stevegrant

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!

Saints: Johns, Flannigan, McCarthy, Turnbull, Targett, Gape ©, Chambers, Ward-Prowse, Sinclair, Seager, Rowe. Subs: Britt (GK), Colmer, Reed, Higgins, Ariyibi.

Joint founder of SOS Pompey, don't you know? No wonder they're screwed with brainiacs like that...

Steady on, they've not finished this spell of administration yet

http://www.football-league.co.uk/footballleaguenews/20121210/league-board-considers-pst-proposal_2293334_3002405

Even at this stage I think a top half finish is way beyond us, much like earlier in the season we're highly likely to be playing catch-up on the teams currently around us, let alone anyone further up the table. Clearly anything's possible, you only have to look at what Norwich have done in the last 6-8 weeks or so, but there's already a group from Norwich upwards who have got a 7-point cushion over us just as we enter a two-month period of very difficult games.

Kelvin Davis is a first choice at the moment, but I'd be absolutely amazed if we offered him another playing contract once his current one expires.

Sounds like a load of made-up nonsense, tbh. Starbucks are operating within the scope of the law of this country. If they were doing something illegal then by all means create a witch-hunt, but until the law changes to prevent (or at least make it harder for) companies transferring their profits to their operations in other countries, they are perfectly entitled to do what they do. I'm going to take a wild guess here, but presumably the amount Starbucks contributes in terms of income tax, national insurance, business rates, VAT, etc dwarves the amount of corporation tax they would be subjected to if this profit-transferring was either limited or outlawed completely?

The shares were trading at 50p because idiots like Michael Wilde and Leon Crouch kept paying massively over the odds for them. Invesco must have thought Christmas had come early when Crouch offered them 65p a share A finders fee is, as far as I'm aware, fairly standard practice in this sort of situation. Clearly it creates a substantial conflict of interests, but it happens everywhere. I remember being shown the offer document and the total pot was £300k to be shared between the existing executive board members. Given the salaries they were all on at the time (IIRC Hone was on around £450k plus benefits), you could argue the fees they'd have got (with no guarantee of keeping their jobs) weren't actually that attractive. Comparing SISU's offer for a controlling stake of SLH PLC with what has since happened at Coventry is like comparing apples with oranges, anyway.