

http://www.portsmouth.co.uk/sport/pompey/pompey-1-hartlepool-3-1-4726994 I think the reason Neil Allen is such a tragically bad journalist, stuck on a dying local rag, is clear from the end of the second paragraph/sentence. "...11 years ago to the very month...." How many readers are gasping at that brilliant revelation? Was it 11 years and 6 weeks, Neil? Or maybe 11 years and 9 days? No, dear reader, it was 11 years to the very month. The very month, Neil? Really? Truly? The very same month? That being the month of January? Wow. Amazing. That's a staggeringly interesting piece of trivia which I'm sure will be a staple of pub quizzes for many years to come. "In which calendar month, eleven years apart, did Portsmouth lose at home to both Leyton Orient and Hartlepool?" the quiz masters will ask. The knowing smiles and frustrated "I should have known that" sighs will echo around Britain when the answer is given as "January". Thanks for being so interesting, Neil, I don't know what we'd do without you. 11 years to the very month. Who'd have thunk it? For those with any interest in the facts, the skates lost to 4-1 Leyton Orient on Jan 5th 2002. On Jan 26th 2013, they lost to 3-1 to Hartlepool. The idea that these two cluster f*ck results happened in the "very same month" is hardly spooky. Lots of things happen 11 years and 21 days apart. I was, I confess, very hopeful about Neil's opening sentence.... "Perhaps it was fitting for Graham Rix to be there." That was an extremely promising start. If the second sentence had read "Because we then got repeatedly and mercilessly f**ked up the arse in the way only a convicted nonce would be familiar with"... ...well, then, I would have said Neil Allen would have truly deserved an award for great journalism.

I've lost track now - does anything serious happen on 31st or is it yet another procedural hearing to fix a date for some time in the future?

What a strange stance. Of the seven points list, item 1 (messy food) was directly reported to me by a staff member as was item 4 (staff departures). I received the email (or was it a letter? or both? can't remember) on dress code and was told directly this was at Cortese's insistence (item 5). Was told by a staff member about the volume being off on SSN - item 6 - (and can confirm directly the volume was indeed off). I asked specifically about the boxing (item 7) and was told the reason the next week by a staff member - at the time I was told "It wasn't possible at this stage" to switch channels. Items 2,3 and 4 have all been relayed to me secondhand by a trusted friend (who claims senior staff as his direct source). I'm really not sure how much more "direct" my evidence could possibly be! As I said, it's not any particular single issue that troubles me - it's the plethora of them, the real deluge of a whole continuing string of these sorts of things. It's systemic.

I don't think he's an idiot. He's clearly an incredibly intelligent man. But it does almost seem like some sort of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder - or at least a total addiction to micro-management.

Here's what I've heard from the man on the street/employees. Quite a few of the staff in the club lounge have passed less than flattering comments about the chairman. I must admit I don't write them all down and I tend to recognise the staff by face, not name. But a typical conversation this season: Me: "X or Y or Z seems pretty daft"; Them: "Yeah, well, we all know why that is and who insisted on it"; Me:"Nicola Cortese?"; Them: "Yep" (whispered, combined with a sigh, a shrug and a rolling of the eyes). Specifically,I've been told either directly or second hand (another club lounge member relaying a conversation to me) that: The absence of proper cooked food for sale in the club lounge is because Cortese banned it because it was "too messy" (even though I've never seem him set foot in the lounge) The absence of sufficient seating in the club lounge is because any tiny change to the original design and layout has to be personally approved by the Cortese The creation of a bizarre, tiny, almost laughable, ring-fenced area in the club lounge (essentially one table ostentatiously roped off) was because Cortese demanded a separate distinct area and an accompanying, ludicrous email to be sent to all club lounge members saying they needed to pay more if they wanted a guaranteed seat and table service (the email was impenetrable and deeply confusing and the take-up of the ring-fenced area has been nearly zero) A substantial number of staff have left or are looking to leave - because it's a nearly impossible place to work, with virtually zero professional discretion for staff and a requirement to comply with sudden, contradictory bizarre orders or "ideas" (in stark comparison to some other Premier League clubs, where some staff have now secured alternative employment and others are actively looking to follow them) The rather odd (and even slightly offensive) email sent to all club lounge members essentially telling us we should "dress more smartly in order not to embarrass ourselves" was sent out on the direct instructions of Cortese to the considerable embarrassment of many of the hospitality staff (who had previously been instructed to explain the rather ramshackle state of the affairs in the lounge was an attempt to create a "pub atmosphere" and were now having to write to us saying this wasn't the intended atmosphere at all, but was instead an upmarket, corporate facility). The reason that the volume had been turned off on the TV screens showing Sky Sports News in the lounge was because Cortese specifically insisted that no words from MLT should be audible. This actually represented a softening of his original stance which was that no pictures of MLT should be visible in the lounge - which led to the extraordinary situation in an earlier game this season, upon returning to the lounge at half-time, the TV screens were all on Sky Sports 3, showing some preview of an upcoming boxing match. When asked to switch the channels, staff were instructed to say "That is not possible at this stage" but were specifically prohibited from giving the reason. Now, I'm happy to accept that some of these things may have grown in the telling a little. Some may even be wholly untrue. But there is such a continual pattern of such issues being raised, and so many different staff raising such issues (with me or other club lounge members) that it's just impossible to believe that everything is going smoothly!

I think this sort of stuff is customer service and the club does it very badly. The mishandling of relations with ex-pros sits hand-in-hand with a slapdash approach to public/customer relations. I remember one thing which truly irked me was when they did away with the senior citizens discount in the Kingsland stand. My mum is a STH and in her early 60s. She can easily afford the standard adult price. But the fact that her season ticket was going up by some huge % was simply tucked away in some mall print in some tiny little sub-clause, not set out and explained in a sensible, sensitive fashion. Sure, people can respond "Tough"...."If you don't like the price, don't renew your season ticket"..."Why's your mum so damned special, I'm in my 30s and struggling financially, but I pay the full adult price"..."So what, the football has improved by much more than 50%, she should count herself lucky her ticket isn't even pricier" etc etc etc. But - for the sake of a simple, straightforwardly honest and transparent piece of communication, people in my mother's situation would have simply felt a lot better about being a Saints STH. These sort of things should matter to a club/company. It seems they don't.