Lighthouse

I can’t see that, he’s played some part in Chelsea’s last nine games in all competitions and started the last two.

Can’t see that happening, everyone knows this is most likely a genuine mistake and not an escalation. There may well be beefed up air defences within NATO territory but I can’t see much more than that.

Crowds never dropped as low as that apart from that one season when Lowe was back in charge and we were getting relegated to League 1. In the other seasons under Burley, Redknapp, Adkins and Pearson we were regularly in the mid-twenties. I'm not saying I want to go down but we'll still pull big gates if we do.

I don’t think it was even what you’d call advice. I believe he was pretty much told before he signed that we’d double his wages at Rovers but we’d be monitoring his physical parameters down to the last fart and expected a big improvement in that area.

Number one by an absolute mile. We’d be comfortably mid table right now if we weren’t utterly hapless in front of goal.

For me it’s borderline, I’ll say yes on the condition that we go down with Everton.

Royal Rumble at SJP.

I think in honour of our God-fearing manager…

I'll be delighted. They have worse players than Leeds did last season, they'll be conceding four or five every game.

The whole point of picking the averages was to reflect the imbalance of wages vs. house prices as a whole. Obviously a first time buyer is going to be at the bottom of the ladder but that will likely go for their wages too. If you’re earning £25,000 you have no chance of saving for a deposit and if you could a bank would only lend you enough to buy a flat in a retirement complex.

A four year mortgage on an average salary of £38,000 (which most twenty-somethings will be earning less than), plus a £15k deposit gives you £167k. For comparison I sold a one bedroom flat in Crawley about five years ago for £190,000 and prices have gone up since then. The £100k was a direct comparison between the average salary and average house price, assuming a four times salary mortgage.

I know some girls from Lincoln, that’s considered an acceptable greeting.

Last played them in 1996, it was also a home LC game. They got a 2-2 draw and took us to a replay.

Switched on at HT, looks like I got it right for once. If we’re going broad spectrum with ‘other games’ that was hell of a batting performance by England this morning. Highest T20 total we’ve ever chased down without losing a wicket.

Entitlement… Let’s say you’re renting one room in a HMO with bills included. The market rate obviously varies depending on location and the property, let’s assume £600-800pcm. Food, personally I tend to spend around £10 per day and that’s avoiding expensive coffees, junk food etc. so £300pcm Fuel, again it depends on your commute but let’s say £50pw so £200pcm Car insurance, tax, service, MOT, let’s say for a modest car in an average year £1200 for easy maths - £100pcm Lets say you have a reasonable gym membership and go to one football game - £100pcm Two modest holidays a year for £600 each - £100pcm Lets allow another £100pcm for miscellaneous stuff you just need sometimes. New clothes, printer ink, opticians or whatever else Total - £1,700 So, IF you leave uni at 21, find a job immediately, which pays a £35k salary from day one, are never made redundant for any period, live in a single room in a house share with a bunch of strangers from spareroom.com or wherever, your salary rises in accordance with inflation every year, you have a partner who is also a qualified professional earning a decent wage BUT you don’t spend any money going on dates at all AND you stay together in a committed relationship the whole time and both intend to buy a house together, you contribute NOTHING to your personal pension allowance, have no children or even pets, have parents who can buy you a decent second hand car, which will last you over ten years and completely ignoring the repayments on your massive student loan which could be over a year’s salary in itself…. If you can do all of that then yes, you might be able to put aside £500pcm from your take home pay each month to put into a deposit. That doesn’t sound like entitlement to me, it just sounds like a nightmare.

You won’t get a week in Centre Parcs for much less than £1,000. You can find cheaper places but not by much in the spring/summer months and all this is assuming a week of walking in the Peak District is the preferred holiday for a 22 year old. It still doesn’t change the fact that you’re basically telling qualified professionals to live a sh*t life throughout their twenties, to then get to your thirties and be lumbered with a massive mortgage on a steep interest rate you’ll be paying off until you retire.

So in other words basically not having a life? We think of foreign holidays as a luxury but in todays world it’s almost a necessity. Humans didn’t evolve to spend fifty hours a week staring at spreadsheets and Teams meetings in offices, sitting in traffic, stressing about mounting financial pressures, relationships etc. If you don’t take a break a couple of times a year, you’ll go mad. Back to the money, that’s less than £17,000 for a deposit on a home costing less than £75,000, adjusted for inflation in today’s money. Hardly surprising you had it sorted in five years.

Seriously, £106,000? If you left uni at 21, got a decent well paid job immediately and after all your basic needs, social life and holidays were paid for somehow still managed to save £500 per month, you'd be nearly forty before you could afford a house. That's in a near perfect world where you never get made redundant, have long term sickness or have children or family to support etc.

What an odd take on it all. When protestors are bringing the M25 to a halt every day, putting lives in danger and causing people to miss funerals, chemo appointments and f**k knows what else, I’m more concerned by that than a couple of journalists being wrongfully detained. Why that happened I don’t know, clearly not all of the details are in the public domain, but if the journalists concerned are just observers and not directly involved, they will be released without charge. As for the new houses, well what would you prefer to happen? We’ve got a generation of people in their thirties, renting one bedroom in a HMO because it’s all they can afford and don’t have a prayer. These are qualified professionals with respectable jobs but a four times salary mortgage wouldn’t come close to buying anything reasonable. I think I read the other day that an average person, with an average salary trying to buy an average UK house would need a deposit of £106,000. Insanity.

Make sure you keep it below room temperature or it’ll all congeal into one big, dark chocolate cricket ball.

I’ve got the weirdest feeling of Dave Ja Vu. Let’s see how this goes…

Gym - Sauna/steam room - Outdoor pool - Shower - Food - Cuppa Tea Can't beat it.

No because that’s a myth and it never happened. Poch didn’t even speak English and most would agree he’s the best managed we’ve had in the PL era. Some people didn’t like Puel from day one because they found his football boring, not his interviews.

That was all media talk and fake ITKs on Twitter. We may well have been interested and even made a couple of offers but by virtue of the fact that he’s not here and ended up in the Championship, we clearly didn’t think he was worth whatever City were asking. As for being a ‘marquee signing’, it’s completely up to you how much you’ve hyped him in your own mind. The club made no such dramatisations.

No, I said it was ridiculous to say we hadn’t signed a striker when we obviously did. I never made any assertions about how good any of them were.