stevegrant

I don't see why not. The company would still be a limited company, which means the directors are duty-bound to act in the best interests of the shareholders and to ensure the company is trading solvently, and the debt would still be owed in the same way as it is currently. The only difference in terms of anything that might affect them is a £250k or so annual cost has been removed from the cashflow. Unless I'm missing something...

Treble it and you're closer.

To be honest, Nick, I'd agree with the skate on the overall "top players" list and also the Campbell issue - he's starting to become a bit of a liability rather than a top, top player Redknapp>.

It's a fair point - in the previous years that we've been either on the full LSE or on AIM, there have been tangible benefits in terms of exposure and also the supposedly increased ease with which people can buy shares. However, with the economic situation as it stands now, it would make sense to save the £250k or so it apparently costs to be listed on AIM each year. Whether it would get shareholder approval or not is another matter, although I suspect the major shareholders may actually be in favour of such a move because then there is no fluctuating share price that they can compare to, and as such can pretty much name their own asking price rather than say "well the public share price is Xp, so I think it's only fair you offer X+15p" or whatever. It should probably be added that you do lose a little bit of the finer details from the publicly-visible financial reports.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/dec/17/englandcricketteam-twenty20 Good news for the purists, bad news for grass-roots funding.

Diarra would have been getting regular games at Arsenal last season had it not been for the massive improvement in Flamini's performances. I suspect Wenger was expecting to be able to persuade Flamini to stay, hence not being too worried about losing Diarra.

As opposed to the -£33m yours was worth as per the last accounts?

I'm sure that £15k will really teach them...

Not a case of too much work - I think it would be a worthwhile addition - but more a case of copyright infringement. We would need to pay various licence fees to the Premier League/Football League in order to show goals/highlights, all of which would be well into four or five figures. Without wishing to go all "advert", SFC do offer a pretty decent service along those lines, SaintsTV. Unfortunately, you have to pay for it.

A little from A and a little from B, I suspect. While I don't think we can complain too much about three century innings for our batsmen (particular credit due for those given the complete lack of practice), apart from them there weren't too many contributors. We could - and probably should - have had 400+ in the first innings, and only three players made double figures in the second innings. We bowled very well in the Indian first innings, but made a mess of it with the new ball in the second which allowed Sehwag to get them off to a flyer. A bit more discipline with line and length would probably have put us is complete control going into today's play. While Harmison and Anderson are up with the best of them on their day, they're the complete polar opposite when things aren't going their way, which then piles the pressure onto the other bowlers.

Going to be a close finish, I think. Should be loads of overs for Monty and Swann judging by the turn and random bounce they were getting towards the end of play today.

I agree that it would be a great move if we ever actually saw any overtaking on the track...

2010 - ban on refuelling?! Surely that takes away a bit of the "competition" in terms of the pit-stop/fuel load strategies?

It's a bit of a gamble though, isn't it... in the Premier League, buying a membership was definitely worthwhile as we'd be playing the likes of Arsenal, ManYoo, Chelsea etc every year, and without a membership chances are you weren't going to get a ticket for any of those games. Nowadays, we play a big club once every 3 or 4 years depending on a cup draw, and many would argue that paying £20 a year just on the off-chance that we get a draw like this isn't worth it. I think I'm right in saying that this game is looking like being the only game since relegation that will sell out before reaching general sale. £80 just to give yourself a better chance of getting a ticket (still not guaranteed) is probably not really money well spent, particularly as there's a hell of a bigger chance that we won't draw a big team in the cup each year...

How the bloody hell would Stansted ever get close to Heathrow's capacity?! Surely that would require an extra 4 terminals (probably 5 given the size of the current one), the relevant road and rail infrastructure, etc?

Yep. There are probably as many credible scientists who subscribe to the "global warming is a load of ********" theory as those who go along the Al Gore chain of thought.

This.

To be honest, I know absolutely sod all about the arcade from a technical point of view, so either Baj gets some time to add/remove some of the games or I'll need to spend a bit more time working out how it all works and how I add/remove stuff. I'm off work from 20th December until 4th January, so it may have to wait until then, as I know Baj doesn't have a great deal of time right now due to work.

As far as I'm aware, SFC only ever outsource the ticket hotline when they are expecting large volumes of calls. They only have a handful of people working in the ticket office at SMS, so if hundreds are trying to call in to get ManYoo tickets, it's going to be a veeeeeery long queue, so at busy periods, the 0800 number tries the ticket office and if that's busy it reroutes to the outsourced call centre queueing system. Or at least I think that's the idea, anyway!

Apparently the 0800 number isn't directing calls to the outsourced call centre, so they've released a direct dial number: 01271 335708 There are more than 20 operators (and a queue facility) there, so if you've tried to get through this morning but failed, give that number a go.

No, there are plenty. The main exceptions are the Muppet Show - where certain people would just take the p!ss - and the main board. We might experiment with allow polls to be created on the main board for a short period of time to see how it goes, but I suspect people would just be forever creating them just for the sake of creating them. I'm happy to be proved wrong though, hence why we will probably conduct a trial in the near future (probably around Christmas/new year).

While the idea is an admirable one, with the way football clubs are run as such massive businesses these days, implementing a salary cap now simply wouldn't work. While it would ensure that clubs don't spend beyond their means on player wages, all it would do is increase the gap between the haves and the have nots, e.g. the Premier League and the Football League. If it had been implemented (and maintained) back in the day when gate receipts were also split evenly between each club, it's quite unlikely that we'd have had the sort of foreign investment invasion that this country's had in the last 5 years or so. While clubs would have been free to spend whatever they wanted on transfer fees, they would have been unable to pay most of the astronomical wages, so they'd have had to have a more realistic budget, which would have kept the wage levels much lower than they are now. Things were just starting to calm down on the wage and transfer fee front when Abramovich came in and took it all to a whole new level. A combination of the Abramovich factor, Carlton and Granada scandalously being allowed to renege on the ITV Digital contract and Football League clubs budgeting beyond their means based on that contract has put the game in the state that it is now.

Au contraire. Done now

When we played Newcastle at the height of the petrol strike and beat them comfortably... "What a waste of petrol!"

Get signed by Chelsea for £24m?