stevegrant

Davies would be ideal as a ready-made replacement for Heskey, IMO. He's also rediscovered the ability to score a few goals as well.

Yes - he also convened the creditors' meeting at very short notice and was particularly obtrusive towards each of the many interested parties who wanted to carry out due dilligence on the company's accounts - hence while there were parties who were believed to be willing to offer much more than Bates was offering, they refused to register an offer without having conducted due dilligence, so Bates' offer was the only one on the table.

Upside-down screen in Windows always gets people panicking

I thought it was highly amusing that, having basically hinted that Chanderpaul doesn't field very much, KP ended up having to miss half of the West Indies innings yesterday due to injury. Karma in action

Yep, still two spaces at centre-back... entry instructions are on the first post in this thread

£30 a ticket at the BIC... seems a little bit over-priced to me.

Teams are as follows: HOME TEAM - Manager: dubai phil GK: The Banana Factor RB: silversaint (45) CB: DarrenLeTiss CB: disintegration87 (45) LB: SaintKenny RM: JustMike CM: prideofthesouth CM: hamster (45) LM: mattbrennan (45) ST: stevegrant ST: The9 (45) ---- RB: dannypope (45) CB: CM: saintsforlife7 (45) LM: Scudamore (45) ST: Nexstar (45) AWAY TEAM GK: bigdavewatson RB: Andy_Porter (45) CB: Saints Mad Si (45) CB: The Flying Finn (45) LB: Neilza RM: forever a red and white CM: INFLUENCED.COM CM: lee_saint (45) LM: Griffo ST: Baj ST: magnet (45) ---- RB: Um Bongo (45) CB: ooohTerryHurlock (45) CB: Bugenhagen (45) CM: MLT's Headed Goals (45) ST: Foxy (45)

There are still two 45-minute slots available (one at centre-back, the other at left midfield).

Yep.

Dominos do BOGOF on all medium and large pizzas as long as you collect them.

Right, e-mails have been sent.

Only 60,000 of Wilde's shares are owned by Merlion Equities. The rest are owned by him personally.

Nearly there now... Only two places remaining - one is goalkeeper (90 mins), the other is either central or left midfield for 45 mins (position optional as there are people I can move across the midfield if necessary).

Officially, I don't think clubs are allowed to talk to players whose contracts are expiring domestically, but can sign pre-contract agreements with players contracted to foreign clubs with up to 6 months remaining on their contracts.

I believe the TV deal for the Football League is worth a lot more from next season. I think I read somewhere that it works out that Championship clubs will get somewhere in the region of £2.5-3m per season, while Leagues One and Two will get a fraction of that.

People had no reason to doubt Michael Wilde when he made exactly the same statements. He even went as far as to put it in writing in his "manifesto". Fiction. Lowe, along with Lord Marland and Paul Thompson underwrote a rights issue to part-fund the SMS construction, which brought an extra £3m into the club. So one "fact" that's actually not true and a load of opinions. If Crouch has attracted investment on the condition Lowe is out (and hey, who am I to doubt that statement is accurate - it's never been said before in order to get people into power, after all ), what is he waiting for?

Yep, which is why nobody's actually bought them yet. For all Corp Ho's bluster on the various threads that have run on the Lounge in the last couple of years, nobody has actually put their money on the table because while Fratton Park remains their home with a capacity of around 20,000, there is no way a mildly competitive Premier League club can be sustained AND make a return on an investment - particularly a £90m one.

Their problem is that they will have to continue to sell/release their high earners, which will leave them with a squad that would probably just about compete for a play-off place in the Championship. If they avoid relegation this season - which is looking reasonably likely given their run-in and the respective run-ins of the teams around them - it'll only be fighting off the inevitable for a year.

I was under the impression the asking price for PFC was down to "nominal", i.e. £1, so long as whoever came in covered all (or a significant majority) of the debt.

I'll be sending out e-mails this evening detailing how/when money is to be paid. If those positions remain unfilled by tonight, they will remain open - I will figure out a way of ensuring all costs are covered in the meantime, which may involve slotting people who had asked to play 45 but said they didn't mind playing 90 if necessary into 90 minute slots, getting the full money from them and then refunding half if/when I manage to get someone to fill the 45-minute slot. So long as 11 positions are covered at £230 each (or 2x£115), the costs are covered. I haven't got my bit of paper where I'd managed to fit everyone into a team to hand at the moment (currently sat on a train to Waterloo), but if necessary I should be able to do a slight reshuffle to ensure there's 15 in each squad rather than 16 if necessary. Getting a second goalkeeper is kinda vital though, so if anyone knows anyone who would be willing to play in goal at a cost of £230, ask them to get in touch pretty urgently!

There's certainly "something" in place in League Two. It's "voluntary" insomuch that the clubs voted in favour of putting it in place on a season-by-season basis, so it could easily be voted against next season. The Football League would have no power whatsoever to impose a salary cap because of EU freedom of trade legislation - it only works if the clubs are willing to vote in favour of it. As you rightly say, they tried it in League One as well but it only lasted a season - the clubs vetoed it after one season. I believe it's 50% of turnover in League Two and it was 60% in League One. However, I have a feeling it only refers to basic salary and doesn't include any sort of appearance/goal/clean sheet bonuses or signing-on fees, so it's still very simple for clubs to circumvent it. Most clubs in League Two do appear to be much more stable at the moment - Bournemouth, Rotherham and Luton's problems were from previous years with punishments carried into this season - with the exception of Darlington, but they do have the massive white elephant that is their stadium to cover the running costs of. 25,000 capacity with an average of about 4,000 - George Reynolds' legacy still lives on long and strong in that town, sadly.

Absolutely positive. Much like the freedom of movement legislation that the EU (rightly) brought in for "ordinary" workers, it causes more problems than it solves in sport. Certainly once you get into the Premier League, a salary cap simply wouldn't work, and would almost certainly be illegal as well. The way I see it, there are two possible options for a salary cap: 1. each club has the same amount of money to spend on wages 2. each club's salary budget is restricted to a percentage of their turnover For option 1, it would never get past the consultancy stage. Some clubs clearly generate far more revenue than others, so what would the likes of Birmingham think about being restricted to spending, say, £8m a year on salaries when their turnover is £20m and their owners are willing to dip their hand in their pocket every now and then? What do these clubs then do with the money they've got left over? Chances are, all it does is make transfer fees go ridiculous again. At the other end of the spectrum, you've got the likes of Blackpool averaging less than 8,000 for home games - would they even be able to spend £8m on wages? Probably not, but if the cap is set to £8m, you can be pretty sure that they'll be trying their hardest to spend as much as they're entitled to do, so that they're in a position to compete, and then they'll get into the deep brown stuff because they're spending more than they can afford, which is one of the main reasons to implement a salary cap in the first place. For option 2, in my opinion, all that would do is make the gulf between the haves and the have nots even wider. Again, taking the same two clubs at opposite ends of the table, if Birmingham's turnover is £20m, and they're allowed to spend 60% of their turnover on wages, that gives them a maximum wage bill of £12m. Blackpool, on the other hand, with their annual revenue of £10m are only allowed to spend £6m. That either allows Birmingham to outbid Blackpool for any player they may both realistically be trying to sign, or it allows Birmingham to attract players who are simply out of reach for the rest. Once that gets extrapolated over a number of years, they really might as well abolish promotion and relegation between all of the divisions as the gulf in class between them will be huge. Leeds would have absolutely ****ed League One if a salary cap had been in place. This is a club who made £4.5m PROFIT last year - the likes of Cheltenham at the bottom of League One probably struggled to make £4.5m in total revenue! The way I see it, the two aims of the salary cap are: 1. to make clubs more responsible in the way they run the club financially, and 2. to make the leagues more competitive, to give the underdog - particularly at the top level - the opportunity to compete. It's no coincidence that only one newly-promoted team in the Premier League has qualified for Europe in their first season since 1994 (Ipswich, 2001), while the top European club competition is deemed tedious by the majority of supporters/viewers in this country because you can pretty much guarantee which 4 clubs are going to be qualifying for it each season and that they'll get through the group stage without any trouble.

I'm not sure of the exact details, but I'm pretty sure I read that they only paid (at the very most) half of the total construction cost, less the money received from the sale of Filbert Street - which was about the same as we received for the Dell site. No, here's an example of what I mean. Take Leicester in 02/03 when they went into administration. If they knew the punishment for going into administration was relegation regardless of how they performed that season, they'd have tried a bit harder not to overspend to the extent that they did. As it turned out, they overspent massively, went into administration and basically cheated their way to promotion to the Premier League. Even a 10-point penalty would not have stopped them getting promoted. Instead, under my idea, they would have still finished second but instead of getting promoted to the Premier League, they would have either just been prevented from being promoted (Sheffield United in third would have been the beneficiaries that season) or would actually have been relegated to League One (with the third-bottom team staying up), depending on how you interpret the rule for a team who finishes in a promotion place. If, as in the case of Leeds in 06/07, they went into administration but were relegated anyway, they'd have been chucked down two divisions. With something as fundamental as finance in the Football League these days, it's going to need something as draconian as that to act as a proper deterrent to clubs so they don't spend more than they can afford. Punishments like this work pretty well in Italy, they've got their finances mostly in order these days - the issue in Italy is that attendances outside the top flight are dreadful so unless it's the likes of Fiorentina, Genoa, Torino or Napoli, the clubs are going to struggle regardless. Fortunately, in this country, there are a hell of a lot of very well-supported clubs who aren't in the Premier League, which is why the whole of the Football League can still sustain three fully professional divisions, at least for now.

Haven't we been here before, only with a list that is now one name longer?

All of that sounded mildly plausible until you said the bit I've highlighted. There will be no chance of anyone getting hold of the land around SMS or Jackson's Farm for redevelopment unless the club is back on its feet, and in order to do that, people have got to be going through the turnstiles. As things stand, Lowe pretty much has control of the club thanks to his alliance with his old pals and Wilde. Why would he intentionally steer the club towards administration where his shareholding would be rendered worthless and he would be battling on an even playing field with everyone else to take control of the club? The very idea of that makes absolutely no sense.