hughieslastminutegoal

....Stephens standing like John Stones ball watching... So he could be worth a fortune..............

Blimey, is this a criticism of Redmond? If we insist on playing "passes" like that we should be in Div 6 of a Pub Sunday League.

"but there's only one change you can make at this time of year, and it isn't to the playing staff. " Isn't that the very problem with the transfer system as it is now? The players are crap, but the manager has to go because you can't change the players... but the new manager also can't change the players.... Football administration has lost sight of the notion that this is an entertainment business, and the objective ought to be to maximise entertainment, not confine as many as possible to mediocrity. But no, it is all about consolidating the position of the richest clubs who can spend ludicrous amounts of money during transfer windows designed to inflate fees (and between windows, inflate managers' compensation packages). Stupid, stupid system.

Poch was running into the same problem at Spurs as Ralph has here, can't refresh without sales, and no one wants to buy what he wants rid of. But how the Great One is the answer to that is beyond me.

Think about it ... would you have borrowed £200m to do this? It makes no sense, and the Chinese have plenty of business sense. There is a bigger and longer-term plan being played, and the waterfront theory seems the best one available.

I agree, but what was the motivation for KL to sell to him while retaining a share? The deal took ages to complete, I am sure there would have been other buyers around but it never looked as though she was interested in finding them. If Gao got a route to get money (that he appeared not to have anyway) out of China, what was KL actually after? if it was £200m, she could have got that reasonably quickly from syphoning off some of the PL money each year, and still own the assets. Maybe she wanted an easy way to get investment cash into China? If only the investigative journalists could investigate that - but I doubt that there was any illegality, so there wouldn't be much of a market for the results to reward their effort.

So glad there is someone else out there who recognised that Niemi never cut out anything crossing the 6 yard box. His serious weakness.

Do you have a point to make? Or do you just love making any kind of sentence(with or without meaning) that contains "pal"?

Yes, why bother playing the football? Just get the chairmen of both clubs to an auction of the "result" and whoever pays the most wins the 3 points. No boring draws. You could even have a "margin of difference" between the final bids which could be summed and averaged and used like goal difference at the end of the season. We could also have slow motion replays of each bid, and have a panel of auctioneers on Sky punditing on the details of the body language of each chairman in the run up to each bid. No need to spend money on players, just write out a cheque to the value of the winning bid and donate it to charity.

added the obvious missing word

He is earning what most of us only dream about. He chose to do that in an "entertainment" industry, putting his ability to entertain in front of the public. Plenty of other entertainers have been booed of their stages and careers ended when failing to give the public what they are paying for. Oh but of course football is different, we must be loyal, we must be true fans, blah blah.

He can't be very good at that which he is limited. He could be very good at that to which he is limited.

RH's post-match comments suggest he sees the potential to boost Long's confidence and there is some evidence that might be beginning to happen. RH is turning other things around so maybe he believes Long's performances can be improved markedly too with the right coaching/management.

Fuming at how he was shafted by KL after her father's somewhat unexpected death, more like. No proof, but it has always been my belief that he had some kind of arrangement worked out with ML about Cortese taking some share in the club at some point, hence the rancour when KL pushed him out. Perhaps NC will kiss and tell one day.

I said to friends that it would be a mistake to give Hughes a contract after we avoided relegation. It seemed very likely that Hughes thought when he took on the job last season that if we miraculously avoided the drop he would be offered a decent contract. He could then make sure we played badly enough for him to get paid off with a nice fat compensation deal. A no lose bet for Hughes.

No it doesn't. He has been around for quite a long time not getting a first team slot anywhere until now. If I were him and someone came in with big bucks and a big wages, I'd probably bite their hand off before I fell out of favour again. Not saying I want him to go, just that it might make good financial sense for him and his family.

It is a shame Harry is still in the Jungle. He can get something out of any fiddle. He will win the jungle if the production team switch from searching for stars to searching for brown envelopes.

Only a neigh-sayer would put it that way.

This may be to the detriment of the strikers, midfield not creating for them with movement and forward bursts but bypassing them instead with aimless (!!) shooting, hence 20 odd shots but only half a dozen on target.

Any reason why you say Yoshida and Bednarek are a better CB pairing than Vestergaard and Hoedt/Stephens yet your CBs for Palace would be Yoshida & Vestergaard?

"The Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus show that regress is much more frequent in both American and British English. Unless you have a very good reason for using retrogress, your language is more likely to be effective if you use regress instead."

Yes, and that solitary swallow I saw yesterday was the only proof I needed that we had a summer.

...because they wanted to hang on in the PL by spending as little money as possible so Gao's loan can be paid off. I suspect the Black Box has fallen into disuse, and when they realised they actually needed someone who could score (we did create a reasonable amount of chances) they just panicked into buying the only available striker they could find. They thought that would just scrape us through and when they realised Carillo wasn't going to do it, they had no other option than to pay off MP and get in the only person available who just might turn around the side's morale and determination. We will see if Gao himself realises that serious money must be spent on players, as the oft-touted Academy has really produced nothing of note for some time. My guess is that as much PL/TV money as possible will be used to finance the loan; it will be interesting to see if he has enough financial flexibility for the squad to be sufficiently strengthened, but I fear that just survival in future is going to be just too expensive. The sale of the club to Gao still stinks as far as I am concerned and we have absolutely nothing to thank KL for.

As distinct from a purposeful waste of money?

Don't you mean his brain is too small for his body? Like a sauropod.