UV

We didnt get them therefore it didnt happen. That's just about it, aye. If we had so much money readily available and had our sights on top players like that, why did we end up not buying anyone instead of them? Woodgate/Coloccini excepted. I gave Ashley the benefit of the doubt all summer on the back of those bids but f*** all happened. Becasue the manager and board werent rowing in the same direction? Are you actually arguing Ashleys intention of spending off the back of a few players turning us down? Intentions mean f*** all when the actions don't back them up. What? What more action could the club of taken with Modric and Woodgate in particular? These intentions alone give me the evidence i need to have some faith in Ashley. If Keegan was still here and we signed who we signed, id be pissed. You know exactly what happened with Modric and how hard we tried to get him? I thought that was your thing, not having an opinion until you know all the facts. You may be happy to believe that we tried as hard as we could to get Modric, yet he went to Spurs for a lower transfer fee and lower wages, but it doesn't quite ring true to me. Like 27 year old Coloccini our most expensive signing? I'd imagine Kinnear will be looking for experience ahead of youth to get us out of a relegation fight tbh.

How exactly is anyone "holding the club at ransom" (other than Ashley himself that is) and in what way is Ashley not being "allowed to get on with things"? Last time I checked the world was still turning, a manager was managing, the players were playing, the supporters were supporting the team. No-one other than Ashley is stopping anything or has the power to do anything about the position the club is in. If we're going to talk about quitters... Arguing contract semantics and debating about who was right or wrong is completely futile anyway. It's most likely everything will be settled out of court with a non-disclosure clause. Even if it did go to court, there'd be 2 sides to the story. People who trust Keegan will believe what he says, and those who have a misguided faith in Ashley will believe what the club comes out with. No-one's opinion is going to be changed by anything said from this point on unless one party comes out and says they were fully to blame, which isn't going to happen. The squad's weak, we have a manager on a month to month contract, we're in the relegation zone, and no-one wants to buy the club at Ashley's price. Have a guess which of Keegan or Ashley can do anything about that.

Let's hope the punishment is he's banned from giving press conferences.

top bit, very untrue. second bit, hypocritical. How is it hypocritical? its ok for X to lie, cheat and steal but not Y? He's talking about motive. The difference between a white lie and a con. It's not hypocritical to say you'd lie, cheat and steal to feed your family if desperate, but wouldn't do it to get a plasma TV.

The first sign of him not getting what he wanted was at the end of last season. He gave them the transfer window to prove him wrong. He wasn't and they didn't.

top bit, very untrue. second bit, hypocritical. How is it hypocritical?

Keegan acted in the interests of the football club by resigning on September 2nd of the 2008/9 season? Whether he was right or wrong, one thing is for sure, the timing was fucking awful. Do you really think we'd be in a better position if he'd gone earlier? How do you see events unfolding better in that scenario?

If we don't, will you? Or will it be all Kinnear & NUSC's fault?

If we are indeed sold will that money be sitting in a bank account for the new owners to spend?

http://withleather.uproxx.com/?p=7379

How much do people reckon we'd get for him anyway, because I can't see us getting more than £3-4m from abroad, or maybe a few million more here. That's the main reason I don't think he'll go in January (unless he really wants to go), because it's simply not worth our while getting rid as we won't get enough money to replace him with anyone any better.

Maybe we can flog him to Real Madrid then. Shouldn't be greedy though as his career has been stunted, only ask for £50m.

I doubt a player who lets the PFA act as their agent is a particularly greedy one. He was still happy to sign a 4 year contract which he wasn't happy with 12 months later, if he didn't like it then he shouldn't have signed it in the first place. He should never have put in a transfer request it made me think alot less of him as a person. He always seemed very amiable but obviously not. 12 million though, christ. Still can't belive we got that. I really don't see what he did wrong by putting in a private transfer request after a Summer of trying to get the club to renegotiate his contract and being fobbed off. It's not like he refused to play, leaked rumours of unrest to the press, got players at Villa to say they knew he really wanted to join them, got Martin O'Neill to say Newcastle were stopping his dream move to a big club or anything. The club didn't have to act on his transfer request, it simply meant they made more money when they sold him (as he wouldn't get a "loyalty" payment). I doubt the new deal he wanted would have been half of what most senior players were getting, many of whom played far less games and were of far less use to the team than Milner. Yes it was a good price (we didn't get £12m for him though, Leeds got a chunk of it), but for me it just confirmed it was a lie that we were trying to put together a team a'la Arsenal, and rather we were just buying cheap in the hope of reselling at a profit.

Page created in 11.243 seconds with 19 queries. It's still lagging a bit for me at times, seems to be deteriorating as the day goes on. Is there no way to automatically log page creation/query times as a measure of performance throughout the day?

I doubt a player who lets the PFA act as their agent is a particularly greedy one.

I guess we'll see if that was ever really the case in January then.

"The last player we want to sell is James Milner. I am sure he will not be leaving St James' Park."

That's the problem with the "squad" generally today, we have 1 decent first choice player for a position, but very little backup. Allardyce addressed those "problems in the squad" the following season spending substantially more than £5m (I assume you mean the defence) and we subsequently went on to concede twice as many goals - in no small part due to the midfield being weak. I don't think you and I are gonna disagree much on this tbh, but regards the defence. Allardyce bought a CB for <3m and one for free, and that's exactly what they looked like. I'd say he got his money's worth for those 2. Beye is a good buy and i think Ricky is a decent and promising defender. I think BSA thought he was addressing the MidF with Barton and Smith, Barton i could understand (BSA was unlucky with him tbf), Smith was a mystery in my eyes. I mostly agree, but I didn't want to take this into a discussion about Allardyce, my point was that 1) it's not at all easy to improve a defence weak in all departments by spending £5m on it and 2) sometimes you can do more to improve your defence by improving your midfielders/attackers than you can by improving your defenders (I'd argue it's only really worth having quality defenders after you've got the other parts of the team sorted, but that's even further OT for this thread).

That's the problem with the "squad" generally today, we have 1 decent first choice player for a position, but very little backup. Allardyce addressed those "problems in the squad" the following season spending substantially more than £5m (I assume you mean the defence) and we subsequently went on to concede twice as many goals - in no small part due to the midfield being weak.

And then binned despite being our best player the season before. If you think that is the right message to send out to a young player, one which will give him confidence and make him a better player, then you must think Arsene Wenger is a right no-hoper. Is this the season he was "binned" ? It's 105 starts, 39 sub appearances in less than 4 years btw. 35 games a year isn't too shabby really, I'm sure it's more than most 22 year old players have had. Using Duff as a way to excuse N'Zogbia's lack of development is very weak. Every young player has to depose a more experienced one to get into the team, it's part of their development and they should use it as a learning experience and a challenge. If the player can't or won't compete for a place in the team, and just sulks when he's not automatically given a start, then what use is a character like that? There's only so much any manager can do, the main drive has to come from the player themselves (I'm not necessarily saying that's what N'Zogbia is like btw as I don't know him, but this is what he's accused of and what he's being defended for). There was nothing wrong with the purchase of Duff (or any other quality experienced winger who should be in their footballing prime) to go above N'Zogbia in the pecking order, unless of course you want a young developing player flogged to death playing week in week out, have no cover, and not have the option to bring on a fresh sub winger (one of the most tiring positions to play). Player development doesn't just happen for 90 minutes once a week you know.

I'd advice against such drastic measures, as a lot of people will lose interest and things might not pick up. I'll ask again to review the error logs, so that we know exactly what is wrong.. I have no idea where SMF stores them and it probably depends on the host's policy, so if you can't find them, contact the host's support. This is important, because the logs contain the actual error and not the generic hacker-unfriendly 'sorry, smf couldn't connect..' message that the users see. Another advice would be to disable the custom theme and all installed add-ons, strip the forum to minimum functionality and see if we still get the errors.. it's very likely that it might be a db conflict, because of some 3rd party functionality. hopefully, N-O isn't the first board to experience similar failures and the SMF community will help us out. I'm largely using it with the default theme and am still getting the errors for what it's worth. I agree that it really shouldn't be necessary to throw everything away, even if you go for a clean install I'm sure you should be able to import the major tables.

We are still talking about Given aren't we?

COCKNEY MAFIA MOVIE OUT! COCKNEY MAFIA MOVIE OUT!

Getting more and more errors throughout the day here. Have you tried asking for help on the SMF forums? http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=59691.0 The new server is great though. I blame the old server for the state it left the database in, the forum software for quitting in the middle of db queries, and of course the forum users for complaining about it. Did you pay for 3 years up front? Better not complain too much or they'll have no choice but to take the money & try to pass the business on to someone else.

That's not 7 months later, its 2 or 3. As we're dealing in hypothetical scenarios ITT, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that he offered to resign around that time and was persuaded to give the system a chance to see what it could produce. Also, the thought of coming out of a job after 6 months a couple of million pounds poorer is probably enough to give anyone's principals a backseat for a while at least.