stevegrant

0.4%

Definitely, but it was a no-brainer of a deal for the club given the situation at the time.

To answer the original question, Mark Hughes. £850k transfer fee (quite a lot for us back then), £20k a week wages, two goals and about 500 needless yellow cards.

Wrong. We were desperate for cash, so we went begging to Spurs to settle the "conditional" parts of the Bale transfer (the original fee was £5m + add-ons up to another £5m). We settled for around £2.5m of that £5m and they threw Forecast into the mix as well for whatever reason. I suspect Forecast's agent was quite clever here, essentially blackmailing the club into giving him a 5-year deal (we never gave ANY player a 5-year deal, let alone one with no first-team experience) with the suggestion that if we didn't agree to it, the deal providing life-saving cash to the club would fall through. There never was a sell-on clause in the Bale or Walcott deals.

That really is Iraqi Minister for Information territory, isn't it

Neil Allen ‏@pn_neil_allen I know I'm grumpy but those praising Nabil Hassan's #Pompey 'scoop'. For 'scoop' read 'was quickest to react to press release.' @solentsport Adam Blackmore ‏@bigadamsport @pn_neil_allen @solentsport You are ungracious misguided and incorrect as well as grumpy - check your facts before you embarrass yourself :lol: :lol:

Hilarious. After Nabil Hassan of the BBC broke the story this afternoon, everyone's favourite local chief sports reporter Neil Allen has whinged at the unfairness of it all, claiming (wrongly) that Hassan didn't "break" the story, he was just the quickest to transfer a press release into an article. The ****ing desperation

Well another 3-4 months with Birch at the helm is up to £1.4m ****ed away into PKF's swelling coffers.

Now all they have to do is turn those £100 pledges into £1000 cash. Good luck with that...

As good a player as he is, signing him would rather go against our policy of signing players with years of playing ahead of them. And as mentioned, the wages would be astronomical and he'll have better offers from elsewhere.

Not much Burnley could do about it, really. Howe has cited personal and family reasons for wanting to go back to Bournemouth, apparently his wife has struggled to settle up north when all their family and friends are on the south coast, and Bournemouth have almost certainly paid a small fortune in compensation. The talk earlier in the week was a release fee of £1.4m but that takes into account Bournemouth writing off the remainder owed by Burnley for Danny Ings. Still, Howe won't get another "step up" job again after this, so he'd better make another decent fist of the Bournemouth job otherwise that'll be his career over.

Didn't Wiggins finish 4th in the TdF behind Armstrong and Contador a few years ago? I probably feel the most sorry for whoever was 3rd, having to share a podium with those two

I hope all his past sponsors will be issuing legal papers to reclaim the money they paid him in good faith all those years ago. While all this stuff has come out now, he's already made his living from the sport and can quite happily sit back and live the life of a multi-millionaire. Apparently crime does pay...

No, I think everyone's quite clear that it's a shambles, to be fair

There isn't anywhere on the ticket system which shows how many loyalty points you have, and the only way the ticket office staff can work it out is by going through your order history. They've not even quoted a number of points for any potentially popular away game yet, e.g. "you need 100 loyalty points to get priority for a West Ham away ticket", they just said "season ticket holders who have been to two or more away games". Well worth bringing in that system then, they're basically making it up as they go along...

GOAL #Pompey 1-3 Wycombe. Morgan extends the lead again scoring off the rebound of a missed penalty.

Might have to shelve those plans for a return to their "second home" for a while

GOAL #Pompey 0-2 Wycombe. Dean Morgan doubles the lead inside ten minutes. Oops

:lol:

Karma was well served, though, with all three major shareholders and Barclays ending up significantly out of pocket.

The bank's continued support at the start of that season was based upon the business plan of reducing the overdraft over the course of the season down to £4m from around £6.5m. I think it had been reduced to around £4.1m at the end of March when the accounts had to be signed off, but Barclays refused to give the required assurances.

And the mysterious migration of that Barclays account manager onto the Saints account during a certain ex-chairman and significant shareholder's tenure before that, with a shared dislike of another ex-chairman and significant shareholder...

Eddie Davies has no intention of calling in the loans for two reasons: The first is that he's a massive Bolton fan, so wouldn't want to put the very existence of the club in jeopardy by calling in those loans at this stage. Naturally circumstances may change in the years to come, but I would say they're probably just about safe for now. The second is that he's still earning a pretty penny from those loans because they're being financed at a pretty significant rate of interest.

Their biggest game of the season so far, IMO - against Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League - saw anywhere between 3,000 and 5,000 empty seats (depending on how much segregation they had and that the front couple of rows don't get sold because the advertising hoardings are taller than the PL ones).

Man City are a bad example to use as a club who sell out all the time, they've only had a sell-out against Arsenal so far this season, and couldn't even fill the ground against Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League last week. Our strategy of only putting tickets on sale for home games 2-3 weeks in advance may be a contributory factor. If, a month in advance, a family have the option of going to the football or going for something else (theme park, visiting family, weekend break, etc), and they then discover they can't actually buy tickets for the football, they'll take the other option. There shouldn't really be a reason why home games can't be put on sale two or three months in advance.