stevegrant

If you've got decent eyesight, the away end at St James' Park gives you a great view. If your eyesight is a bit ropey, it'll be the worst view in the league. It can be a bit "Sensible Soccer", I guess, but if you're interested in the tactical side of the game, it's perfect.

£37 is quite a jump from the price we paid last season!

Raheem Sterling is hilariously ****. There might be a half-decent player in there somewhere if he had half a brain cell.

Someone from Portsmouth FC saying "we owe you"? I'm flabbergasted...

Loads of options, basically find anywhere that's on the District line and you'll be in easy reach of the ground. Clapham's fine, but you'd need to get a train to West Brompton to change onto the tube, and those trains are absolutely rammed at weekends as they go to Westfield.

Not a proven victory, IIRC, the case was never heard. Considering the fact that Nadaj has ****ed off without paying his legal bill, why hasn't Hall reinstated his blog posts?

Why doesn't he just offer to pay 0.4p in the pound over the next 5 years?

He either wilfully lied to you, then, or was misled by someone else within the ticket office. I've just spoken to someone at the Chelsea ticket office, querying the article that was posted on their website last week about "extra Southampton tickets", he said that the tickets there were some internal returns, but confirmed that Saints had only requested an allocation of 1500 seats.

I still stand by my belief that it was a strange footballing decision to let him leave, considering he had fitted in perfectly well to the system last season, and it has still left us short of options should we either suffer injuries or a lack of ideas. In games like the Sunderland and Norwich ones earlier in the season where we didn't have both full-backs overlapping to create width (only one v Sunderland and neither at Norwich), he'd have been perfect to give us that wide option. You'd imagine we would have to be very lucky for neither Clyne or Shaw to miss any further games this season, and while Chambers and Fox can do a job to varying levels of success for us, neither of them play the same way as our first choice pair, so if they're unavailable for whatever reason, we need to be able to adapt accordingly. Puncheon almost certainly wouldn't be in our ideal first choice starting eleven, but he's better than most - if not all - of the backup players we currently have.

Szczesny, Gibbs, Wilshere, Walcott, Ramsey and Bendtner would all qualify, while Chamberlain and Ryo Myaichi will have been at Arsenal 3 years next summer. Jenkinson will also have been at Arsenal 3 years next summer, but he'll be 22 by then so wouldn't count.

Not "this weekend" (how do you have .2 of a player in one game?), it's an average per game over the whole season.

Doubt it, although I can't imagine the club makes much money from it anyway.

Not including corporate tickets, there are just over 6,000 available on a match-by-match basis this season.

The only thing I can suggest is that you get yourself registered on the online ticket system as soon as possible. While tickets generally only go on sale around 4 weeks in advance, no game has yet sold out (suspect Man City will be the first, considering more than 3,000 have been sold today already), so while clearly nobody can "guarantee" you a ticket, the balance of probability is certainly in your favour.

Based on past history. We didn't even sell out the smaller allocation there last season, it's £50 a ticket and it's on TV a week after a more popular London away game.

The reason the Costa situation is a bit more complex is that he hadn't represented either Brazil or Spain at an age-group level, but has been eligible to represent both for a few years. He has two caps for the full Brazil side, but they were both in friendlies. If Costa had played at U21 (or U23 for the Olympics) level for Brazil, he wouldn't have been eligible for Spain. The Boateng situation was a number of years ago when the rules were different.

No, the point being that an agreement exists between all of the home nations that none of them will seek to call up "naturalised" players who don't qualify by birth or parentage. Hence the situation with Almunia and Arteta a few years back and Januzaj more recently has been a weird excuse to waste column inches when it's a non-discussion.

Pretty sure it's not even possible anyway, as he's represented France at U21 level.

I have, yes. I've been trying to get to the bottom of the double-post thing and one of the workarounds people have come up with on the vBulletin support forum is to increase the minimum time allowed between posts. I'm hoping they're actually going to fix the bug at some point, though, rather than rely on inconvenient workarounds. The problem is that they've released version 5 which I suspect they'll be putting more resource into than version 4, which we're currently running. It's going to be a while before we move across to that version for various reasons.

Throwing this one out there, despite having had such a big impact on England qualifying for the World Cup, Andros Townsend won't go to Brazil.

Not with advance fares, usually. It's the trade-off with getting the cheapest deal and it being non-refundable if something like this happens, but with the TV games having been announced a month ago, and no other word that they wanted to reschedule it, it seemed safe to book tickets for the Saturday.

For no apparent reason. Excellent. ****ing glad I'd already decided not to bother with that trip, otherwise the train tickets I would have already booked would have been rather wasted.

Difficult to tell. They beat Moneyfields 12-0 in the first round, but you'd expect a professional academy side to give a local county/regional league side's first team a decent game. Barton Rovers v Stevenage is tonight, so they'll know who they've got to beat in the second round after that. There's no replays in the FA Youth Cup, so it has to be decided on the night.

You do realise that there are the same number of games in the Champions League group stage as in the Europa League group stage?

Surely the best thing about all of this is that they go into an FA Cup match against Stevenage - a non-league club 5 years ago - as massive underdogs