stevegrant

His scoring record's good, but has to be put into context. It's in the SPL. Many players have scored plenty of goals up there and then failed to do anything of any note when they've moved south of the border. Take the likes of Scott McDonald and Kris Boyd as prime examples, both scored goals for fun for Celtic and Rangers respectively, but couldn't buy a goal last season for Middlesbrough (or Forest, while on loan, in Boyd's case).

The two previous away games down there didn't...

The "cloud" concept looks and sounds nice but I'm yet to find a solution that is both cost-effective and doesn't involve downtime when you need to switch between different hardware configurations. One that I looked at last year told me that an upgrade to additional server nodes would be almost instantaneous, but that a downgrade back to the normal level could result in downtime of up to an hour. That's a situation I'm not prepared to accept. We will be trying out a new enterprise-level server, which will be identical to the servers I use here at work. These servers support a number of high-traffic sites (much more so than SaintsWeb), and will have the company's sysadmin managing the hardware for us, so my relatively modest server admin knowledge won't be needed. It's requiring a fair bit of investment, but it stacks up financially as long as the current levels of membership and advertising revenue are maintained.

West Ham had huge debts when the porno dwarves bought the club and they continue to have huge debts (probably bigger) now. However, they will get away with it if they go straight back up. Don't forget, they've got a £500m stadium built by the taxpayer which they are being gifted for £40m, and will also get to keep the proceeds of the sale of Upton Park.

West Brom side: Myhill, Jones, Mattock, Thorne, Dawson, Ibanez, Fortune, Dorrans, Cox, Miller, Cech. Subs: Kiely, Downing, Roofe, Gayle, Mantom, Wood Pretty strong. Interesting that Dawson's getting a second game in two days, as he played at Rochdale last night as well.

The one time I saw us at Barnsley (2-2 draw, Rasiak scored both), there were no advance sales, only cash on the turnstiles. Hopefully won't be the same again, particularly looking in advance for in-demand away games.

First thing I spotted as well Also, they appear to have 4 teams going down...

Brighton... what could possibly go wrong?

Is there a link to that anywhere?

I had a great deal of sympathy with Aviva over the whole situation, they'd been very good to the club during the dark days but ended up the biggest losers in pure monetary terms because of a personal grudge held by a bloke at Barclays.

Got mine on Friday, only had 9-23. Waiting for the replacement to be posted before sending back/destroying the old one, I'm not going to risk not having any sort of season ticket for the Leeds game...

Indeed. £1m in cash plus the removal of £500k from the annual wage bill was a no-brainer at the time, especially for someone who had already picked up a knee injury that would keep him out for the first 3 months of his spell at Stoke.

I see Nottinghamshire are already 8 wickets down against Lancashire at Southport. I wonder if the pitch inspectors will be called for that one...

Correct.

Nothing along those lines planned at this stage.

Shouldn't need them separate with that size of setup.

No, I'm not entirely convinced by the reliability of the cloud options available at the moment, mainly as they all seem to suggest a "potential" downtime of anywhere between 1 and 60 minutes whenever the system is downgraded to the "base" level after a period of high traffic. I'm looking at an IBM x3350 M3 server, which would have 32GB of RAM (8x more than we have now), 2x quad-core processors, a RAID10 system, etc.

Signed for Malaga on a big contract on 1st June 2011. If you're going to make up a rumour, at least put some effort into it

Looking at it in advance, there were some things I liked about Saturday's tournament. I liked the intriguing nature of the tournament and I was impressed with the quality of the opposition we attracted (and presumably paid for). I knew I wouldn't be able to attend as I was away this weekend, so I didn't even bother looking at the ticket prices, so didn't really have an opinion on that. On the negative side, perhaps there was too much time between games, perhaps the tournament started too late, perhaps people didn't like the emotional blackmail thrown their way by the club, perhaps some don't like the fact that this trophy appears to have replaced the Ted Bates one. Clearly 8,000 felt the positives outweighed any negatives. It'll be interesting to see whether the club focus on the however-many-thousand who might have turned up had some of those negatives not been present.

An interesting assumption that has absolutely no logic attached to it. Personally, I'd rather keep as many users here as possible - if that means sacrificing one offensive idiot and their £5, so be it. Hatch has summed up the situation better than I could:

Latest: We're working on moving to a(nother) new server. The new one will be light years ahead of what we've had in the past, and hopefully for not much more money. When the move takes place, I will carry out a full upgrade to the latest version of the forum software, and look at implementing the "Like" functionality. I need to be satisfied that it's not going to cause any performance issues - I don't think it will, but want to check first.

I can fully understand the removal of the multi-ball system, as a number of teams basically cheated the system by removing balls when the home team were winning, throwing extra balls onto the pitch to stop the game, trained ballboys to place the ball in the right part of the corner area for the home side but not the away side, etc. Either it's used consistently throughout the game or not at all. With the subs bench changes, nobody's been forcing clubs to name seven subs. If they only want to name five, name five. It's a bit more understandable in Leagues One and Two because many clubs have very small squads, but there's no reason the Championship couldn't have continued with seven-man benches, IMO. As I said earlier, the only team this benefits in the Championship is Pompey.

Depends what the qualifying criteria are. Taking the starting XI from the St Gallen game, which I'd regard as pretty much our best XI at the moment (possibly swapping Guly for either Barnard or Connolly): Davis Richardson - Fonte - Seaborne - Dickson Chamberlain - Cork - Schneiderlin - Lallana Guly - Lambert Who would count as "home-grown"? Clearly Chamberlain and Lallana would automatically count, as players who have come through our Academy system. Would Schneiderlin count, having been signed as an 18-year-old and having been at the club for more than 3 years? Likewise with Bialkowski who's now been here for 5 years.

This has been brought in because teams in lower divisions were often struggling to fill a 7-man bench. Not quite sure why they couldn't have left the rule in for the Championship, whose teams generally (our fishy neighbours of course being the exception) have much bigger squads.