Lighthouse

Disappointing, that result is definitely in the '2 points dropped' category. West Ham came for a point and stuck to their plan superbly, so it's not like this was an easy game to win but still very frustrating. Pelle seems to have lost his mojo, I really don't get why we didn't get another striker in in January. Perhaps we went for someone and didn't get him but there is definitely space for another striker (literally) on our bench.

How is that not a red? Jesus ref.

I've had a lucky brew and slice of carrot cake. I feel Mother Superior may make an appearance before the end of the night.

According to the tater on my stream, "booze for the referee at half time." Seems rather unprofessional.

Villa sack Lambert

COYR etc.

True. I thought it was ridiculous that Rooney played on the left of the front 4 at the World Cup, whilst Lallana sat on the bench. This year though you couldn't make a decent case for either of them. Rooney seems to be playing as some sort of holding midfielder these days because Utd spunked so much money on RVP, Fellaini, ADM, Falcao, Herrera and Mata (plus Januzaj from the youth team). Lallana played the last 11 minutes for Liverpool last night, Lambert didn't feature at all. Come next summer the likes of Ings and Austin will be on the bench for teams like Spuds and Liverpool. Kane will probably replace Drogba on Chelsea's bench and JRod will be propping up Man City's quota of English players. Something like that anyway.

A Palace win would put Pardew 2 points behind Newcastle and lead to a volcanic eruption of lava and brimstone from the True Geordie.

I don't think anyone is arguing this woman in a slapper because she got caught on video. She is a slapper because she hangs around with footballers in nightclubs and sucks them off in the gents. Same with the celebrity topless photos, I haven't seen anyone saying Jennifer Lawrence is a slag because of that.

It also explains why countries like Holland have a much stronger national team than we do. Chelsea haven't brought through a young British player since Abramovich took over. Even the likes of Sturridge, who they stole from City, couldn't make an impact. If they were giving prolonged first team action to players like Bertrand and Cork, instead of loaning them out, we might have a better national side.

TBF you can spend more than that on one away game. I'm not arguing that it's cheap but in terms of sports it's far from extreme. I've just upgraded my TV package to include sports, it cost £25 a month for the SD package. It's mainly because the Formula 1 season is about to kick off and we've got televised games against Swansea and Liverpool this month.

Why must they go down? We're coming close to selling out pretty much every game as it is, so why would clubs make them cheaper?

Which would be pretty fair I think, if we're trying to distinguish what's right for the game from what suited us in the past. I think we could still have made some of the signings we did but with smaller wages and transfer fees. Take Lambert as a prime example. We paid about £1m for him and pretty much doubled his wages from £5k to £10k as I understand it. Both Lambert's agent and Rovers' board knew we were quids in and trying to spend out way back to the top asap. As a result they pushed their prices up. Under tougher FFP they may have agreed to something like £600k and £7k a week, knowing it was the best deal they would get. It would have given us a similar budget and chance at promotion to other similar sized Championship clubs. We would have had to compete with the likes of Leeds, Forest, Derby, Boro etc. on a roughly even playing field and the best managed clubs with the best youth teams would come to the fore.

19C? That's going old school, I thought he was just Rupert's PR agent. I reckon it could be Amy

Him and Charlie were saying we should 'graciously drop out of the Premier League' in the summer, so I wouldn't pay much attention.

They've scored as many in 5 months as we did against Sunderland.

Ah bugger, York have thrown away a 2-0 lead.

If decent FFP rules were in place 10 years ago we wouldn't have ended up in administration in the first place. It's true we spent beyond our means to get out of League 1 but we should never have been there at all. Where Saints went wrong was 2 years before administration when Mike Wilde was still running the show. We lost our parachute payments but instead of cutting the wage bill we spent large amounts of money we didn't have on wages for Stern Jhon, Jason Euell, Greg Vignal, Marek Saganowski, Wayne Thomas, Andrew Davies and Useless Safri. Had Football League rules prevented us from offering those wages, we'd have ended up a fairly stable Championship club.

Or you could do that, I wont argue that's a bad idea. They've got the right idea with that but it needs to be applied universally across all leagues. There should also be a rule whereby a single, be it a sponsor or just a sugar daddy, cannot invest more than a certain percentage of a clubs income. That way people can still invest if they think they can make a profit in a higher league but they can't throw silly money at a club to get them into the Prem.

Which would be impractical to put into place as both teams would have to agree a deal before every live TV game. It's partly why I think having games available on PPV at a fixed price would be a good idea. It would bring revenue to all teams across the PL and FL but the more popular games would still get more subscribers. For example fewer people would watch a dull bottom half PL game like Villa against Stoke but they might watch a top of the table clash between two decent League 1 or Championship teams.

Your point being?

If you funnel money down to lower leagues, all that will happen is a general wage increase across the board. What would be best for football IMO would be a restriction on what percentage of income could be spent on wages. Supposing it was something like 60% it should ensure everyone lives within their means. I'm sure there are laws against it and ways around it though.

That's infeasible, you cant obligate a club to build bigger stadiums. It just wouldn't work, you are basically telling clubs they have to fork out tens of millions on stadium expansion which won't actually bring them extra income. As MLG pointed out, it's not fair to ask any business to subsidise it's rivals. It would be like telling Apple that Nokia are losing money because they build inferior products, so they have to hand over a load of cash to help them compete.

Good point, I forgot they were still in the cup. In that case, 3 match bans all round and a 0-0 draw please. I wouldn't wish injury on most humans beings but if Kane and Eriksen were out for a while, that would be handy.

The three Amigos are on the bench for tonight's 2-1 defeat to Spurs. Chambers is absent from Arsenal's squad, Shaw is suspended for tomorrows game. Any Liverpool suspensions from tonight's game will lead to them missing their game at St Mary's on 22nd.