stevegrant

That Fabregas red card was amazing Quite how Terry hasn't followed him down the tunnel for giving that penalty away, I've no idea.

Thought they might have waited until after the Arsenal v Sunderland game midweek before making the decision - if Sunderland somehow win that, there's no point showing their game at Chelsea as they'll be safe, and the last relegation spot will be between Newcastle and Hull.

413 all out in the end. The first time we've hit 400 in a First Division first innings since an innings victory at Somerset in September 2011

I don't think Demin will be mental enough to let him anywhere near any sort of position of power. He'll let him come to games and sit in the padded seats, but that'll be it.

Take a seat at the dining room table, then. With the income they'll be getting from the PL next season (plus parachute payments even if they go straight back down), they'd do well to spend more than they receive.

We're stuck regardless of which way any argument about FFP goes. If they stick with FFP, we're stuck because it's nigh-on impossible for us to grow our revenue as fast as the bigger clubs can - our commercial operation is light years behind Spurs and West Ham, let alone the likes of Man United and Chelsea. If they ditch FFP (which I can't see happening), then while it allows us to spend more, it also allows other clubs to spend more as well. We've got resources, but nobody knows whether KL would be willing to throw any more money at the club on short-term things like transfer fees. Her dedication to long-term investment isn't in any doubt, but more immediate spending is less clear-cut, I think.

Invision Power Boards. Much more powerful, more secure and infinitely better technical support.

The problem I've got with such a system is that it'll clearly get abused by a select few. There's a relatively new plugin available for vBulletin that does it, but we're going to be moving away from vBulletin in the not-too-distant future anyway (the newest version is all kinds of ****), so it's not really worth the effort at this stage.

http://www.cultzeros.co.uk/product/12422/matt-le-tissier-southampton/

I'm guessing the average house price in Portsmouth is significantly higher than that in Chesterfield, for example. I think his point is that while their wage bill is ****ing massive, they have to pay more because the players would have to pay more to live in the area. While that may be true, is that really the difference between a £1.5m wage bill and a £3.8m one? I'm not convinced. Essentially, Pompey's wage bill is massive because they have made a correlation between paying big wages and getting good players. While that largely rings true in the top flight (put the PL clubs in order of wage bill and, barring a few obvious examples, that's generally the order they finish in), it becomes less true the further down the pyramid you go. There are loads of clubs who manage to squeeze out more than the sum of the team's parts in Leagues One and Two - just look at Wycombe, stayed in the Football League on goal difference last season, going to Wembley for the playoff final this season having spent very little. Older players looking for a last big payday skew things, they're generally not as motivated or as fit as they once were, and there are certain clubs in each division of the FL who everybody knows they'll get an extra wedge of money from (Nottingham Forest in the Championship, Bristol City in League One - assuming Wigan will take that one on next season - Pompey in League Two) so those clubs get lumbered with a whole host of overpaid mercenaries who couldn't give a ****. It worked for Bristol City this season, most clubs don't get that reward at the end of it.

I find it difficult to believe there is a club in Romania that could afford that sort of transfer fee. Steaua Bucharest's record transfer fee paid is around £1.7m.

The one weekend in July when I'm not around

Really weird commentary on there, seems completely non-plussed at Mané scoring three in three minutes or Long scoring from 40 yards, but goes absolutely mental at Benteke scoring a header to make it 5-1

"New manager Paul Cook expects Jed Wallace to leave the club." Not a great start, you'd imagine...

That was a small but contributing factor.

*shrugs*

Rather strange for someone who he went to rather extraordinary lengths to identify and publish personal information about, don't you think?

It appears as though the list of televised games on the PL official site doesn't list the Liverpool home game. Weird.

Not a massive amount of difference, we were televised 10 times last season, and will have been 12 (possibly 13 if the City game bizarrely gets picked) by the end of the season. That's an extra £1.72m (£860k per game). Enough to cover Jay Rodriguez's pay rise for a year, more or less.

15 AND 17,000?! Impressive stuff.

I suspect that advice was given by people who weren't in the position to be making promises to him.

As Hatch rightly says, one (outrageously good as it seems to have been) innings against a team who haven't won a game for more than two years shouldn't mean an automatic recall. The middle order where he'd fit in is also the one part of the current Test team that doesn't really need fixing. I'd hope to see him back in the ODI and T20 teams where he would clearly make a difference, but I wouldn't want to drop any of Ballance, Bell or Root to bring him back into the Test side.

They'll get a partial victory in that they won't be paying a £50m fine, because the Football League don't possess the balls or the legal resources the likes of Fernandes and Mittal will be able to call upon. It'll be watered down to something redundant, possibly with a points deduction imposed. Ultimately, they participated in Football League competitions in 2013/14, at which point FFP had been voted in by the 72 member clubs (nearly unanimous, if I remember rightly), which implies acceptance of the rules of the competition, which includes the FFP regulations. They chose to ignore them initially and then attempt to completely fudge their accounts when they realised the FL was actually serious about it. The Football League is effectively a private members' club, if you don't like the rules they impose, don't join.

That's the one, cheers

Has anyone got a link to that puff piece article Emma Judd did for the Pompey News when Antonov bought the club where she waxed lyrical about their serviced office in London?