stevegrant

England away grounds: Vienna Chorzow Cardiff Barcelona (Montjuic) Copenhagen Moscow Zagreb Paris Amsterdam Frankfurt Stuttgart Geneva

Someone's been listening to Barry Glendenning on the Football Weekly podcast...

As per the title, really. I'll be installing a minor upgrade to the forum tomorrow (Friday) night. There are various bug fixes included in this upgrade (although I don't think any of them have actually affected us), and it'll also give me the opportunity to reinstate the arcade. I'm not 100% sure what time the upgrade will be done, but it's likely to be some time around 9-10pm or so.

We all did. We completed the internet after killing Dr Robotnik

Thanks to everyone who helped with the load testing, looks like the changes I've made have made a significant difference. About bloody time... While we "only" had just over 300 people online, it's the weight of adding lots of new posts to the database simultaneously that has been causing the problems in the past, and having generated nearly 7 pages in 15 minutes, I'm now satisfied that it should now hold firm against heavy levels of posting. :vuvu:

Pretty sure they said that last time, when they (and Leicester) were told to go away and come back again when they actually had the relevant documentation.

You could still join in by hammering the F5 key

I've been testing it on my laptop over the last couple of days, I'll put it live along with a minor version upgrade on Thursday night.

Looks like it's impossible to get back that night due to engineering works. £14 for the single fare from Euston to Carlisle, but fairly pointless if you can't get back again. £46 is the cheapest single fare for the journey back on the Sunday.

Sunday, hopefully...

Re the booing, I remember watching the game back having recorded it on my Sky+ box, and I remember the commentator having a chuckle at Liebherr getting a massive cheer and Cortese getting a "much more lukewarm" (I think they were the words used) reception. I'll have a look again tonight if I get time.

In an ideal world, I guess I'd rather have "affordable success", but as we're not in Germany, we're caught between a rock and a hard place, as you rightly identify. The upper echelons of football will implode at some point - there will come a time when those who have managed their finances well over a sustained period of time will be the ones who eventually rise to the top. It may not happen in the next ten or twenty years, but I am sure it will happen eventually. If we are to be successful, I would rather it came as a result of genuine hard work and being deserving of it, rather than just chucking money at the cause with no real thought process behind it (hello, Manchester City). At the moment, that appears to be the way the club is working - there are some aspects that many (myself included) aren't overly happy with, but we all have to make some sacrifices every now and then. I still firmly believe that this club has the infrastructure and support to organically grow and be successful. It'll feel much more rewarding to keep it that way, IMO.

I don't think Howe's said anything at all about it, sensibly.

Would be good if he's anywhere near the player he was when he was here previously, but by all accounts he's been crap for Preston in the last year or two. A move could be what he needs.

I don't think there was much "speculation", per se, that they didn't get on - that seemed fairly obvious from the rare statements and comments attributed to NC that he wasn't happy. I know a couple of people who have had contact with AP on a professional level over a number of years and the one thing they all relayed, with exact wording, was that AP was "always watching his back". I wouldn't say it's necessarily a bad thing if a chairman and his manager don't get on, you need some friction otherwise it all gets a bit too cosy, but it seemed to become a hindrance in the end. As I think a few people suggested on one of the other threads, it's possible that the cause of our pretty pathetic levels of fitness at the start of the season are down to AP feeling as though he's for the chop at any given moment so why should he put that much effort in to get the players fit for someone else to then grab the glory. The fitness is certainly the area I feel AP has badly let us down in over the summer. The speculation that AP was going to be fired didn't start gathering momentum or any sort of press recognition until very late in the season - certainly the Echo didn't print anything about that speculation until mid to late April (will try to find the first article they ran - think we're probably in agreement that they'd have been the first to run that sort of story ), and then there was the MLT, Keegan and McMenemy comments which particularly got NC's goat. I can't remember whether anything had been going on prior to the JPT final in terms of NC doing things that had been controversial in the eyes of the wider fan base to get the reaction he did when the camera panned to him. I remember at the time someone suggested it was because the "Markus, give us a wave!" chant had been ignored and it was just coincidence that the camera panned to NC at that time, although I'm not entirely convinced by that If it genuinely was NC advocating for AP at the end of the season - which I personally find unlikely (it was ML's club, if he wanted him gone, he'd have just done it over the top of NC if necessary, IMO), but appreciate that not everyone will share that view - then that still screams out that he only had to do so because ML wanted him gone, hence the speculation was entirely accurate at the time.

Nick, as I said above, the timing and/or reasons for his dismissal at the end of August are irrelevant here. Four months ago, NC said the mere suggestion that AP was under threat was "ill-informed", and yet straight after he does get the boot - for whatever reason - he's telling journalists that he had to persuade ML back then that he was worth keeping on. Either: 1. the speculation was ill-informed, in which case he lied to journalists after AP's sacking, or 2. the speculation was spot-on, he was about to be sacked until either NC or ML persuaded the other (depending on which logic you believe) to persevere, in which case he lied to the fans in May.

The reasons behind his sacking are completely irrelevant here May: "speculation is ill-informed" August: "in May, I had to persuade the owner that he should be kept on" It really is quite simple.

Well I could do, but strangely, the statement that was released on the OS in the middle of May (17th or 18th, can't remember exactly) seems to have mysteriously disappeared, where Cortese said that the speculation about Alan Pardew's future was "without exception, ill-informed". On the day Pardew's sacking was announced, journalists were briefed that Cortese claims that in the summer, he had to persuade Markus Liebherr that Pardew was worth sticking with [as reproduced by the BBC's Paul Fletcher in his blog], which (whether true or, as would be more logical given the very obvious dislike AP and NC had for each other, the complete opposite of the truth) proves that the speculation about AP's future in May was not in any way "ill-informed". It was bang on the money.

You are assuming that they are lies, despite no evidence either way. Both men have form for lying, so neither of them would be a particularly reliable witness.

He was linked somewhere with Sulieman al-Fahim, IIRC. He realised he couldn't actually get any money into it, so pulled out. SAF decided he still fancied owning the club, though, and went through with the purchase anyway

I think I've narrowed this problem down to a browser issue. It seems to only happen in Internet Explorer, and particularly in older versions. Also, I have vague recollections that it was only an issue when you have a particular type of reply box visible, so perhaps try playing around with the settings in your control panel (right at the bottom under Miscellaneous Options)

Our fans are no different to fans of any other club in the country, and there hasn't been a sudden change to a number of people picking up on anything to have a moan - lest we forget, any time Rupert Lowe wiped his arse, there was someone waiting to have a go at him. It's not something that's just suddenly happened now Cortese's the chairman.

Where has this "unpaid bar bill" stuff come from? The last (and indeed only) time I've been in the directors lounge before a game, it was a cash bar, i.e. if you don't pay at the point of purchase, you don't get the drink. I'm not really that fussed about Mitchell, he's a complete gob****e, but it does seem somewhat contrary that all the club's official statements bang the "we will continue to run the club in a professional manner" drum, when I would imagine the "professional" thing to do on this occasion is to rise above his comments and simply ignore them.

Now there's news we didn't expect...