stevegrant

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.

Richly deserved - nobody in the country matched us for form over the last 15 games of the season. It does also make a change for Richard Bevan to not be whinging about another manager being sacked.

Regular England international, fits into the home-grown quota for domestic and European competitions, can play in more than one position, has blistering pace... plenty of key attributes ticked off there as far as a top club is concerned. Considering someone like Andy Carroll - a similar age but with far less experience - went for £35m, if there was widespread interest in him Arsenal could probably name their price. However, he's not a player whose future has been subject to speculation, so I would assume he's not the sort of player who would necessarily fit into the system employed by other clubs.

I don't see any particular problem with the relatively quiet transfer window, the vast majority of the players we have signed in the last two years have been with a view to playing in the Championship anyway, so they should all be well-suited and perfectly capable of making that step up. The only position I feel we're a little bit light on at the moment is at centre-back, Fonte's a guaranteed pick, but there are a variety of pros and cons when you look at his potential partners, and it would appear as though the club is in agreement there having left the number 5 shirt vacant.

Spot on.

Most games don't actually have 10-15 minutes of "highlights", so all that ends up happening is you get even more replays from even more obscure angles of the highlights you'd already seen. The best feature of the whole thing - assuming it's still there, I've not had a subscription for a few years - is the archive where you can go back and watch highlights from games that took place years ago.

Bit of a scrappy game tonight, really, they were clinical when one genuine chance came their way whereas we were not. Lallana and Chamberlain probably should have scored in the first half, Jaidi was unlucky to have a header cleared off the line and then Doble should definitely have scored when put clean through in the last minute. Another decent workout though. Cork and Schneiderlin look an impressive partnership at the moment, which does make me wonder whether the team captain will actually start the season as first-choice... Also, while many people have a gripe over ticket prices in general in this country, it pales into insignificance compared to the Swiss prices. CHF30 for tonight (about £23), with no child concessions However, they do have bratwurst

2+2=5, presumably, much like most rumours. FWIW, Lawrence's agent has been touting him around to any club who'll give him the time of day since January. However, Pompey appear to be in a position where they wouldn't have to accept a knock-down fee for him at the moment.

Highlights of every game on the BBC and online...

Especially considering that's half what it costs to stick your company's logo on the segregation netting I really hope there are no takers for the substitution sponsor