CanadaSaint

Minsk, I threw a minor wobbler at the address jasonb provided above. If enough of us complain I suspect the Club will have more influence than we could.

That's the service provider, isn't it? They have my money so I'm not expecting much there. I'd like to talk to someone at the Club - someone who who might be more concerned that their fans are being short-changed.

I'm in for the season but already starting to regret it because it's not a very good product. For that price I expected a far better commentary and no ongoing technical issues. I didn't expect to be bouncing hither and thither, checking on scores that don't interest me at all, and I didn't expect to be missing goals while the feed cuts out. Out of interest, who should we speak to at the Club if we want to express our concerns?

Excellent post. I couldn't agree more.

Is she good in the air then?

Just a reminder that the thread title is "New SIGNING expected shortly". Not "New SHAFTING expected in your wildest dreams and only after you've ingested loads of drugs and consumed copious amounts of alcohol". God, some of you guys must have carpel tunnel syndrome in the right wrist if you can take us this far off track.

Some people are confusing Profit & Loss and Cash Flow. Profit is the difference between the Club's revenues and expenses; Cash Flow is the difference between the company's inflows and outflows (not all of which are revenues and expenses). For example, concession revenues are a cash inflow but not a profit, because you've still got to pay for the pies you sold and the staff who sold them. Paying off the overdraft and the stadium loan means that we lose the interest payments from our Profit & Loss statement - a saving of maybe $3 million a year. Paying off the overdraft and the stadium loan means that we lose the principle and interest payments from our Cash Flow statement - a saving of maybe $4 million a year (because we weren't really paying down the overdaft anyway). Even though we're in the best cash flow period (season ticket revenues coming in, no 'proper' games being staged) we need to keep the money, along with more that we'll earn along the way - walk-up attendance, concession profits - to fund the entire season. Unless ML is willing to put his hand in his pocket to underwrite a loss (or to fund negative cash flow if we sign players), we're only really about $3 million (in Profit & Loss terms) better off than we were last season - at best. However, we don't have a stadium loan and we don't have an overdraft, so we aren't staring down the barrels of a twelve-bore. We haven't gained much cash but we've lost two lethal 'enemies'. Right now, it looks as though AP is trying to keep the books balanced, but there could be major signings around the corner. We don't know what ML's goals and aspirations are yet. We can still do well if we are run responsibly because the irresponsible option is starting to disappear across the country; the creditors are running scared. It might take time - and more administrations - to get to that point, but it's coming and we're already well set-up for it.

I'm braced. It's going to take time for us to acclimatize, with the "us" being AP, the players and the fans. Of the three, the fans will probably have the most trouble. I can see it now - "We're as good as 13 points behind", "... now it's sixteen points", "we're doomed", "I knew this Swiss dude was a phony", "Pardew's worse than Burley/Branfoot/Wigley/Wotte/Poortvliet", "Rupert's still back there somewhere", and so on. And that'll be before the end of August and the close of the transfer window. Meanwhile, inside the club, people who actually know what they're talking about will be plotting a top five finish, which is what we'll achieve.

I hear you, Hypo. But when (not "if") they get relegated, we can bring him back as our GK coach and give him a tracksuit with "Agent Antii" on the back. Just the thought of that makes it a little more palatable for me.

That's a sickener. He can handle being Number Two to David James but the way Pompey are going (shipping players out left, right and centre) he may well end up as Number One, and I don't think he's durable enough to handle a full season. Especially a full season behind the kind of sh*tty defence and losing record they're going to have.

I don't think we really know what kind of squad we have, and we won't know until they are moulded into a good system, used in ways that utilize their talents, given solid coaching and motivation, and given some time to gel. It's certainly not beyond the realms of possibility that some of last season's no-hopers will become very effective players under AP. Yes, I think we need to bring some players in - better established players for the most part - but rushing at it will A) do more harm than good, and B) waste money. Remember Sunderland's promotion from the CCC? They were crap for almost half a season and then nobody could touch them. We're Against Nutty Knee-jerk Action but that doesn't make us W*NKAs.

With a brand new minted owner and our season just days away, and with so much to look forward to, this thread about the lot down the road has the second-highest number of posts on the front page. 'kin Ada.

We'll have to differ on that one. He used to play right on the offside line and was lightning fast. For every ten goals he scored I'll bet he had at least a couple wrongly disallowed because he was too fast for the linesmen.

I think Lallana has a ton of potential but he has been allowed to lack positional discipline. Although he can bring a lot of skill, energy and creativity, he can also seem like a f*rt in a thunderstorm at times, and this indiscipline can destroy the team's shape. I really hope Pardew can sort this out because Lallana can be either a huge asset or a major liability, and that probably accounts for the wide spectrum of views on him.

We've tried throwing a load of sh*t against the wall and hoping some of it sticks. It didn't - during either the Redknapp or Burley eras. We've tried avoiding the transfer market in the belief that our kids could carry the load. They couldn't - at any point during the hideous Dutch experiment. What we haven't tried for quite some time is building a good system around the available talent and acting decisively to address weaknesses within financially acceptable parameters. The prerequisite for that is A) having a system that works, B) taking the time to figure out who fits within it and who doesn't, and C) establishing who wants to be here and who doesn't. A fair bit of that happened last week and at the weekend, and I'd expect the transfers to start arriving this week.

Keep posting please.

We (somewhat understandably) keep discussing this in the context of the past. ML is a very different form of owner to anything we've ever known and (whether we like it or not) it's HIS club, not ours. However, I very much get the sense that he's genuinely sensitive to the need for a strong relationship with the fan base (witness his unease about bidding against "MLT's group") and is high on ethics and values. But we also need to think about this in the context of a different kind of future. Professional football is unsustainable in its current form, and the chickens are heading home to roost at a lot of clubs. There are not enough Sugar Daddies to go around, and their interest usually wanes fairly quickly. Things have to change - quite drastically. We're heading for an era of greater financial responsibility, and the greatest asset in that era will be being debt free. The second-greatest asset will be having an owner who is capable of putting his hand (sensibly) into his pocket in order to move up to the next level. We had neither of those assets under recent regimes. We have both of them under ML.

Oi !! More respect from you please. Don't you realize that they had to play Old Corinthians and the Royal Engineers twice per year during those days? I don't wish them out of existence but I do wish them into reality.

From what I've seen AP really has to replace him because it's such a pivotal role. We can't succeed with inconsistency and questionable fitness in that position because that takes everything down the sh*tter with it. But get that one right and a whole lot of good things start to happen. So the question is who?

Just as Rupert's heavy (actually excessive) focus on the Academy and his revulsion for big transfer (and agents') fees was ahead of its time (so far ahead that it nearly killed us), so are we ahead of our time in having much of the infrastructure without the throttling debt. Pompey are in an especially precarious position because they have a lot of debt but still don't have the stadium - and the Avivas of this world aren't very keen on funding football stadia any more. When the "Sugar Daddy" types lose interest, and they will, we may well look back on these days as the making of the Club.

Lallana will become a lot more than a decent prospect IMO. But he needs better guidance and a clearer idea of how he fits into a decent system, both of which he'll get under Pardew. What he didn't need was being thrown in at the deep end within a dysfunctional system and left to figure it out for himself, which is what happened all too often last year.

He sounds like Rasiak's kind of manager! It sounds like Pardew has chatted to Rasiak and knows he'd prefer to leave, so Toomer's suggestion that it was a "shop window" performance may well be right. But after two goals and not being expected to track back too much, you never know.

A sniff of the coffee will tell you that this is far more likely this year than it was last. You know it. It's as though you're treading the same ground as us, but about three to five years behind. The big difference that will work against you (in the short and long term) is the drastically declining appetite in the financial community for loaning new ground or ground improvement funds. Our administration didn't help you at all on that front. Far from it. So the only way of boosting turnover (a bigger ground) might well be beyond your reach for the foreseeable future, which would mean that your prospects for surviving after relegation from the Prem would be dimmer than ours. It could get really ugly really quickly.

It's easy to rush to (negative) judgment on a lot of players when they are not being used or motivated properly, and Rasiak is far from the only example. For the first time in a long time we might be watching a manager who knows how to build a credible system around the players at his disposal, who knows how to motivate them, and who can see fairly quickly who can't cut the mustard. This is his first game with his hands fully on the reins, and that's why it wasn't too troubling to see him holding back on bringing players in last week. The coming week may well be very different.

I'm not advocating a "finger in the ear" mentality at all, or that we "ignore" the past. You're too good a poster to mis-characterize what others are saying. I am advocating that people stop re-hashing the past at every opportunity. You learn from the past and then you get on with trying to make the future better, and that's all that concerns me right now. How did we learn from Lowe's/Wilde's/Lowe's past transgressions - in such a way to make sure we were not jerked around again? Not very well judging by the succession of complete and utter screw-ups and the near-disappearance of the Club. Exactly how do you propose to hold Begbies and Fry "accountable"? They were working for the creditors, not us, and they have probably met the creditors' objectives. Everyone was taken in by Lynham & Co, at least for a time (including our own beloved MLT), so what's to learn there? No, I'm not saying that we should bury the past but that it's time to move on from it.