stevegrant

Who'd have thought it, chairman of a club likely to be fighting relegation every season in "suggestion of stopping relegation from cash cow league" shocker...

Eventually

To be honest, I haven't got a clue what parameters the club uses to set their "break-even" attendance figure. For example, this season's is apparently 17,000, which equates roughly to 7,500 matchday sales per game, but that would bring in just under £4m in revenue (about £3.2m after VAT deductions) in addition to the £3m or so (after VAT) in season ticket sales. That's not going to make much of a dent in the debt given that the wage bill is still going to be somewhere around the £6-7m mark. I honestly think Leon Crouch got himself caught in two minds. On one hand, he saw the need to keep hold of our better players as we were starting to look like we were going to slide down the table, and the better players would give us the best opportunity to remain safe, as well as the maintainence of reasonably high fan morale after the play-off season which would probably have dropped significantly if he were to flog all our top players at the first opportunity. On the other hand, he did recognise that costs needed to be cut, so the top earner was packed off to Bolton on loan, thus saving nearly £20k a week, as well as getting a decent loan fee from them and then subsequently a bonus payment because Bolton stayed up, even though Rasiak had pretty much zero impact on that. Surely the figures show that last season's expenses did at least equate to the entire income - revenue of approx £14m with a wage bill of £12m, while I'm sure there must be at least £2m worth of other "footballing" costs in there somewhere. Then there's the question of the remaining £13m...

I'd be absolutely stunned if the bank sanctioned paying up any contracts early, and the player(s) involved would effectively have to accept a reduction in overall earnings to do so (although they could of course recoup that "lost" money by signing a contract with another club). I think it's highly likely that either our top youngsters (i.e. Surman and Lallana) will have to be sold in January, whether we or they like it or not, or more of the higher earners are disposed of, or a combination of the two. Either way, unless St Mary's suddenly starts selling out week in, week out, or somebody injects a serious amount of money into the club's bank account in the next few months (both of which seem about as likely as me going to the moon next week), players will have to be sold in January to keep the bank onside.

Perhaps, although I was going on the comments made here by Lowe that the figures "indicated a potential recurring loss of £17m". I guess there are various bits and pieces that aren't covered in the operating profit/loss figure but would be included on the cash-flow statement, such as interest payments and suchlike. Regardless of whether it's £13m or £17m or somewhere in between, though, it still clearly suggests that even by taking £5-6m out of the picture we're still losing a hell of a lot of money, and that it's only natural that the overdraft will have increased in a time where we've not brought in any single large sums of money to reduce it.

I've heard it from a number of sources (some more reliable than others), and with the current level of attendances it makes sense that the club has had to extend the overdraft again. If we assume that about £5m has been shaved off the annual wage bill and various cutbacks have been made elsewhere at the club, that still doesn't come close to repairing the £17m operating deficit from last year, and of course we've not sold any players this year to lessen that either. With those figures, we were losing approximately £1.4m per month. About £500k per month has been saved by ditching loads of high earners (either permanently or on loan), but that still leaves a significant monthly loss, which leaves us with no other option but to go further into the overdraft.

And of course every single voting member of the council only voted in favour of the proposal because of the leader being caught five times...

I don't think they're physically removing them, just that they're not prepared to fund the upkeep of them anymore. They are entirely right to point to the fact that only 6% of accidents are caused by speeding and yet the vast majority of the government's road safety funding is being "invested" in speed camera technology. The money would be better spent covering a wider range of causes of accidents (i.e. the other 94% of causes).

Plenty more info on the OwlsTalk case here: http://browse.guardian.co.uk/search?search=owlstalk&sitesearch-radio=guardian&go-guardian=Search

This is the key part. Two-match ban for Lancashire, I reckon.

I'd be pretty happy if it stays as a really boring game as long as we get at least a point!

I'm not sure we'd get away with cloning him... To be honest, I've actually been more impressed with Cork when he's played the holding role. He was particularly excellent in the two wins we had against Doncaster and Norwich, IMO.

Novatech are a decent bet for that sort of budget, although with any laptop of that price, battery life is going to be pretty poor. http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/range.html?t=nb&c=home&r=E15

Well it went in that general direction (i.e. to the left), and I'm not sure it's not too much of a risk to actually "aim" the ball at the top corner with that sort of power (Jaap Stam anyone? ).

Wotton's always taken his penalties like that. I remember him scoring against us in a 2-1 defeat at Home Park a couple of seasons ago, he wellied it into the top corner.

Quite worrying that he only knew which way he was going to put it from that, or at least it would be if I was a Watford fan. I'd have thought that a professional goalkeeper would have done a bit more research on his forthcoming opponents than just reading the programme on the day of the game. What if that photo hadn't been in there? He'd have possibly guessed the wrong way, whereas if he'd got a video of our games this season he'd have seen that both Surman and McGoldrick place their penalties in the bottom-right corner.

I've been confused about this for ages. Bringing 11 men back to defend a set-piece just seems complete nonsense. Even if you clear the ball, as you've got no outlet up front, the ball's just going to come straight back at you, so in effect they've got two chances to put a decent cross into the box. It's not just this season we've been doing it though, I've noticed us do this for years... even in the Premier League we were defending set-pieces with all 11 players back helping out. To be fair, I've also noticed that a lot of opposition teams do it as well, so there's obviously *something* that makes teams do it, but on the face of it, it does seem a very strange tactic to employ.

Record in matches in which Schneiderlin has played: Played 9 Won 4 (Exeter, Derby, Birmingham, Doncaster) Drawn 1 (Ipswich) Lost 4 (Cardiff, Birmingham, Blackpool, QPR) Record in matches in which Schneiderlin hasn't played: Played 5 Won 1 (Norwich) Drawn 1 (Barnsley) Lost 3 (Rotherham, Coventry, Watford)

Just checked Soccerbase, you are indeed correct. 15 league games and no wins!

I have, on both occasions that I've rented.

I would imagine that you may be able to give them a month's notice of termination (check the contract very carefully to see if there are any clauses regarding breach of contract). However, don't expect the house to be in any sort of fit state to live in once they've gone...

I don't think that, even if Lowe wanted to, the club is in a position financially to be going through a managerial change at the moment.

He also has a house in the New Forest, I believe.

SCW was appointed after we were relegated...

I wasn't offering any analysis of the figures, to be honest, but yes, that's certainly a view I would agree with. The idea at the time of removing the different pricing categories following the first season of Championship football was based on a bizarre situation where games against Crystal Palace and Norwich were both actually more expensive in the Championship than they had been in the Premier League due to them being moved from a "Bronze" rated game in the PL but a "Gold" rated game in the CCC. If we'd been flying high in the league for the whole season in 06/07, the standard price wouldn't have bothered people too much as they were watching a winning team, but to have the same price for games against Birmingham and Blackpool doesn't really make an awful lot of sense. I'm not sure they'd be able to do anything this season as it could just confuse matters. Also, I don't think we'd really want to be putting the prices UP for any games at the moment, but the club have made it clear they're not in a position to reduce the prices for any games either.