badgerx16

Not wanting to p1ss on anybody's parade, but we have spent the last 6 matches bemoaning the lack of pre-season & match practice in the squad, yet as far as I can see all the selections above include Jaidi & Waigo- just remind me how much first team action either has seen in the last 6 months ? In my opinion Jaidi might well start, but how long will he last, and how sharp is he likely to be ? And I think Papa will be on the bench as an 'impact substitute'.

As things stand, it is going to be at least 8 games to have reached 0 anyway, ( at least 9 if we don't win at The Valley ), and a minimum of 9 before we catch any other team, assuming all other results go our way. This was always going to be a long haul, and the most realistic expectation has always been survival in L1 this term, promotion push next season.

I hope saint_clark is better at spelling and grammar:cool:

Sorry, H, but you are a bit out here, on the basis that the 33% was of those polled in 2006, and the 25% was a different poll the next year, you can't add them together. Mind you, if you polled 100 rednecks out in the midwest you would probably find about half who couldn't stick a pin in a map to show where Washington DC was, let alone tell you who was President !

Just for the sake of accuracy, the Lancastria was sunk on 17th June 1940, 2 weeks after the Dunkirk operations ended, and she went down off St Nazaire, on the French Atlantic coast. One telling quote from WSC is allegedly "The newspapers have got quite enough disaster for today, at least", presumably responding to the news that Marshall Petain had just ordered the French to sue for 'honourable peace terms'.

I wasn't trying to find their motive, I was pointing out that they are not "mindless", in that from their perspective they actually have a perfectly valid motive. Unless, and until, we can understand their motivation, and learn to take account of it, our response to their actions will only serve to promote the same old merry-go-round of action and retribution. After all, this is what ended the troubles in Ulster, sitting down and actually talking to each other.

Historically, there has been no better way to distract from domestic problems than having a 'foreign adventure'. After all, that's what led the Argies to invade the Falklands. Of course, the Yanks have, since Vietnam, tended to pick on the real 'big boys,; Panama, Grenada, Nicaragua, etc. Oh, but then they got their fingers burned in Somalia, didn't they.

What complete and utter tripe. Over 300,000 troops came back from Dunkirk, let alone the naval, RAF, and even civilian crews involved. Do you think they all came back and kept shtum ? Of course some of them might have, but Joe Public isn't stupid; they saw the BEF go off to France, saw them come back with their tails between their legs, and then experienced the Luftwaffe bombs being dropped on them. Yet during that period, the 'Dunkirk Spirit' was followed by the 'Blitz Spirit', and civilian morale went up, exactly as it did in Germany 3 years later. Unless of course the media managed to completely suppress all news of the bombing to keep it out of the public mind. People aren't as stupid or gullible as you assume, ( but then you do live in the US of A ).

The media in the 30's & 40's was far more tightly state controlled, if not explicitly, them by the social 'norms' of that era.

But the people initiating the wars would expect us to keep supporting them, paying for them, and even signing up to be killed in them. Why can't we know what is being done in our name, with our money, and with the lives of our relatives and friends ? Why can't we know exactly how much 'collateral damage' is being done ? How many innocent civilian deaths justify the extermination of one Taliban leader by a drone bomb or cruise missile ? Whe can't we be told that our troops are being sent out in 'snatch' landrovers in areas where the Yanks are using bomb proof vehicles ? Or that there are not enough helos to transport them safely, exposing them instead to the IEDs ?

He was previously held hostage in Iraq in 2004.

There are very few 'mindless acts" of terrorism. The people who plan and carry out these acts are living, breathing, thinking, and quite often highly intelligent human beings, who do so generally out of a sense of injustice; real or imagined is open to interpretation dependant on which side of their argument you stand. How aggreived would you have to feel to do something like this ? To carry out a hijack knowing that your death was at the end of it, not at the hands of some law enforcement agency, but at your own hands. There is some very powerful motivation involved here, and as has been evidenced by this week's court case, we are still failing to prevent others taking the same stance against us.

What did we do before all that ? We had one third of the world map painted red and called the British Empire.

I remember watching CNN on t'Interweb at work as both the BBC and ITN news channels failed due to network traffic. ( Was going to put that they 'crashed', but that would have been in poor taste ). The additional 'unseen' bits just added to the surreal quality of the events; hundreds of people just standing in Times Square staring at the big screens in shock. Then we got the predictable 'we should go in and kill all the Arabs now' reaction, together with a couple of scenes that seemed to show 'innocent' people being attacked on the sidewalk for no apparent reason, other than possibly retribution. Also watched bits of Flight 93, and found the launch of the air defence ( defense ?? ) flights mildly amusing; one pair fighters went off in completely the wrong direction, and the other was launched unarmed - cue desperate calls for authority to 'ram and eject' when engaging the hijacked planes. I still think the most telling visions of that day were the clips of dubyah, sitting in a primary school and looking completely brain dead, ( nothing new there though ), as the unfolding events were relayed to him.

This is just begging for the sort of answer WGS would give, something along the lines of "Where ? Between the players' ears !"

Parkinson is now winning games in a division BELOW the one he was losing them in. Using this analogy we will start winning if we keep Pards and go down to L2 The problem is that whilst people will agree that the squad and backroom setup needed time to gel, we started 10 points from safety, and are now 11 away after 6 games, that is a backwards step, regardless of how many 'green shoots of recovery' you might think you see. Not winning can become as much as a habit as winning, and somewhere else on this forum somebody posted that Saints have only won 8 of their last 38 games at SMS. and any success we might have must be built on solid home form. And whilst it is possible to look at what our potential best starting 11 might be, ( including Papa, Saga, Holmes, a fit Murty, etc ), it is patently obvious that a line-up with only 7 of our "best" 11 struggles, particularly in front of goal. Whilst there are sufficient points still to play for, none of the other teams in this league will look to give us an easy ride. A finish that sees us mathematically safe with 4 games to play, ( about 57 points from the next 36 games ), will do for me.

Problem is we are more a 500,000 ton super tanker than a racing tri-maran.

Millwall are 13th, Stockport are 18th

How soon is soon ? This seems to have been a standard statement for the last three games. I am not doubting the opinions and observations of those lucky enough to get to SMS every week, but by next weekend we could be 12 points off safety. Would that then make Yeovil a 'must win' game ?

Not much, if Brighton hang on we will still be 9 points behind the team immediately above us and 11 from 20th place, so that's 1 point worse off than when we started, and we will be the only team in the division without a win.

If you are accessing your work e-mail remotely, are you using 'normal' OUTLOOK or OUTLOOK Web Access ? Also, are you sure you are not using any form of VPN system ? If you are remotely accessing work's servers, it is most unlikely that OUTLOOK will be permitted to work, unless you have something like an SSL tunnel VPN, the firewall configuration and security considerations otherwise are a nightmare. If you are using a VPN, it might be that the tunnel is failing to initialise for some reason. A common problem is a conflict with other applications on the laptop over the JAVA version, something you would not be likely to experience within work as you would not be using the VPN to access OUTLOOK. ( And it's a loooooooong time since I was a YOUNG whizz kid ! )

Who cares if we have upset a bunch of isolationist ingrates who always turn up 3 years late for a world war

Aren't TESCO doing their spend £50 and get an extra 5p off each litre of fuel again ? Nearest independent to me is £1.03 /litre.

Think the Yanks might have a say in how the field is developed then, and will probably want first dibs.

Sky Sports has him "considerably lacking in match practice having turned out just six times for the Salentini", so he should be just about as fit as the rest of the squad