CHAPEL END CHARLIE

If this 'mythical next level' of yours is defined as a club that finishes every season in the top six places then I've always thought (and still do btw) that SFC can never be that club - at least not on a sustainable basis. The question of sustainability being key here. One year in the Europe won't change SFC from what it is - a middle sized regional club - into a veritable giant of the game and neither would I sacrifice a (entirely theoretical) FA Cup triumph to keep Morgan Schneiderlin on board for another season - much as I have always admired him. What some on here are not facing up to is that the downside of European competition are that most, if not all, of the additional money generated will have to be spent on enlarging the squad and paying the increased wages that go along with European competition. Another huge problem many clubs have struggled with in the past is that the additional fixtures to be played can significant effect league form - someone told me it was 17 games to a Europa League final this season. It may be that the remarkable number of fans on here who'd put Europe before Cup glory can be explained as a generational thing - perhaps many older fans still considering the FA Cup to be a treasured competition that means something important to them, while the younger 'Sky Generation' on the other hand have been brought up watching the Champions League on TV and want of piece of that action whatever the cost. To me if that cost were to be a Cup Final then that price would be too high. I'm well aware of course that if we lose tonight this whole argument would become instantly moot ...

Yes my mistake, the UEFA Cup not the Champions League. But the the wider point remains I think - dreams of Europe don't always prove to enjoyable as you might think they will.

As I don't remember claiming that they ever finished 4th I'm not entirely clear what you are on about.

Of course the 'both' party on here will recall that that lot down the road won the Cup and got into the CL a few years ago ... if memory serves the Cup proved to be a rather more enjoyable experience for them than (briefly) playing in the CL was. Just saying ...

The FA Cup and a grand day out at Wembley of course - it seems to me rather odd for a football fan to say anything else.

Have we now abandoned all hope that JayRod will ever walk again?

I could hardly disagree more. We do have a chance now at a CL spot, and what a splendid achievement that would be, but realistically it is a outside chance I suspect - we are rather more likely to miss the target and end up with the unmitigated horror of the Europa League #shudders#. Even if we did get into the CL we are surely neither funded, or for that matter experienced enough, to long prosper at that exalted level of the game. On the other hand I see no reason to believe why we don't have some sort of real chance of getting to Wembley this season - with a bit of luck of course. I'm easily old enough to remember '76 and thus I know what it means - I say our younger fans deserve the same experience if we can manage it again.

Well played Leicester - I've always liked Nigel Pearson and at long last his team look like they're a side that is not prepared to go down without a fight. I wish them well.

Not a book this week but one of those specialist history magazines that are becoming so popular now - 'Trains at War' edited by Andrew Fowler. Able to move vast amounts of people, equipment and munitions around both at home and at the front the railways were to play a crucial role in both World Wars. So it came as something of a surprise to learn that those responsible for directing our war effort during the Great War committed a grave error of judgement when they planned to supply our forces in France not by rail but via the primitive lorry's that were available in 1914 - lorry's that naturally either broke down or soon became hopelessly mired in the all prevailing mud! The answer to this logistical problem (as the German and French Armies had already foreseen) was to build a network of lightweight narrow gauge tracks to link the standard gauge main lines of the French Railways with the front - a vital lesson this famously railway obsessed nation only learned in the nick of time surprisingly. The pressures of war also played a crucial role in forming the railway system we know today. The many independent railway companies that existed before World War I were placed under state control when the conflict started and after 1918 reorganised into the 'big four' of our railway's so called 'golden age' - the famous LNER LMS GWR & SR groupings. It turns out that the peacetime nationisation of the railway system that occurred after World War II was driven more by the necessity to address the run-down state of the system at that time rather than for reasons of mere political dogma - our railways were virtually worked into the ground during the war. The magazine also contains interesting sections dealing with the crucial role Hospital Trains played in WWI and graphic illustrations of the bomb damage the system suffered from during WWII - a devastated GWR loco laying blitzed at Weymouth Station in January 1941 being particularly interesting to me. Finally in 'Horror and Heroism' the stories of our worse ever rail disaster at Quintinshill in 1915, and the near calamity the little Cambridgeshire town of Soham so narrowly avoided in 1944 are told - the latter tale proving that acts of selfless heroism were not just confined to members of the armed forces because our railwaymen did more than their 'bit' too - even at the cost of their own lives in this instance.

I can only agree that the modern world is under attack from Jihadists who reject our secular values and rampant commercialism. People who (unlike so many of us) are more interested in prophets than profits. But can we simply 'exterminate' this real and growing threat to modernity by matching their extreme level of violence with our own? Its been done before I suppose, and we must stand up for what we believe in (whatever that is) but I can't help but think that our experience in Afghanistan shows that as soon as you kill one extremist you automaticly recruit two others. So it would seem that a bloody war of attrition with extreme Islam is underway, a war that has no end in sight and that no sane person could possibly want. History shows all too clearly that exterminating people is a relatively simple business for terrorist groups or for nations as wealthy and powerful as we are, but exterminating an idea that has taken root in the mind's of men is quite another matter. This is a huge question that the wisest statesman might struggle to answer, so I'm not about to claim that I'm able to do so here on a football forum. However, it seems to me that we are at war with religious extremism not because of what we do, but because of what we are. This fundamental incompatibility between modernity and its focus on secular capitalism, and a much older world that rejects those godless values may prove to be utterly intractable.

Some might say that political and religious beliefs are but different sides of the same coin. A smarter man than me once said that both religions and political credos become ideologies when the faithful come to a point when they cannot tolerate the existence of those who maintain a different set of beliefs. When these religious or secular fundamentalists comprehend their core texts literally and refuse to accept any way of understanding the world other than their own we end up with horrors such as we have seen in Paris this week ... or in Cambodia during the 1970's for that matter. I'm not one of those who resorts to a 'blame the victim' mentally in the face of crime, but it seems to me that the French satirical magazine in question was extremely unwise to pursue the editorial line it took - some pots are best left unstirred. Needless to say those fanatics who decided that a mere cartoon could possibly justify mass murder were behaving in a manner that was far more grave than being merely 'unwise'. Moderation in all things would seem to be the answer - but that quality alas is too often in short supply.

It's not at all rude, but I think that Mr and Mrs Power deciding to name their son 'Max' is pushing the boundaries of Liverpudlian humour a bit too far.

I see no persuasive reason why this young man should not be able to resume his career in football. It is a important point of principle that once a convicted offender has served his sentence then his debt to society is deemed to have been paid. If he wants to maintain his innocence then that might well have been a matter for the parole board to consider while he was still in prison - but once his sentence has been served he becomes free to think and (within certain limitations) say anything he wants. More than any of that, this affair is starting to reek of 'Witch Hunt' and I want nothing to do with it.

No funny women? As far as I'm concerned Victoria Wood is a little short of a genius and anyone who didn't laugh out loud at Dawn French's performance in 'The Vicar of Dibley' is a bit odd if you ask me - although admittedly having Richard Curtis doing the writing helps.

I'll be forever grateful for Blackadder of course, but as a stand up act Ben Elton got on my nerves more than a little with his relentlessly PC/pro feminist stuff he churned out in the 80's. I seem to remember Rory Bloody Bremner falling into the same trap when he decided that a controversial England cricket tour to South Africa would make comedy gold. BTW - whatever happened to Kelly Monteith?

Those who think Frank Skinner unfunny I presume have suffered the misfortune of never having seen the great man perform live. I saw him do a standup routine many years ago - when he was drinking I guess - and you can trust me when I say he almost brought the house down. I genuinely don't believe I have ever laughed as much either before or since.

I just can't abide the bastard - as soon as this little runt's pig ugly mug appears on my TV I switch over.

The cheap tickets were most welcome but a pretty tired and lackluster game of football I thought, enlivened only by young Lloyd Isgrove's spirited performance - one young man who was definitely 'up for the cup'. Early days of course but it will be interesting to see how far this lad can go.

I've been overtaking those mugs who go for the steps for years - now thanks to you pal the dirty little secret of St Mary's is blown!

I'm happy to accept that what we might describe as a 'liberal' attitude towards gun control is just one of many complex issues that lay behind the USA's homicide rate. I'm happy to accept that there are many nations that have a significantly higher murder rate that the US - although these tend to be poor African and Caribbean states in the main. I agree wholeheartedly that those on here who resort to infantile 'thick yank' type comments are themselves more than a little dense. But is there a direct causal link between US gun control legislation and their homicide rate? Methinks the only possible answer to that question would be 'yes'.

The thing about a 'scape goat' is that these are players who are being unfairly blamed or criticized for the nature of their performances. Looking back on it I must say that most of the players already named in this thread probably earned some/all of the stick they received to be honest. To those who say; 'what good does criticizing a player ever do' I would reply; 'when did remaining silent about a players deficiencies ever improve one'. You could have had 32,000 Saints fans cheering Paul Wotton's or Guly do Prado's every touch, but it wouldn't have made them any better. It seems to me if you find yourself in the fortunate position of making a bloody good living out of kicking a ball around then you either better do that job well ... or develop a thick skin.

I was dragged along (against my better judgement) to see the 'The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies' today - which is a very long film that boils down to a dragon, a tedious talkie interlude that nearly sent me to sleep, and a huge punch up with yet another apparently invincible army of bad tempered Orcs. So that will be almost exactly the same as all the other Lord of the Rings/Hobbity films then ...

The Presidency may (remarkably) have resided in the hands of two extended families for many years now ... but one of America's key problems may be that the archetypal 'most powerful man in the world' has surprisingly little real power to influence the nation that elected him. This lack of leadership - or is it a unwillingness on the part of the US people to be led - is my explanation for the situation the US finds itself in today.

On one level this issue may illustrate the perils of a written constitution that evolves too slowly to reflect changed circumstances. On a deeper level the issue may well be one of where best should power lay in society. Government in a modern democracy must of course reflect the will of its electorate to some degree, but it seems to me there is a invisible line to be drawn somewhere that marks the border between where it becomes desirable for society to be led from the 'bottom up' or the 'top down'. It may well be that because this great nation was founded in a historic distrust of unrestrained executive power the USA has therefore evolved to become constitutionally incapable of finding where that invisible line should be drawn. Perhaps the best democracies have a touch of 'meritocracy' about them the US lacks - too little paternalism is as dangerous as too much. Can it be that the nub of the matter is that the United States is the first nation on Earth where a noble effort to avoid the old tyranny of kings has resulted in a new tyranny of the masses evolving instead? A great many Americans (including their current President) can see quite as clearly as we do that their gun control legislation is a utter insanity in todays world, but in a society where a paranoid mania for upholding a individuals 'rights' (be it to the famed 'pursuit of happiness' or to 'bare arms') has become more important than a persons wider responsibilities to their fellow citizens the voice of the sane can be drowned out in a sea of fear and ignorance. The US has developed a highly atypical constitution that allows for not only the executive branch being chosen by the electorate but also much of the judiciary, public prosecutors and even local law enforcement officials too. Crime will alas occur in any society, but in such a system it is inevitable that elected officials must react - or more to the point overreact - to every screaming headline on the TV news if they want to keep their jobs for long. The end result of this inbuilt need to pander to all the fears and insecurities of the electorate is the nation state the USA has become today ... its jails overflowing, its streets echoing with the sound of gunfire. A country that even its many admirers must admit is not a little dysfunctional in some regards.

Although it's a little odd to see actors of Julie Walters and Peter Capaldi's status being somewhat wasted in what are quite minor roles, but Paddington is nevertheless still a great choice if you need to find something to entertain the kids over the holidays. I may be guilty of looking at the past through 'rose tinted specs' on occasion, but even I have to admit that the production values to be found in so many of todays children's films are quite outstanding and head and shoulders above most of the stuff on offer when I was youngster. I still say that 'The Railway Children' stands the test of time though ...