stevegrant

I got one with a 1-2 week expected delivery

Only if you use London Midland, which is a stopping service and takes forever. Group Save tickets aren't valid on Virgin trains.

Why? If you can't score a penalty into a 17.86m2 space that's nobody's fault apart from your own.

Saints team: Cropper, Young, Stephens, Turnbull, Targett, Ward-Prowse, Chambers, Reeves ©, Mayuka, Hoskins, Lee. Subs: Johns (GK), Curtis, Sinclair, Forte, Moore

The most frustrating thing about the whole situation is that we still end up selling the tickets. It's only Man City that hasn't come close to selling out so far this season and there were all sorts of mitigating circumstances there. This is why fans in this country will continue to have the **** taken out of them by clubs nationwide, even when they're being forced to jump through all sorts of hoops just to buy a ****ing match ticket, they'll still happily do so rather than actually stand up for themselves.

The total foul count was 12-7 against us, so that's clearly nonsense, but managers do tend to have a habit of spouting absolute nonsense when they have a microphone thrust in front of their face 15 minutes after the game's finished, so I can't say I'm surprised.

I hope you thanked him for the fine work he has done and continues to do

Michel Platini is dangerous as far as the future of football in Europe is concerned. It'll get even worse when he inevitably succeeds Blatter at FIFA. This is a man who voted for Qatar in 2022 and proposed a winter World Cup.

I've got that day off, so hangover depending, I might pop along to see what all the fuss is about

It didn't really make any difference who he brought on in the 2nd minute of 4 minutes added on with the score at 2-0 and their confidence shot to pieces, to be honest. Pardew had said when Nile Ranger had his most recent brush with the law that he wouldn't play for the club again but he was forced to stick him on the bench to make up the numbers, he was never likely to actually stick him on the pitch. Taylor got injured so he had to put *someone* on.

Disagree. QPR have got a very kind run of fixtures starting tonight (wonder why 'Arry chose now to start ), where they play Sunderland, Villa, Wigan, Fulham and Newcastle before Christmas, where they should pick up some points (especially in the home games against Villa and Fulham). Sunderland, on the other hand, play QPR, Norwich, Chelsea, Reading, Man United and us in the same period. Unlikely to get too many points there - possibly tonight and Reading at home and that's about it for "likely" wins.

Hartlepool did the smurf thing infinitely better than that, and in bigger numbers.

Get a better phone tbf

You could have just linked to here, tbf

Draws would be preferable, simply because that means all 4 teams drop points. It's still early days yet, really, but I guess everyone's view will depend on whether they think it's better (at this stage) to have two teams cut adrift completely - in which case two home wins wouldn't be disastrous for us - or for everyone to be quite close together but for us to be a couple of points above the dotted line. Obviously come the end of the season, we'd take the latter, but if teams like Reading and QPR can be completely demoralised by Christmas it means there's then only one relegation place to play for.

I think there are some pillars towards the back of the stand.

I would expect any player who didn't have a promotion pay rise written into their contract would have sacked their agent pretty swiftly. That sort of thing must be pretty standard, it's a fairly easy incentive to offer a player - earn the club success on the pitch and be rewarded on your payslip.

Do left backs and centre backs not count as defenders these days?

Thing is, there's no real context given to those statistics. You would expect that on the occasions when, say, Man United are losing going into added time, their opponents are making substitutions and doing anything else they can get away with to waste time. In those situations, naturally there's going to be more time added on. Also, the number of times when they're losing in the last minute will be far fewer than the number of times they're not losing at that point, so it's a much smaller sample size.

They have to provide a service, certainly, but I wouldn't expect them to go out of their way to rearrange work that would have been scheduled months ago (the game was only officially moved to the Sunday about 6-8 weeks ago) for the sake of what probably wasn't any more than a few hundred people who would travel from your part of the world. Also, if you think your weekend fare isn't "reduced", try travelling the same journey at 7am during the week

I can't see many (if any) being sold in January, simply because the wages any likely departing players are earning are probably much higher than their quality deserves. That's not their fault, and to an extent it's not the club's fault either as many of them are as a result of automatic increases written into their contracts as a result of the two successive promotions. Ryan Dickson's the perfect example. He was good for us in League One but didn't get a look-in last season, so would have been an obvious candidate to move on, and he'd apparently agreed to sign for Yeovil if the deal was sorted, but because his wages had increased so much as a result of the promotions, Yeovil then couldn't afford him at his current salary (and Saints wouldn't pay up part of his contract to get him out, apparently). I know footballers get accused of only thinking of their wallets, but if you or I were in a position to earn far more than our "market rate" for a year or two and not have to work too hard to do so, I'm sure the vast majority of us would take that option.

As far as Network Rail are concerned, it is infinitely preferable to carry out engineering works on a Sunday when relatively few people travel than during the week when there are thousands of commuters (who pay the majority of the fares) standing in the aisles waiting to get to work.

Morning all, The site will be unavailable for a short period at lunchtime today while I install a software upgrade. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Probably IP-blocked.