Lighthouse

I’m in the garden under the pergola… or gazebo, I’m not sure what the difference is. WiFi signal keeps dropping in and out, so I gave up, is the game any good?

Yep and Tonda has just cost every single player an absolute f**k tonne of it. How on earth are they going to be in any way ‘fine’ with that?

Knowing we were going to cheat is not entrapment. If we had an email inviting some of our back room staff up too Teeside for tea, biscuits and a guided tour of their facilities, where we were invited to watch them train and take photos if we liked, with everything else that subsequently happened, then we’d have an argument.

Makes you wonder why the best clubs in the world have £100m training facilities really. Why not just save the money, buy all the lads a PureGym membership and get them to turn up with their boots on a match day. You can try and tell them that as they celebrate promotion back to the PL if you like.

It’s going to be hard watching some p*ssed up Teesider get pepper sprayed for punching a police horse, knowing that should be me. Truth be told though, I don’t actually care who wins. Boro fans haven’t done or said anything ours wouldn’t have in the same situation and Gibson has done little other than fight his corner for his club, and it’s paid off.

To be perfectly honest, I immediately went to the, “yep, don’t give a sh*t,” phase as soon as I heard we’d been kicked out. After the 12 points, the 9-0s, the ridiculous signings, the defeats snatched from the jaws of victory and everything else, I just can’t even pretend to be upset. Saints are like your d*ck head ex. Who kept doing more and more dramatic things for diminishing returns of attention, to the point that you eventually just stop caring. Whats next Saints, the entire squad caught rabies from some bats, on a preseason tour of Asia? A meteorite flattened St Mary’s? Sure if you want.

Imagine coming into work one morning and your boss says, “you know that big promotion and pay rise you were hoping for next month, well I’m afraid we’ve had to call it off because I’ve been caught embezzling company funds and we lost one of our major contracts as a result. Still, never mind, we’re all in this together eh, I bet you can’t wait to get started on our next project.” On a scale of one to ‘you can f**k right off’, how likely are you to stick around that company and pull up trees to try and succeed?

Yeah they stuttered slightly when they lost the three wickets but it was still as comfortable as they could have hoped for. Manny will need patience. He looks a real prospect but those first three balls, well they don’t come much worse than that. What’s the latest on Turner’s injury, anyone?

I don’t think we’ll survive 15 overs the way this is going. Cartwright and Potgeiter are not Ellis and Brevis.

Obviously Somerset are one of the best teams in it but we look little better in this than we have in the CC. 7 wickets down for 41 to finish it off, never in a million years will we defend 158.

How have we been given a '20 year sentence'? We've been disqualified from a game we cheated in, we can still compete in next years Championship. What's happening here is a burglar has been caught stealing a million pounds in cash and some people are bizarrely trying to argue that he should get to keep the million pounds and pay a fine of £100k. Put it this way, if we were in this same scenario where Pompey had beaten us in the semi. I'm absolutely certain that everybody on this forum would definitely be saying, "oh don't kick Pompey out, that's way too harsh, let them play in the final."

Just so you know, if there are any Boro fans still reading this forum (or skates for that matter) they're probably laughing their tits off at this thread. The complaints about the panel were bad enough. Now we've got the football equivalent of a burglar being arrested and saying, "it's not fair! the shop next door warned them that they had a break in last week, so they put up cameras deliberately to try and catch me out. They haven't acted in good faith!" We cheated, we got caught, we got kicked out. Suck it up.

They aren't a jury and they don't have connections. We haven't demanded they get replaced because this is very clearly just a bunch of whining nonsense. There's nothing to see here; a footballer who played one game for Boro in 1994 and a lawyer who was once paid to represent them in a completely irrelevant case eight years ago. Lawyers don't have tribal loyalty to people they've represented in court. They don't have half and half scarves at home with Ian Huntley on one side and Harrold Shipman on the other. Our defence, "not picking up on it," is all in your head. We haven't complained because there's nothing to complain about.

A week ago people were laughing at the Boro forum being, "a desperate, delusional echo chamber." I think trying to claim you're the victim of corruption because a member of the panel played one game on loan at Boro 32 years ago, is getting pretty deep into the same territory. It would be like claiming Andrei Kanchelskis is obviously corrupt in our favour.

On the contrary, I use a lot of the posts on here as compost in my garden.