steve_69

The guy is currently a guaranteed starter in a team that regularly plays in the Champions League and challenges for their domestic title. I'd be pretty fucking concerned if he didn't have reservations about potentially warming the bench for a team that might challenge for a Europa League spot this season, even if it is in a better league and for more money.

That's a bit high brow for this place mate - tone it down a bit eh?!

I'm pretty sure any player would want to speak to the manager of the club he might join before actually joining. Isn't that just how things are done?

Slow-mo technology is the referee's worst enemy. Of course it's easy to see that a referee has made a mistake when you slow the action down 50x but the refs don't have that luxury - they have to make a decision on the spot based on what they saw in real-time...once! It's a ridiculously hard job and they do it very well but when you have a studio full of retards like Andy Townsend analysing the s*** out of every decision and then criticising the wrong ones, it makes them look incompetent. The standard of refereeing is better than it ever has been - the problem is that the play-acting is also better and more prevalent than it ever has been. The poor fuckers are on a hiding to nothing.

My Ex's Dad used to referee semi-pro 11-a-side games, so it was a pretty decent standard. He's quite straight-laced and goes to church a lot so he's not a massive fan of bad language (until he gets on the golf course). Anyway, before each game he'd go into both dressing rooms and lay the law down - he'd regularly book players for swearing, even if they weren't swearing at him, because there were kids watching the match. If they persisted he'd just send them off. All of the teams in the league learned that he wouldn't tolerate swearing and you'd often hear the captains reminding their team mates about it, when they saw he was their referee.

It's very rare that a poor refereeing decision actually costs a team the game though. 99% of the time the best team on the day will win the game and it's highly unlikely that a shit ref will change that. Players often vent their frustration at the ref if their team aren't winning or if the game isn't going their way, even if the decision given is unlikely to change the course of the game - Rooney is a perfect example of this. Red cards and penalties are more likely to have an impact on the outcome of a match but IMO the refs get a lot more of these decisions right than they do wrong, and if the players stopped diving around like a bunch of fairies they'd get even more right. The players just need to grow-the-fuck-up and start accepting that human error is part-and-parcel, and rather than blaming the ref for losing them the game take a look at what they could have done better/more to help their team win

The only reason the petulant little fuckers act like they do is because they've been allowed to. Football was a lot more physical in the 60, 70s and 80s than it is now (full-on violent at times) but the players showed more respect to officials than modern players do. It has nothing to do with their backgrounds either - Rugby League is predominantly a working class game played by working class men but they give total respect to the referee because that's the way it has always been. The situation within football could be rectified within one season - install a no-nonsense refereeing policy whereby players get booked for any backchat and back it up with retrospective bookings for diving and violent conduct. Ok, so games might finish with 8 or 9 players a side for the first few weeks but it wouldn't take long for even the more retarded players to get the message.

If this is true, it explains a lot. We put our first offer in for Debuchy before the Euros, and if that activated the original clause it would explain why the board aren't prepared to meet the higher valuation from Lille.

Yeah, I had a similar moment regarding Fitz Hall the other day. Fitz fucking Hall FFS!!

It's a tough one but i'd have to say CB. We'll probably spend most of the time playing with one striker so we should be able to cope. CB is such an important position and you can't get away with having shit ones, especially in the premier league. If we're serious about challenging for european football again we can't go into the season with Williamson and Perch as back up.

Ner, not in the squad. Tbf he's not exactly a regular. Not yet.......

I'm not saying it's one or the other. I have gone on record saying I don't think we work to a transfer budget, but we try to get good deals when we see them even if this means our squad is unbalanced. This is my concern currently... Do you really believe that the Anita signing is an opportunistic bargain? That strikes me as frankly ridiculous if I'm honest. Not that ridiculous like. He just turned down a new deal so he's kind of become 'available' now. Obviously its not that simple and we've had an eye on him for some time like all our targets. We have a list of players and when someone's situation changes in a way that allows us to make a good value for money signing, we strike. And that's fair enough, but there is no way that we sanction knee jerk bargains at the expense of the squad and positions that are more pressing. I'd even question whether €8.5m plus future bonuses is that much of of a bargain in the first place. We want him for a reason, he will play. If we can't do a deal we're happy with we'll happily leave gaping holes in our squad as has been proven before. We've gone the first half of last season without the striker we were after since Carroll left and the second half of the season without centre back cover even though we knew Saylor was out injured for the remainder of the season, gambling our excellent start of the season by relying on Colo and Williamson staying fit for the sake of a few million. I'll be seriously pissed off if we have to put up with another season of Danny Simpson, and I bet Hatem would feel the same. It's such an obvious weakness for other teams to exploit

A tweet from someone called The Football Man Big clubs should just bid for Vurnon Anita now and save themselves £10-15m in a year or 2 when he inevitably becomes good. I love it that other football fans think this about us now

There's still an offer on the table for Douglas isn't there?

Why do they always fuck about with the UEFA Cup/Europa League draw? Every year they so something ridiculous. Just pull the fucking balls out of a bowl one by one.

I'm watching it in silence and i've got no fucking idea what's going on

I don't think we deliberately went for higher profile for our scouts etc. If you have this much success, you will become well known. You're right though, the fact we are now famous for getting a bargain is bound to count against us. So why let your chief scout do interviews for the media? Or your team manager to discuss it in length in the media... I don't have any knowledge of this going on at any other club... apart from Daniel Levy likes to drive a hard bargain perhaps... Just all seemed very unnecessary and a little self-congratuatly... At the same time though, it might work in our favour. If we put in an offer for a player the selling club knows we are not going to be held to ransom. If the player expresses an interest in joining us and then lets their club know, then it might help to net us a bargain. We've shown that we're happy to bide our time with players so the pressure is on the selling club - either put up with a disgruntled player or sell him at a reasonable price to his preferred buyer.

As if those fuckers need anything else to moan about

And i give you Dean Windass..

If Bigi turns out to be the business (and the reports are looking OK) then I'd say that kind of signing would indeed be the way forward, insofar as it was a cheap buy, you get to mould the player from a young age and they can be bedded into the first team at their own pace. I suspect that'll ultimately be the model for us going forward (interesting topic actually). At the minute we are building (have mostly built) a very strong first eleven and have added some promising back up this summer. Not all are going to make it (as is the case in football in general) but I think with the advent of a much more switched on scouting system we'll find more of these players will make the grade than in previous years. The future of football in the model we "appear" to be working towards is, youth, youth, youth. Bring in young, talented kids and school them yourself. It'll take years to get right and we've balled up in the Academy thing, but I really see this as the way forward both in a football and business sense. Thoughts? We do seem to be heading back to the days of SBR with lots of promising youngsters being signed (Milner, Ambrose, Bellamy, Bramble, Jenas, N'Zogbia, attempting to sign Bent etc..). We (fans) seem to be more scared to give these players a chance now than we were then (from memory). I know some of those mentioned in the SBR days were pretty big money signings so it is a little different but still has a familiar feel with what we are doing now. From that list I would say all players were useful to us, I have no doubt missed off a number of howlers but it would be nice/exciting to turn back to those days. Although many/all might not be ready to be thrown in yet the likes of Vuckic, Tavernier, Bigi, Good (based on the comments during the radio interview), Abeid, Sammy and Ferguson all interest me a lot. I am a bit of a footballing paedo mind, always get excited by the youth, just call me Wenger. The difference now is that we seem to be doing our homework with regards to players' temperaments. Under SBR we signed a lot of very talented wankers, which ultimately resulted in chaos. With Obertan I guess it has to come down to whether the coaches think he still has room to learn and develop. Last season's performances were not good enough by a long shot but if we think we can improve him then he's worth keeping. The fact that Fergy was prepared to let him go at the age of 22 doesn't bode well though - he's generally a pretty good judge of a player's potential

Could've done with a few more goals but the Spain v Honduras game was good. I took a ball full-on in the face during Spain's warm up though, which hurt like a motherfucker. We were on the 2nd row in the Leazes and I only looked away for a second. I saw a young girl take one in the mush from one of Japan's players as well before the first game - they can't shoot for shit.

He's a poor man's Obertan. No thanks!

We're always linked to that Fanni. Yeah, we should just sign him and stop fanni-ing around

That is a fucking disgrace!! It took me about 2 minutes to crack the code.