stevegrant

Hey, I didn't put your studs into the ground and twist your knee causing the ligament damage... anyway, loads of players have come back from a similar injury to be better players - Alan Shearer, for example

Obviously you're all welcome to run one between yourselves, but I'll also try to get something that will integrate with the site set up for the start of next season.

I think there's 4 fewer in total, with some merged together and others deleted altogether, and of course the new betting forum.

Minimum is obviously 11-a-side, maximum is 16-a-side to allow enough playing time for those who want to play 45 minutes and those who want to play a full 90 minutes. Depends on which dates are still available Don't know Depends on what's available.

But how would we lose if we were both teams?

Not as far as I'm aware, but I've asked the club to let me know the full terms and conditions.

Amjad Khan is the other one. Never seen him bowl, so haven't a clue whether he'd be up to the job. To be fair to Harmison, he's not been helped by being constantly in and out of the team in the last couple of years. Either give him a run of games to prove he can or can't still do it or draw a line under it and tell him he's not getting back in the side. You can't expect any bowler to just come in on the odd game having been out in the cold and take 5-fors.

5, surely. We need to take 20 wickets, it's as simple as that. My XI would be: Strauss Cook Shah Pietersen Collingwood Prior Swann Broad Rashid Anderson Harmison I've put Rashid in there ahead of Panesar as his batting and fielding is better, but also because he's a bit unknown, which might cause the Windies a few problems.

Let's not run before we can walk...

I've emailed the club to try to get the finer details of the offer... I'll let you know when I hear back.

I'm guessing the pitch is likely to be relaid/seeded after these games anyway. If they can get two games on every day (one daytime, one evening), that's £144,000 in revenue and very little expenditure. Must be looking at at least £100k profit there, as well as any extra revenue they get from food/drink sales, so it's a decent way of bringing in a bit of extra money.

Football Aid has squads of 16, with 5 pre-determined substitutions taking place at half-time. The people designated to sub on/off at half-time obviously pay less than those who play 90 minutes. Personally, I'd be sceptical that we'd get more than 30 people willing to pay £100-odd to play. With rolling subs, it's much more likely that the subs will play a bigger part in the game as you could rotate 2 from 3 outfield players at any one time being on the pitch, which in theory means that each of those three players would play an hour each.

I would say so, yes. As far as I can tell, it's entirely up to the organisers (after all, it's your money!) as to how they want that side of things to be played. The officials should be happy with whatever arrangement you want, as long as they are actually told about it beforehand

Hence having squads of 15

That was exactly my thought when I saw that it was £4k for the whole thing. I would potentially be willing to organise it, but would obviously need definite numbers. It's easy enough for people to say "yeah, I'll play", but actually parting with that sort of money for one game of football is another matter

He did his cruciate ligaments, I'll be very surprised if he plays this season. At the moment, there isn't any real need to rush him back either - it's not as if we're a) leaking goals left, right and centre, or b) short on defensive cover right now.

I got an HP one fairly recently from Staples for £75, think it was reduced from £160. Wasn't wireless, sadly, but it will obviously connect to a wired network and has all the other things you've mentioned above.

Two new columns get their first airing today on the main site: Firstly, St Landrew introduces an in-depth breakdown of the Greatest Saints XI as voted for by SaintsWeb Forum members, which will feature profiles of all the players selected as well as touching on a few of the players who narrowly missed out in the polls. http://www.saintsweb.co.uk/2009/03/05/saints-greatest-xi-introduction/ Incidentally, you can see all of the polls in the Golden Posts forum. Secondly, we have a new resident betting expert on-board who will be giving us a preview of every Saints game with all the odds and his own recommendations on where to place your money. http://www.saintsweb.co.uk/2009/03/05/odds-on-birmingham-city/ We will shortly also be making some slight changes to the layout of the forum. Some of the lesser-used forums will be merged into the main off-topic areas, and - by popular request - a dedicated betting forum will be created. We've also been investigating ways to improve things on matchdays, particularly in terms of the site's performance. To aid those who don't want to keep hammering away at that F5 key, we are installing a chat room that will be open on matchdays. You will need some sort of Flash player in your browser for this to work - if you don't have one, or simply don't want to use the chatroom, don't panic as the usual discussion threads will still be running on the forum. The intention is to merge the chatroom discussion into the forum discussion after the game, we'll try it for Saturday's game and see how it looks. The address for the chatroom will be posted on the forum on Saturday. Any comments, queries, etc, please let me know.

While we will be making some changes to the forums (in particular, trying to reduce the number of them!), creating a StuRomseySaint one will not be one of those changes

Exactly what I was just about to say. It's going to be so difficult to predict a "safety" target - even Wolves aren't mathematically safe from relegation at this stage of the season :shock: - and while teams at the bottom continue to pick up "surprise" points (arguably all three of our wins in the last two weeks have been completely against the form book), that safety target will continue to rise. Leicester went down with 52 last season, which was an abnormally high total. This season, the teams fighting against relegation have pulled in more points per game than their counterparts last season. 07/08: http://stats.football365.com/2008/ENG/D1/tofeb.html 08/09: http://stats.football365.com/dom/ENG/D1/ppgame.html While this season's table is a few days and a couple of games more advanced, the points per game ratios are a pretty decent marker. Norwich were 12th at this stage last season and dropped like a stone to only just be safe before the final day, so I'll use their position as the starting point: Position - 07/08 - 08/09 12th - 1.32 - 1.37 13th - 1.33 - 1.33 14th - 1.23 - 1.31 15th - 1.20 - 1.29 16th - 1.20 - 1.23 17th - 1.21 - 1.16 18th - 1.18 - 1.14 19th - 1.14 - 1.14 20th - 1.08 - 1.11 21st - 1.08 - 1.08 22nd - 1.09 - 1.05 23rd - 0.96 - 1.00 24th - 0.94 - 0.77 Only once is the PPG lower this season compared to last - ironically our current position. Coventry stayed up by a point last season, and scored 1.15 points per game by the end of the season, showing that there is clearly an increase in the number of points struggling teams collect in the latter stages of the season. I think 55 could well be a minimum safety figure, which would mean we need at least another 18 points from the last 11 games. Winning - or rather "not losing" - when we play other teams around us will be the key.

"Don't know" is the honest answer, although I'd be very surprised if it was more than 5-10% of that figure. I don't think I've ever seen more than about 25 people viewing any one of the other forums at any time, and those sort of levels are only likely to be found on the Lounge and Muppet Show boards. As both Baj and I have said above, we're looking into ways of easing the load at peak times. Hopefully we'll have come up with an answer by the weekend.

As Baj has just said, we're discussing the options right now, and trust me, we're just as ****ed off as everyone else that it was unable to cope last night - it obviously causes us a great deal of embarrassment as well as being unable to access the site.

To be fair, mate, we'd got the performance sorted over the last couple of weeks to cope with the then-highest number of users online at a time (about 650, I think) and the server had coped well for the last few games. Last night, that maximum spiked to 793, an increase of more than 20%, and we've not had to deal with that sort of load on this server before so had no means of testing it.

I don't see any reason to change the tactics from the last three games - the results speak for themselves, against three of the supposedly better teams in this division (thinking of Ipswich's home form in the last couple of years rather than their league position). Birmingham should be there for the taking, despite having a squad full of strikers they can't score goals, their defence is slow and sluggish and they don't seem to be able to control the game in midfield either. That said, I'd still take a draw as a decent result, although chances are that would mean the gap would open up again, such is the ridiculousness of the bottom half at the moment!

Direct train from Southampton Central on the London Victoria service.