stevegrant

They won't get another point all season.

It's already Van Gaal's job. Has been for months.

Some things never change...

They would have been banking on beating West Brom on Saturday to give them enough of a cushion that the last 5 games wouldn't matter and they could get rid of Hughton in the summer and nobody would really bat an eyelid. Losing that game has changed everything - Fulham will be 2 points behind them if they win on Saturday, with a run of winnable games in the run-in. The view now is probably that with Hughton in charge they're more or less guaranteed to lose all 5 games, so they might as well make a change in the hope that they get something different, rather than any sort of expectation. Let's face it, Neil Adams can't really do an awful lot worse.

Must admit I couldn't be bothered to trawl through the Premier League rulebook to find whether they had anything about it, so credit to you for doing so Actually quite surprised they've accounted for this specific issue - I would have thought the vast majority of their rules that could see disciplinary action taken against clubs would be quite generic, thereby leaving the PL 400 miles of wiggle room in which to not do anything.

Any other league would have deducted points, either the points gained in games played by the ineligible player or 3 points per game, depending on the league's rules. It's interesting that Hartlepool were docked 3 points in 2010 after they fielded a player who should have been suspended for a game which they won against Brighton. That's Gus Poyet's Brighton. Here's what he had to say on the matter back then: Wonder if he still feels this way...

From what I recall, the club doesn't own all of the land it currently uses, part of it is leased (long-term). Entirely possible that the same applies here.

Sadly you cannot libel the dead.

Indeed. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that the clause was active during Johnson's initial contract period (i.e. 4 years), but is no longer valid. I wonder if the Pompey board are already deciding how to spend the £1m before Liverpool pay up, only to find that they've spent money they don't have. Again.

In a slightly perverse way, them signing all of this young talent is their way of attempting to satisfy the UEFA Financial Fair Play criteria. Signing these players means that their rivals can't sign them, then they loan them out to teams of their choosing, thereby saving on wages and probably collecting a loan fee as well, and then if they still have no use for them after a couple of years they can sell them at a profit. Kevin de Bruyne is a prime example of that, signed for £7m a few years ago, sent out on loan a couple of times to his old club Genk and then Werder Bremen, came back, didn't do enough for Mourinho's liking so they sold him to Wolfsburg (who have been throwing money around lately) for £17m.

Puyol still had a year left to run anyway, they'd agreed an early mutual termination. Valdes' agent will be laughing all the way to the bank.

Yeah, seems reasonable. Full details: http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/news/article/02042014-southampton-manchester-united-ticketing-arrangements-1461485.aspx Basically, only available to those with 4+ home game purchases this season, then to 3+, then 2+. The club don't expect there to be any left after this.

He's on loan at Lazio at the moment. Chelsea's links with Vitesse Arnhem, who he was on loan at earlier in the season, is being investigated by the Dutch FA at the moment after there was a suggestion that Chelsea have "discouraged" Vitesse from qualifying for the Champions League. Their owner is an "associate" of Abramovich, so they're clearly worried that UEFA will link them and ban one or both of them as UEFA rules state that two clubs owned by the same person/group/company cannot compete in the same competition. The reason the Chelsea one went away was because Chelsea settled with RC Lens privately, so they dropped the charges. With Barcelona, there are at least 10 deals under scrutiny here, with little prospect of them settling with all of them.

Difficult to tell whether that means a ban on sales as well - if you're not allowed to sign anyone, why would you want to sell anyone anyway? Ultimately it'll probably all be redundant as Barcelona will appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and it'll take months for that appeal to be heard, so the ban will be suspended until the case is heard, so they'll just go mental in the summer to make sure the ban doesn't actually affect them at all when it's eventually imposed.

They can sell, but their first-team squad is so small they'd be utterly mental to do so, assuming the ban is enforced (Barcelona will appeal). The most interesting part of this situation is what happens to the players they've already agreed to sign in the summer - they've already got a deal with Borussia Moenchengladbach to sign their goalkeeper, Marc-André ter Stegen, to replace Victor Valdés, and Gladbach have already started spending that money.

Apparently because the FA have done an exclusive licence deal with Topps, Panini can't use the FA logo on the England "shiny", so they just have the St George cross instead, and the players have been photoshopped onto generic white shirts rather than the full "portrait in kit" images. Good of the FA to **** it up for everyone

It's got Tom Cleverley, Jermain Defoe and John Ruddy in it, so I wouldn't read too much into it.

If I remember rightly, it was something like http://www.soton.ac.uk/~saints

And also by people who seem to fail to grasp the concept that the figures reported are up to 30th June 2013, a full nine months ago, since when we have improved our league position by 6 places (currently) and will benefit from the new broadcasting contracts that kicked in this season. It's a story about nothing, basically - presumably there's very little else going on at the moment.

There are a whole host of players who this applies to, stretching back the best part of a decade. The ECB has been allowed to treat people like absolute dirt because - until now - the team on the pitch has been winning regularly. Think back to how Matthew Hoggard was discarded after the tour to New Zealand, and players like Nick Compton, Samit Patel and James Taylor have been selected and then dropped seemingly without even being given the common courtesy of a phone call to explain the reasons. Carberry and Patel would have done a good job in Bangladesh, IMO. Carberry would have improved the fielding immeasurably, while Patel's record on the subcontinent with both bat and ball is excellent. His fielding's largely crap, but can he be any worse than, say, James Tredwell?

Assume Middlesex would want their side in the field for a day as well, so would expect them to declare overnight.

I thought it was 100%

Lovren was £8m, I'd say he's been pretty decent value thus far.