stevegrant

A few hours... good spot

St Mary's can be extended up to 45,000, but I'll be very surprised if it ever happens.

Particularly to Hauritz...

There are many people whose CVs stack up but have tried and failed to make significant money from football. It's not like any other industry. Even Sir Alan Sugar, about to be given a peerage for his services to business and industry in this country, made a complete pig's ear of a football club. The way I interpreted Liebherr's comments was that he wasn't going to be spending money the club hasn't got - as I mentioned earlier his clearing of the debts has freed up a significant sum of money which can now be apportioned elsewhere, so that along with any increase in matchday revenue will still see us as one of the bigger-spending teams in this division, but it won't be silly money. He seemed to emphasise the need for patience and not wanting to rush anything. To me, that's not the words of someone who's going to go on a spending spree any time soon.

Yep. Couldn't make either the Eastleigh or Totton games, and won't be able to get to Cheltenham either, so I'll be making the most of this one.

If he wants to do so, and isn't necessarily expecting a return on that money for a potentially-significant length of time, then fine, but I would rather we took the sensible and stable option of not running the club like a loss-leader in the hope that spending enough will get us back to the Premier League. If Liebherr was to bankroll a load of spending, and then a year down the line decide he doesn't want to do so anymore, the club's then back in a similar position to the one we've just got ourselves out of.

This. Anything else and it would prove that we really haven't learnt our lesson, and we'll only be in the same situation again a few years down the line, IMO. There will probably be a bit of money to spend - after all, we're not spending nearly £5m a year servicing debt anymore - but I wouldn't expect us to be going on a spending spree this season.

It's also very wide

Because that billionaire is only offering to pay them that much. It's a case of "take that and get something or reject it and possibly get nothing".

That £12.5m is the agreed settlement of the debts...

I'm not expecting him to put any money into the club right now. He's bought the club and rescued it, which is about as much as any of us could have asked for. As far as I'm aware, we now have no debt, which frees up nearly £5m a year which can now be utilised elsewhere.

Ah, I needed a laugh this afternoon and you've graciously provided it. I'm guessing the irony of a Pompey fan uttering those words having been unable to pay the pie supplier and asking the players to wash their own kit because of the financial situation there and then being bailed out by Mandaric is completely lost on you...

Well I think that worked out quite well...

It's a load of crap to be honest, unless you've got a car that's clearly worth nowhere near £2k and is falling to bits. All of the participating manufacturers hiked up their RRPs by about £2k when the Scrappage scheme was introduced, so the consumer isn't actually getting a better deal out of it at all. And yes, you have a point about the credit/finance thing as well.

Full marks to Transport for London for closing the Jubilee line on the day of the final... I'd go into Waterloo and get the Bakerloo line to Baker Street - you can either walk from there (about a mile), or there's a bus replacement service for the Baker Street to St John's Wood section of the Jubilee line.

They gave plenty to MK Dons when they reappointed Paul Ince, to be fair. It depends what else is going on further up the food chain.

That's permanent.

We've doubled what was there before, so I'm fairly confident it should be able to cope.

OK, the memory upgrade has been successful this time. We will need some tweaks to the database config at some point, but we'll probably put those on hold if it looks like it's going to clash with any announcement.

I think/hope that should be it - just waiting for a confirmation e-mail from the engineer...

Should be fairly soon, I've just given the engineer the go-ahead to do it asap.

UPDATE: Server will be down again shortly for about 10 minutes - there was a problem with the memory that was added yesterday, so the engineers will be trying again today. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Unfortunately I can't make it - does anybody want to use my membership to get two tickets?

Something you and him definitely have in common.

As far as I'm aware, Sale is a Saints fan - he used to post on the Ugly Inside forum and various predecessors of this forum as well, so it's not inconceivable that he saw the thread from last week and did some digging of his own to verify it.