rallyboy

Q. What's funnier than drawing your local rivals after five years and it being your last chance to smash up their stadium and finally redress the balance of a bitter generation? A. Going out of business that very week and handing them a bye into the next round.

soon we might have to revisit the question about who wants them to survive and who wants them to disappear - the draw will certainly crank up the hate in the next few weeks. Not a good day for the old bill. And if their new investment doesn't appear and the court case forces them into a serious hole as we book our Wembley final, I can see one or two of their supporters using it as a last opportunity to smash someone else's town up. That has the potential to be an interesting week for both clubs. (slight understatement)

it's most likely to be either well-meaning fan-based consortiums who will expect the current owners to pay off the debt, step aside, and hand the club over to them, or corporate sharks looking for a post-admin bargain. In both scenarios any new owners won't want to touch the debt so I see no change to their situation. IF there is a consortium ready to go -they need to open talks/hunt down and agree individual terms with Faraj, Fahim, Gaydamak, Chinrai, creditors, the Prem, AND complete due diligence and all the paperwork in the next three days. That will give them time to strengthen the squad, pay the wages to prevent a player exodus and pave the way for a rosy future. If any deal was that advanced, Storrie would have told the inbreds where to stick their bells and he would be all over the press talking himself up - and he ain't. If we are playing Call My Bluff I'll go for Frank Muir's suggestion that there is in fact no sign of real investment and it is more lies to deflect attention away from the elephant sat in the corner....

someone mentioned a 40% cut for the away club, but that was on Meridian. And having watched the tv game, has Redknapp sold Spurs our songs or did he get them as a payoff? 'get your father's gun, and shoot the Chelsea scum....' - 'oh when the Spurs, go marching in'...??? Are we owed royalties?

I think the Prem may have cleared Chelsea but we can stick a couple of agent fees in their instead so it won't be far out - it is difficult to keep up with this comic saga. Let's also remember that if Chanrai has lent about £18.75M he will be wanting £20M plus now, or maybe £25M over a couple of years, or the ground when the payments halt. The arms dealer/child maimer's amount must be stacking up interest as well. The cost of servicing the loans must be equivalent to the wage bill at the moment because the borrowing will have been at ludicrous rates from people who will bleed them dry. I see no tunnel let alone light at the end of it.

offloading Williamson is like turning up in Haiti with a dustpan and brush. Serious action is required to avoid implosion, and I don't know why the media bother to tell us the wages might be in doubt. If they actually paid the wages - now that would be a news story.

as finance director I'm sure she had no knowledge of unusual practice or the state of the business. There must have been some furtive meetings between her and Storrie in recent months....and much shredding of documents. I wonder which one of them will take the offer of a few weeks in Ford and become the prosecution's main witness when it eventually falls apart?

I do hope they lift this ridiculous embargo and pull through, their 6,000 fans deserve better, but more importantly, where do I get a Udinese shirt with HMRC on the back?

I will miss this thread, hopefully someone can edit the 'best of' and launch a website so we can revisit it when feeling low. If someone could add the timeline of each comic development it would be excellent. It will be a real shock if they go pop, imagine not googling 'Portsmouth on the brink' or meeting here to compare financial notes, I'd have to find a new hobby. Oh well, it's been a golden autumn/winter, all good things come to an end, and it has been the longest running comedy of all time so we shouldn't complain. Fraud, prostitutes, own goals, tax evasion, last minute penalties and of course the stadium plans, hilarious, if only they had shot it in 3D. So for laughs per minute I feel far from shortchanged - if they don't get sued again or convicted of anything else it has still been VERY funny.

so another little gem emerges, they paid half of Sol's wages as 'image rights' to avoid tax and NI. There is no way you could justify matching a players wages with an equal amount as a rights payment, I believe this may be called fraud. Hopefully the rest of football is now realising that Pompey have been cheating for years, since they bought their way out of the championship with money they didn't have. Please put this poor animal out of it's misery, it's suffered long enough, it no longer has dignity nor a quality of life. I'll go dig a hole in the garden.

cold facts - On the pitch - they have proved to be the worst team over half a season, they are likely to weaken as others like West Ham strengthen. Likely scenario - relegation. Off the pitch - big money needed now, the type of money that hasn't been found in a year, so unlikely to appear. Likely scenario - stumble into Championship with very weak squad - drop again? In court - they are likely to lose the tax case and should the other three be found guilty the resulatant forensic examination of their accounts could lead to penalties. Likely scenario - further charges against the club itself. Potential results, give or take a few charges and penalties.... 1. The club ceases to exist. 2. They are demoted to non-league. 3. They drop two divisions very quickly. 4. They are relegated and struggle. 5. They are relegated but rebuild. 6. They survive in the Prem. 7. They build a new 60,000 seater harbourside stadium complex for World Cup games and Maradona leads their squad of Galacticos to Champion's League glory. the thought of them folding completely seems far-fetched but with every passing day it becomes a realistic possibility, if I was a betting man I think I will go for a penalty-assisted version of 3. And for those with blue-tinted specs - you only need two wins and all your troubles are over, you've been unlucky, you're playing really well, sign a good striker this week and you'll be mid-table, the press is nasty, so are the judges and the taxman, it's not fair etc.

Solent just announced that they have lost the appeal!!!!!!

Interesting that they still seem to regard themselves as the pluckly little victim putting the nasty authorities in their place. In reality all the power must be with the taxman and the league - behind all the bravado it sounds like a big day for them - the countdown to implosion could be triggered today.

That can't be right - it makes the club sound like a corrupt company that has been run by criminals for their own personal gain, and that wouldn't be tolerated by the Premier League. I'm sure these fit and proper people will be cleared of all charges and continue to be heroes to the blue few. And if these three were running around with filthy cash hanging out of their holes from signing overpaid players via dodgy agents for no reason, I can't see how that could lead to an unsustainable wage bill and financial collapse... It's not like they closed their youth team to concentrate on 'unusual' transfer activity a few years ago, that would make it sound like they planned huge personal gain and deliberately prevented young players coming through to halt their little scheme. It must be the nasty press picking on the plucky underdog again. I'm sure it's all a misunderstanding, as are the land issues, ownership, unpaid debts, wagebill, etc, etc. Is it correct that Redknapp signed Nugent and Utaka on the same day? To sign one liability is unfortunate, to do it twice on the same day could be considered criminal.

'Pompey could get TV money!' - great headline, no substance though. This is Scudamore drawing a clear line in the sand and making sure the fans know that the ball is in Pompey's court so when they don't get the money he can refer them to his statement about proof. And he wants to see legally-binding re-written contracts? Good luck with that, they shredded the originals when the door was being kicked in. He'd better look on Storrie's computer, it's in the bath and the hard drive was flushed. Is it time yet for the predictable mysterious blaze that starts in the accounts dept and spreads through the offices that deal with all relevant paperwork?...

I've been away for a week so just been catching up - other than threatening the league and then withdrawing it, having a show of strength attending by 75 people, watering the pitch all night to postpone certain defeat attempting to rewrite the UK VAT rules. Have they done anything else that would make me chuckle?

let's remember how clubs queued up to buy our squad that must have been valued at £25M. They are dreaming. I do agree with the post about them hanging on for a bit, I would rather they stumbled to relegation on merit, which I think is within their capability, and then start next season with a 35pt penalty for all the offences that are stacking up.

if they now want the league to guarantee loans have they run out of things to secure against? Is this the last loan they can get? This has been a VERY funny thread but nothing made me laugh out loud as much as when they claimed their squad is worth £50M!!

I seem to recall fans and senior figures from other clubs shouting that we were in admin when Southampton Football Club was clearly not. If the authorities were happy to decide that our club was in admin when it wasn't, with no right of appeal, I see no reason for suggesting now that Portsmouth are anything but totally bankrupt.

as well as the tainted cup win let's remember they bought their way out of the championship with unsustainable wages so anyone who is considering sympathy when they go into freefall should realise they are just returning to their natural position. Wenger has it right, using players you can't afford is cheating. At least we were just run into the ground by idiots!

it's about time Barclays came out and apologised for the appalling service they've been giving the club - every month there's a mistake, a corrupted file here, further delay there - the bank manager needs to explain exactly why his staff keep making these errors. And as a sponsor of the best league in the world the bank is bringing the Prem into disrepute and making one of it's established and respected clubs look silly.

if the worst happens the outstanding big loan will see the ground go into new hands, the child-maiming arms dealer will claim everything else, the administrator will be selling just the club name plus responsibility for the remaining debt to the taxman and clubs. Those debts HAVE to be paid if you want to continue as a football club - so for £10M you will get the club name, no ground, no land, a handful of player contracts that no one wants PLUS the opportunity to haggle with all kinds of loan sharks who own the stuff you need. You can rent the ground from its new owner for a few million a year so after coughing up maybe £20M you will be the proud owner of an asset-free business that can't sustain itself - a black hole. All you have to do then is take out loans secured against the tv money for league one or two. See, they do have a way out after all, it's called freefall. And on the money laundering - how about this for an idea? The arms dealer gets the club to take out loans all over the show, he takes that new cash to get his money back, the company then crashes and defaults on the loans, he's paid up thank you very much, and it's someone else's problem. But that would be trading illegally I hear the experts cry - mmmm, but has that worried them thus far?

I think you should at least pay your poor captain before bragging about the glorious 1-0 win over cash-strapped Cardiff. 'When Sol went up to lift the fa cup, he didn't get paid, he didn't get paid!' How much did that win cost? About £100M? Or the whole club? That's one expensive day out.

so we have an arms dealer on the run and a man who sued him for millions queued up behind the taxman as the two main creditors of a bankrupt club with no income, owned by arabs and fantasists, controlled by jews, with the day to day running in the hands of convicted fraudsters and those awaiting court appearances on tax evasion. What could possibly go wrong? -and they're still worried more about what goes on out on the pitch.

Does anyone know when the tickets for the world cup final in the harbourside stadium at Portsmouth actually go on sale? If they play their champions league ties in it before that I wouldn't mind seeing one of them as well, though presumably with only 70,000 available there won't be many for the casual fan.