Verbal

Good news. The Evening Standard is predicting a Brentford win. And it is ALWAYS wrong.

Bizarre. So you think two relegations, admininstration, minus ten deserves 'not being blamed much'? But I resent the frankly insulting suggestion that Lowe's problems are down to his class and our allergic reactions to it. Class war is really, REALLY, not the point - and there is SOME legitimate complaint, even to you surely, in his horrendous and hubristic mismanagement. And would people stop ending with 'let's move on' as a way of trying to shut others up?

Doesn't need a job. He'd just been given a year's contract and told to leave about five minutes after that. I'd be amazed if he wasn't paid up in full.

Best insult of the day.

I'm with Topcat on this one Frank. I think you have a mistaken idea of what 'balance' means. I think it's Liberal-Democratically meaningless to say: X did some good things and he did some bad things, therefore he should get SOME credit and SOME blame. What you should be doing is saying: did the good things outweigh the bad, or vice versa. And it seems to me at least, that Lowe would have had to been a one-time football genius for his 'achievements' to outweigh the brutal facts of two relegations, administration and -10, regardless of wherever else you might choose to apportion part of the blame. These terrible events - which all but destroyed the club - happened on his watch, no one else's. So, no, we're not unlike other football fans at other clubs - and besides, I can't think of a single football chairman who's presided over a screw-up on this epic scale, with the possible exception of Ridsdale. The Portvliet/Wotte affair is revealing in one sense above all, at least for me. And that's that the many posters on here who predicted disaster and who saw in this the malign influence of a meddling know-all (aka know-nothing), were right all along.

We'll win, and Hammond to score on his debut.

Some comments defy any response at all. So I'm saying nothing...

trousers is the resident expert on this, but I distinctly recall a very long prediction thread - and a play-off place was certainly suggested by a quite few. Remember, there were a couple of blazing performances by the kids last year that raised the hope - as good results tend to do - that 'total football' would sweep us up towards the top.

Déjà vu all over again. This was said quite a few times last season. I'll take a long succession of narrow 1-0s - much better proof that we have the staying power that's been clearly absent ever since the first relegation.

Me neither. What was I talking about?

I'm sure more players will come in, Robbie, but I don't think the players already here are rubbish - not all of them anyway. Their confidence as players and as teammates is shot to hell, certainly. But there's some talent out there which has simply forgotten what it's like to win, or how to be part of a winning team.

Okay, I'm lost. Could someone do a family tree of who was what in the Eagle's Nest? There seem to have been an awful lot of secretive lieutenants buzzing about.

Evidence? Really - I'm curious.

I think there's a rule against claiming to be the winner on your own thread. Sorry.

Don 't worry. If you PM your musings to me before posting, I'll proof-read them for you. You're welcome.

Wrong in so many ways. Apart from the space before the comma, 'there's' is a perfectly acceptable abbreviation of 'there is', and you've forgotten the apostrophe in 'it's'. I think I'll pass the 'peasant' baton back to you.

Well, it would be needed, or at least optional, if you read it as implying the word 'you' after the comma.

Space after the comma, you've misspelled 'yourselves', and there's another word in there that doesn't look quite right.

How long did you take to type that?

The job? Or a job?

One story told by a Tory MP with intelligence links last week is that Megrahi was a patsy for the Lockerbie bombing - which may not even have been a Libyan operation - but that he was positively identified as the gunman in the murder of Yvonne Fletcher. In other words, there's the suspicion that agencies of the British and other governments have sought to kill two birds with one stone - nail Fletcher's killer and make the whole 'who bombed Flight 103' go away. Freeing him keeps the lid on the whole affair - certainly more than allowing the appeal to proceed.

We may be crap at football, but no one is ever going to get close to challenging the Saintsweb Spelling Bee team.

You didn't say it, you winked it. Hence the ballooning conspiracy theories.

I fear nothing more than one of your predictions.

Like me, you're never going to know, because the only people who do insist on keeping up their nudging and winking act. I expect it of Weston, but I'm disappointed in the usually indiscreet Phil.