rallyboy

1. Do not talk about Fight Club. 2. Do not talk about Fight Club. 3. Ignore 98% of internet forum advice/rumours.

yeah, the first thing Matt wants to do after assisting in the salvation of 124 years of history is to bring an end to it. Nice try to wind people up though, a good study in how a rumour becomes fact as it evolves....

like it, and the fact that Rudi has rested the shirt for a while and kept it clean and sweat-free makes it a natural progression. Replica shirt sales would soar as I can't imagine there are many players' names in the current squad you would want on a shirt.

For those people who have run out of commas I have a few below you can use. They do break sentences up and aid breathing for those trying to read. ,,,,,,,, ,,,

saw Orient last year, he should concentrate more on knocking down their stand that looks like a tribute to football in the 30s or perhaps buying some decent players. They have a nice little ground, though it is more aimed at the people who live in it than football. Orient is half a football club and half a housing development. And I do recall him hanging out at Pompey with Terry Brady when their great Venables experiment was at it's peak.

Reflecting on my early days of going to the Dell, I can't help but think there must be a few more like me thinking, if my Dad was still about he would go up the wall at what has gone on here, in fact I am not even sure I could put up with how annoyed he would be!

I remember standing at Highbury and watching the Everton fans spill all over the pitch celebrating Heath's winner - Shilts stood with hands on hips, grubby scousers leaping about, that should have been our year... As for tracking our decline from afar Tim, let me tell you that in the last six months the fans have given far more support to the team than they deserved, while the players struggled hopelessly the support was at times magnificent - the spirit that celebrated life at the Dell is still there, keep the faith. Even if we are wound up, one day soon some poor footballing backwater in the conference will get a good beating from New Saints!! We have to believe that we will rise again, and don't be depressed by what is happening down the road, you can give some people a billion quid but they will still spend it on pegs, horse brass and caravans.

I see that the administrators have opened their new office in Portsmouth. Handy if the arab with ties to Manchester City and a guy up on torture charges proves to be involved with another club or for that matter, people who are up on torture charges. Scudamore didn't bother to look at their last two chairmen so I don't suppose he will look too hard at these characters either. But it would be funny if he is just a caravan wheel kicker, that would be an oasis of ****ing-your-pants humour in the current desert of despair!

The alleged shirt curse didn't seem to prevent us hammering Pompey when they came over, that might have been an indicator if there was any spooky truth in it. And if their new owner has to remove travelling folk from any site to make way for a new ground he had better be polite if he wants their continued support.

so there is no money for the staff but the bill for Mr '48 hours' Fry keeps climbing. I hope he is on a 'no sale, no fee' deal, because if not he could drag it out a bit longer and overtake Barclays on the creditors list. How about some good news from SMS for a flipping change.

and while we look for cash down the back of the sofa to pay the wages Peter Storrie is revelling in new wealth and talking to caravan makers about designing the first 50,000 seater stadium with wheels and a towbar - with a family centre where you can buy a pair of seats to sit with your wife and sister. Any super yachts on the horizon? In the next 48 hours?...

Bearing in mind Storrie can sell Pompey over afternoon tea, incl due diligence etc, could Mr Fry get off his arse and get a deal done because them getting new investment before us is about as stupid as us getting relegated. We are cursed, that is the only rational explanation.

a balanced summing up there from The9 - I hope that no.5/6 on that scale is realistic, what happens in 'the next 48 hours'/'by Friday' may decide whether we are looking at level 1 or level 8. But if anyone wants to pretend none of this has happened to us and continue to debate what international manager we are going to attract instead, go for it! I think we should sign Tevez and Terry, get Keegan and Shearer as a coaching dream team, we could get a club Lear Jet, have our own radio station, have catering the envy of........oh hang on...

I fear that new investors will have been put off by the poor use of language on this thread. Or they may have died of boredom ploughing through it, trying to find something relevant to the topic.

nice to see in the Echo that Fry is keen to rush through a sale. Thank god he isn't dragging his feet or it could go on for weeks with no sign of significant progress, just pointless deadlines coming and going, and the media fobbed off with rumours. That would be frustrating if it happened, and would suggest that Fry is racking up a huge bill and achieving nowt, and that would be worrying. But luckily that isn't the case. Apparently.

a very exciting player, and in recent years a great man as well.

you are right about this season's efforts, quite a ropey collection I thought. I always think that the most important part of a contender is the actual finish so I have never been a fan of those 28 passes and a tap-in sort of goals (Archie Gemmel for Forest...) Haven't they missed some good ones off the list? Wigan overhead volley? As for all time, Matt's best are right up there with several of Henry's - running from the halfway line and holding off about four defenders, and Di Canio's volley that for anyone who has kicked a ball was the perfect execution of a difficult skill, and it was before he went all extremist. Let's face it, most of us have leapt up and volleyed a similar cross with the outside of the foot, and many of them went out for a throw...

I've got better things to do than read a thread and put up a pointless comment.

It was nice to see there is a team out there with much-higher paid players than ours and who care even less about their club. That must be the best squad on paper to ever go down (?), and they deserved it with consistent apathy. As for Shearer coming here to work for maybe 1/20th of his current salary, I think he may feel he has unfinished business up there.

I think we may have covered this already.

Give me £14M and I will take Eastleigh, Havant or Salisbury into the Championship, that is how overpriced our club sounds. Let's remember that this particular money will be going out of football, not into the future of the club - some people are still confused thinking that we will be able to spend £14M on players... Fry - stop faffing about and get it sorted.

No one in their right mind is going to clear the debts discounted in one hit, and no one will clear the lot by paying £14M up front and restructuring the rest so Mr Fry is either a raving lunatic or there is far more to the deal. It sounds like a ridiculous figure. You need £14mill to buy, the same again to restructure debt, the same again to run the club for a year, the same again to overcome points penalties. That's a lot of money to stand still. Another £14M to get into the Championship and double it to get into the Prem and we are looking for an investor with an enormous amount of patience and £100M to hand. (you picky people - don't bother disputing the figures, they are approx!) If you are in that league you would buy the reasonably-priced Reading or someone like that, not a failing Lg One team on minus points with an awful squad. Any new owner will be looking at the future cost as the main barrier, not the relatively cheap deal to take the reins, and that ain't cheap. Nice that Mr Fry is following his brief to get the best for creditors but on current form he is heading for getting them nothing, so if he is the only one who makes any money, in the traditional way of the banking world it will be a reward for failure. Let us hope his brinksmanship is the right side of the line that separates idiots from shrewd negotiators, the jury is out.

Looks a bit odd to me. It appears that the main investor is using his loans to take full control of the club. The club will NEVER repay that amount without getting into the Champion's League and increasing the stadium size, so in a few years he will force the other shareholders out through default of repayments, and on top of that they don't even own the land!.... IMO it's not a new dawn for them, it's a 22,000 seater can of worms.

Owing someone £100K is your problem, owing £24M is most definitely THEIR problem. I don't see how the main creditors could benefit from the club folding, there isn't anything worth selling. Barclays are at the back of the queue so they will get nowt, Norwich Union might get a stadium that is worth 3 or 4 million if they can sell it to someone else like the council, but even they need a club to cover some rent so without a club there is little hope of selling SMS - NU's best deal is getting maybe a million a year for the next dozen years. Common sense says they must agree debt-restructuring with new owners to have any hope of getting some money back. If I was a consortium I would play hardball because these two creditors have got nothing to bargain with, you could tell them how much they are going to get or they could whistle for it, and this has become less-risky since relegation. Lg One or the conference? We ain't talking about the Prem so close us down and wave goodbye to the whole lot the pair of you if you want to threaten the only people likely to give you some of your money back, could be one hardline approach. Good luck with planning for the stadium Mr NU, you will be the proud owner of a white elephant if you don't accept new terms, welcome to 2009! Hopefully it won't come to that and they can all get together and play nicely but a few financial institutions have to re-position themselves realistically post-crunch. And on a PR level, if it all goes pear-shaped and the two main creditors are one day shown to have closed Southampton FC, their businesses in the city could be shot to bits for a generation and beyond.

Dealing with figures and expectations Mr Fry should be adept at being VERY precise with anything that he says. He has stated quite clearly that he thinks that completing a deal for the club is unlikely, not that he can't come to an agreement with Pinnacle. Either he is as poor at using language as he is at selling things, or he has come over all vague at a vital moment.