stevegrant

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.

Even though all of the information (and probably some more) has been on this forum since last week...

This is relevant to my interests... details please

No - that was centred around the names put forward by Pinnacle.

Here we go then... Brett Lee's definitely out for Australia which, having seen his performance against the Lions last week, can only be a good thing. Both teams' batting lineup pretty much picks itself, I reckon: ENGLAND Strauss © Cook Bopara Pietersen Collingwood Prior (wk) Flintoff Broad Swann +2 AUSTRALIA Hughes Katich Ponting © Hussey Clarke North Haddin (wk) Johnson +3 The Aussies clearly now have fewer options in terms of bowling, Stuart Clark's probably guaranteed a place alongside Peter Siddle, which leaves either Nathan Hauritz or Ben Hilfenhaus, who seems distinctly average to me. A lot's been made about Hauritz and the probability that he'll be left out with Michael Clarke and Simon Katich left to do the spinning between them, but Clarke has a dodgy back and Katich doesn't seem to want to bowl these days. On a turning pitch, I reckon Hauritz will be picked. Anderson's obviously in for England at number 10 bat and number 1 bowler, and then it's a straight choice between Panesar and Onions. I wouldn't be surprised to see Strauss wait until just before the toss before actually making the final decision. I'd fancy Swann to have the experience and guile to carry the whole spin attack for us, so for that reason (along with Panesar's form this year being absolutely dreadful) I'd go with Onions as part of a four-man seam attack. That way, there's also the safety net just in case Flintoff breaks again. I'm going for a 1-0 England series win, and they'll win the first test in Cardiff as the pitch will be a little bit unpredictable. The other four will have been prepared to last the full five days, so it would take something special from the bowlers or something dreadful from the batters for anyone to win any of the other four tests, IMO.

We rushed it through as soon as the hosts could do it for us so that (hopefully) it would be in place for when something does actually happen, as I would expect the number of visitors to go through the roof, and clearly we want the site to be able to cope with it. Not especially - I've heard the various bits and pieces from Solent and what's been in the Echo, but I have also heard that it might possibly be sewn up tomorrow; I'd take that with a pinch of salt at this stage, mind you.

Anyway, all done by the look of it, just waiting to hear back from the engineer at the data centre that they've done the config modifications as well.

How did you guess that?

Just in case people haven't seen the announcement above (not sure if unread ones show up in bold or not)... -------------- The forum will be down for about 10 minutes or so at some stage this afternoon while a hardware upgrade is performed. Basically, we're putting more memory into the server and tweaking the config so that - hopefully - we'll be able to cope without any problems when the takeover news finally arrives. Obviously it's not an ideal time to be doing it, but we only broke the record number of users online last week, which caused the server a bit of a problem, so we're doing our best to make sure that won't happen again. If you have any questions, please PM an admin or moderator. Cheers The Admin Team ---------------- 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.