Verbal

This is actually wrong. The awfulness that is the north starts at the northern fringes of Regents Park, and the acceptable parts of Britain are mostly in a band between the park and the River Thames. Anything south of that is also dark and horrible - Southampton and Bonchurch excepted. This means our only real competitors are Chelsea (QPR, West Ham and Brentford being quarantined islands of crap.).

These bits are especially good: "Sacha Gaydamak's sale to Sulaiman Al Fahim, more front than Harrods but as much substance as an empty can of Coke, was the catalyst of the looming disaster, especially as the Russian still owns all the land around Fratton Park - and is owed more than half the total £60m debt. That Al Fahim was, in effect, a fraud - his claims simply not backed up and not a single bill paid during his short-lived spell at the helm - is now abundantly clear, although successor Ali Al Faraj does not have the cash required either." It's like they're living through our nightmare - the only difference being that whereas our flakes - like tommac, lifelongnit and HMR - never actually got their hands on the club, theirs did! History is repeated, first time as tragedy (because it really mattered), second time as farce.

And the owner is a certain Walter Mitty. That thing is ridiculous on so many levels.

You'll owe me £20 if you're wrong (which you will be, let's face it.)

The latter. No question!

And then be bought by lifelongskate.

Very likely, I'd have thought - at least as a 'hope'. The problem is, the PL will have to back up their hope with tens of millions of pounds to enable Pompey to trade their way to relegation.

"I want a change of air." Can't argue with that.

Well written.

How predictable. As I've said before, I would love to be convinced that the climate change scientific orthodoxy is wrong. However, every time some detractor is put up, it turns out he (and it's always a he) has no scientific credibility in the field, or is hopelessly corrupted by accepting the generous hand-outs from the oil industry...or, as in most cases, both. The carnival of cretins paraded on here and elsewhere as 'experts' do more to strengthen the orthodoxy than anything else.

This is acceptable.

Given the choice of reading one of your books or being imprisoned in an Iranian jail, I'd think about it.

These days, the charge of 'anti-Americanism' often comes from the least expected places. This, from the Huffington Post, is fairly representative of many comments on newspaper sites in the US: 'After this I would have to think long and hard before sending any child of mine abroad for study, scholarships or no scholarships. Regardless of guilt or innocence this entire trial has been nothing but a media circus. I can't help but thinking that this verdict was heavily influenced not by the evidence but by simmering anti-American sentiment.' And the evidence for this is – what exactly? But it isn't by any means a one-way street. Quite a few comments on the Fox News site (of all places!) take a more balanced view. Here's a pretty good one: 'This young woman had a year long trial. She had two top notch attorneys. If anything, this trial had more scrutiny than hundreds of others ever do. She lied repeatedly, accused an innocent man, her blood was found mixed with Meredith Kercher's in the bathroom sink. She has never apologized for her lies. Although she says the Italian police were mean, she had no bruises or cuts and scrapes. She certainly wasn't even interrogated for very long before she started making up stories. Knox was convicted of a crime - she is now a convicted murderer. Saying she was innocent doesn't make it so. No one could fathom the cruelty of a woman drowning her children to keep a boyfriend but it happened. Unless you were on the jury or watched the trial every day for the last 12 months, I cannot fathom how so many people can say this was a travesty of justice. Clinton's comments were impartial in that she would look it over, and she didn't commit to anything more than that.' The really weird thing is that it's in the more traditionally liberal media that the 'anti-American' charges are made the most stridently - especially in papers like the New York Times. And the term is used as a sort of equivalent of 'anti-Semitism', almost always when talking about Europeans. The idea that 'anti-Americanism' is always and everywhere an irrational knee-jerk expression of pure hatred, rather than a reasoned objection, has taken hold so strongly in papers like the NYT that it was inevitable that the Knox trial would be characterised in this way. Calls for mass boycotts of Italy and Italian goods have already started, and it'll probably get worse. How has Europe come to be seen as a threat by liberal elites in the US - and as a source of seething hatred towards the Land of the Free? I really have no idea. Maybe Borat’s the blame.

Widesprad reaction in America to the outcome of the Amanda Knox/Raffeale Sollecito trial is that it was the result of 'anti-Americanism'. This is fairly typical: 'Senator Maria Cantwell, a Democrat in Knox’s home state of Washington, also leapt to her defence. “I am saddened by the verdict and I have serious questions about the Italian justice system and whether anti-Americanism tainted this trial,” she said.' Or this: Judy Bachrach, a Vanity Fair journalist who wrote about the case, told CNN: “This was a very carefully choreographed trial and everyone knew from the beginning that the prosecutor had it in for Amanda Knox and the charges were trumped up. This is the way Italian justice is done. If you’re accused, you’re guilty.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/philip-sherwell/6735329/Amanda-Knox-Foxy-Knoxy-was-an-innocent-abroad-say-US-supporters.html Fair?

Good to see the first conversation on the first mobile phone is a take on 'I'm on the train.'

Yeah, but you can easily be bumped by stories about t1ts in the NOTW. So HR is in there then?

I'm sticking with January 31. I can't see how they can legally trade beyond that date.

No, I'm well aware of how wafer-thin the test is. I just assume that your identity has to be known and face put to the name before you can be passed. I'm also aware that Thaksin was given a clean bill of health, despite the corruption case in Thailand outstanding at the time, and that Gaydamak passed despite continuing suspicion that he was fronting for his dad, who would not have passed even the FA's pathetic requirements. The football 'fit and proper' test in this country is generally pathetic. The front company that's taken over Notts Co also tried to move into F1, but the FIA banned them. So there you have it: the FIA has more of a moral compass than the FA and FL. Amazing.

QED

I'll take your clean sheet and raise you a single Lallana goal.

You remind me of tommac. Same self-defeating rage, aimed at posters who collect their ammunition from...you!

This is where my money is (metaphorically speaking!). Admin by end of Jan.

Can't - because it's a test for owners only. Although how on earth they're going to do a 'fit and proper' test on the invisible Faraj seems a pretty big question. The PL seem to be dodging that in the doomed hope that this mess unravels in a way that doesn't embarrass them. In the meantime, of course, they're simply failing to apply their own rules.

So the only thing anyone knows for certain about the mysterious and elusive Faraj is that he has no money. Brilliant!

From the way the New york Times tells it, the Americans think they've got it pretty easy too. There's even the merest hint that they'll turn us, and our 'incessant long ball game', over. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/sports/soccer/05draw.html?hp