Charlie Wayman

One cannot help but agree with you... Yawn!

Fear not sir as The Gooners are about to implode and Wenger will soon be gone; the last thing on their minds will be youngsters. That era is over so's been whispered!

Don't over rate the NPC just because we've been away for a couple of years. Some of the Academy kids did quite well at this level before and will do so again. it was just a pity that Jan Poortvliet had few options other than to chuck them all in at the deep end together. Don't forget that pre-season match against PL West Ham when we went 3-0 up early on with a dazzling display of pass and move from our kids.

Surely we are not allowed by law to carry brand sponsorship for beer on our shirts? The Irish connection ensures we'll be in orange & white stripes and green shorts. If nothing else it'll show Coor's that the designer we used at Umbro was downing plenty of their amber juice.

Bloody crocodile tears from Adders if you ask me, when he had him he obviously didn't rate him highly enough to start him no wonder the lad got so ****ed off that he wanted out so badly that he settled for a lower division. Self confidence shot away. Good luck lad!

Simple, he was younger. Everyone posts their favourite pictures from the past and usually much more than 3/4 years ago. Obviously Corkie is no exception.

So ;ets work this out, you'd prefer a forum in which the literary skills of the writer are sufficient to construct sentences with no verb and at least four dissimilar expletives e.g. " You moronic ******* ****** **** the ***** off"?

Me too but they've stopped surface mailing renewal forms so looks like a scrummage up there on Friday. Why people panic and have to be first in line is anybody's guess but panic they do and no bets taken on how long the queue will be at 8.00 am

The main criticism I have is that too few people on here keep to topic and reply to the first posting. As a result almost all topics descend into the usual circular arguments and eventually a slanging match between people who obviously know each other beyond this forum. The moderators do have a responsibility to make sure this does not happen and have to a certain extent failed in their duties. Otherwise, this is a football web site not Mensa so you get the level of debate you should expect from a bunch of looney-tunes thicko football fans, if you expectlphilosophical and literary masterpieces go elsewhere

Bridge could never defend properly. He catches the eye easily with his powerful surging runs and great crosses and of course that got hm noticed here and we made a good pile of dosh as a result. But we all know how often he was caught out of position up field when the oppo made a quick break and i recall many goals against coming in from that side of the field. That was obvious here and good forwards soon sussed him out. He was never first choice at Chelsea, which is telling and soon got moved on down to Man City and then on down to West Ham - more or less a steady decline. OK, he's probably a bit of an emotionally weak character as well which doesn't help when mates start bonking your ex but hell Bridgey she was your ex and you don't own any rights to an ex once she'd gone. (If he's better at it than you that's the risk you take but what's to worry about in that anyway). Being that way probably means that he might suffer fragile self confidence as well so a bad game plays on his mind and begets another bad game and so on. On balance he's good not great, never in the class of Bale and has a few flaws in his playing style that he sees unable to correct. But, hey! who hasn't?

Don't expect to be flavour of the month with this analysis but of course you are right! The first priority is to establish ourselves in the Division and the first dozen games will test our competitiveness e.g. W4-D4-L4 would be a good set of results on which to build confidence and a sound foundation. By then it would become clearer who's hot (enough) and who's not from the present squad. Any defender regularly getting skinned would quickly be dropped whilst others might actually blossom under the higher challenge and kick on. We all have an opinion on this now but fair-do's , we need to let the lads have their heads under fire before condemning them out of hand. In fact none of us lot have a clue who'll respond well and who can't. It's possible that we might surprise ourselves in the way that Norwich surprised the whole league last year but it is extremely unlikely that it will happen again anytime soon if the Division structure and pecking order means anything at all. Even the most cynical of us lot surely does not believe that there are zero differences between mid-table PL clubs and mid-table L1 clubs? In my view, we'd do well to use this season to establish & consolidate and think about the PL in two years time. If we don't rush into spending this summer taht may not be a bad thing - let this squad have a go , beef it up in Jan 2012 if necessary to keep us up and then by next summer we'll know who to keep, better know who we want to bring in and prepare to kick on. We should not risk buying too many apparently very sprightly spring chickens from lower leagues right now, who could turn out to be even bigger turkeys than some of our present squad in the NPL. As for Adders, I'm confident Mr Cortese has a touch of the Russian Oligarch about him. He's smarter 'though and is never seen with designer stubble in public.

Don't be too naive. Rules and Regulations are written for external consumption. There are always loopholes and clubs quickly find many ways of circumnavigating them. Compliance to the law is not the same as compliance to the spirit of the regulations. No matter how sincere is the intention of the regulators to level the playing field it does not mean that the subsequent regulations can or will deliver that goal. It is very difficult to write water tight rules and nigh on possible to police them. For example the loan system is a clear breach of a simple regulation to restrain spending on transfers and will also have to be stopped etc, etc.

Wouldn't it be nice if there were no agents taking their 25% or whatever, then we might see more realistic prices and players actually wanting to play for us rather than the usual crap... "always been my dream to play for XYZ" (fill in as appropriate). I'm glad that Cortese is difficult to deal with, means we won't roll over and have our tummies stroked every time some tinpot tosser says "I'm from the PL and your best player is better off with us than little you"

Still think it'll be Swiss Red with a single white stripe, diagonal or vertical - could be like the Air Florida version - and surely white shorts with red edging after this year?

Eriksson obviously likes him but why aren't the PL clubs in for him? With their budgets he'd be a gift at £3m so something doesn't add up. Second, who gets shipped out to make way Ricky, Lee or David as this guy looks like he would be an automatic first choice on the team sheet? No way we'll keep all those strikers happy and what about Guly who is at his magical best running off Ricky

There was an excellent piece in The Sunday Tmes yesterday by Rod Liddle which was very insightful - he opined that very often the reason clubs don't sign people early is not because they are not trying to do so but because big name players turn them down. This (he said) leads to mangers getting ever more frustrated and coming our with excuses like "plenty of time yet" and "no need for anybody to panic", lines in fact which are very familiar to most fans - we've heard them used here in the past many times. If he's right it maybe puts a different slant on our apparent inactivity in the transfer market, perhaps we have been turned down by some key targets who may not see our prospects of a quick return to the PL in quite the same light as management at SMS. Apparently bookies odds can be a factor influencing players judgement's as to where they should go to ensure career progress and more importantly more dosh.

With everyone fit and a full squad to pick from we should be pretty good as you say but as you saw last season when Oxo, Lallana and Schneidelin and other key players went missing through injury we often fell apart and looked decidedly second rate. So one or two real quality reinforcements are needed to strengthen the squad in depth to cover these times and also to put REAL pressure on the key players. We need one or two who could seriously give Lallana and Co a run for their money so they don't get complacent as well.

It is but we've been away only two seasons and until the political and financial implosions at SMS were well able to hold our own and usually nudging the play-offs, so mid-table should be a reasonable expectation for the early months of the season. Even in Div 3 we did well against Ipswich, Bolton , Birmingham, Blackpool and Manure in the various cup competitions. What you have to remember is that other clubs will remember us for our history and former glories rather than the recent slip-up - like Leeds, nobody thinks of them as anything other than a PL team clawing it's way back to where it belongs - so opponents are wary of them, don't know what to expect. It'll be the same for us. Don't forget too that Leeds and Millwall were in our league only last year so at least 4 clubs in the NPC are very familiar to us. It is not quite the great unknown that some fear. Had we been down 7 or 8 years as happened back in the fifties then the challenge to stay up would have been immeasurably higher. Time for stout hearts and strong voices.

Which confirms as discussed a year or two back that only 7 teams have never been out of the Premiership and at the time of our relegation, we were one of only 8 to have achieved this distinction. That says a lot about us even 'though we have this snide press reputation of being relegation dodger specialists which is entirely unfair. It was pretty galling then to leave the elite party and even more so now on reflecting on this table. Having been away some time inevitably we are now sliding down the games played list of course but we are still top-20 so we need to get back there fast to maintain our record.

I didn't agree with your opening comments about Alpine but do so 100% on this well thought through point. Are we even sure at present whom we might be off-loading? Maybe the Oxo situation is not truly resolved and until it is we may not know our strict priorities or cash situation. If he stays a key position in mid-field is sorted, if he goes we may have far bigger transfer kitty than may be the case now but our needs in mid-field may become critical. If Jack Cork is coming then a midfield boasting Cork, Hammond, Do Pardo, Oxo, Schneiderlin, Lallana, Chaplow and Dixon is surely massively good enough for this league and maybe even the one above. They are all one year older, one year wiser and one year more experienced and with talent to spare the rest is up to the lads up front to knock it into the net fro time to time. The back four is a different story; one hopes we would not kick-off without a quality centre-back to supplement Jose Fonte, praying of course that Mr Pardew does not come-a-calling when half his team bugger off in a sulk over the ****-poor £40k per week wages!

Exactly right! The management concept of "Hit the ground running" obviously has not filtered through to St Mary's yet. Perhaps they were waiting to see the fixture list first ;-) ? Now its Leeds we might go all out to sign their best players before we play them.

Last one to bed please put the lights out... Yawn!

Never seen a ****ed seagull. Can it stand on one leg?

Who?

Tit!