hughieslastminutegoal

I hope you don't accept everything so unquestioningly. It sounds awfully subservient to me .. the rich and powerful, by being rich and powerful must by defintion know more than me, so I will trust them implicitly and completely (and I'll try to disuade everyone else from even asking questions). Presumably you would support the statement that RBS (for example) was run by professionals who knew what they were doing, and therefore no one else outside of the banking industry should be concerned enough to ask why did it all happen?

Isn't that a bit like saying bankers must have done something right for their enormous bonuses? Sounds more like "people like me like people like me..."

If so he doesn't deserve an award, as he did nothing spectacular. Maybe Cortese/Leibherr played a canny game, got the club cheaper than Fry was trying to get for it. If so Fry did nothing out of the ordinary for the creditors, other than take the only real offer being made, at the very last minute. I wish everyone could win an award for taking the only option available to them.

Isn't it amazing that the richest professional football league set up in the world cannot get proper reserve team football organised effectively. Especially in the Prem, how much talent is unchallenged and virtually unwatched. R I D I C U L O U S.

I was answering the thread's question the way it was asked, which was very specifically about past players. My mistake for not changing it into something it wasn't. You chose to attack people who were responding as invited, with the comment that they were "digressing into irrelevant comparisons with past players", patently absurd (and maybe even a tiny bit insulting?) in the context of the thread. I apologise for suggesting you couldn't read, so I'll phrase it more accurately: "Please re-read the thread initiator's question as I think you have completely misunderstood what it was about - which was about past players as well as Paul Wotton, more so really, - no insult intended." Nowhere did I even attempt to make a comparison between Wotton and any past player, other than by accepting the initiator's opinion that PW might be the crowd's whipping boy, as some past players have been. Now a person who did get the thread's question might have understood I was saying (as invited to do by the thread) that one particular past player (whom I actually respected a lot) was the undeserved whipping boy of some "fans", and that the crowd in my opinion was wrong. Other posters have supported different players picked on by sections of the crowd. You seem to be implying that it is ok to pick on Wotton and that it is ok to make a player a whipping boy if you think he isn't very good. Nowadays you have an internet forum on which to criticise a player, which is fine. My view is that it doesn't help, and it is unnecessary, to vent your spleen against one of your own players during the match itself, especially when you just might be wrong.

Could have been worse - he could have put that T after the H.

Is Torquay now our Nursery club?

I think you missed the word "TOP". Last season that word was "ANY", and "ONE AT ALL" was used instead of TALENT.

But that's not really getting the 3m transfer fee back is it? You'd hope that perhaps a clause might be included in such contracts to the effect that if you are sacked through gross misconduct you will have to pay back the transfer fee in proportion to the time that would otherwise have been left on the contract. That might focus their attention, and give some power to the employer to insist on better behaviour. I actually think "refusing to play (cos I want a better deal somewhere else)" sometimes could be treated as gross misconduct and incur similar a penalty.

That'll be fans favourite WGS will it?

Only time travellers can score a goal more than once. Jimmy was possibly the most shot-shy player I've ever seen. I can recall a time when he was totally on his own just inside the penalty area with just the keeper to beat - and still passed it sideways away from goal. It was such an obvious chicken-out that he was bound to get more stick from then on. He was well past his best when Ted Bates signed him for 30k, but he did bring some composure to midfield and contributed to getting us promoted to the top division for the first time. He was a good example of why fans should save their criticism until after the game. Baracking your own players when they are on the pitch just makes them uncertain and hesitant. It just ain't supporting your team. Conversely baracking the opposition often makes them fight harder!

Irrelevant comparisons with past players? There's me thinking the thread asked the question "Who has been a whipping boy and deserved it, and who was better than the fans thought?" Note the past tense. Learn to read matey.

There are occasions when you need to stop digging yourself in deeper. People have pointed out the times it would have been easier for us to score when we missed. That is hardly Orient's game plan working, more like damn lucky. Sh*t happens. Don't always try to read too much into it. You started by asking a question which I think has been resoundingly answered. But you don't seem to want to hear what they are saying, and are now propounding what you want to believe. And I am certainly no "happy clappy support the management whatever" type.

Yes. Did Ron Matthews really pull Terry down by his left ear for a penalty when we beat Derby 6-4 and we were down to 9 men, or was Terry just conning the ref (again)?

Crossing the halfway line becomes a difficult manoeuvre - if you stay in a circle, the other team all step over the halfway line and catch half the team offside. But I've seen it where the team in a circle suddenly stretch out into a straight line across the pitch just as the other side step over the halfway line, and then all gallop like crazy towards the opposition goal, making sure the man with the ball is just in front of the rest. Oh, sorry, that's rugby after a scrum.... Woodward, where are you when we need your tactical advice?

No. Because you can't come up with a set of numbers separated by hyphens for such a system.

How can you propound such heresy? I don't know how you look at yourself in the mirror in the morning and not see horns growing out of your head and a forked tail. We all know it is IMPOSSIBLE to play 4-5-1 and train to adapt it at will to push one wide player up front closer to the lone stiker, and drop the opposite wide midfielder inside a tad at various times in the match. Professional footballers just can't get the hang of it. We all know that our footballers are all dumber than the average NFL player, none of whom can remember a variety of plays at all. It has got to be one or the other. .

Now, say we'd signed a player for £3m on a 3 year contract, and he then goes and gets banged up and has to serve 3 years. Great - cancel his contract and save the wages... but you've still wasted £3m. Are there any rules about that? Maybe the club has to cover that risk with insurance, if so I'd think King is now uninsurable.

You aren't seriously saying football club badges are pieces of art are you? A japanese whole back tattoo might be a work of art, but that thing we call a club badge? And whether it's a work of art or not, I wouldn't want to be saddled with it for the rest of my life, as my taste in art will almost certainly change over a lifetime. Even your club alliegance could change - what if the NC and ML hadn't come along and saved the club from extinction? What if the new owner hated red & white? Tattooing is a fashion - it went seriously out of fashion after National Service was done a way with, and will go out of fashion again. Why mark yourself for life for something as fleeting as fashion? But to be honest I can (just about) understand that having a tattoo representing what you think will be a life-long alliegance to a club means more than a bunch of chinese characters or temporarily fashionable celtic scrolls.

Hughie is the classic example of a player doing a job for the team which, because it isn't flashy, was derided by the ignorant. Never once could you say he hid, he ALWAYS made himself available to the player in trouble with the ball, the classic "be available, receive, pass, move, and be available again". He wasn't especially a ball-winner in the Brian O'Neil mould, as Hughie always wanted to stay on his feet. But when you play like that you are inevitably in possession an awful lot - and as a result you risk the crowd's ire for any misplaced pass, even if your % completion is good. In that respect he was very much like Alan Ball. Good managers really don't need the advice of those fans who are incapable of watching anything other than the man with the ball, while players (like Fisher and Ball) don't play any better with morons getting on their backs at the drop of a hat.

I would think that his regular offending could be deemed to be bringing disrepute onto the industry, just as inappropriate behaviour can cause a doctor to be struck off. But the FA needs to say what the rules and expectations are, and what the likely punishments are 'up front' - they can't just invent them whenever they feel like it, just because they think this time it's gone too far. It mustn't smack of arbitrariness. In this day and age, young females can be easily impressed by famous and overpaid footballers, and therefore the footballing authorities need to require a high standard of behaviour from these players to go some way towards helping to protect them. After all, other professions are required to behave better than the average thug.

Might be a little bit strong -- but it's the ones who have something in "chinese" tattooed on themselves make me smile -- how the hell do you know what it says to a chinese fella? Probably means something like "Big Dog's Brown Excrement". They all look like a dirty-blue smear after 25 years anyway. And as for Amy Winehouse -- the scribble she's got on her looks like something off the cover of a 12 year old's school excercise book.

You bother to listen to Talk Sport's brand of neanderthal broadcasting?

Yes he did fall over quite a lot - but between two stools? That's not a nice way to talk about our previous midfielders.

I think you are spot on. People keep saying he played out of his skin when he first came. To me he looked pretty average but he had one of those runs of scoring luck that many bog standard strikers get once in a while. He really has never looked any different to me, it's just that little purple scoring spell hasn't shown sign of coming around again. When we offered him a contract not everyone on here thought he was really the answer, to me he was never more than "oh well, maybe he'll turn out ok". He hasn't.