rallyboy

you have to take your hat off to the russians. They offloaded a truly awful manager, demanded money for him - and they kept a straight face until they got back in the car. I guess the real test is yet to come - let's hope they have an equally awful replacement lined up, which is quite likely.

Ho me old mucker just putting aside the amusing image of the CIA waterboarding Phil in his orange boiler suit, just to gain access to his busy mind - I'm not sure I follow the idea that the Liebherr family will want £50M just to break even.... Can you just run those figures past me again, perhaps with a little more detail....

well that's cleared all that up then. While Ho tries to bore the thread to death, Phil encourages Ho to suffer a mental breakdown by attempting to make sense of all the clues.

would you buy the top of the range, low mileage, one owner Audi that could really do with a new parcel shelf, OR the rusting 1975 insurance write-off cut-and-shut Trabant that has a terminal engine problem, four wheel clamps attached, has already been involved in two fatals, has outstanding parking tickets and comes with a list of dodgy former keepers that looks like a court listing? Whatever the Liebherr family decide to do in the future they currently have a really attractive asset - a progressive business with good facilities, great footballing potential, and in footballing terms it is debt-free - a rare and sought after beast. It ticks every box and would generate a very good price on the open market. And before Ho starts on debt, I'm not saying we shouldn't keep an eye on outgoings, but money lent by the owner to a valuable business is not debt. However, lending money into a business with no structure or chance of repaying just so you can take control of it and usher it through insolvency using your pet administrator as a paid puppet is called loan sharking. So no, I'm not worried about the 'debt' created by the sensibly-planned and successful rebuild required during our exit from administration.

knocking out away shirts half price is standard business practice. In May! With that and the ticket deals, a cynical man might suggest it could indicate a cashflow problem. But I'm sure it's just a reward for the hardcore support from the cash rich owners.

It must be difficult not to have your head turned by the money involved. Agent. My client wants to buy player X. Seller. He's not for sale. Agent. They'll pay £10M. Seller. No thanks. Agent. He's already been tapped up with a massive pay increase. Seller. He's not going anywhere. Agent. How about £6M...and there's £1M each for you and I to make it happen.................... Seller. See you at the services in 10mins. And completely unrelated - I'm not convinced about the huge profits claimed on transfer deals like the Johnson one. A player rockets in value....that means he has either developed amazingly - or he was deliberately undervalued in the books for the initial deal. Perhaps agent fees were quite large, or perhaps his signing on fee was massive, he may have had a few million for image rights, or perhaps there were other monies moved to other parties who smoothed the deal through.... I'm sure some agents can make any deal happen, but they will want a huge slice of big profits, and that cannot appear in the books. Then you add in his wages on and the huge profit looks a bit paltry. So I'm sure there was a profit, but we all saw the agent fees in the accounts and we all know that there seems to be a lot of money unaccounted for. Perhaps the forensic investigation will explain a few of the odd deals.

mmmm, I'm starting to wonder whether the figures stack up.... If I was forced to offer an opinion I think I might suggest that perhaps they don't. So when did/will the russians realise, and what is their exit/crisis plan?

so Forest will pay pompey £300K to take Cotterill off their hands?? This is where the Russians' WRC experience comes in - fire up the Scooby and get Cotterill to Nottingham before they change their mind. I'm pretty sure we did the same driving Burley to Scotland.

Steve Cotterill celebrated Tal Ben Haim’s unlikely Pompey revival and insisted: He’s a key part of our team now. Yes Steve, he is key, mainly as the club is passing all of their matchday income directly to him! His contract is nearly as big as the club itself. He is key to holding the business back from rebuilding in a sensible way. He's a big chunky millstone around your neck Stevie boy - but you keep telling us otherwise and maybe one day we will believe you...

pity you didn't wake up some of the England rugby team. They just need Gerrard and Lampard failing miserably to reproduce club form in the middle and it'll be like every flipping football world cup we've been to in the last three decades. I still reckon we can have the French at cricket.

presuming the russians have trousered the season ticket money the matchday income is starting to look like 5,500 x £15. Which is just enough to pay Ben Haim and a cleaner.

as one of those who doubted their wisdom, I still don't see how the game was a good idea U.P. A personal donation by the owners would have been worthy and constructive, but a predictably poorly-attended game where the tickets have to be all but given away doesn't really support the cause. At least they did something? Many clubs do a lot of things for various causes, but they think them through and don't set up games that will lose money when a donation would have been sensible. So I still maintain it wasn't a great idea.

though the few become fewer by the day, let's not pretend that we'd have got 20,000+ for a similar game, the mistake was holding it at all. It was well-motivated but emotionally self-indulgent by the owners - they would have done better to just put their hands in their pockets if they wanted to assist the families, or to get the players to wear t-shirts in a warm up or similar. Holding a high profile fundraiser just adds to the hassle over charities and their relationship with the club. So IMO the game could be considered a poor business decision - though hopefully the win keeps Cotterill in place for a few more games, I really did fear they were going to dump him in this break.

any wagecap and a common sense attitude to finance is nothing to do with the CVA, it's to keep the football authorities onside as they still want to see projections and budgets that make sense, all part of the post-admin agreements. Lampitt's major role is presumably to make sure that his former colleagues accept any bonkers plans they submit. So yes they can pay someone £100K a week.....but they'll find that their golden share has gone walkies pretty sharpish if they do. Pompey also need to get into the little thing that other league clubs have to do - to file accounts. And we don't mean a fantasy version as per the Premier League set, or the ones where you withold wages to manufacture a profit.

even now as Cotterill is being regularly exposed as a failure, the spin and hype about last season continues. He didn't perform a miracle with no funds, he took one of the most expensively assembled teams in the division and rather than competing for promotion as they should have done, he turned them into relegation survivors. That spin can be filed alongside the stuff about Avram being a good coach. And just to show how dim Clott and Lumpitt are, their suicidal quality over quantity plan that fell apart so hilariously last year is being repeated. Not through the state of the business, or outside pressures, they actually discussed it, agreed, and chose to pursue this course - while the russians say they sat down with the manager pre-season and agreed this plan as well. Anyway, bring on Avram please - his record will be just what they need, the league table never lies, and I can give my favourite prossie gags another airing.

all these £15K-£20K a week players are fine and dandy with the occasional £36K one thrown in, but I thought the financial statements and budgets presented to satisfy the authorities suggested that their would be a wagecap of approx £10K a week, with the need to bring many new players in on £3K-£5K just to break even and meet the CVA.... I don't know if anyone has mentioned it in the last 854 pages but it would seem that the figures don't add up. If 14K was a breakeven attendance to cover the outgoings, what attendance is required to cover the massive wages overspend? And I repeat, the first £250-£275 of every pompey season ticket goes to pay just one player.....the bloke they pretended they had sold to West Ham and whose wages they used as a loan to themselves to massage accounts for the russians' due diligence. No problem here, we've made a profit for the last six months... The equivalent of us paying Lambert approx £70K a week. An insane business plan - yet another that demands an immediate return to the Prem, not a season of survival.

you can't blame Ken Bates, its a mystery to him who even owns the club let alone who sets the prices, he's just as much a victim as the rest of us. Poor bloke. And to get back on topic, he's possibly only the worse man to have at your club than the last four or five pompey owners, in fact for all we and the league know of his complex, evasive and sinister business dealings, he might well have been one of their owners.

people are right about Lambert struggling yesterday. He was marked so tightly and physically that they kept him out of the game. And gave away two penalties as a result. Yes teams may have sussed us out - but as people have said there is one thing asking someone to mark Lallana out of the game, another doing it. Ditto the short passing - if we resort to the long ball because they have closed down our back four, a whole world of space and opportunity opens up for our midfield. We are a multi-dimensional team - or is it as Poyet suggests, no more than Dagenham playing hoof ball to a big front man?... Gus who?

went in weeks ago and was underwhelmed - didn't really take it too seriously after I saw that their nickname is apparently 'the Skaters'... Not much about their theft from charities either so it's a re-written version of history.

one of them said there that they are fast becoming the laughing stock of the south coast. No, they already ticked that box a couple of years back. If we hear no gobby claims from the even fewer I'm prepared to take it easy on them for a fortnight. I kind of feel sorry for them now, and I'm a bit worried they might sack the tactical genius Cotterill - we need to campaign for him to stay. He's doing a tremendous job with that small squad that he and Lampitt chose to have, brilliant coach....

he comes across so well, unless he turns into a lunatic in the dugout I can't see how the likes of Poyet can fall out with him, he's too likable. Top bloke, let's hope he can continue to deliver and we all move forward. As one. In the same direction. As a team. On the bus.

Whoops! That's another deal that could come back to bite them on the ars3. Can they check back through his earnings and images rights for the last five years.... Then again the russian says they are clean and have no tax issues, so I guess he knows best. Cue different company, different owners, nothing to do with our football club defence - though the present club seems to have a very similar name, history, ground, and is entered in the same league system as the one that was implicated in criminality. Ho hum.

it is standard to pay off contracts. The club decided it was worth paying off staff to get a new manager in. That new manager delivered, justifying the expenditure. The End No need for anyone to retweet it unless they wanted to score cheap points. So I hope it's a fake.

fortress fratton indeed! Welcome to hell!! Yes, we are all really scared - of both of you. And I could sense that Peterborough were overawed by the big arena experience with a massive crowd making up that 12th man - quite daunting, just need Avram shuffling around with his pants round his ankles bellowing into a microphone and then we'd be scared. And just returning to the Harbour Superdome for a mo, you must remember it, the ground that would be financed by world cup games? - if that wasn't a genuine attempt at producing a new stadium why did they spend more on architects plans than we spent on Rickie Lambert?

so the best opportunity on the south coast was actually the only opportunity as Brighton and Saints weren't for sale and Bmouth told them where to get off? And the 'no tax issues' claim? I think ongoing forensic investigations and club-related tax evasion charges might be considered issues worth mentioning.... So no, sorry Ho, the russian was talking cr+p. And don't get taken in by the Portsea pub myths - Cortese desperate to sell... Scummers heading for administration... They don't even own St Marys.... All the stuff that makes us laugh and makes many of the few look quite feebly-minded and easily taken in - see previous owners claims. File them with the hilarious dock strike myth stolen from West Ham/Millwall, the shirt under the pitch that is claimed at every new ground without fail, Lambert to sign for pompey last summer, etc, etc, etc. Our accounts look quite healthy from what I've seen, set up costs and the intitial squad rebuild post admin was expensive and would be a problem were we in League One. Our five year plan is on course and might even be a year ahead of schedule at the mo. So don't fret about our finances, concentrate on the car crash at your end of the M27. Its between a Saab and a Spyker, and both have rolled their caravans.