stevegrant

Tough choice for Tevez... AC Milan, Internazionale or QPR

Same as airlines, they take advantage of peoples' need to travel and willingness to pay through the nose for the privilege.

What could possibly go wrong, the nation foots the bill for building it and Network Rail maintains it, while a private company comes in and benefits from the profits, just like the rest of the rail network. Fantastic. I'm all for getting from A to B in less time, but those claiming it'll alleviate the crush on commuter services into London from Birmingham so the proles can have a seat on Virgin and London Midland services are missing the point. The way the prices continue to rise without any tangible improvement in the service provided by the franchises (my train into Clapham Junction has been late on at least 5 occasions since the new year already!), they'll have enough seats to accommodate everyone anyway, and with the downturn in passenger numbers on the "normal speed" lines, the franchises will be forced to whack their prices up again.

No, afraid not, it's server operating system upgrades.

Morning all, Just an early warning that we're expecting some downtime tomorrow (Tuesday), most likely at some point between 10 and 11am UK time, while we install some important upgrades on the server. Best-case scenario is that the site will be down for about 5-10 minutes, but this could stretch to an hour or so if there are any problems.

Having gone on strike to get a move away from here, he can **** right off.

Some actual figures, rather than made-up ones: 3005 users on here are deemed as "active", i.e. have logged in within the last month. Of that 3005, 1276 have actually posted.

As someone who went to that game, take it from me, ignore the scoreline from the Amex completely, it does the game no justice whatsoever. The performance before Lambert got sent off was as good as we've played away from home all season, and after that decision merely showed a bit of fatigue and lack of depth, which we knew would happen at some point anyway. Of infinite more concern to me was how a team as **** as Bristol City have managed to outplay us twice in a month when they've failed to even come close to beating anybody else. There's also a fundamental difference between our situation now and the situation we faced in 2007 - we don't have a £7m parachute payment that's going to cease to exist come the end of this season. Financially, we appear to be on solid ground, with no need to shed any of our better players in order to balance the books. In my opinion, we're also in the interesting position of having a strong side but at the same time not having players who would automatically be the sort of player to attract attention from the Premier League. Sure, the likes of Lambert have been linked, but he turns 30 next month and it would take a ridiculous offer for us to let him go, so that pretty much rules out any of the sides likely to be monitoring his progress. On the flipside, I also wouldn't necessarily read too much into a decent second half against a woeful Coventry side, as good as it is to see the likes of Ward-Prowse getting a game and playing well.

Wrexham away

Sorry, my bad... fixed now

No idea whether this guy is a direct replacement or a domestic equivalent... http://www.mkdons.com/page/NewsDetail/0,,10420~2567349,00.html

For the first two years, we were fairly heavily reliant upon the cash injected by Markus Liebherr (and latterly his estate), but we've since sold Alex Chamberlain for an initial £12m - first year losses were just under £8m, second year losses likely to be less (but won't be confirmed until 31st March), with a smaller squad and bigger attendances - and are now in the Championship with much higher revenues. We now get around £5m in broadcasting revenue, compared to about £500k in League One, and our attendances are averaging more than 26,000. Depending on transfer spending this month, I'd be very surprised if we don't at least break even this season.

1967, I believe.

Whether it was posted or not, it doesn't mean it's true.

An odd sense of deja vu reading that forum... a team in the Championship relegation zone with fans discussing boycotting the club in order to force out unpopular owners/board members and a sticky thread talking about a new server

The Conference are much stricter when it comes to clubs going into (and particularly coming out of) administration. There is a standard 10-point deduction applied when the club goes into administration, but clubs exiting administration must repay football creditors in full at the time of doing so, and either repay non-football creditors in full at the time or have an agreed CVA, the length of which is restricted to a maximum of 3 years.

As has been mentioned, it's unlikely that Puncheon is a long-term option for whatever reason, but given the injury and suspension situation we now find ourselves in, we'd be cutting our nose off to spite our face to not use him in the next couple of weeks, even if it's just from the bench. He can put himself in the shop window with some good performances, and perhaps those good performances might lead him to actually stay here after all... either way, I don't see what we've got to lose, really.

I wouldn't necessarily say so. I for one won't be particularly bothered about getting a ticket at Stamford Bridge and paying £45 for the dubious privilege. Certainly, when we were last in the top flight, we very rarely sold out away games as most of the away following had been to all the main grounds countless times before. I'd expect that to change for the first season if we go up, although there might still be some games where we struggle to sell very many. Places like Fulham and Chelsea are obviously easy to get to, but they'll probably charge a fortune. Fulham's away ticket prices vary quite a lot, for games against the likes of Blackburn and Bolton it'll be £20, but they charged both Man United and Man City fans £55 this season because they knew they'd sell the tickets.

What are the viewing figures like for it, by the way? Especially interesting to see the ratio of live/iPlayer viewers and the comparison with MOTD.

I remember Lowe's (perfectly reasonable but not especially diplomatic) comments after it fell through when Bierhoff wanted £35k a week: "Oliver has to realise we are not Manchester United and he is not 27 anymore"

As mentioned above, whatever happens with the highlights, as long as they don't end up on ITV I don't think there will be too many problems. While having coverage on the BBC has been good simply for the access it provides, I don't think they've really made the most of the platform they've paid for. They tried too hard to go for the "Television 2.0" model initially by allowing fans to email and text in, providing in effect a TV blog. Fortunately they realised it was a waste of time, but instead of increasing the amount of time each game got, they simply shortened the broadcast :Picard: Whatever your views on Sky's pay-TV model, you can't deny that their coverage is excellent. As a result, I'll have no complaints if they get the full rights from next season, as long as they do offer something for the majority of the nation who don't subscribe to Sky Sports, even if that's just an online offering. I'd imagine a sizeable percentage of the Football League Show's current viewers watch via iPlayer anyway because of the time it's aired.

The rule in league games is the lower amount of 3,000 or 10% of capacity, with various caveats depending on how easy it is to segregate sections of the ground, etc. For cup games, it's 15%, although there's been some sort of row between Man City and Man United about United's allocation for their forthcoming FA Cup game at Old Trafford. In theory, they should be entitled to around 7100 tickets, but City have restricted their allocation to 5500 on the grounds of "safety".