shurlock

But he's a different player - much better on the ball but less good in the air. Not saying he hasn't got a role to play; just that I have doubts whether he'll be able to lead the line.

Out of all our players, arguably Lambert's going to have to adapt his game the most to thrive in the championship. Think he can do a v.effective job in a deeper position, creating chances for others and arguably he's most comfortable in this position; but just don't see him having the pace and movement on the floor or the presence and power in the air to really lead the line as he did in L1. Puts extra onus on getting in a proper front man for this level.

Its v.unlikely he will go to Leicester as per post 148 - they have King, Oakley, Wellens, Abe and now Danns (as well as a few others who can fill in at CM); any money they now spend will be on a CB to replace Hobbs and a CF to replace Yakubu/Kamara. Re. Burnley: from what i understand, they don't have the funds and/or unwilling to meet Chelsea's valuation/Cork's wage demands - not least because McCann has penned a new deal. West Ham would seem an obvious destination; but its hard to know how credible -they are financially or agent's talk is. While I don't think we're Cork's ideal choice; that' s not necessarily here or there. We seem to be the only show in town at the moment and that counts for more than some here suggest.

FFS, do you want him to swear a blood oath? Any player who is contracted to a club and knows their long-term ambitions depend on them doing well for the club won't have any trouble finding 'commitment'. As for Stephens, the kid didn't strike me as complacent or uninterested; but nervous and slightly overawed when he played for us, suggesting, if anything, the opposite problem. Either way, its a totally different kettle of fish when you're on loan at the club compared to being permanent - you know that if you f**k up, especially if like Stephens you start week-in, week-out, you've got a club to go back to.

Can't see Leicester going in for him now that they've got Danns. They already have so many CMs that their lot's first reaction on hearing they had landed Danns was not upbeat or positve but the fear that the decks were being cleared for the sale of their talisman Andy King. With King, Oakley, Wellens, Abe and now Danns, they're stuffed with CMs.

Disagree - IMO NA was properly disappointed. You just have to count the number of times NA referred to OG in interviews to appreciate that the club supported and saw something in him (wasn't it somebody on here who spotted NA having coffee with OG in town, leading them to liken the two to a headteacher and pupil); and these were not sweet-nothing words: Wotton was released to open up a berth for OG when many others would have played it safe and kept him as CM back-up.

FFS, can't blame him for leaving. Not played in 2 years - not all of which was down to injury. Currently the 4th choice CM and with the arrival of Cork or someone else (which was happening regardless of OG's plans), the 5th. Fair play he wanted to kickstart his career. Going out on a loan can be quite disruptive for someones's development if they can't see a path into the first team. Better to bite the bullet and get established elsewhere.

We'll do what we want and all that; but we're no longer in L1. Wouldn't be surprised if the newboys tag affects our ability to recrituit. Even if we go on and blitz the league, would an ambitious player at the start of the season take a gamble with us, an unknown quantity or plump for a proven championship side?

Wot, is that the new shirt?

TBF, you're the only one who paid any notice to the story.

Disagree - class is class. Obviously, you need to watch for attitudes; but Adkins strikes me as a good reader of people. Which Pompey route? I guess you don't mean the one that got them promoted in the first place and involved drafting in the likes of Merson, Stone, Sherwood, Berger, ageing but model pros who could no longer make it in the prem but were still a cut above in the championship.

"The spirit amongst the lads is great and you can't buy that" Priceless

Did some work on this for the gov and methodologically its an extremely difficult question to disentangle - at least to produce anything rigorous. However, there are a few academic/policy papers that lend support to this argument. My favourite is a piece -published in the context of NHS and nurses pay- which found that higher outside wages in the local labour market made it difficult to retain and recruit experienced permanent staff resulting in greater deaths per year amongst patients who had been admitted to hospital following a heart attack. A 10% increase in the outside wage is associated with a 4% to 8% increase in hospital deaths from heart attacks. Whatever you say about ethos and motviation, public sector workers DO respond to monetary incentives and low pay can literally kill. You pay peanuts, you get monkeys. The paper explicitly criticised national pay bargaining which means public sector workers get paid the same irrespective of where they are located in the country (notwithstanding a modest London allowance) such that if you are oop north the public sector is a honeypot (since outside wages/living costs are very low) while if you are in the south east (where private sector pay for comparable skills is higher), you fare poorly in it - hence difficulties recruiting good workers into public sector which ultimately harms the users of the services these workers deliver.

Jack Cork

We're cradle-snatchers - we don't need to.

Will be a case of adkins bingo, mixing the coy with the cliche. No doubt one or more of the following stone wallers will come up: We're working hard behind the scenes to get things done. Its one of them, the best things are kept as private as possible. Its important who we bring in, that its the right person, not just somebody for the sake of doing it. Is that right? I've not read that one. You know more than me, then. We've got a good strong squad of players in the building at this moment in time and we always talk about getting the best out of the players we've got. Together as one. He's a Doncaster player. Full stop. There will be speculation and we've got to make sure that we control that to a level to allow the player to flourish He's one of our players. He's got a smile on his face. He's working hard. We're looking forward to him scoring more goals for southampton. That's the beauty of football, that's the drama of it, the speculation goes on. Its great. That's what makes football go around.

Beavis

Wasn't that North Korean player compared to Rooney in the world cup, the dog-eating wazza.

Heaney wasn't half bad for us.

Until the next time it blows up -at least, the jerries have learned their lesson or failing that their military had its hands tied.

The country has been heavily dependent on the City for well over a century - dates back to Victorian times (check Dickens’s Mr Merdle for a literary reference or the discussion of MacMillan gap between WWI and WWII). In one sense, political parties of all stripes have simply going along with the grain of the country's comparative advantage - much safer to do than execute and nail some risky industrial pirouette, even if it has long-term advantages.

How about on the liability side- the fiscal costs of bailing out banks and the slowdown an unstable, highly leveraged banking system has had on the wider economy? Once you net out these effects, increased tax revenues look like crumbs.

Of course, its not just the loony left that wants tighter regulation of bankers - once you adjust for risk, the contribution banks make to the economy looks less rosy. Increased tax revenues is more than offset by direct fiscal costs and wider output losses. And the idea that most banks would move wholesale to another country in response to higher taxation/tighter regulation has been discredited pretty convincingly - check the Vickers report, the major report in this area. Aint got a problem with wealth creators - if anything, the case against parts of the banking industry is about protecting, not dismantling capitalism, ensuring a proper symmetry between individual reward and failure. The alternative is socialism...

It was a sh*t, derivative thread (not the first time, someone's defaced a wiki page), so deserved the fate it got. Sounds like the OP's dressing up sour grapes as some kind of righteous if bogus cause. IMO the forum has got funnier over the past month (though perhaps not intentionally). Been quite funny to watch posters tear pieces out of each other and some act like knobheads -big chafed, reddened ones- as the boredom, antsiness and p ri ck ly heat of the summer break has tightened its grip.

Its far from straightforward to me when and how long the cut-off for renewing STs is - there's nothing logical about starting on July1 and ending on July 14, esp compared to your facetious statement that STs are bought during the summer (I wish it were that simple). We're also human - we sometimes get lost in mountains of text -more likely when a price plan is written for all kinds of customers with all kinds of needs (surely a personalised email or letter just for existing STs is clearer?). Finally science underlines how humans procastrinate, how we tend put off decisions off to our cost and regret; as such, any gentle reminder or nudge, even a cursory email on something as ultimately trivial as a ST renewal, is to be welcomed. FFS am a mug for getting caught up in this...