stevegrant

Agreed. It would also represent a fairly sizeable risk to chuck Forster in at Anfield having only had a week's training with the back 4 he's got to play behind.

Despite it now being nigh-on impossible with the FFP regulations preventing owners just injecting hundreds of millions of pounds.

That seems to ignore the fact that everyone was screaming blue murder at the guy for having gone quiet and not said anything while everyone was being linked with a move away. The complaints were that the words he and Les Reed came out with were quite wooly, they wanted something finite and categorical. They got that, and yet STILL people are ****ing whinging.

The bit I've highlighted is the important part for me. At this stage, the club hasn't received an offer that comes remotely close to his value.

Rojo, sorry, not sure why I wrote that

By all accounts, Spurs have only offered £10m for him so far, so as long as that situation keeps up, he's going nowhere. If (and it's a big if, considering this is Daniel "last day of the window" Levy we're dealing with) Spurs double the offer (at least) then we may have to reconsider, but we're not at that stage yet.

Amused that Koeman said "I don't want to talk about individuals who we may want to sign" before agreeing that both Gardos and Rios are players we're interested in

Likewise, having scored less than 6 an over in the 50, it seemed a bit harsh to make Leicestershire chase at nearly 8, but looks like we bowled pretty poorly overall.

Ramirez as a reserve rather than first team or fringe?

Cheers, will look into that. *searches for Tapatalk control panel login details*

I knew it was Balmer but thought it was a bit too sad knowing it...

In the first year that the Football League adopted squad numbers in the early-to-mid-90s, Charlton assigned their squad numbers alphabetically as well. One of their centre-backs had the number 1 shirt, which was pretty weird.

Stoke will be there or thereabouts. I'd be amazed if either West Ham or Palace are as high as 10th and 11th, though.

Not confirmed yet.

Cheers for reinforcing my laziness

My purchase history isn't available on the new site, but when I emailed the club to ask about it, they confirmed I'd bought for enough games to qualify for a Liverpool ticket, but of course the new online system thinks otherwise

I see they're still more than £50k short in their crowd-begging fund for the academy. I know that on sites like Kickstarter, you don't get the cash unless you raise the full amount, does this one work in the same way?

I'm aware of that, but that is still a backwards step from the old system where you could see exactly how many tickets were left to sell.

Once you have added a seat to your basket, I think you then have the option of setting that as your favourite seat. I would have thought season ticket holders should have automatically had their ST seat added as their favourite (as you obviously can't select it for individual league games as it's already been sold), but nope, they've not bothered with that.

And the new system doesn't show how many seats are left in each block, only a vague "Availability" rating

The ECB shouldn't use the attendances as justification to not give us an Ashes Test, because of the obvious mitigating circumstances. Had it even started on the Wednesday, I reckon they'd have got 10k+ every day, plus a load of corporate sales on the Thursday, Friday and Saturday. That said, I do think the prices need to be looked at. I know they compare with other grounds, but I think every ground should tailor its pricing to its audience. There's been two Tests at the Rose Bowl now, and neither has come remotely close to selling out on any of the 10 days. The weather was absolutely perfect this year as well, and the timing decent coming right at the start of the school holidays. I saw they were offering family tickets for £99 (a very good deal, IMO) on a photo that was tweeted on Monday, but hadn't seen any publicity to that effect in the previous six months. Surely that was a great opportunity to get families in, although I appreciate that T20 is a much more family-oriented spectacle than Test cricket.

That was a fair enough point to make by Alan Cork, but it was pretty obvious what the rationale behind offering Rodriguez that new contract when they did.

My assessment is that Pochettino never rated him particularly highly (hence rushing Wanyama back to play at Fulham when he clearly wasn't fit and Cork was arguably our best player at the time), and as contract extensions for the first team squad would largely be up to the manager to decide whether to offer or not, MP opted for the latter. Now he's gone, it's now down to Koeman to decide, and naturally he wants to get a proper look at everyone before making that sort of decision.

That sounds like a "leak interest from another club to get a contract offer on the table sharpish" story to me.

I'm not sure anyone would claim that having a network of scouts and analysts is anything revolutionary - unless that person is Neil Ashton at the Mail or Ben Smith at the BBC - and I would assume that an agent might be a bit disparaging of it on account of the club having the resources to actually watch a player he tries to hawk to us rather than signing them on the strength of a YouTube compilation video. It's not so easy for him to get his players through our door as a result, so of course he's ****ed off