stevegrant

He's played in two County Championship games in the past couple of weeks, and presumably will play Twenty20 this week, so he is at least getting games under his belt. Whether it's enough, I'm not sure. The main person who insists that he's a star all-rounder is Flintoff himself. Until he comes to terms with the fact that he's not a world-beating batsman anymore, the problem will remain.

Here's another way of looking at it: Score range - number of occurrences (not out) [opponents] 0-9 - 8 [WI(a) 1, WI(h) 1, SL(a) 2, IND(a) 1, IND(h) 3] 10-19 - 4 (3 not out) [iND(h) 2, WI(a) 1, SL(a) 1] 20-29 - 1 [WI(h) 1] 30-39 - 2 [WI(a) 1, IND(a) 1] 40-49 - 3 [WI(h) 2, IND(h) 1] 50-99 - 8 (1 not out) [iND(a) 1, WI(a) 2, WI(h) 3, SL(a) 2] 100+ - 2 (2 not out) [WI(h) 1, WI(a) 1] Clearly scored heavily against the West Indies, but then we've played a lot of games against them with Prior in the side. Personally, I like the fact that he's scored big runs on the subcontinent, and that 10 of his 28 innings have produced scores of 50 or more. For me, that's an excellent conversion rate regardless of the opposition. Also, it's interesting to note his averages based on his batting position: 6 - 3 innings at 117 :shock: 7 - 18 innings at 43.64 8 - 7 innings at 36.67

Probably - now that Setanta have lost the Premier League rights, they'll have cancellations left, right and centre and will almost certainly go to the wall. ESPN will then run their own operation and the football will be on a new channel, rather than their current ESPN America and ESPN Classic channels. So essentially you'll have to pay again, but it'll probably just be a replacement.

Exactly as I would expect. Mustn't grumble for the princely outlay of £0.00 per month, tbf.

They will also be charging an extra monthly subscription like Setanta. Hopefully they use the right satellite to broadcast from, unlike Setanta...

Quote of the day

Not seen it myself, but apparently SSN has said the Football League will make an announcement at 6

Two points: 1. To be fair, an average of nearly 50 in 28 Test innings isn't particularly "hit and miss", IMO. 2. I would normally agree that as the wicket-keeper is such a specialist position, you should get your best keeper in there and not worry about his batting. However, we have the slight issue that is Andrew Flintoff. Until the other day when he hit 54 against Hampshire, he'd done absolutely nothing with the bat for a very long time, so it's difficult to count on him as a batsman. Similarly, while Stuart Broad looks very promising and will probably become a bona-fide all-rounder in years to come, he's still pretty raw as a batsman and again can't be counted upon to score big runs consistently. With Flintoff in the side, if he has a bad run, we're effectively going in with only 6 batsmen. Bring Foster into the picture ahead of Prior and we're then down to 5, which is just a recipe for disaster. If Flintoff a) gets his form back with the bat, or b) gets injured again, it might be worth looking at bringing Foster in and possibly using Prior just as a batsman, or bringing someone else in. However, Prior's figures stack up against any other English batsman, and he's generally been batting at 6 and 7 rather than at the top of the innings, so dropping him wouldn't be anywhere near my thoughts at the moment.

Can't really argue with that, although still far from convinced about Shah, and Panesar's form is very worrying - 6 wickets at an average of nearly 87! Apparently Bell's going to captain the Lions team in a warmup game against the Aussies at Worcester (assuming it's not flooded). Clearly most of the first XI picks itself: Strauss Cook Bopara Pietersen Collingwood Prior Flintoff Broad Swann Anderson plus one from Onions, Rashid, Panesar, Bresnan and Sidebottom. I would guess it would be either Panesar or Rashid at Cardiff because it's a ridiculous turning wicket, but Onions and Sidebottom will come into the equation for the other games. While Bell's been in decent form for Warwickshire, I still don't see him getting in ahead of Bopara any time soon. His chance might come if Flintoff gets injured again.

On the flipside, we're campaigning for the Football League to enforce their own rules properly. They a) failed to close the loophole when they had the opportunity after Derby went into administration (obviously before they brought in the points deductions), and b) failed to close the loophole or raise objections when we were relegated to the Football League in 2005. If they hadn't been so retarded over the course of a number of years, we wouldn't be having this discussion as we'd have clearly broken at least one rule. As far as the rules are written, we've broken none. I agree that from a moral standpoint we're bang to rights, but criminals get away with countless crimes on technicalities based on the law not being tight/explicit enough (or enforcement procedures not being followed, etc) - it's a very similar situation. The Football League should close the loophole at the first available opportunity, but they failed to do so at their AGM recently.

"Very" is the simple answer, I guess "Economic Duress" is all I've managed to find. Essentially, a contract is voidable if the innocent party can prove it had no other practical choice but to agree to the contract. One of the elements of this is that there should be a "lack of reasonable alternative but to accept the other party's terms" - clearly this would apply here as there isn't another league at the same level that we could join instead. Who knows...

Very wordy reply from the FL there but offers absolutely no response to the actual issues raised...

Initially it would go to the Football League themselves, which would clearly be a waste of time, but after that it could be taken to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which is where I presume the Pinnacle lawyers believe they've got a strong chance of getting it overturned. Personally, I think the negative reputation we'd get from mounting such an appeal from other clubs and particularly at the FL themselves - particularly if it was then successful at CAS - renders the whole exercise a waste of time. However, they should certainly not have the *right* to appeal taken away from them, which is what the Football League are attempting to do.

:tfrag:

I'm generally of the same view, that to the letter of the rules we shouldn't have had the deduction but in the spirit of them we deserved it. However, regardless of whether it is seen as a spurious appeal, for the Football League to attempt to withdraw our basic right to appeal it is scandalous. Surely if they were that confident of the decision they came to originally, they wouldn't be too bothered if we appeal as it would be pointless. They're clearly far from confident that they made the right decision.

Number of direct quotes in that article: None. Probably fairly safe to ignore for now.

My thoughts entirely, sadly.

When has this "non-appeal" stuff come into play? Didn't Mawhinney state that we had a right to appeal when the sanction was first imposed?

I'd take the safe option of accepting the deduction. The Football League have us by the balls, just like they've had Leeds, Rotherham, Bournemouth and Luton in similar situations.

That's pretty much it - the main route for appeal (over and above the FL's own appeal system) would be via the Court of Arbitration for Sport, but it could take a year before we got a case heard there, by which time we might have a hypothetical situation where we've finished more than 10 points off automatic promotion but still got into the play-offs, so the 10 points wouldn't have made a blind bit of difference. I'd rather they concentrated on just getting the deal signed and sealed, and they can get solicitors to look into the appeal later.

This is baffling. Surely the intention to appeal the points deduction is completely irrelevant to the takeover? The funds have been proven, everything's been signed and sealed, the "Fit and Proper Persons" tests have all been passed... that should be everything they need. Mawhinney said himself that we have a right of appeal, so I don't see how this can be holding it all up

Damn right it's sour grapes, sour that we are now playing League One football, sour that a couple of hundred of hard-working and decent employees have been put through the mill over the last 3 months not knowing if they'll have a job to go to the next day and sour that thousands of supporters have been put through a similar mill not knowing whether they'll have a football club to support the next day. And of course the takeover is NOT completed yet. Until a press conference announces it, I'll be just as worried for the future of the club as I have been for the last few months.

No you won't... http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/page/Membership/0,,10280,00.html Very bizarre.

What they are like as a player and as a bloke is fairly irrelevant here though - the question is whether Wise was wielding undue influence over the role that Keegan was supposed to be performing. I find it hard to imagine that he wasn't aware of Wise's presence (or likely presence) when he took the job, although clearly there's not going to be any public evidence to confirm or contravene that, so that's just my interpretation of it. Clearly Mike Ashley is a bit of a mentalist, so it's not entirely beyond the realms of possibility that he appointed him and then said "oh, by the way, meet your new Executive Director (Football), you may have met before somewhere..."

I have a feeling that there was a clause inserted into KK's contract when he went back there that if he resigned without due cause, he would owe the club an amount equal to the remainder of his contract as compensation. KK will clearly claim that the influence of Dennis Wise and Tony Jiminez above him at the club was "due cause". I'm not entirely sure I'd agree with that, to be honest.