Chin Strain

Well....10k for the 3rd and 4th round of the cup and 16k for what may have been the last ever game at FP - all including away fans. Seems like 3k is about right for a club that you have no affinity with.

I personally wouldn't have had an issue with the advance....if only you'd have sold every player you could in the January window to make some sort of attempt to pay back HMRC off your own backs. Instead, you extend the loan of O'Hara, get in Quincey, keep Dindane (contractually you've failed to pay Lens for him to make the mover a perm) and not sold the most obvious bankable asset in Belhadj....oh, all three who scored against us. On top of that, you weren't very quick to get in front of the PL and beg them and FIFA to allow you to sell Boateng, despite the fact he'd played 5 mins for Spuds in August. Add in another couple of loan players, just to boost the numbers, and mess Stoke around with David James, when he should have gone there (he played quite well on Saturday too) We offloaded every player we could and played with the youth team for a year. We did everything we could to stay out of admin, and it was only when Barclays stripped the overdraft from £6m to £4m that we went under. So, if you're wondering why nobody has any time for you, or what the difference was between your position and ours, here you have it in a nutshell. Basically, you've tried every trick in the book to keep your players, knowing full well that your only slim chance of being saved is to stay up - relegation equals no chance, staying up equals slim, slim chance. Hope that's simple enough for you.

£15m in wages before the end of June, plus the £11.5m to HMRC. Doesn't leave much room for manoeuvre with Chanrai and Gaydamak does it?

I can understand him wanting to play, especially as Spurs will still be paying his wages, but I don't understand why Tosik, for example, buys himself out of his Werder Bremen contract to sign for you. That's got to be the worst advice from an agent in the history of football.

I suppose being a loan player he's one of the few that expects to be paid come the end of the month.

I think that's HMRCs view too.

Imagine how bad you'd be if you actually had a team that you could afford.

2 weeks to pay day...tick, tock, tick, tock. I would rather it had been next week, but I can't believe anyone will buy them if you gave them 10 years to find a nutcase willing to burn money

I think I could come up with five owners, chairman and directors in the last 4 months that would beat Lowe. Nice to see that they can take a pop at us for £4m on Rory Delap....a player who is still playing in the PL. Utaka anyone...and that's just for starters?

Fortunately the economy doesn't rely on the state of Pompey's financial health!

How do you come to that conclusion, and what makes you think the Prem / FA and PL have any control over this? HMRC will liquidate them on Wednesday unless they come up with the money that HMRC are owed, and Pompey can prove that they have the means to carry on trading on a solvent basis. If that doesn't happen, they're gone. HMRC don't give a toss whether this will inconvenience other clubs / brand PL / the FA or anyone else.

It's an unbelievable story that they would ask for this. They're effectively being rewarded for not trying to sell everything that wasn't nailed down in the January window. Maybe if they had approached the PL or FIFA and asked if they could turn a blind eye to Boateng having played 5 minutes for Spuds in August, thereby allowing him to be sold, then you could understand that they had done all they can. If they were playing their youth team (like we did) in order to try and stave off relegation, then there may be some sympathy. Instead, the likes of Boateng, Belhadj and any other player who may be worth something (even a £100k) have been retained, and are continuing to play for Pompey. Effectively, they're cheating by retaining these players, and could well cheat us out of a place in the 1/4 finals of the cup. OK, we don't need the cash, but if we did, how ****ed off would the club be? I'm hopeful that all the clubs will tell them to fook off - like someone said, there will be clubs like Liverpool who will gain from them going under, and they're not about to kiss goodbye to a CL place to help out Pompey. Also, WHU would lose 4 points, and that wouldn't exactly help them, especially considering Wolves wouldn't lose any. On the basis that they need all the clubs to agree, it's just not going to happen. I think the PL should insist that they return all loan players to their parent clubs now, and stop signing anyone else (they shoul;d never have been allowed to do that anyway).

Seems strange that people think a married man with children, having sex with a hooker in a lock up on an industrial estate.....isn't strange

Seems strange

Agreed with those, but some kind of deal to flog Boateng and Belhadj would have been a goer. I know Boateng has played 5 mins for Spurs this season, but I'm sure UEFA would have cut some slack to give them some breathing space. Even if they were asked, and said no, I'm sure that someone would have had a sale and loan back deal put together if the deal had been right. The bottom line is that they just didn't do anything to help themselves out. My guess would be that they know the best chance of staying alive is to stay up. Without that they're definitely dead in the water (as opposed to almost definitely dead), so they played the high risk card and are trying to string it out until the end of the season...only HMRC haven't been reading the script.

Don't forget that they restructured the remaining payments to other clubs for various transfer payments, sell on clauses etc. Dindane alone is sitting pretty at £3.5m, Udinese are owed for Muntari (couple of mil I think), Watford, Chelsea and Spurs also owed apparently.

Ironic, isn't it, that the FA charge him with improper conduct, yet Hampshire Police seem to think it's ok to go to a brothel.

Wouldn't help anyone as they couldn't do anything with it. Pompey should have made more effort to sell everyone who wasn't nailed down in January. Loaning them money is effectively allowing them to keep players that should have been sold in January. Effectively they're cheating for keeping those players.

Probably needs new brakes / accelerator / steering then...

Chanrai's going to try and pay as little as possible to buy more time. I honestly think he reckons the club just needs a few weeks to find a buyer. Maybe he doesn't quite get that a PL club with infrastructure in place is worth something, but a CCC club with no infrastructure isn't. If he's looking at paying £1.8m, then that's probably about the same amount that will be due again at the end of this month once wages have been paid. The much quoted £1.8m per month wages is well short of what they're actually paying. Storrie alone is on £100k a month. At least the same for Grant, and once you get to the likes of James on £260k a month, and Utaka on £320k a month, £1.8m just doesn't add up. Storrie himself claimed a couple of months ago that they had chopped a third off the £55m wage bill.....so they're up for at least £3m per month. Hopefully someone at the Revenue has a calculator and is asking how they think they're going to pay their way between now and the end of the season.

How though? Nothing left to sell, especially if Chanrai gets the ground. Liquidation ensures that the problem doesn't get bigger.

I'd wondered if BC may be stupid enough to chuck more money into the pot in an attempt to try and sell it on. Hasn't anyone told him that the club is worth nothing, and he's not going to get anyone to take on a Championship club with masses of debt attached to it?

As a creditor you'd be pretty upset if the likes of Boateng, Nugent and Belhadj could walk away for nothing purely because of a transfer window.

One thing I haven't got my head around yet. If they go into admin / liquidation, where do they stand with the platers and selling them? In admin, I think they'd be able to keep them, depending on if they could pay them I assume. If liquidation, do they just walk away, or can the liquidator ask for a fee for them, and would they be allowed to do so outside of a window? Even in admin, if they fail to pay them do they just walk away? Again, can the administrator sell them outside of the window, and are there any restrictions?

Apparently they've already had one payment schedule in place and it fell over in month 1. Whilst they won't have much VAT on transfer fees to pay now, every month they have a £3m wage bill and are responsible for the PAYE and NI attached to that. If they pay the players, they have to pay the tax and NI...and therefore the HMRC bill gets bigger and bigger. By the end of this month the £7.5m will become £9m...and so on. Come May they're going to owe a shed load of cash, and then they've got to get through the summer without any cash....difficult, to say the least.