CanadaSaint

This year there will be a premium on getting forward quickly and, more to the point, getting back quickly. While Richardson has an older and wiser head, I suspect that he will be shown to be dangerously short on pace - something teams at this level will quickly exploit. What Clyne lacks in wisdom he can largely make up for with speed. IMO this will (hopefully) be a very key signing for us - short term and long term.

Well, they've been coming up a little short for quite some time so Gillett fits the bill.

And so we have another crap thread turning into another p*ssing contest. Roll on season start.

I seem to recall dear old Joe Mercer saying that someone at a world cup had been sent off for "violence of the tongue." If that's where things are going we're going to end up with some six-a-sides.

Did we ever establish who the "third party" was? If it really was Buttner's father, as rumoured at one point, I could see Cortese cooling on the deal.

I'm getting close to being concerned. "Old" football or "new" football, you need strength - and depth - "up the middle" in order to have a chance of being a decent side. It troubles me that we have no goalkeeping cover and no cover in the middle of defence, all the more so for the fact that one of our two first choice central defenders didn't play well for much of the second half of the season. If Fonte was somewhat exposed against Championship teams, he's not going to find life easier in the Premier. Hopefully we'll see the Fonte of the first 20 or so games rather than the one of the last 20 or so. That being said, I have a lot of faith that Adkins knows what he's doing.

No white stripes?

Yeah, ironic, isn't it? But they're also renowned for the "Do what we say, not what we do" mindset. And a lot of 'em don't have much regard for England or English football, and still think there's some score-settling to be done.

In this new electronic world - and it was electronic back then as well - very little disappears into the ether completely. I'm sure the big chains keep records, just in case stuff like this emerges later. I'm also sure that they're "on it" right now.

I don't disagree with what you say but that's not how it will be seen from outside the club and its fan base. Claus has a major brain fart and everyone else ends up smelling, whether they deserve to or not.

This is going to get a hell of a lot bigger and, probably, much farther reaching. As others have said, the precedent has been set in cricket. It's an extensive investigation and jail time for those found guilty. It's a huge embarrassment for the club - at least until former players from a much bigger club are drawn into it, which probably won't be long.

I'll pose a couple of questions because they've been "bugging" me since MLT first mentioned this - and even more since Claus saw fit to flap his lips about it. Given the tendency for footballers to talk about this kind of stuff among themselves, and the fact that some of these things needed more than one player to pull them off, how far did the betting reach among the squads of those eras? Given the tendency for footballers to giggle like schoolgirls in the dressing room when something tickles them, just how aware were the managers of the time? Surely, they weren't completely oblivious to it, were they?

First 30 seconds, wasn't it? I remember thinking that Claus had taken leave of his senses and would be very lucky to stay on the pitch. And now I find myself starting to wonder what the odds would be on a red card in the first minute of an FA Cup Final.

All the best Whitey. Great advice and I, for one, need to heed it even if it does sound really boring. Get that ticker sorted because we're all going to need a good one this year! P.S. Thanks Gemmel.

I couldn't agree more.

Bearsy has been stirring occasionally for several years now.

Pleased for Corky. Not sure how happy I am that he'll be exposed to Pearce's coaching for a while.

I hear what you're saying because MLG's corrections grate on me as well, but he still makes some good points beyond those - and I can ignore the annoying bits. I'm all for a bit of banter but there's a difference between that and the constant sneering and sarcasm that's contaminating almost every thread. It's reached the point at which a lot of good posters don't bother any more, which is sad. No, TK, it isn't that simple because a) people quote them, b) their 'contributions de-rail entire threads, and c) it's getting worse every week. The simple answer is for people who want this forum to succeed is to reign-in the sarcasm and sneering. I've been on here (and its predecessors) for eight years and I'm just about ready to quit visiting because it's so frustrating. It kind of defeats the point behind cheering for the same team.

It seems to me that Spain's style is built around some particular players, and if they play something more akin to 4-6-0 right now it's largely because they lost David Villa to long term injury. I'd suggest that the Italians would have been buried much earlier had he been playing. When they brought Torres on, who hasn't been really effective for some time, they looked lethal against a fast-tiring team. I completely agree with your comment about English football. When it comes to the comparison the OP was raising, I'd suggest that our triangles are about 15-20 yards longer than Spain's and that our main playmaker - Morgan - starts off about 20 yards farther back from where Xavi and Iniesta start to initiate attacks. I'm hoping that one of our goals this year is to enable Morgan to play a bit farther forward or to sign someone to fill that role. We've signed some very pacey strikers (Rodriguez, Lee) and we need someone capable of feeding them an early ball as one of our attack options - or else there wasn't much point in buying them. That would give us a lot of options when it comes to attack but we'd be very different to Spain.

WTF is wrong with people on here? MLG posts a fairly positive story and it's instantly buried under an avalanche of sneering and snide comments. Damn near every topic on here ends up going down the same toilet, as some people choose to contaminate it with their sarcasm. Give it a rest FFS or else there will be nobody left on here whose opinions are worth reading. Many already don't bother any more as it is.

I'm not sure that he has no sense of history - he's too smart for that. I think he sees it as an obstruction to the kind of progress he has in mind. In both the playing and financial contexts. The anti-Cortese brigade would go into meltdown if they could see what this club (and the cost of following it) will look like in five years if we go where he's planning on taking us. I'm not saying that's a bad thing at all, but that his goals will involve much more of this kind of change.

Now I'm starting to get a little worried. We splash out seven mill on yet another striker and we're scratching around in the bargain bin for one of the most critical upgrades we need. I've never rated Jenas and I don't think he'd add anything at all. I, too, would prefer Hargreaves but this isn't a position we can afford to fill with unreliability.

It's been a really negative close season on here, even after the triumphant last two years. God knows what this forum's going to be like when we actually start playing football. Against the big guys.

Given the vast array of red and white striped shirts from different eras worn by the fans, it makes big commercial sense because it outdates all of them. However, it's a massive "f*ck you" to the club's tradition.

They've done it so that it'll be easier to read the names of all our new players.