stevegrant

While the ground looks fantastic (I think I'm right in saying that it's actually Stanford's own private stadium, which is just mental :shock:), the pitch is unbelievably slow which isn't too conducive to high-scoring Twenty20 cricket, which is a shame. For a "showcase" event such as this, ideally you'd have both teams scoring at least 180 or so.

Seems as if Ticketmaster may have had a bit of a tip-off yesterday...

"Sergio Ramos". Brilliant.

Of course he'd never desert his spiritual home, particularly when there's the likelihood of getting to play with someone else's money again. I notice he's quoting financial problems as one of the reasons for leaving... wonder who might have caused those then!

First signings in January for Spurs - Crouch and Defoe.

Spurs are about to make the biggest mistake of them all, then...

The way Jones described it to me was that Crouch wrote the cheque and handed it over, but as the club was in a bid situation they had to check with the Takeover Panel as to the situation regarding director loans/donations so they couldn't cash it immediately. Once they got permission (a few days later), Jones phoned Crouch out of courtesy to check he was still happy for the cheque to be presented, and he refused. I suspect the actual truth lies somewhere between those two stories.

To be fair, while it's an admirable "offer" (I say that in inverted commas because, as far as I'm aware, such an offer hasn't been formally made to the club), I don't expect either Lowe or Wilde's personal fortunes to be such that they could afford to **** £2m down the drain even if they were willing to.

Seems to have served one of Europe's most famous clubs for years. And Ajax.

Given that he didn't get it 18 months/two years ago when global finance was in apparently-good shape for whatever reason, I'd imagine it won't be so "easy" right now.

Not true. It would be entirely down to the poster to prove that what he was saying is true.

I looked for it as well but no joy I've got it on a video at home somewhere though! Albeit not from the PFTF series, my personal favourite YouTube Fantasy Football clip is this one

Anyone remember Baddiel and Skinner's Phoenix From the Flames recreation of that game?

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.