OzzieMandias

No good having a huge turnover if you're still spending more than you can afford on an underperforming playing staff.

One of these days UV will amuse us all by pointing out what he thinks 2009 has in common with 2001.

Looks lke you already know the ans. So you think the towering intellects guiding the actions of the NUSC have said to themselves, "Let's get together and express our sense of frustrated victimhood and then everything will improve"?

Perhaps you can momentarily ditch your obsession with the past and link to a recent example. Me, I see Liverpool's owners desperate to sell to a cash-rich customer because they can't refinance their debt, and the club with the Premiership's second-richest benefactor operating a sell-to-buy policy because even an injection of £600 million (!) hasn't been enough to buy sustainable success for Chelsea.

So someone explain what this rally is hoping to achieve, other than merely expressing a sense of frustrated victimhood?

He chose to pay off the debt in full rather than pay off some and invest more in the team. He is choosing to arrest the clubs losses by slashing costs rather than trying to increase profits. He chooses to pay up front for players rather than spread payments like most other clubs do, thus increasing the losses made by the club in the first years of this changed strategy, and reducing the amount available to spend on incoming players. You cannot tell me he could not put more money into the club if he wanted to, so he is chosing to gamble on our Premiership status with a small depleted squad, just like he did last year. He chose to employ the managers and directors he has which have us in the current state. He chose to put the club up for sale causing unrest and turmoil, and then not accept any of the bids. Non of this was forced on him. Non of these decisions are down to the previous board or the financial climate. They are all his chosen course of action. Different times, different circumstances. Though if you have me pegged as someone who applauds every move Ashley makes just because I can see that Shepherd fucked things up, then you're as dumb as your pal NE5. Can't I? I've posted elsewhere that I think it likely this is the case. What a bastard, eh? Did what the most vocal section of supporters seemed to want, but was just too damn mean to give away tens of millions of pounds. Would have been better, though, I agree, if he'd ignored those supporters, not tried to sell, and appointed a better manager to replace the one who'd just chickened out.

So they've done the truth equivalent of bunging in about £130 million more than anyone in the club's history?

qualifying for the Champions League ? Do you honestly think Shepherd was going to get us back into the Champions League? In 2001 do you regret the fact we didn't: Cut back on signings and not brought in Bellamy & Robert Sell the likes of Dyer for a good profit Let injury prone Shearer's contract run down so he could leave on a free and we could get his high wages off the bill (after all, we had a ready made replacement coming through from the youth team). Get someone like Vinnie Jones in to buy and sell players over Robson's head. If it pissed off Robson and he left, should we have replaced him with someone like Dave Basset. 1. No. 2. No. 3. No. 4. No. 5. No. PS. The year is 2009.

qualifying for the Champions League ? Do you honestly think Shepherd was going to get us back into the Champions League?

Doiubtless you two clowns are just full of bright ideas about where to get more money for players etc. Let's hear 'em, then.

nowt to say then ? Just joking man, I'm pretty bored, we all know spending money improves your chances of doing well, but it's not a given, you need the right manager, the right scouts and the right amount of money but you can do well without spending massive amount if you have the right manager e.g. Moyes and Everton. on the other hand, if you are lucky enough to get a decent manager, and it IS a lottery, and don't back him, he'll be off. Like Moyes, unless Everton are taken over or it all suddenly goes tits up for him. When you say "do well", how well do YOU want to do ? It's a lottery getting a good manager? No it's a skill, not an easy one but it is definately a skill. is it now ? We'll see how easily Arsenal replace Wenger and ManU replace Ferguson. Or Everton replace Moyes .......... Even a "good manager" isn't necessarily the "right manager", which I suppose adds credence to NE5's "lottery" theory. Bit simplistic on the whole though, as usual. you mean "realistic", as usual. Which also, as usual, too many people fail to grasp. were you happy with the kinnear appointment ? hey getting a good manager is a lottery right,surely theres as much chance getting a s*** one to turn out good results as there is a good one turning out bad to your thinking or maybe you are piffling again in anattempt to detect any criticism from the your beloved fred ? (conversly it must work with players aswell...shevchenko,veron,woodgate at real,keane at liverpool......good players who didn't do it so surely it means it's pointless spending big as these players prove it works) i'll stop you in your tracks........."back your manager"............what with ? where was the money going to come from......at this point you mention the debt of others and as always i mention the debt of the top 4 is different to ours as they are making money aside from those with sugar daddies where as we have consistently made losses (not a good scenario when begging to the banks with few assets left to hock). look at the other clubs who,like us have lived beyond their means,they are all cutting right back and ask yourself what liverpools or arsenals spending would be like if they missed out on the champs league for 3 or 4 years ? often on here you have alluded to others having thir heads in the sand but it is clear the one one doing an ostrich is yourself in relation to the position fred left us in. silly. Especially when there are still people hell bent on defending Ashley to the bitter end, and I mean bitter end = relegation and with little chance of coming back. Pleased for you that you still appear to write off all those european qualifications and champions league appearances and the manner in which they were achieved. Still, nobody is "embarrassing us" any more, right ? BORING ! we've covered the euro qualifications to death as that has little to do with the position we were in spring 2007. defending ashley to the bitter end......like you defending fred ? i never mentioned being embarassed by fred's utterences. nice to see you keep your head in the sand re our position when fred left. you mentioned Shepherd, not me, with a silly childish comment. Yep, I will "defend" anybody who gave me the only 15 years out of 45 that tried to compete at the levels this club should always compete at, and thus gave me the best most consistent and highest league positions as a result. As I've said before. Then you should be happy that your season ticket money is going towards paying the bills he racked up in the process.

Yeah, I'm sure he's going to sell at a massive loss just to appease a bunch of people who are calling him a cunt.

who's he Who did you think he was all those times you posted in his defence?

If we all just believe hard enough, the Northumberland Street tramp will reveal himself to be an eccentric multi-billionaire, wave his magic wand, and buy us loads and loads of world-class players.

"Doing something" is not, in itself, necessarily constructive. The people who come out with this one are invariably those who think that what they're doing is the right thing.

They've also been citing 6,000 people who've expressed an interest in joining. This is entirely disingenuous, as it includes people like me who clicked a button to find out what the deal was, and then decided they wanted nothing to do with it. Naturally, the fact that they're using me in statistics angled to ramp up their supposed legitimacy as a representative organisation does little to alleviate my feeling that they're a bunch of wankers.

It\s been predictable at the top for several years now. Pretty unpredictable at the bottom, though, with maybe a dozen teams fighting relegation.

How much would that run. I like that letter and would help fund it. http://www.ncjmedia.co.uk/pdfs/advertisingRatesPage/NCJMediaCoreTitlesRatecard2009.pdf Putting it in Births, Marriages & Deaths seems cheapest at first glance. It'll easily fit in there if we simply edit HTT's post down to its salient points.

You had the Fairs Cup, anyway!

St James' Park is found to have been built on the site of ancient Roman temple, itself built on the remains of an even earlier celtic shrine, dedicated to the worship of local god Antenociticus. Undead Picts and zombie legionnaires stalk its buried corridors, while the anger of the scorned god, driven mad by his long confinement, radiates upward into the cursed SJP turf. Will Chris Mort arrive in time to appease the god with a ritual centre-circle sacrifice of Peter Beardsley before the crucial Premiership fixture...?

Obafemi arrested for cottaging.

So it really IS Ashley's fault! The evil fucking bastard!

The ability to deal with stress is part of what it takes to be a successful manager. Kinnear suing the club on those grounds would be like a sewerman calling his lawyers because shit smells.

That is absolute bollocks, sorry. The club like every other employer have a duty of care towards its employees but football is a stressful business, no employer could protect him from that. From an outside perspective, Kinnear looks to have been left to face immense pressure from the press, the fans, the players and other members of the board, with minimal support from anyone bar Hughton. A similar comparison between now and the past when someone has done much better in a similar situation would be Freddy Shepherd. Robert was mouthing off at Souness, and Freddy Shepherd spoke to the media and his his buffoonish manner, supported the manager and quashed the player. Derek Llambias should have done something similar to N'Zogbia this week. Yes, there is always stress, but there are ways of making the job less stressful, and from the outside, it appears that the likes of Llambias haven't done as much as they could have done. So a football manager will sue a club on the grounds that football clubs should make the job less stressful?