stevegrant

In fact, it wasn't either... On The March. Got the two lesser-known fanzines mixed up. I think both had fallen by the wayside by the time I started buying the Ugly, around the late 90s.

Pretty sure the "Hope you die soon" cover was from the Red Stripe fanzine, not the UI.

I think you've answered your own question there. They were happy to rescind the correct awarding of a red card against John Terry for a rugby tackle that had absolutely no intention of playing the ball, and yet throw out a worthwhile appeal. But of course John Terry is the England captain...

I was made aware of the possibility of Crouch making such an "invitation" (I'd probably call it more of an ultimatum, personally!) on the day of the Swansea game by someone quite close to Crouch and my words to him (as they always are when I hear such rumours - I'm sure he's bored of hearing the same thing from me every time ) were "I'll believe it when I see it". If it has happened, then fair play. However, I would have thought that Crouch would have made Barclays aware of the invitation/ultimatum/offer along the lines of "There's a conditional offer to inject new capital into the company based on the two major shareholders currently on the board matching it, but they have declined the opportunity to do so", which could make Barclays force Lowe/Wilde's hands in a "put up or shut up" (i.e. put money in or resign) way. By the look of it, that hasn't materialised. I don't understand the logic in that argument, really. While he may be able to engineer a bigger stake than he currently has if the club was in administration by making an offer to buy the club at a (presumably) much-reduced rate, it would also assume that nobody else was able to place a better offer for the creditors, which - given Leon Crouch's supposed willingness/happiness to lose part of his own personal fortune on ensuring the future of SFC - seems highly unlikely. It's far more likely that the Fulthorpe group, if it turns out they're not just a bunch of timewasters, would then be brought into play as it wouldn't require as much investment to buy the club in administration as it would right now. Also, if we were to go into administration, the club's asset pool would be stripped bare by the administrators in order to satisfy the creditors. In reality, that means goodbye to all of our better players, and it probably means goodbye to Jackson's Farm and quite possibly the necessity of some sort of hideous sale-and-leaseback deal on St Mary's. From that position, I don't believe there would be much/any chance of Lowe being financially better off post-administration, which is the claim that people seem to be throwing his way.

Yeah, you fat bastard I think this argument has run its course.

I would say the more obvious answer is that nobody in their right mind would "invest" (i.e. **** money down the drain) in SFC/SLH in its current perilous position. I think the three of them would be far more willing to listen and perhaps negotiate on such a deal now than they were a year ago when SISU were floating around.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/internationals/7727451.stm A few injuries: Michael Ballack (Chelsea) Philipp Lahm (Bryan Munich) Clemens Fritz (Werder Bremen) Marcell Jansen (Hamburg) Christian Pander (Schalke) Thorsten Frings is out after a dispute with their manager, and Kevin Kuranyi retired during half-time of their qualifier with Russia last month, but apart from that, it looks a pretty strong squad.

Defoe has also proven in his countless chances for England that he can quite happily score goals against the likes of Andorra and Kazakhstan, but can't do it against the better nations. Here's his England goalscoring record: Sep 04 v Poland (1) Sep 06 v Andorra (2) Jun 08 v Trinidad & Tobago (2) Oct 08 v Kazakhstan (1) Poland are the highest-ranked nation from those, currently at 32 in the FIFA rankings. Trinidad are 78th, Kazakhstan 125th and Andorra 194th. He has 31 England caps (somehow), but has scored in just 4 of those games. Time to move on from that experiment. Darren Bent is in good form at the moment, he should get a chance, as should Agbonlahor.

He batted further up the order in the first game and his first action was to run out KP who was one of our only hopes of chasing down the ridiculous total set. I agree that he probably *should* be higher up, but he doesn't do himself any favours with his abysmal running decisions. Not sure I'd agree with that - in my opinion, Collingwood is still a far more accomplished part-time bowler than Bopara. I'd entirely agree about his batting, but you could then also make the case for Collingwood's fielding ability (I don't think there's a better fielder in the squad) often being worth the number of runs he now seems unable to score with the bat. Bell is the ultimate 30s and 40s player - gets in, looks well set, and then plays a stupid shot to get out. I'm not sure who else I'd have opening the batting right now though. Prior does exactly the same, plays some good shots to get in and then skies one to give his wicket away. I understand Gough's comments, although I personally think it applies more to the Twenty20 side that went to Antigua. Alistair Cook was in that squad... I mean, really? He's the most non-Twenty20 player I've seen in recent years.

One positive to take from today's game is that at least Flintoff looks as though he's back in decent nick with the bat. He got an absolutely shocking decision against him in the first game, so couldn't really judge how he was looking, but today's knock was decent. The real blow was losing both him and Pietersen in the same over - that pretty much killed it when it looked as though we might have a chance of rescuing the game. Certainly an improvement on the first game, although they'd have found it difficult to be any worse!

The main issue with FM Live is that you're always paying for it, unlike an "offline" version of the game where you pay £30 or however much up front and that's it.

I'm sure he'll still try to defend the indefensible. The long and short of it is that SI have, once again, released a product that isn't fit for purpose at the time of release (hence having to release a patch 15 hours later). They've tried to prevent piracy with a over-complicated product registration process which hasn't been tested to cope with the likely demand on the first day of release and has proven to be completely incapable of handling the number of requests.

15 hours after the game was released, they've issued a patch! http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php?t=60956 Some ****ing hilarious bugs in there - my favourites: and the best of the lot...

Yep, I'd totally agree. Clubs with a lot more money than us could possibly take something like the transfer window system to the EU stating that it's a restriction of trade, and I think they'd probably win that case.

Apparently they've made a complete balls-up of the new product registration/activation procedure they've tried to implement for this year's release. It seems that, in order to run the game, you need to have already activated it. If you don't have an internet connection, you can do it over the phone. Good to see that SI are moving with the times and doing away with all that old-fashioned DRM and copy-protection nonsense... They've had problems with: a) some of the characters in the product key printed on the back of the user guide being illegible/ambiguous; b) activation phone line simply cutting users off after they've entered their product key c) the download service stating that users don't have an internet connection, despite said users posting on internet forums at the same time Oops.

I agree there. While I'm neither pro or anti Lowe, per se, you only have to look at the contrast of opinion on him on here to see that his very presence has divided people. It's what happens at a hell of a lot of clubs every single summer, things get built up and then after most of the season tickets have been bought a star player gets sold or some sort of major change is brought in. Alan Shearer was sold to Blackburn on 24th July 1992 - the league season started three weeks later. Also, I don't understand how you (or anyone) didn't forsee a major overhaul of the playing staff in the summer. In the second half of last season, everyone was going on and on saying that we should be playing the kids because "at least they'll be energetic and look like they care, and they won't cost us anywhere near as much money". We shipped out lots of high earners, promoted a lot of the younger players who were hungry for first-team action, which was exactly what loads of people were asking for and exactly what was necessary in pure financial terms.

Or they just make them up. Which is precisely why, in my opinion, they feel the need to keep on the club's side. The Echo probably needs SFC more than SFC needs the Echo.

I think you'll find Leon Crouch was the chairman at the time of Burley's departure. I have vague recollection of the Echo (might have been Simon Carter specifically rather than the paper as a whole) being banned by SFC for a short period of time when they suggested that Burley was on the verge of being sacked around this time last year, so it's got nothing to do with who is in charge really. FloridaMarlin's excellent post above sums up the situation very well for me. Basically, it's not "the Echo are being censored by SFC", it happens with every single newspaper/football club relationship across the country.

As per the subject... have they actually fixed any of the ever-so-slightly fundamental bugs that were in the demo?

That said, he's putting on a reasonable score himself... would have been nice if he'd allowed KP to stay there with him!

It's ridiculous. He plays with such maturity for Essex and the Lions team, yet whenever he gets a(nother) chance with the full England team, he does something stupid like that.

85 players have played a league game for SFC since relegation: Baird Bale Baseya Belmadi Bennett Best Bialkowski Blackstock Brennan Chaplow Cork Cranie Dailly Davies Davis Delap Dyer Euell Folly Fuller Gillett Gobern Guthrie Hajto Hammill Higginbotham Holmes Idiakez Ifil James John Jones Kenton Miller Kosowski Lallana Lancashire Licka Lucketti Lundekvam Makin Madsen McCann McGoldrick Mills, J Mills, M Niemi Oakley O'Halloran Ormerod Ostlund Pahars Paterson Pearce, A Pearce, I Pekhart Pele Pericard Perry Poke Potter Powell Prutton Quashie Rasiak Robertson Safri Saganowski Schneiderlin Skacel Smith, P Smith, R Surman Svensson Thomas Thomson Viafara Vignal Walcott White Wise Wotton Wright, J Wright, R Wright-Phillips

1024x768 is still by far the most popular. I've just tried the OS at that resolution and it does fit the full width of the screen. Looks like they've fixed the blank box problem (now PaddyPower advert). The alignment at the bottom is a tricky one because IE and the other browsers handle the display of tables so differently. In Firefox, for example, the league table snapshot looks as though it should fit another two rows in to make it line up, whereas in IE it'll only fit one more. There's an add-on called AdBlock Plus.

Depends on the screen resolution, I guess. I think it is wider than the last version, although it doesn't quite fit the entire width of the screen on my PC. It does look a lot better in IE, mainly (as someone else has already pointed out) due to the lack of an advert blocker.

We don't get any say in the scheduling of away games, sadly. Otherwise, I'd have thought we'd have vetoed the Palace game being moved. That said, there's not going to be any advantage to either side as we both play on Saturday at 3pm so both teams have the same recovery period, and it will then give both teams an extra day's recovery for the following week's games against Burnley and Doncaster respectively.