Wes Tender

I agree with what you say about this. Managers like Mourinho sense that by this sort of gamesmnaship, even if it results in an additional point over the course of a season, it could make the difference between being champions or second place. Equally at the other end of the table, an extra point could mean the difference between survival or relegation. As well as Mourinho, there are others like BFS who appear to school their players in the art of gamesmanship to gain an advantage. They do this by having their players mob the referee calling for an opponent to be sent off, their players dive or go down easily at the slightest contact to gain penalties. They put themselves about going hard into tackles, risking cards or sendings off, but also injuring key opponents who might be game-changers. We generally don't indulge much in this form of cheating and might have been a place or two higher up had we done so. It is telling that we have only had one penalty all season. Are we the team with the fewest penalty awards? Perhaps we might have succeeded in having a few more had our players mobbed the referee, or Koeman had complained publicly a la Mourinho at the poor refereeing which had cost us the match. I also believe that there has always been a tendency to award penalties to the top teams at their home grounds and to deny penalties to rival teams playing away against those teams. Whether this is because of the larger crowds baying for it, or because the referee is afraid to do it because the stakes are higher if he gets it wrong, who knows?

Credible is nowhere near what the greens are. To be credible, they would have to be electable and there is no chance of that the way that they go about putting across their policies/wish list.

Dubbed as the worst interview ever given by a leader of a political party in this country. If the Greens wish to stand any sort of chance in the General Election, they need to ditch this muppet and get in somebody better at stonewalling the questions they can't answer. So the revenue to pay for the 500,000 new social housing programme would be raised by taking away the tax relief on mortgages of private landlords. It doesn't seem to occur to her that if they were to do this, the knock-on effect would be to lessen the number of private properties for rent, thus increasing the very problem they seek to address.

Bernard Manning did alright for himself too given his character and personality and neither was he the best person to attempt to justify his racist jokes.

Are people who use the term that intelligent? Judging by the posters on here who use it with any regularity, I would say not. Interesting to cite Gervais as somebody who defends its use, as I suspect that those on here that attempt to justify it would probably demonstrate similar character and personality traits to his in other areas too. Gervais is hardly the best person to give the defence of its use any credence.

You don't know this at all. You might be prepared to take the word of an anonymous poster on a fans' website and undoubtedly he has some credence based on other snippets that may have turned out to be accurate. But please excuse my cynicism.

Exactly. And Gallagher too. Looking at the posts below yours, it becomes apparent that the short-term solution was to sign a proven goalscoring striker, yet there are no suggestions as to who that might be, what he would cost, why he would be available if he was so prolific and what we would then do with him when others became available because they were fit again or got their goal-scoring touch back again. It would be nice to have somebody like Harry Kane, wouldn't it, but then of course he was unknown except to Spurs' staff and only became prolific once given the chance. Might one of our academy strikers follow suit? And then we have the claim that the club doesn't have the money to buy such a striker anyway, as they have spent it all. Quite how WC knows this to be a fact is beyond me, especially as we made a profit of about £30 million on the sale of those players during the Summer.

I'm pretty sure that you made considerably more than one comment damning the board during the Summer situation. You put the failure to sign a striker in the loan window down to a lack of ambition, without any knowledge of the background thinking behind the decision. As others have asked, who was available and at what price? And then of course, a loan is a much better proposition anyway, as it gives the club a chance to assess their abilities and also the situation with Rodriguez becoming available later might have rendered one or the other of them surplus to requirements. It could be argued that the addition of Mane, Elio and Djuricic, plus the return of Long and Rodriguez, Gallagher, gave us enough ammunition up front and that the service provided by one or more of them would assist Pelle to regain his touch in front of goal. The point remains, that it is ridiculous to accuse the board of lacking ambition when they have appointed a manager of Koeman's calibre and spent that money from the the sale of those players in the summer on generally very able replacements.

The point was that despite the claims from those players that they left because they weren't given assurances about the club's ambitions, the truth is far more likely that they left purely because of the money and glory and that the thing about the ambition or lack of, was just a front to make them look less than greedy mercenaries. I disagree with your assertion that we have somehow fluked this season and that if we wish to gain a top four place in the future, it will take investment a la Man City to achieve it. We could yet end the season there without that sort of investment at the moment and provided that we can continue producing star players on the academy conveyor belt and we retain a manager of Koeman's calibre, a lot of the financial outlay to stay there will be mitigated

You're like somebody with a bad itch that needs to be scratched every so often. Yours is the urge to have a good go at the board regularly over something that is quite intangible if not expressed publicly, their ambition. This is despite their appointment of a top-class manager and the expenditure of a substantial proportion of the monies received from the sale of those five players in the Summer. But whatever opinion you express on this subject is bound to be coloured by your abysmally poor record during that Summer of discontent, when you were one of the the chief rabble-rousers believing that Katharina was in the process of dismantling the club to recoup her investment in it. I would have thought that after that, you would have been a bit more circumspect about your opinions, but apparently that was short lived. We didn't push for it? So we spent much of the season up to now within the top four places purely by chance, is that it? How lucky we have been, eh? This is precisely the type of remark for which CB Fry is correct in labelling you as a bit dim. If you carry on expressing this type of groundless speculation, it won't be long before you're dismissed as a Skate on a wind-up.

I agree with most of this. But I would add that the drop of form in recent games could just be down to something quite simple, like Bertrand being suspended and Long, Schneiderlin and Alderweireld being injured, as well as Targett latterly. Also Djuricic has not had much game time to meld with his colleagues. Without Bertrand and Targett, we have had a makeshift left-hand side, lacking the speed down the right-hand flank, so undoubtedly the cannier managers have exploited that. Although Reed has been excellent in midfield during the absences of Wanyama a Schneiderlin, those two must surely be our strongest partnering there. Yoshida has been very good as the replacement for Alderweireld, but would Liverpool have scored either goal against Bertand, Aldveireld, Fonte and Clyne, with Wanyama and Schneiderlin in front of them? With luck, all of those players will be back for the remainer of the season, plus Long and maybe Rodriguez soon. We also know that we have some decent deputies for them in the event of injuries and suspensions. But we have to get back into the habit of scoring goals and then we could hold our own for a top four place even now.

So what colour was **** Fosbury, the guy who revolutionised high-jumping and whose style is still used today? I thought he was white.

It's just as well that they give us a pre-match video of all the goals we've scored this season, as I'd began to forget what a home goal looked like.

You're quite right. I've studied body language extensively and there are some lovely little snippets in the interview; the defensive folded arms, hands over mouths when answering certain questions, the "pain in the neck" question that Lambert was reticent to answer, etc. The non-verbal communication was much more interesting than what they actually said.

Lallana reckons that a win for them would put them level on points with us. I thought that it would still leave them a point behind us. But then that might have been the situation when the interview was held. I'm glad that Lovren is enjoying himself at Liverpool, despite their fans wishing that they hadn't wasted all that money on him.

Against QPR, I put a blow softening £5 on Austin to score, as he is one of our jinx players who usually scores against us. I hear that he left the match on crutches. Which of the Liverpool players should be the victim of my bet on Sunday?

Who cares what other football fans think about us? Nice if we're their second team, but I wouldn't lose any sleep if they change their minds because we have usurped their team from the summit of the division.

You demonstrate a remarkable level of naivety for not realising that football players are a bit different from normal company employees and your expectations that football fans (fanatics) should behave in a particular way that meets with your approval are not realistic I'm afraid. Undoubtedly Lallana did well for us for a sustained period of time, but any prospects of him achieving legend status were breached by the contemptuous way that he behaved when he left. How people wish to react to his first appearance back at St Mary's is entirely up to them. You can tut tut all you like, but having paid their money to attend, people are entitled to express their feelings towards the players in whichever way they like. Now that Lallana has expressed his feelings poorly once again by believing somehow that if we boo him, it is only because we miss him, should we not boo him to confirm that belief in his febrile imagination? Or should he cheer him instead to prove that we don't miss him at all?

To draw a blue line under it = to move on To be on the bus = to be a team player

Shouldn't that be "that made oi smile"?

It wasn't about the Lib Dems.

Me too. Who would want to have their club associated with those parasites on the Club's kit, regardless of the amount of wonga it brought in?

We can still beat Liverpool, even without Toby and Morgan. OK, their attack is pretty good now that Sturridge is back, but their defence is not the best. Ours is.

Did he cheer our victory against Man Utd because he still harbours some love for us, or because he is now a Liverpool player and they loathe United? Hate is probably too strong a word to describe the feeling that many have for Lallana. Despise or loathe are probably closer. Those feelings are hardly anything to do with the fact that he left, but all to do with the way that he went about it.

Why would the Airbus project necessarily fall apart if we pull out of the UK? Would that be so that we could instead build the whole aircraft in the UK and then only buy our own product for our airlines? Seems like a good idea to me. But then I suspect that us wanting to leave the EU is just that; to leave the European Union. Originally we joined the Common Market and have never had the opportunity to vote in a referendum on the monster that it has since become. It is in the interests of most of the Countries in the current EU to continue to trade with us and of course there will not evolve a situation whereby they refuse to take our goods, but expect us to continue to take theirs. Should we vote to leave the EU and then express a desire to put in place reciprocal trading agreements with our former partners, I can see other member states' voters starting to agitate for a similar position. Regarding that abomination of a programme by Channel 4, I'm not sure that it won't end up being good publicity for UKIP. OK, so they painted some lurid picture of the unrest that might be caused by the enforcement of their supposed policies, but if they were to achieve a Parliamentary majority in the first place, it is suggestive that either their manifesto met with the approval of a significant proportion of the voters, or that the electorate was considerably p*ssed of with the other parties. What it also illustrated is that somebody on that Channel with a political agenda for one of the other parties has shown that they are all running scared of UKIP if they have to indulge in such underhand tactics in a vain attempt to discredit them.