stevegrant

Nugent?! :lol:

Folded. Some people started taking it far too seriously, which just ****ed everyone off. Team selection "issues" as well. If you were a manager's favourite, you'd start every week regardless of how **** you were playing and how well other players were playing.

I'd rather Notts won it than Sussex, and they play each other next Sunday in what will probably be a title decider.

Am I the only one that, remembering how we played last time we played Andorra, actually thought we played alright last night? Last time we looked as if we didn't know what to do when we got the ball, but this time we passed the ball fine, Walcott did pretty well out wide in the first half particularly.

To be fair, Macedonia really are not the bunch of no-hoper part-timers the press and fans like to make out. In two attempts on HOME soil, England have failed to beat them. I know that doesn't say an awful lot right now, but England are ranked 15th in the world (somehow), so while people thought the result the first time Macedonia played here (at SMS) was a fluke, they proved otherwise when they got a draw at Old Trafford as well. Better teams than Scotland will go to Skopje and fail to win.

I cannot believe anyone would pay £15 to watch that. To be honest, I'd rather watch someone fight JOHN Prescott

I cannot believe anyone would pay £15 to watch that. To be honest, I'd rather watch someone fight JOHN Prescott

People in this country (and I freely hold my hands up on this one as well) have taken energy supplies for granted for years. Last year, I was working from home, and it was entirely normal for me during the day (i.e. peak time) to have: :: 37" LCD TV on all day :: Sky+ box on all day :: Laptop or PC (or both!) on all day All of those would then also be on all evening, perhaps along with the lights, heating and X-Box or Wii. Now I commute to London and I'm generally too tired to spend too long watching TV or playing games in the evening, I suspect my next electricity bill is going to be tiny compared to my last one.

People in this country (and I freely hold my hands up on this one as well) have taken energy supplies for granted for years. Last year, I was working from home, and it was entirely normal for me during the day (i.e. peak time) to have: :: 37" LCD TV on all day :: Sky+ box on all day :: Laptop or PC (or both!) on all day All of those would then also be on all evening, perhaps along with the lights, heating and X-Box or Wii. Now I commute to London and I'm generally too tired to spend too long watching TV or playing games in the evening, I suspect my next electricity bill is going to be tiny compared to my last one.

It's the right decision long-term, IMO, because the Treasury simply cannot afford to pay out billions of pounds to everyone because they can't afford to pay their energy bills. They'd be setting a dangerous precedent... what happens in a year's time when the same percentage of the population who cannot afford to pay for energy then cannot afford to pay for food because the "help" that was given to them ended up being spent on Sky HD rather than paying the gas bill? Will everyone rally round and say that people should receive help to buy food? I also don't see how they would legally impose any sort of windfall tax on those companies, as has been suggested.

It's the right decision long-term, IMO, because the Treasury simply cannot afford to pay out billions of pounds to everyone because they can't afford to pay their energy bills. They'd be setting a dangerous precedent... what happens in a year's time when the same percentage of the population who cannot afford to pay for energy then cannot afford to pay for food because the "help" that was given to them ended up being spent on Sky HD rather than paying the gas bill? Will everyone rally round and say that people should receive help to buy food? I also don't see how they would legally impose any sort of windfall tax on those companies, as has been suggested.

But then those teams who never win the league but seem to always be in the Champions League these days (Liverpool, Arsenal, Sevilla, Roma, Marseille, etc) would kick off because they wouldn't be able to get their grubby hands on that Champions League cash. Someone should try to bring court action against UEFA for misrepresentation or the European equivalent of the Trade Descriptions Act, just for a laugh

Curbishley signed those players. Then West Ham appointed a DoF who subsequently decided it would actually be in their interests to pay Ljungberg £6m to leave the club straight away!

Yep, unity is the one thing that is required under this structure. Foreign clubs tend to get that a bit easier as there is already a pre-conceived understanding that the DoF/head coach structure is how it works. It's very clear that Keegan wasn't aware that a DoF was to be appointed at Newcastle, particularly one who was going to be working out of an office in London. With JP/MW, it's clear that they understood the structure when they were appointed and seem very comfortable with it. As such, there is a hell of a lot more chance of that working than the situations at West Ham and Newcastle, where the old-school manager is very clearly uncomfortable with the situation.

It's certainly a cultural thing, the English game pretty much since football began has been run on the basis that the manager does everything from picking the team to buying the players. After all, managers in any other industry will be the ones who hire and fire their employees, so from that perspective you can understand "old school" managers like Curbishley and Keegan being slightly hacked off that some of those responsibilities have been taken from them. The same would apply to managers who ply their trade in the lower divisions, predominantly on the basis that clubs at those levels can't really afford to have more than one person in decision-making positions like the manager, director of football, etc. It's a system that's been in place on the continent for as long as I can remember. Clubs like Real Madrid, AC Milan, Bayern Munich and so on have all had "sporting director" positions or similar, who has generally been the person who conducts the transfer business, leaving the team manager/head coach to get on with training, tactics and team selection. Of course they will "generally" have an input on transfers as well, and I'd be absolutely stunned if the likes of Bernd Schuster and Jurgen Klinsmann weren't heavily consulted on transfer targets etc. With Curbishley, it actually appears to me as if the board has been trying to force him out for a while. They didn't let him spend very much in the summer, but enforced the sales of Zamora and Paintsil to Fulham and then Ferdinand and McCarthy (for ridiculous fees, FWIW) to Sunderland. Based on AC's transfer history with West Ham since they suddenly found themselves fairly flush with cash, I don't blame them one bit, and I'm surprised he's lasted in the job as long as he has done.

The 3D engine is a waste of time and goes against everything that Championship Manager and Football Manager have always been about. The text-based engine always left more to the imagination than the "visual" engines, which was one of the main appeals of CM. Now it's just like any other football management sim...

Yeah, I think I'll be giving it a wide berth until that EULA gets changed. I am aware that the "incognito" mode has been present in Safari and Firefox for a while, I was merely pointing out what I felt was an amusing warning that secret agents will be watching you

Another quite nifty little feature is to compare the memory usage of currently-opened browsers. Obviously the Firefox reading has to take into account that I'm running 5 add-ons (Firebug, McAfee SiteAdvisor, Web Developer, Del.icio.us and AdBlock Plus), but even so there's an enormous difference.

"Incognito" mode is interesting... basically doesn't save any history, cookies or passwords on your computer from pages viewed in that mode. The introductory message about it is amusing though...

Currently playing for a team in the Champions League. I suspect not, somehow. And Vieira (as in Patrick, formerly of Arsenal) is spelt differently

Yes you would, although the website says it's currently out of stock... Looks quite decent, particularly for the price.

Players from outside the EU have to fulfil certain criteria in order to get a work permit, something along the lines of having to have featured in 75% of the international matches for that player's country in the last two years that he has been available/eligible for, and that country generally has to be "reasonably" ranked in the FIFA world rankings (top 75, I think). However, of course, the big clubs frequently get away with work permits for players who don't even come close to fulfilling those requirements. Quite how that happens, I'm not too sure. I think the overall remit is that you should always employ the best person for the job, regardless of race, nationality, disabilities, etc. If that person happens to come from Brazil rather than Barnet, so be it. That will be the clubs' argument, that the foreign players they bring in are a) better technically than their English equivalent, and b) more cost-effective as transfer fees for English players are always ridiculously over-inflated.

What can UEFA do? The clubs would just take them to the EU who would rule on the side of the clubs as a restriction of trade. UEFA simply wouldn't get away with implementing anything along the lines of the 6+5 foreign:home-grown ratio because of EU employment and discrimination legislation. Of course they do, because it means that they have very little power themselves. If they'd actually used their power when they had some to show that they have the interests of the game at heart, they'd have had more respect from the clubs (the former representatives of the G14 in particular) and perhaps might have had more chance of staying in control. They've shown themselves to be utterly clueless on key issues. Racism, for example - they've been preaching an anti-racism policy and that they're going to come down hard on clubs and national associations whose fans break the rules on this, and then they go and fine the Spanish FA £3,000 for the monkey noises aimed at SWP in the Madrid friendly in 2003, and give Rangers a slap on the wrist for sectarian abuse in a European game a year or two back. It's no wonder nobody takes them seriously.

That much is obvious by Michel Platini's continued comments about trying to bring in various rules and regulations governing debts, player quotas, etc. Basically, all the things that ensure the top Premier League teams succeed on a regular basis in the Champions League and reap all the financial rewards available there are things that Platini wants to place restrictions on. For example: :: Foreign ownership :: Levels of solvency :: Spending power :: Home-grown players All of those are currently in the favour of Man United, Chelsea, Liverpool and Man City because they are all owned by foreign investors, they all have massive levels of debt, despite which they still have much bigger spending power over most of the rest of Europe and they don't include many home-grown players. Arsenal buck the trend a little bit because they are still (mostly) owned by British people and they run a fairly tight financial line, although they do have a large debt on the stadium it's a very manageable one with annual income of £200m, although because they don't have the foreign ownership with massive bundles of their own money being used, they don't have anywhere near the same spending power as the others.

True, although in both of their cases it's been due to substantial investment from either a wealthy owner (Dave Whelan) or a generous local business (Kingston Communications). If Hull were still at Boothferry Park and Wigan at Springfield Park, they'd both be in League Two.