stevegrant

I go out for a few hours and all hell breaks loose, what the **** is going on?!

The problem there is which side does he take, considering Portpin did the biggest diddling...

My heart bleeds

10.30am on Thursday in Court 17, Mr Justice Sales is sitting.

Didn't Swansea do it in the 80s? Luton had three relegations in three years as well, from the Championship to the Conference.

A very strange link. A Barnsley-supporting friend of mine reckons he's rubbish

So they'll happily publicise the "rejection" rate but not the "success" rate... I wonder why

They're dreadful. My only real criticism of our performances in recent weeks is the inability to put teams to the sword when we've been so far on top. Newcastle and Reading should have been done for 4 or 5 goals apiece, and think what our goal difference would look like if that had happened. Sunderland have struggled to score goals all season and yet they look like they could get double figures tonight.

Guthrie's appeared to have problems there ever since he arrived. Very odd. Apparently there's some sort of issue with Alex Pearce as well (saw loads of references to it on that Reading forum that was linked earlier in the week), although no idea what that entails.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate where some are coming from in wanting Sunderland to win so Reading and QPR are cut adrift completely, and there's some merit in a situation where we know we're fighting to avoid being the one worst team out of the rest, but with the fixture list sending Sunderland our way next week, we could do without them having any confidence. They go to Old Trafford on Saturday as well...

Controversial: Reading win for me, they're clearly nowhere near good enough to stay up so I really don't think we have to worry about them over the course of the season. Sunderland should be doing much better than they are, so the fewer points they pick up when they should, the better, IMO.

4261 seats at the moment, but the logistics of converting the Chapel end could be a bit of a problem because of the location of the raised disabled sections.

I'm all in favour of any system that allows fans the choice of whether they sit or stand to watch the game. The notion that terracing is unsafe is nonsense, after all if it was unsafe, it would be rather negligent on the part of the government and football authorities to allow terracing in Leagues One and Two where you do still get reasonably big crowds. Who is to say that the life of a Liverpool fan is more important than the life of a Burton Albion fan? That's effectively what the current law states. Crowd management techniques have improved immeasurably since Hillsborough happened, and as has already been said, it wasn't the terracing itself that was the cause of the disaster, which so many people still seem unable to get their head around. That new panel show on Sky, the Footballers Football Show, discussed the issue a couple of weeks ago and all it did was demonstrate how ill-informed everyone within the game is. Both Ray Wilkins and Paul Elliott dismissed the idea out of hand, using Hillsborough as a prime example, the fact that the Premier League is watched by millions around the world as a result of the safe and family atmospheres around the grounds these days David Jones, the presenter, looked like he was banging his head against a brick wall whenever he tried to introduce any reason into the discussion.

Has someone hacked his account?

Nonsense. The deal that was put forward last week allowed CCFC to pay off the £1.2m owed over 10 years, dropped the current and future rent figure to a much more realistic £400k a year and enabled the club to make some money from the catering, which isn't the case at the moment.

I plead fair comment, M'lord

I think the Europa League semi-finals are played on a different week to the Champions League ones, so they get shifted to the Wednesday, which subsequently means any following league game wouldn't need to be moved.

Won't happen. They probably have more season ticket holders than that ground can hold, for a start. They'll also come to an agreement with ACL over the Ricoh rent. The stuff in the last few days is both sides jostling for position to get themselves the best possible deal. I'd expect SISU to accept the deal offered last week.

Potential opponents for Newcastle: Viktoria Plzen (CZE), Fenerbahce (TUR), Steaua Bucharest (ROM), Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk (UKR), Genk (BEL), Rubin Kazan (RUS), Lyon (FRA), Lazio (ITA), Metalist Kharkiv (UKR), Hannover (GER), CFR Cluj (ROM), Olympiakos (GRE), Benfica (POR). In terms of a difficult journey, the worst draws would be Dnipro, Rubin Kazan and Metalist Kharkiv. The others are all fairly straightforward.

Walker Morris are a bunch of useless ****s. When I bought my first flat back in 2006, I was rather naive and went with the estate agent's suggestion of using them as my solicitor. Big mistake. The flat was a vacant possession and I had no onward chain, and yet it took them SIX ****ING MONTHS to put all the paperwork together

Worth bearing in mind Bristol Airport is miles outside Bristol city centre and there's no mainline train station anywhere near it.

Arsenal v Spurs was televised, so probably a 1pm kick-off. The other two weren't on TV, Man United and Stoke were in the Europa League on the Thursday, so they'd have been standard 3pm kickoffs.

a) They claim around 2000, which probably means about 1800 b) They can have as many pledges (£100) as they like, but they need them converted to a full "share" (a £1000 donation to you and I, albeit with additional trust/club membership benefits) for it to make any discernible difference. The target figure is around £1.8m, so that's near enough a 100% conversion rate. Good luck to them... I'm sure they'll argue that they don't *need* that much money, but if they want to retain a majority stake in the football club, that's what they need. The cash itself will largely be used for working capital so they could take a minority stake and have less money to work with until the end of the season.

0-1, Waring (11') Dodd out!