stevegrant

What have you been smoking?

Sometimes the manager has to adapt his philosophy to fit the squad of players at his disposal, rather than attempt to shoehorn them into a system that doesn't suit the players' best attributes. He's only had experience of players who are willing to learn and are eager to improve themselves and to make it as top players. With Spurs, he's gone into a club where the majority of the first team squad think they've already made it and have nothing new to learn.

A good journalist would fact-check from someone other than a very obviously biased source. Blackmore's main gripe over the summer was that all of his sources were no longer connected to the club so he was losing his exclusives, it's why he's been banging the Jack Cork drum louder than anybody else.

Because the Stoke cup game hasn't been played yet, it won't count towards your aways for this season.

Chelsea to drop 5+ points in three games that include a home game against QPR?

Neither of our previous league trips to Arsenal have seen us take an "initial" allocation, it's just been "right, we've got 3,000, here's how we're selling them". A very strange decision to go with an initial allocation first considering the price.

Mike Newell when he was at Everton. Even better placement on his header than Vergini's volley on Saturday, similar distance from goal as well. Speaking of Everton, both of the own goals they scored in the game at SMS last season were pretty special. This one is still my favourite, though:

I don't think he's got anything against us, per se, he's just a ****ing idiot.

:hunt: :hunt:

Again, there's no context to that specific statistic. In the first half of 2011, we were playing in the third tier. An increase from £23 to £32 between League One and the Premier League doesn't seem like a particularly big deal to me.

Those who are lucky enough to get a season ticket on the Yellow Wall, which is 100% terracing, will benefit from ludicrously cheap prices, but as you rightly say, they claw that money back with the prices elsewhere in the ground, as well as the culture over there being significantly different in terms of merchandise purchasing - pretty much everyone has a replica shirt, scarf, hat, etc, whereas that's clearly not the case over here. Every Bundesliga club earns far more in commercial revenue than they do through the turnstiles.

Absolutely nailed on.

I don't think there's much doubt that he was a source of fun in the dressing room at times (hence the KP Genius parody Twitter account), but surely that applies to every player in every dressing room in the country. It seems hugely hypocritical for him to complain about bullying when you consider some of the **** he's supposed to have done in the direction of the likes of James Taylor.

You've just made that up, haven't you?

Because it's good to see long-serving players rewarded, perhaps? Players have left us in the past because they weren't getting enough international recognition, players have left us in the past because they got recognition but felt they could play at a higher level. Both of those things will continue to happen for as long as the earth rotates. You seem to be determined to find a cloud in every silver lining.

There are conflicts of interests at all levels of the game, to be fair. It's only really the last few years where such blatant ones have been seen, such as Cardiff signing a billion players from Norway who share Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's agent, Sam Allardyce and Kevin Nolan putting pressure on Ravel Morrison to switch to their agent (for which they would have received a commission), etc. The murky world is getting murkier.

It's also possible that Fonte's choice of agent may have influenced his lack of recognition under the previous coach. The vast majority of their World Cup squad had the same agent - Jorge Mendes. As did the coach.

Portuguese journalists are reporting that Jose Fonte is included in a 40-man preliminary list of potential call-ups for the new Portugal national team coach Fernando Santos. About bloody time he got some recognition, it seems the previous coach Paulo Bento hadn't even heard of him when questioned last year

No great surprise with any of those departures, I assume Alsop will be the backup keeper next year. Very surprised that Surrey have given Balcombe a deal, though, they're not exactly short of bowlers already.

Countless reasons why that's a nonsense link, many already stated. Another one: his current £90k a week salary.

Completely blew it this morning, what should have been a 3-1 lead ended up as a 2.5-1.5 deficit Great idea to pair the two weakest players together as well

Losing out to a team who only finished where they did because of a bowler using an illegal action for 11 games.

Presumably he doesn't remember #AskHarry from around 18 months ago, then?

I'm not sure having to follow on against Kent last week was perfection, to be fair

Champions!