Guided Missile

Only Fulham, West Brom, Manchester City, Aston Villa, Swansea and Southampton voted against the Financial Fair Play rules, when Cortese was Chairman.

Sell the club for £150M or sell our best young players every other season for £100M. You do the maths...

I just had a text from a football agent with strong ties to Southampton FC, who told me that the player budget at Saints was out of control. He suggested that the board was hamstrung by the commitments Cortese had made to both the players and Pochettino et al, which would have ensured that any future success on the field would have swallowed up income off of it and led to an unsustainable situation going forward, given our restricted income, with regard to sponsorship and crowds. Cortese had taken his focus off of the commercial income growth. In fact it was shrinking, due to the fact he was an unpleasant guy to deal with. Sony swore never to sponsor a box again, after the way they were treated last season. So, my take is that to prevent all and more of the riches earned in the Premiership disappearing via players, their contracts, bonuses and constant demands, leading to an unsustainable future, it made sense to clear the decks and adjust the player budget to a level that a club our size, with 30,000 crowds and a tiny commercial income, compared with virtually any other club in the Premiership, could afford. Cutting our cloth in an area in which the majority of the overheads are spent. The area of greedy, spoilt, ungrateful, spoilt and self-obsessed children who can kick a ball around for a living. Better to start with new contracts than have to pay for the mistakes of the past. English players? Cr@p and overpriced in my opinion.

We led the league in possession last season, but failed to break into the top four. As the Dutch showed against the Spanish and Atletico Madrid against Barca, possession is no longer everything. The new way is quick counter attacking into space, from midfield. The rapier like football the Dutch have played in this WC has changed the landscape. For attacking at pace you need the players and let's face it, without J Rod we just didn't have the personnel to play this way. We were pretty to watch but frustrating at times and were quickly found out by, for instance, Spurs. We were just not going to ever challenge for the top 4 with the squad we had. I'm hoping that the rebuilding on youth and imports that Ronald knows can play the way he likes, will shake up the whole league. He had to change the squad to fit the way football is going. I can't wait....

Unfortunately, it is now "tending towards a breakeven point".

A brilliant summary here:

I would like to thank all the people involved in the setting up and maintenance of this website, for all the good work they have done, in providing the care in the community, so many posters on this thread obviously need. The only thing that concerns me is there is a small chance that one of them sits next to me at St. Mary's. Scary...

Northern Monkeys

Every mile back from the Derby playoff game, in the torrential rain, I was hoping for their classless northern monkey fans to be on the end of a result like this. I don't give a sh !t that it was a team managed by Harry Rednapp that gave it to them. Anyone on this thread that feels sorry for those Derby pr!cks wasn't there that day.

A cheap way of getting a CV out there, in my opinion.

"The overall innovation of the manuscript is very low." Never stopped them accepting papers in the past as the above pile of cr@p shows...

Here's a peer reviewed paper by Dr James Screen that managed to get through the strict peer reviewing on that joke of a "scientific" publication "Environmental Research Letters He's the type of spotty youth they obviously like to publish, after he's spent some time playing modelling games on his laptop. "Dramatic retreat of Arctic Ice" Mate, go and get a proper job....

I'll write to the Times immediately to complain. This is the "past it or or have no relevant qualifications or meaningful experience in the field" guy, right?

Read all about it in today's Times:

Pity that level of charge is illegal nowadays, as you can see here. I think someone should report them, preferably after they've had the money in their account for a while. What a tinpot, amateur bunch.... Although...I guess they could now be a micro-business...

Mind you, if a dog got on the pitch, it would be mayhem. Sat in the middle, chewing on Rickie's leg would be enough to send me back into hospitality. I might stay and watch if the mutt started on Rooney, mind...

I have decided that I will no longer lay awake at night, worrying about the predicted 500 ppm increase in CO2 and the terminal effect it will have on our species. No, the real problem facing us is dark matter. Dark matter sends comets hurtling towards Earth every 35 million years. As solar system orbits the centre of galaxy, it moves around in 70 million year cycle. This means it would move through a dark matter disc every 35 million years. This corresponds to increase in pattern of comet impacts on Earth and scientists have concluded this could have led to impact that has been linked to the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. I have spent some time on my computer, on some complicated projections and can predict with some degree of certainty, that a major comet strike on the earth is 31 million years overdue. I can reveal a graphical image of my modelling below: After the last major comet strike on Earth, it appears that no species weighing over a pound survived and the larger the creature, the quicker it was wiped out. I think the only option we have, if mankind is to survive this event, is to embark on a program in which humans are genetically modified, so that they don't exceed this weight. There may be some interim adjustment required, particularly with our race temporarily slipping down the food chain, but when Armageddon happens, we will be in a great position to crawl from under the nearest rock and watch while all the bigger creatures go the way of the dinosaur. I bet women will still ask "Does my bum looks big in this", though...

Yawn....

More made up, navel gazing, b0ll0x purporting to be a scientific paper but really a work of science fiction... Two main points from this pile of cr@p: What accelerated global warming over the last 30 years? The suggested mechanisms are, however, too complex to evaluate meaningfully at present. In other words, they haven't got a clue...

Good to see the followers of Malthusianism are out in strength today. Not many changes in the noisy and easily led rabble, since Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus wrote "An Essay on the Principle of Population", in 1798 at the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution. One major change apparent on this thread, is that we are able to feed more village idiots nowadays and they live longer.

The source of this data is from this publication by the CATO Institute.

The good old days, back in the era of low CO2 emissions: 1750 – Education Most children in England and Wales did not go to school, very few could read and write. Only the sons of the wealthy or the clergy went to school in England. Their sisters were taught at home. There were only two universities in England, four in Scotland and one in Ireland. Only men could go to university. In Scotland all parishes had schools and most children could read and write. 1750 – Medicine and Health The link between hygiene and the spread of infection and disease was not understood yet. Few people could afford to pay for a doctor. Only men were allowed to be doctors. Only simple operations were possible, because there were no anaesthetics. Most patients died from shock or infection. If you had a problem that was severe you were almost certain to die. Even having a tooth pulled out could be fatal. The average life expectancy for a man was 31 and for a woman was 33. 65% of babies died at birth. 20% of mothers died in childbirth. 1750 – Transport Most people walked, but horses, mules, donkeys, horse drawn carriages and wagons were all forms of transport in 1750. In towns there were hackney carriages and sedan chairs that you could hire. Roads were the best way of getting around, but they were incredibly rough and lumpy. This made travelling by road very uncomfortable and slow. The first traffic jams were seen in narrow city streets. In 1750 it would take you 12 days to get from London to Edinburgh in a horse-drawn carriage. 1750 - Towns and Cities 13% of the population were living in towns. Slum housing increased as people came to towns looking for work. It was very crowded with families sharing houses or living in one room. There was often only one toilet for a whole row of houses. Houses had no running water. The water supply was often contaminated with sewage. Rubbish was not collected, it was left rotting in the street along with tons of horse manure. The dead were not disposed of properly, with open pits for the poor. Nearly half of all British wheat harvests went directly into gin production. The ‘Gin Craze’ was blamed for crime, poverty and the soaring death rate. Some streets were lit with oil lights. Unsuprisingly, people weren't too concerned with climate change back then, although the weather wasn't that great: [TABLE=width: 100%] [TR] [TD=width: 40]1750[/TD] [TD=width: 549] A very thundery year, with severe thunderstorms & hail causing flooding on the 11th & 24th July in this year.[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=width: 40] 1751-1760 (10 years)[/TD] [TD=width: 549] In England, the summers of this period were the wettest in a record that began in 1697. These 10 wet summers in a row produced an overall anomaly of 127% of the modern-era mean. 1751 in particular is regarded as a notably wet year, at least in the London/SE region. It included a wet March, a wet first two-thirds of May and some severe thunderstorms & flooding in November. The 1752 summer (London/SE) was noted as 'cool & damp'. More wet summers for London/SE in 1755, 1756 & 1758.[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE]

Another hockey stick graph: