stevegrant

I think they agreed to extend it for another 3 or 4 weeks. Presumably the only renewal form they'd received in the first two weeks came from a Mr B Chainrai...

I posted them all out to everyone who sent me their address.

To be fair, the wage bill is almost double what I expect many - myself included - expected.

Increased by £30 and £15 for 90/45 minutes respectively. Short answer on the "other forums" thing is that no, I'm not going to go down that route. It's hard enough to organise the game in its original format at this short notice, I'm not going to add any extra complications. Sorry.

Headline figures (rounded): Turnover £14.3m (£800k broadcasting, £10m matchday, £3m corporate) Operating Loss £6.7m Overall Loss (including player trading, interest, tax, etc) £7.8m Cash in the bank £2.6m Debtors £1.9m Short-term creditors £7m (£1.7m trade creditors, £800k tax/NI, accruals/deferred income £3.9m) Long-term creditors £14.6m (amounts owed to group undertakings £6m, loan from shareholder £8.4m - both stated as being due "in more than five years") Wage bill £10.9m, £12.3m if you include social security and pension costs Highest-paid director £105,870 Transfer fees spent since 30th June 2010 £1.3m, no transfer revenue

Right, simple explanation of where we are is that I've had applications for 17 of the 32 places, with Nick and Phil both confirming they'd like to take the manager hotseats again. Clearly that is nowhere near enough, so unfortunately this year's game won't go ahead

They have a pool table - whether it's a good one or not, I'm not too sure! Re the Etap, I found it to be fine, at the end of the day, you usually get what you pay for. If you only want somewhere to stick your head for a few hours then it's ideal. If you're after room service and your arse wiped, it's not so ideal.

It will shortly be under discussion

FAO Minty for the original...

Yes. It will not matter a jot what the other teams do if we win all ten games. 10 wins would give us a total of 95 points, and we still won't win the league!

I've got a LinkStation Duo, which has a BitTorrent client built in. http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/17469537/Buffalo-LinkStation-Duo-1TB-RAID-0-1-MultiMedia-Hard-Drive-Network-Storage/Product.html

Brighton have demonstrated that you don't need to play well to win games (as have we on a number of occasions this season) - if the belief is there, that will often be the key factor. By all accounts they've been woeful in their last two games (home to Notts County and away at Dagenham), but they've scraped them both 1-0. I'll take a terrible performance and one going in off Lee Barnard's arse tomorrow if it means three points.

Au contraire, a record run unbeaten, but they've drawn loads of games. 8 of their unbeaten run of 18 games have been draws.

I'm glad my intentional jinx at 2-0 worked a treat

Make that 2. Game over

1-0 Posh

Brief update: so far, I've had 16 applicants for playing positions (17 including me but I'm not sure I can justify the cost this year yet), plus the two managers. It goes without saying that I'll need plenty more before we can confirm the event this year.

Djamel Belmadi - the one good thing Redknapp did...

Potentially 40% depending on how much you earn through it combined with your regular job earnings. There are almost certainly tax savings to be made by channelling it through a limited company, but that's beyond the scope of my knowledge, to be honest.

Just a pointer for those travelling via Waterloo next week... if you're planning on going direct from there to Leytonstone, the Northern Line section of Tottenham Court Road station is closed, so there's no interchange to the Central Line. Instead, the quickest route will be the Jubilee Line from Waterloo to Stratford, changing to the Central Line there.

They wouldn't have needed to buy St Mary's, considering it was already owned by the club The mortgage was never a problem for us, it was the overdraft which proved to be the millstone.

The whole "completion bonus" issue was blown out of all proportion, IMO. It's common practice for directors to receive such payments on completion of what would have been quite a complex takeover process. IIRC, the total pot to be shared between the five directors (i.e. Dulieu, Hone, Hoos, Oldknow and Jones) was in the region of £300k - I dare suggest the bonus each board member stood to receive would be less than the bonuses and pension contributions that were normally being paid out regardless of performance at the time. The link between SISU and Dulieu at Coventry poses the question of a conflict of interest, but I can't remember any suggestion of that link existing back in 2007. I assume the current link is as a result of the relationship developed from our offer. Re the ownership, the share placing would have given SISU a majority shareholding, so the likes of Lowe, Wilde and Crouch wouldn't have been in any sort of position of strength, even if they became part of an incredibly unholy trinity (the thought of which genuinely terrifies me ).

Nominally. He only worked two days a week (at the most), so the amount of influence he actually had was minimal. Hone was the one pulling the strings. If people took their blinkers off for just a second rather than pigeon-holing people into "this side" or "that side", you might actually realise that the situation we were in at the time of the SISU offer and the situation Coventry were in when they went that way were poles apart. Slight issue there in that it's 4 years since SISU bought Coventry, thus saving them from administration (they would have been forced into admin the following day), and as I mentioned in my earlier post, Coventry don't actually have any assets, so quite how SISU are going to strip them is anyone's guess. They've supposedly already "invested" (i.e. ****ed away) £30m into the club in those 4 years - the main mistake I think they've made at Coventry is not taking up an option to buy the Ricoh Arena (or at least a large share of it); if they'd done that right at the start, they'd probably be pretty stable now. From memory, I don't think the trust ever had a stated position on the offer - everything moved so fast that it was nigh-on impossible to consult the membership. Lowe, Wilde and Crouch were against it as it would have diluted their shareholding, but the share placing that was on the table would have injected more than £10m of cash straight into SFC. The overdraft that was built up on Wilde and Crouch's respective watches - which was ultimately the reason we went into admin in the first place - would have been paid off, leaving the club on a much more stable footing. With the crowds we were still getting, we could have remained competitive financially in the Championship. "Could" being the main word, as let's face it, none of us know how it would have panned out over the 4 years since the offer. Given how it all turned out, with all three of them losing everything, I wonder if they might reconsider their decision now. I suspect they might. From my perspective, it certainly would have been infinitely preferable to that relegation season, administration and not knowing if I'd actually have a club to support in August.

It's like comparing chalk and cheese, though, as the deal they'd put forward for us was completely different to the one they put in place at Coventry. For a start, Coventry still don't own the Ricoh Arena, which means they need crowds of 22k just to break even On the face of it, sure, it looks bad, but had it gone through here, the overdraft would have been wiped out with plenty to spare, and we would have still been competitive in the Championship. In the long-term, barring anything mental happening in the next couple of years (and let's face it, with Saints, we can never rule it out!), we may well end up in a similar or better position, although who's to say what that position might be?