stevegrant

I think he once held the record for the number of England U21 caps, I assume James "permanently a young prospect" Milner has that record now. That 10-game ban killed his career, really - he was one of the (very) few players Redknapp managed to get the best out of, he was in the form of his life when the red mist descended. Who knows, we might even have stayed up that year if he'd been available for selection.

I'm in a similar boat (albeit without a child to pay for as well!), only did City because it guaranteed me an Arsenal ticket, and the cheap ticket at the latter cancelled out the rip-off at the former. Didn't do Everton or Liverpool, won't be doing Man United, only going on Wednesday as an "enabler" for a mate with terrible eyesight so my ticket's free Absolutely. Unfortunately, very few seem to be prepared to do so. Yeah, imagine if we were Category A everywhere we went

I only need a single from Manchester to Wigan, managed to get a decent price on the direct train back from Wigan to Euston.

This. I constantly see references to "against modern football" on Facebook, Twitter, etc, and yet I know that every single one of those people still parts with their cash every week. The only way prices will come down is if everyone decides enough is enough and withholds their cash.

This.

There or thereabouts, I'd have thought. Avensis/Princess are doing Villa for £20, so £25-30 would be about right.

Yeah, quite surprising, that, although I guess most Saints-related tweets are posted at or in the vicinity of SMS, rather than where fans live/work.

Unlikely, he's been out injured for 3 months, still not fit yet.

Blackburn really are doing their best to provide even more slapstick comedy than Pompey. In true Blackburn/Venky's style, they're still going to gloriously fail even to manage that.

It can work out cheaper to book a train to Manchester Piccadilly and then pay on the day to go from there to Wigan (£3.70 or thereabouts, I think).

They'll (in theory, at least - the system often has glitches that lets you get tickets even when not eligible) go on sale in the following order: 16th Jan - Season ticket holders who have been to at least one away game this season 18th Jan - All season ticket holders 21st Jan - Anyone (season ticket holder or not) who has been to at least one away game this season 23rd Jan - General sale If you've only just signed up for a customer account online, I assume you'll fall into the last category. We'll have around 5,000 tickets so you shouldn't have a problem getting a ticket, but obviously you're at the back of the queue in terms of priority.

As this scenario hasn't arisen before, prepare for the Football League to basically make it up as they go along. I suspect they'll end up waiting to see where they finish regardless of when (if) any takeover does take place. Let's face it, any deal is unlikely to be completed by March. They probably won't even get to hold the valuation hearing until the middle of February, and I can't imagine they'd be able to complete any time soon after that. They simply don't have the funds to do so yet.

What the **** are Blackburn doing?

Tbf, he's right about the bit I've highlighted, but they had an opportunity in the summer to make realistic signings who would last for an entire season, which would give them an opportunity to blood those youngsters every now and then. They chose not to, they made their bed, time to lie in it.

IIRC, they only received around £3m of the £4m that was due in August. I assume there is some sort of pre-standing agreement that part of the money is used by the PL to pay off some of the football creditors.

MLG must have a list of contract expiry dates somewhere. Pretty sure Seaborne, Forte and Dickson are also out of contract this summer.

Yep. For someone like Ryan Dickson, a year out of the game raking in £10k a week isn't going to dent his career too much, I wouldn't have thought. He'll still have plenty of suitors at League One level, IMO. The club's stance on this, while it's obviously good that they want to control costs as much as possible, does appear to be rather counter-productive. Let him go to Yeovil who are going to pay him, say, £3k a week, while we pay £5k, so he still has to take a pay cut if he wants to move (which it appears he did/does), that saves us £250k a year. Seems a no-brainer to me. I'm intrigued that someone has gone to the trouble of photoshopping a Swiss shirt onto that kid, the original of that photo's done the rounds for years, and it's always been a Feyenoord one

Correct.

That scenario would require a change of attitude/ethos to what's been demonstrated in the past year or so by the club, though. Ryan Dickson is the obvious example, he'd agreed terms with Yeovil to sign for them in the summer under the belief that some of the pay cut he would have to take would be subsidised by SFC (as seems to be fairly common within the game when a club wants to get rid of a player), but we pulled out of the deal, presumably once we'd sealed promotion and he'd received an automatic pay rise. As a result, we've now got a player who's of no use to us sat around doing nothing for a year while costing us somewhere in the region of half a million quid. If we want to get rid of some of the "fluff", the bean-counters are going to have to put their hand in their pockets to do so.

The problem with all of them is that their wages are massive compared to the standard of football they're probably best suited to. All of those in your "certainties" list were with us in League One, so they'll have had bonuses and automatic salary increases for both promotions. Lee Barnard, for example, is on £13k a week. No side with any sense (I don't count Bournemouth in that, they actually agreed to cover 100% of his wages during his loan spell there) at his sort of level is going to pay him that. I suspect Danny Butterfield is being lined up for a coaching role, by all accounts he's a good influence around the training ground. Those who are out of contract might as well wait until the summer and collect the last few months of bumper pay packets, really.

Game confirmed as Sunday at 1.30pm

Start again from the beginning of the thread

This is why it's absolute nonsense that the transfer window closes three weeks into the season. IMO, the window should close at the end of July rather than August, which would then mean that teams need to actually plan properly. In that scenario, there's no way we'd have been so tardy in getting defensive reinforcements in, and we might have been a bit tighter at the back right from the start. As I said above, we wouldn't necessarily have collected any more points in those opening games (we caught Wigan at the wrong time, I reckon we'd beat them at home now), but there wouldn't have been such a confidence crisis.

There has been a clear improvement - let's face it, defensively we couldn't get any worse - but it also needs to be put in context as that dismal early part of the season coincided with playing three of last season's top 4 in the first month. That said, strangely, I reckon if we played Man City (A), Man United (H) and Arsenal (A) again, we'd get beaten more comfortably at City, perhaps likewise by United, but the margin at Arsenal would be smaller, so I don't think overall we'd necessarily be any better off.

Oh, and my ticket arrived yesterday. 11 days after purchase. Shambles