CHAPEL END CHARLIE

Jrod maybe, but better than Adam Lallana? You must have been watching a different game shipmate. As for a £12m player "showing promise" after 18 months some might be expecting a lot more than that from a player who was hailed as one Europe's brightest prospects before we signed him.

You may well be right, although I note he only writes some Sherlock scripts rather than attempting to be both Series Producer and be Head Writer for Doctor Who. I suppose it's no surprise that both series exhibit a similiar tendency towards a confusing plot, fast (if not hyperactive) pacing, and a witty script that is so typical of the man. Much as I've criticized him on here we both obviously love the same kind of stuff (Dr Jekyll, Who & Holmes) so he can't be all bad then. ... Oh and what a superb Doctor Benedict Cumberbach would have made, although I suspect he may be too expensive for the beeb now.

At my age I quite like sitting down most of the time to be honest about it. But supposing our younger/fitter fans had the freedom and flexibility to buy match tickets in a contained safe standing area, and then watch the game standing wherever they liked with their mates without having all the fuss and bother of trying (and failing) to find consecrative unallocated seating then that would be great. A fan might even be able to move around a bit (within reason) if he chose to. If standing were a tad cheaper too, so that a working man could afford to go to the football more often perhaps, then all the better I say. Now the police/stewards would doubtless object to that idea on the grounds that they like to be able to identify everyone from their allocated and easily traceable seat number. I think however that making this country a bit less like a 'Big Brother' state might not be such a bad thing. No one in their right mind wants to see another Hillsbrough-like situation occur again. However there were unique (and easily preventable) circumstances surrounding that tragedy and they do say that 'hard cases make bad laws'. Methinks that any revenue lost by introducing cheaper safe standing areas would be easily offset (and them some) by increased attendance. Indeed I suspect that St Mary's could easily grow to a 38,000 fan mixed seating/standing stadium without much trouble. That scenario is be too good to be true of course because 'mother' always knows best in this over regulated and health and safety obsessed country of ours ... more's the pity.

Well Drew Surman was sold to raise cash just before the Liebherr takeover went through, but you are essentially correct. The player you refer to (AOC of course) was only allowed to leave because he was determined to go anyway. In that sense we are no longer a true 'selling club' anymore, although the press (and some on here) don't seem to have cottoned on to that fact yet.

I took the kids to see the new film version of 'Walking with Dinosaurs' the other day, and was mildly amused by it. Although co-produced by our very own BBC this is in reality very much a Hollywood film that shifts the emphasis away from the beebs somewhat pseudo scientific/educational approach on TV, towards a schmaltzy entertainment focused kids film. The plot (such as it is) won't stretch the imagination of even the younger kids all the much, indeed it can be summed as yet another variation on the 'little guy overcomes and gets the girl' theme familiar to all. But if you are looking for something visually impressive that will keep the little ones occupied for a hour or so then (within its self imposed limitations) it was not too bad. Also available in 3D for those with more money than sense.

I thought that 'The Time of the Doctor' was in many ways another absolutely typical Steven Moffat yarn - a veritable smörgasbord of disparate ideas and half forgotten plot-lines stuffed into a blunderbuss and fired off right into the face of its somewhat bemused audience. What younger children made of it I don't know ... they were probably left even more confused and befuddled than I am frankly. But that's not the whole story because it was also pretty damn wonderful in places too. The scripts Moffat pens are peppered with genuine 'laugh out loud' humour mixed with a kind of subtle pathos and level of emotional depth that is all-too uncommon in Science Fiction. The special effects and production standards on display now are (very) close to the quality you would expect to see at the cinema today - a quantum leap from the old cheap and cheerful Who of my childhood. As for the now departed Doctor himself, Matt Smith is such a abundantly odd and talented young actor I fully expect him to buck the ever downward career path of most ex Doctor's and a forge a successful future for himself as a working actor. If only Moffat's time at the helm of 'Doctor Who' were infused with a better understanding of this series audience and the value of discipline in his writing then perhaps he might be remembered as one of the truly great 'Who' producers, and not just a memorable one. ps - I loved the little 'dig' he took at Christopher Ecclestone when explaining just how the Doctor had used up all his regenerations!

Well, I've reread the OP carefully and for the life of me I can't see anything in it that constitutes reasonable grounds for banning anyone from this site in my opinion. Is he really a WUM, or is he merely expressing a genuinely held opinion? I don't know, but it seems to me sometimes you just have to give people the benefit of the doubt ... or you'll end up looking like a bunch of Stalin wannabes.

We may like to think that we 'know' our players, but it's hard to really understand what makes another Human Being 'tick' isn't it? My take is that Adam seems perfectly happy, both in his private life and his career. I dare say he is now very well payed too. Additionally he has almost certainly rejected attractive offers in the past in order to stay at the club he loves - methinks he will do so again. But that's just my interpretation and I'm no more privy to his private thoughts than any of you lot are. But I'd be very surprised to see him go.

There's a rumour going around that Santa has come baring the welcome gift of a fit again Luke Shaw and Kelvin Davis in his capacious sack. If so, then the mighty Saints can perhaps make a proper game of it. If that is no so however ... well in that case we surrender before kickoff.

Alan Turing is a bit of a hero of mine. I think he should be held in high esteem by all right thinking people because the contribution he personally made to the Allied cause during WWII is incalculable. Like Oscar Schindler in a way, there are generations of people alive today just because of his intellectual labours. Now welcome as this development undoutably is, methinks that Turing would probably have preferred to see everyone persecuted by officialdom because of their sexuality receive much the same (belated) recognition of the crimes committed against them. But this nation has alas a long history of treating its hero's badly. Many of the ordinary sailors who did so much to defeat the Spanish Armada were abandoned to their fate by a disinterested government soon afterwards. That was the lot of the 'common' people throughout much of our history you might say, but even great fame doesn't always ensure better treatment. Perhaps Britain's greatest ever son, Admiral Lord Nelson, made it quite clear while suffering his long and agonizing death aboard the 'Victory' that his last wish was that the nation should take care of Lady Emma Hamilton and their daughter Horatia after his death. Not too much to ask you would have thought, but Emma and Horatia would end up in a debtors prison just a few years later while Nelson's do-nothing brother was showered with money and fame. I could go on, did the brave lads who sacrificed so very much in WWI really return home to a 'land fit for heroes' ? For that matter the manner in which surviving veterans of the Arctic convoys and RAF Bomber Command aircrew were teated by the establishment after the last war left much to be desired. To end on a more positive note however, at least our wounded soldiers returning home today from Afghanistan ... etc do seem to be receiving the very best medical treatment this nation can offer. The very least they deserve if you ask me.

I should be very careful about treating this story too humorously. For all we know one of our players might have a terminally ill loved one, or in be middle of a messy divorce for instance. So please don't be posting something crass now that may end up making you look like a utter sh1t in a few weeks time.

In a ideal world any club would love to build a team around its own academy trained players. SFC is probably now closer to achieving that ideal than any other PL club I can think of. But in the real world a academy that generated even a single top class youngster a year (on average) would be doing very well. We've performed outstandingly in that respect of late, but it may be unrealistic to expect even our academy to sustain that level of success indefinetly. What worries this fan is the desperate lack of value out there when you're looking for quality players to fill the gap between what we produce from within, and what we must bring into the club from without. Perhaps we've just been rather unlucky of late. Perhaps it's closer to the truth to say that those responsible for selecting our transfer targets need to get their act sorted out PDQ. Whatever the reason is it seems that spending what are quite large sums of money on signing players (the £10m/£15m bracket) no longer buys you the kind of near guaranteed success you'd have thought it really should do. The economic implications of this are serious for a club of our size that harbours ambitions of competing near the top of the Premier League. If, more often than not, £15m only gets you a average PL player nowadays (this is still a debatable proposition to be fair) then the day may soon come when middling PL clubs like SFC can only prosper via their academy system because signing genuine top class players will become a habit that is increasingly out of our reach. At the moment a productive academy is merely a nice bonus for a club like this one to posses - in the future maintaining a freakishly good academy may become absolutely indispensable just in order to survive in the crucible of Premier League competition.

I like the manager, I don't think he gets all that much wrong in the grand scheme of things, but today however he must take his fair share of the incoming flak because methinks his calls played a significant part in todays defeat. When Luke Shaw is out injured then he continues to place his faith in Danny Fox, but this player lets him down every bloody time! When are we ever going to learn this? I'm reliably told that the Full Back position is not the most difficult one to master in the game but watching Fox today you'd be hard pressed to believe it - indeed I've seldom seen a player at this level with a worse positional sense. MP has had plenty of time now to devise a satisfactory solution for this ingrained structural weakness in our current squad - indeed he eventually found one today when he swapped Chambers over to the left and played Ward-Prowse in the right back position - but far too late to effect the outcome. This must never happen again. I've already expressed my opinions re Gazzaniga and the blame for that unsatisfactory situation lays elsewhere IMO, but if Fonte is fit enough for the bench then surely serious consideration must be given to starting with him and seeing how long he lasts. In any case Maya Yoshida is a better technical player than Jos 'own goal' Hooiveld will ever be. It may well be that we just don't yet possess the strength in-depth in our squad to rest key players when it is not absolutely necessary to do so. If that is true then we must continue to ask lot of our better players and hope they can cope until we can strengthen. But todays questionable calls go beyond the matter of team selection. On 63 minutes moments before Spurs took the throw-in (that led directly to their wining goal) MP made the call to substitute Jack Cork (who had done little wrong IMO) for James Ward-Prowse. Is it's not a IRON LAW of the game that you never disrupt a team when they are defending a situation like that? Not something that can be proved of course, but I think delaying this substitution by a few minutes and that particular goal may not be conceded. Hay, we're all Human so therefore we all make mistakes ... but no win in six now and we saw a few too many mistakes out there today I reckon.

Thanks I was struggling to find just the right word but you found it for me - 'woeful' sums the situation up nicely. It's rotten luck to have both your 1st and 2nd choice keepers simultaneously injured of course, but the risk of that happening is a significant one that needs to be guarded against. Therefore if we see the 3rd keeper as a kind of last resort 'insurance policy' then this particular 'policy' of ours looks unlikely to ever pay out. I see the apologists are out in force again, but unless we expect other teams to go easy on us out of a sense of sympathy for our plight then the simple truth is that it matters not a jot that he's only our 3rd choice keeper. Neither do I care very much that he's only 21 years old, what evidence is there that he has improved one iota over the last 12 months? It seems to me he's gone backwards if anything. No, if you're not good enough then you'll be found out at this level. Indeed, the Premier League has a way of mercilessly exposing any weakness in a squad - the final proof of that statement being todays woeful performance from this player ... and others I might add.

I suspect that young lad from Everton may be more of a threat to Adam than Ashley Young is ... what the hell, just take both of them Roy! SRL really needs to get on the score sheet more often this season if he wants to secure a berth.

Well perhaps I didn't explain myself properly. When I say 'standard of living' I'm not referring to the middle class being able to afford two foreign holidays most years and having a nice new Audi on the drive. No, what I mean here is having hot food in your belly, electricity in your house 24/7, and a job to go to if you're lucky. Do nations go to war to ensure their populations 'enjoy' that kind of standard of living? Trust me, they have gone to war over much less than that in the past.

The US has been developing nuclear powered submarines for 60 years now, they have never fired a single torpedo in anger. No, apart from the fact it relies upon government contracts to a unusual extent, the Defence Industry is actually much the same as any other commercial enterprise in the capitalist system; IE it exists to generate a profit for its shareholders. Needless to say it also equips our armed forces and provides gainful employment for tens of thousands of working people by the way. If you want to level some charge at the defence industry then methinks you'd do better to question its efficiency or state that defence has far too often proved to be a amoral - as opposed to immoral - business. But even those propositions are debatable. The defence industry seems to me to be more the tool of government rather than its master. The record shows that between the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the '9/11' terrorist attack on New York and Washington US defence expenditure was contracting rapidly. This situation only reversed after the US was attacked. Extreme budgetary pressures in the US mean that post Cold War contraction is now bound to resume. As for the United States maintaining a "permanent war economy" I'm struggling to reconcile that bold claim with the hard fact that US defence expenditure has reduced to 4.4% of GDP. The UK rate by the way rate is now down to a mere 2.5% and shrinking fast. Now okay that's still of hell of a lot of money when you consider just how large these economies still are, but really a 'war economy' ... this seems an exaggeration. The relationship between those who control expenditure, a group we might call the 'defence establishment' for want of a better term, and the armament industry that actually produces the weapons is indeed far too 'cosy' for my liking - in that I agree with you. But in my view it's just too easy to blame the 'evil' defence industry for the pity of war. The truth is much more complicated than that I'm afraid.

In my (unedited) post I was careful to acknowledge his status here. But is football not a squad game these days? Some might say squad players who are incapable of doing a satisfactory job when called upon serve no good purpose. Both this season and last, Gazzaniga reminds me so much of the 'bag of nerves' Bart had become before we got rid of him that the resemblance is uncanny ... it must be something in the water. Now if you want to add to this forum ever growing 'excuse mountain' (AKA Mt Guly) then carry on ... but that won't make any difference however.

You can talk Gazzaniga up all you like, doing so may even improve our morale temperately, but the simple truth is we've gone from fielding one of the very best keepers in this division, to one who is almost certainly the worst. Now if you don't agree with that statement then name me a worse keeper who played in the PL yesterday? Yes he's young and only 3rd choice, and yes he might even improve over time I suppose. There again it seems just as likely he may never make the grade at this level. For me I'm just not seeing much strength of character and confidence in your own ability from this player - surely basic requirements needed for anyone to become a success in the game. But those questions remain debatable propositions at this time. What seems more certain however is that with Boruc still weeks away from returning, this team of ours needs Kelvin back desperately.

The so called 'Vimoutiers Tiger' was left abandoned in a roadside ditch until as late as 1975, but following a article published in (the excellent) 'After the Battle' magazine it was recovered and put on display in its current location alongside Route Nationale 17, the only Tiger left in all of Normandy to commemorate the battle. The current camouflage scheme is allegedly based on paint fragments found on the vehicle - if so I can only say it would seem to be a highly atypical scheme then for German armour of this period. The unit this particular tank was assigned to remains something of a mystery I understand. It seems most likely however to have been a Army (Heer) vehicle rather than a SS one, possibly one belonging to Schwere Panzer Abteilung 503. Many German vehicles which had somehow manage to escape from the terrible fighting in the Falaise Pocket were found abandoned in the area - either out of fuel or broken down perhaps. As per the proper procedure the crew attempted to destroy the vehicle before they fled, indeed damage can still be seen to the top of the engine covers and the turret was jammed. Subsequently, to clear it out of the way, a US army bulldozer pushed it off the road and into the ditch. A local businessman purchased the wreck after the war but then did nothing with it for some reason. So there it was to remain for 30 years ... what had once been the pride of Hitler's army had become a rusting plaything for the village children.

Of course the ever present need to obtain, and then secure, the supply of natural resources is a major 'driver' of any industrialized nation's foreign policy - and yes wars too are sometimes fought over such concerns. However when I see people arguing that the US is "only fighting about the oil" for instance - with the clear implication that such a motivation is a bad thing somehow - then that strikes me as a particularly naive thing to say. One reductionist point of view is that the entire purpose of government boils down to 'keeping the lights on' as it were. Very obviously we all rely upon fossil fuel derived energy generation to maintain that standard of living. All predictions show we will continue to do so for many years to come alas. So until the happy day dawns when mankind learns to rid itself of this pernicious 'oil habit' of ours then doing everything and anything required to secure the free flow of oil remains very much a vital interest for all nations. Therefore when the US (and its allies) decided to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait back in 1990, in order to remove one potential threat to Gulf oil, then I say that was a action taken in furtherance of our true national interest rather than a attempt by this sinister 'US military/industrial complex' to manipulate the world to it own ends. It seems to me those on the left who continue to object so strenuously to the hard (but sometimes necessary) measures taken to secure our current standard of living, while at the same time enjoying the many benefits that very same lifestyle entails, could be accused of hypocrisy. War - the large scale destruction of property and killing of our fellow Human beings - is a truly terrible thing that all right thinking people should abhor. To justify such a terrible deed most of us would prefer to think that we fight our wars in some noble cause, such as the defeat of Fascism during WWII certainly was in my view. But outside of the student debating society and out in the real world, war is seldom some 'Crusade' (as Eisenhower put it) to rid the world of evil, but rather a grubby fight for survival.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj97_pTIT1E

He is heading for legendary status now he has been bigged up on here. But for mercy's sake, the poor bugger really needs to get himself moved to a lower row before his arthritic old joints siege up completely.

The Sherman, although inadequately armoured by then, could still be an pretty effective tank even as late as Normandy, if it was the British 'Firefly' version fitted with our 17 Pounder anti tank gun that is. This formidable weapon was quite capable of destroying the biggest meanest Panzers the German army could field. Speaking of which, littun talked me into taking him to Bovington Tank Museum yet again last Sunday - this boy is Saints and tank mad - but both of us were somewhat disappointed to see that 'TIGER 131' (the star of the collection) was AWOL because it was away making a film with Brad Pitt don't you know. Isn't it infuriating when a 56 ton lump of old iron gets to have a much more varied and exciting existence than you do!

Every game I see this little old chap (who bares a striking resemblance to Old Father Time) arrive at least fifteen minutes late and then proceed to climb up to a high back row of Block 19 at a pace that can only be described as 'glacial'. Bless him, the time it takes him to get anywhere he must miss half the action. God alone knows when he gets back home after the game .... sometime Sunday morning I should think. It's sad but somehow funny at the same time if you know what I mean - funny that is until I realise that in not so many years time I might have the same trouble!