Verbal

We'll win, and Hammond to score on his debut.

Some comments defy any response at all. So I'm saying nothing...

trousers is the resident expert on this, but I distinctly recall a very long prediction thread - and a play-off place was certainly suggested by a quite few. Remember, there were a couple of blazing performances by the kids last year that raised the hope - as good results tend to do - that 'total football' would sweep us up towards the top.

Déjà vu all over again. This was said quite a few times last season. I'll take a long succession of narrow 1-0s - much better proof that we have the staying power that's been clearly absent ever since the first relegation.

Me neither. What was I talking about?

I'm sure more players will come in, Robbie, but I don't think the players already here are rubbish - not all of them anyway. Their confidence as players and as teammates is shot to hell, certainly. But there's some talent out there which has simply forgotten what it's like to win, or how to be part of a winning team.

Okay, I'm lost. Could someone do a family tree of who was what in the Eagle's Nest? There seem to have been an awful lot of secretive lieutenants buzzing about.

Evidence? Really - I'm curious.

I think there's a rule against claiming to be the winner on your own thread. Sorry.

Don 't worry. If you PM your musings to me before posting, I'll proof-read them for you. You're welcome.

Wrong in so many ways. Apart from the space before the comma, 'there's' is a perfectly acceptable abbreviation of 'there is', and you've forgotten the apostrophe in 'it's'. I think I'll pass the 'peasant' baton back to you.

Well, it would be needed, or at least optional, if you read it as implying the word 'you' after the comma.

Space after the comma, you've misspelled 'yourselves', and there's another word in there that doesn't look quite right.

How long did you take to type that?

The job? Or a job?

One story told by a Tory MP with intelligence links last week is that Megrahi was a patsy for the Lockerbie bombing - which may not even have been a Libyan operation - but that he was positively identified as the gunman in the murder of Yvonne Fletcher. In other words, there's the suspicion that agencies of the British and other governments have sought to kill two birds with one stone - nail Fletcher's killer and make the whole 'who bombed Flight 103' go away. Freeing him keeps the lid on the whole affair - certainly more than allowing the appeal to proceed.

We may be crap at football, but no one is ever going to get close to challenging the Saintsweb Spelling Bee team.

You didn't say it, you winked it. Hence the ballooning conspiracy theories.

I fear nothing more than one of your predictions.

Like me, you're never going to know, because the only people who do insist on keeping up their nudging and winking act. I expect it of Weston, but I'm disappointed in the usually indiscreet Phil.

Is that it? I was hoping for something a bit more Watergate.

I thought it was your autobiography - Rupert Lowe: My Part in his Downfall.

This has got lost in the headlong rush of this thread, but seems important. Who are you talking about? And how did it, as Weston suggests, help drive the club into admin? Are these the deals done by Lee Hoos? Or before?

The posting of a guilty man.

Actually, I do expect other clubs to develop players for SFC. As many of the successful teams making their way out of these divisions and further up have demonstrated, the real skill is in spotting not an 11 year old, but a 21 year old who has found himself in the lower league but after getting plenty of time in games is really proving his worth. And as for 'not all will make it from the Academy', that's exactly the point. It's very hit and miss. I'm not saying you shouldn't have a youth squad, but the full-scale academy is a luxury that a League 1 team - even one backed by a billionaire - cannot afford, because it drains resources away from building a first team that can compete NOW, not (with some vague hope) in five, six or more years ahead.