Wes Tender

OK, your opinion is that because you have some gripe against Pearson, that you cannot accept that he is as erudite and as honest in his interviews as Pardew was after the match. I attach a recorded interview for your benefit, to illustrate his capabilities and honesty. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOAiDnKNFOg You obviously do not realise the irony of a couple of things. By asserting that there has not been a manager capable of speaking in such a way at a post match interview, you naturally invite comment about previous managers. Then you go and put your foot in it by telling me that the person who I put forward as a manager equally capable of coming across well in a post match interview is not longer with us and that I ought to get over it. Matt Le Tissier is also no longer with us. He's moved on and so should you. ....I have. It is a pity when you start a thread like this where most agree with the thrust of it, including me, that when this one little matter is debated, you are not big enough to accept it because of some agenda you have against Pearson.

I don't disagree with what you say, except that the last manager to talk with so much openess and common sense was Pearson. Other than that, as I say, I do agree.

You have to be careful calling him a troll, Steve. He denies it. I'd prefer to believe that he develops a fixation about certain people and then has to spend a certain amount of his waking hours each day indulging his fixation. I'm still unsure whether it is all the same person, or other family members with the same condition, but Flashman and Sundance fixated on Crouch, whereas Nineteen fixates on MLT and McMenemy seemingly.

Whoever it is, he was up past 2am last night.

According to the latest edition of The News, Fahim's spokesman says that German Investment Banker Holger Heims was not interested in buying Pompey, but merely advising the fake shiek. Furthermore, Hong Kong billionaire Richard Li also denies any interest in taking over the Skates. Are there any other names of billionaires that delusioned Skate fans might pull out of the hat before the transfer window closes? It has got to the stage that some clubs are reticent about selling their players to Pompey in case they won't be paid, but thankfully the FA has stepped in with guarantees that the payments can be deducted from TV recipts. This is assuming that that money has not already been earmarked for debt repayment to other lenders.

I was watching Henry VIII last night and there was Wotte on the screen before my very eyes, playing the Emissary for the Emperor, having an audience with Queen Jane...it was spooky, darlings.

How much is this young Arab going to blow over the next 4,5,6 years on the gamble of trying to keep you afloat in the top division? Transfers and wages in the Premiership are not cheap. At the moment you've got in a manager more used to coaching youngsters or lower league clubs. How much would the fake sheik have to pay a decent manager? How much is SAF going to bet of money he doesn't have?

Why do you need pace or height at FB particularly? Surely if you have a pacy winger, then the FB doesn't need it so much. So you would prefer either a tall RB, or a pacy one, or indeed a mixture of the two, even if he was a bit thick about his covering and positioning and didn't have a decent brain and was young and inexperienced? Yes. IMO Murty is better than James, for the following reasons:- 1) He has more experience. That means that what he might lack in pace against James, he makes up with positional skill and ability to read the game. 2) Murty has been captain of Reading during the period when they achieved promotion and also while in the Premiership. That infers a maturity and leadership qualities that have not yet been conferred on James. 3) Although James is a decent enough passer and crosser of the ball, IMO, Murty surpasses him. 4) As you say yourself, Murty is solid. More solid than James and more difficult to bully off the ball. 5) Murty has been in the game at several levels and knows what's what. James is still a bit wet between the ears. He will develop with experience, but with a straight choice between them at the moment, in this division, Murty wins every time. 6) Murty is a winner. What has James won yet?

A decent bit of psychology being applied here; make us the underdogs, lower expectations and then the euphoria of a win is that much better.

To borrow from your earlier reply to me, it's not that simple. I'd say that there were a significant number who were in the first group of fans who ceased attending because they felt that they were not respected by Lowe or who thought that the football on offer did not represent value. They are the few thousand who have returned now, even though we are a division lower. They can hardly be categorised as plastic fans who only attend when we are winning. Effectively, whether they paid heed to campaigns to boycott the club as a weapon to rid us of Lowe, or whether they made up their own minds independently, as you say, the result was that things were brought to head by it. The simple lesson to be learned here is that without customers, there is no business

I'm not losing any sleep at all that things have turned out so poorly for Messrs Lowe, Cowen, Wilde, etc. They had an opportunity to sell the club while their shares had some remaining value and decided that they could weather the storm, keep the ship afloat and sail on. The ship hit the rocks and they have lost everything. Thankfully, it wasn't a question of asking whether we would take our being in the third division on -10 points under Liebherr with all his money, or survival under Lowe and the other charlatans in a higher division. Lowe took us into that position himself and is gone forever with the others as a result. We are where we are and it is less likely that we would have been taken over as a PLC when the main shareholders did not want to sell. Although many said a few months ago that the risk of our ceasing to exist was a price too high to pay for ridding the club of that dross via administration, it turns out to have been the best possible course of action. Whereas it is interesting to be reminded how dire things were under the hapless double Dutch and how mad our former chairman was to appoint them, I'd rather look ahead with gratitude that all of them are history.

I think that you are confusing height with bulk. There might be taller players about, but defenders need some bulk about them too. Would you want Peter Crouch as a FB? Jason Dodd was a good RB for us and was the same height as Murty. Gary Neville as England's most capped RB was only an inch taller. As he was under six foot, was he small?

The football club is a business in its entirety. You cannot pile blame on the manager or the players and divorce blame from the chief executive who appointed them. A chief executive who presided over such a hefty turnover of managers at the rate of one a year, has to accept responsibility for either being a poor judge of character, or of being incapable of good man management. OK, in one or two instances, bad luck played a part, but otherwise either of the characteristics mentioned above must hold true. The turnover of management and playing personnel, resulted in the instability that ultimately brought about our downfall. The club was run on a shoestring for too long and we never had the money to invest in the better quality players to take us forward. Again, the blame for that lies squarely on the shoulders of the board, who failed to attract the investment needed and which they were incapable of providing themselves. Our double relegation was directly attributable to poor decision making by the board that resulted in the poor football, that resulted in the loss of matches, that resulted in declining attendances, loss of revenue and ultimately administration. That entire chain is based on poor business decisions.

What is this snobbery about whether it is a lightweight easy read rather than a heavyweight literary masterpiece? Lawrence Durrell is a heavyweight writer and yet much to his chagrin, his younger brother Gerald outsold him massively with his hugely entertaining lighter style of writing about his zoological experiences around the World. Who was the better author? And what irony that somebody who loves to watch and support his local team would apparently turn his nose up at reading the autobiography of arguably the best ever player at that club, ghost written by one of the most respected sports journalists in the South. The further irony is why somebody who places such weight on matters intellectual would be watching football rather than spending his free time following the international chess or bridge circuit.

Murty might lack height, but I wouldn't call him small! Presumably you didn't see those two or three killer balls he put across from the byeline in a couple of the home matches? He seems to like getting forward, but is an experienced enough pro to know that he can only get forward if he has defensive cover behind him that enables him to do so.

Your post was spot on. The problem with our existing players is that they have become used to losing and are afraid to dare to win. Their confidence is shot. Pardew can utilise the new arrivals to his advantage by fielding all of them and tell the remaining 4 outfield players that they have the opportunity to claim those places as their own, that he believes they have the ability to do it with a bit of application. On that basis, we have a good chance of gaining a win tomorrow. He can then use the euphoria of the win to build on that confidence and tell the players that we might have turned a corner. Another win following on from that and we gain some real momentum and belief. The existing players are key in that if they can be motivated by the new arrivals who are winners and we will not be far off a decent team. But if they don't perform, they will be a hindrance and ought to understand that they will have to begin their development again back in the reserves. But Pardew really has little excuse if his tactical plans are as naive as they seemed to be at Swindon. We are at home, playing a team that we ought to beat with the players we now have. I'm certainly not expecting us playing a lone striker, but rather attacking them with width and commanding the midfield and getting balls in the box and to the byeline.

Whether the football was superb on occasion is a total irrelevance. It didn't take long for our rival to suss out how one dimensional we were and they just let us play the ball around until the final third where we played a lone young striker, took the ball off us and scored on the break. Ultimately, if the football was truly any good, we wouldn't have been relegated. Thank God that the two Dutch incompetents are gone, along with the nutter who brought them here. In a few years when we are back in the promised land, we might be able to have a good laugh at the whole sorry episode.

The fact that this particular division 3 club has been bought by a billionaire whose aim is to return it to the Premiership in the next few years, makes anybody buying your dump an even worse proposition than it already is. The massive gamble is that if you get relegated this season, it will be money wasted if you are not in the Premiership. If the stadium is not built, the income will not sustain the club. Unless you are in the Premiership in 4/5 years time, many of your potential fanbase will come over to us if we are back in the Premiership by then. You might bracket the 3rd division club with the great infrastructure together with the Premiership dump as good buys, but we were a bargain and rare, there not being many clubs with anything like our facilities for anywhere near as low a price. As a wealthy buyer could pick up several other clubs in the Premiership with everything already in place and for much less than it would cost to get you up to that standard, they would have to be barking to buy you.

And your spelling of "things" was correct.

Only in his own head.

I understand that an application for an indefinite leave to remain visa is currently taking several weeks to process. Could it be that we are keeping quiet about the player so as not to attract interest for him elsewhere while his application is processed? In the meantime, perhaps we are patiently biding our time, making short term loans cover until it is all resolved.

Just loves the fantasists who believe that they will get taken over by a consortium with enough wealth to buy pretty well any football club in the country. Under those circumstances, why would they buy Pompey with its crappy old stadium and threadbare team?

Even when "the truth" is known, it will often be the truth according to one source or another. As a lot of the evidence is likely to be circumstantial or heresay, rather than something documented accurately, whether it is the truth rather depends on who is looking at it and how objective they are.

He was at Swindon, but spent the entire evening trying to negotiate his way around the magic roundabout. As far as I know, he's still there.