Colos Short and Curlies

when they published their accunts for the first 6 months of the 2005-2006 season the loss was £6m. When they published them for the full year to last June (only 11 months as they chanegd accoutnign dates), the loss for the whole period was over £12m. but as you well know that is different to losing £1mill per month.(ie,they could make a profit of £1mill per month for 11months then buy torres(knowing us fred torres from stevenage borough) for £23 mill which would show a loss of £12mill but isn't a loss of £1mill per month. it may seem pedantic but the way you make it sound and it may be that way,that we are losing £1mill per month on the day-to-day running of the club not the one off hits for transfers. if we didn't buy anyone for a year would we still be "losing" £1mill per month ? The first half of the seaosn included all the summer signings, so Luque, Owen and Solano. The second half os last season had no transfer activity in it. The club do their accounts by dividing the cost of the transfer fee by the length of the contract and saying that's the monthly cost to the businhess.o So Luque for £10m, on a 5 year contract means the club accounts shows a cost of £2m per year, or £160k per month. Obviously things like wages and ground maintenance costs are the same every month. The income and expenditure for games happens as the games happen. So there is neither game-related income nor expenditure in June as there are no games. The club spread the season ticket money they receive in the summer across the football season. So say they get £25m in season ticket sales, then at half way through the season the accounts would say they had used up £12.5m of it, but it would also say that they knew they were going to have to use the other half in the second half of the season. The other steady outgoing is the interest payments on the ground redevelopment, and on the loans they have taken out. The steady incomes are from things like sponsorship, and from catering and merchandising. The sponsorship one is a slight concern. The club were given £8m of future year's sponsorship money (I guess from Nortern Rock) early, to allow them to buy Luque, Owen and Solano. This means that over the next few seasons there will be a drop of that amount from what woudl have been expected. This probably won't matter inthelong run as the extra Sky will swamp the drop. So, basically, "yes" we'd still be losing £1m per month even if we didn't sign anyone. The number will reduce but it will be hard work to get it back to the level where we at least break even. Don't forget we've been borrowing against future season ticket sales. I thought we'd used the future ticket sales as security to raise the loan, i.e look mr bank manger I'm going to be earning £25m a year - bit like you do for your mortgage. The income from the sales doesn't directly go against the loan as it were, the payments dont move in line with season ticket sales

I reckon around 250 of that full time staff figure of 307 would probably account for only £7.5m or so of the £50m wage bill. Average wage £30k. That might even be a bit high. They might but if we take Owen's and Dyer's wages at what we think they are, then you can effectively take another £8.5 million off the total, since these 2 will skew the average. Why would you want to do that? They are playing staff (alledgedly) and therefore their wage forms part of the average, doesn't matter if they skew it or not. Its all well and good saying that if we weren't paying Owen this and Dyer that we wouldn't have a problem. We are paying them it, and we do have a problem

I can also tell you as a fact that the ManU wages were no where near that high as a basic. I could also tell you how much Giggs etc were on the seaosn they signed Rooney, but that would be confidential! Ballack's on £121,000 a week and Schev is on £130,000....Terry is negotiating for £130,000 which would make him the highest paid English player in the league above Gerrard reported to be on £95,000 and ickle Mickey on £105,000. Fat Lamps is reportedly on £121,000 only recently as he wanted parity with Ballack. Ferdinand was the highest paid def (soon to be Terry) no idea what he's on though. Figures from the papers, I got to see the Man U players wages through work, wouldn't be right to disclose details. You tease. I'll accept a PM. Put it this way, they can afford to go large at McDonalds once in a while.

I can also tell you as a fact that the ManU wages were no where near that high as a basic. I could also tell you how much Giggs etc were on the seaosn they signed Rooney, but that would be confidential! Ballack's on £121,000 a week and Schev is on £130,000....Terry is negotiating for £130,000 which would make him the highest paid English player in the league above Gerrard reported to be on £95,000 and ickle Mickey on £105,000. Fat Lamps is reportedly on £121,000 only recently as he wanted parity with Ballack. Ferdinand was the highest paid def (soon to be Terry) no idea what he's on though. Figures from the papers, I got to see the Man U players wages through work, wouldn't be right to disclose details.

I can also tell you as a fact that the ManU wages were no where near that high as a basic. I could also tell you how much Giggs etc were on the seaosn they signed Rooney, but that would be confidential!

Same with the National team to be honest. Play the way you are used to, change is bad!

Nah, hes just lazy to bother trying tbh

Woodgate and Carragher here too. I remember when we signed Woody a comparrison was done on some website or another woth him and Rio. Woodgate = steady for 90 minutes, does nothing flash but never makes horrendous errors. Rio = Steady for 89 minutes, but is flash in everything he does and is therefore prone to make one rik a game due to playing on the edge. Therefore Woody the better defender. Rio has improved since his drug ban, but is just shaded by the other 2 at present

Tell you what its a tough call to make. Liverpool to win the Champions league and the Toon the UEFA. Or neither win a cup. As much as I cant wait for the Toon to win a pot, it was unbearable the last itme they won the CL

David Pleat. Paid for sex Nuff said

Used to refer to it as the Cathedral on the Hill. But never heard any of those lot

Yup, and shouldn't be if you want to follow best practice

Wasn't Bridge signed, sealed and awaiting delivery if Cole signed for Chelsea? Only we couldn't get the medical sorted in time? would have thought we could have got the medical sorted and simply have the transfer pending Cole. But that would be too logical

Bobby Robson

Its been said earlier but you can say something that is racist without actually being a racist person. Its all about interpretation, and if Yobo etc were insulted by the phrase then he's bang to rights regardless of his intention in using the phrase. btw this is what I believe has happened, I don't believe Emre is racist, just made a stupid comment which the recipient has taken as racist. Bit like Sheringhams ex-bird in CBB

Throw Sevilla out of the UEFA cup. Better chance of us winning it then. Though there is more chance of us winning the damn thing than UEFA kicking them out

I don't get this 'prove hoimself at a lower level' balony It's a completely different game outside the premiership. Any lower league players would be a fool not to bust a gut for a person of Shearer's stature in the game. Brgin him to the Premier League and its a load of egos who believe the sun shines out of their own arse. He'll get the job and do a decent enough job, in most probability he aint going to be a Mourinho, Wenger or Fergie, but then not many are

Wonder what they think of Ian Rush's two page preview of the Liverpool Barca tie in the Sun today? From living in Liverpool for 6 years my views are tainted by: Being banned from my local newsagent for not signing a petition for Michael Shields. Having my car trashed for having a Newcastle banner in the back window Being chased by scallies for wearing a toon top. What I would say though is that Liverpool is the biggest village in the world, if you're a scouser then they willback you to the hilt (see Michael Shields etc) but if you cross them then they will react (see the Sun etc). They also fail to see any faults with Scousers/the city etc. But the majority of Socusers are bitter toffees so what do you expect?

I thought Barotn was going to be overlooked due to his comments about Fat Frank?

So Gillet has gone in and stolen LFC from DIC. Shoudl fit in well then

Not 100% true, we had to change our style due to Gillespie being injured for the second half of that season. Funny how people are quick to blame Tino, but not many put the blame with Batty who broke up an effective Lee-Clark partnership in midfield

Would love to see him back. Good back up striker for the remainder of the season, good for 5 goals or so

Who's coming in to replace him? Surely 'Pool won't let Crouch go at this stage and after last night? (That's the rumour I've heard.) Apparantly were in for Marlon ' i look like the baddie in the mario brother film' Harewood and Teddy 'where's my walking stick' Sheringham. Worst transfer business in the clubs history if this comes off. Oh and we dont want the beanpole. We flogged him off years ago. Liverpool are welcome to him. Harewood does look exactly like a Goomba (Mario), as well. I love that someone else has noticed. http://www.dan-dare.org/Dan%20Mario/SMBMovie-Goombas.jpg I was saying this in the summer when we were being linked with him. No one took any notice then. boo.

Monkey, I think you're genuinely a top-class poster but that last line is pure bollocks. Smacks of nowt but ego to me and it basically alludes to you being 100% correct with this and everyone who disagrees with you being way-off. As for the "debate", I'd venture to say that there have been good points raised on both sides, but much like everything else that sparks interest on here the main protagonists are never going to agree. Anyone could simply sign-off by saying "agree to disagree", but wording it the way you did isn't the way to go about things. You've made points based on not much more than personal opinion with a lot of guesswork/prediction interwoven, just like everyone else has in here. I came at you without calling you a Mackem (laughable that people have), or ridiculing you, and offered an alternative to your story of "what might have been", now you're bowing out of the "debate". Bad form. Theres nowt else for me to contribute to in a thread where there are plenty of posts that do nothing except ridicule anyone with a different opinion. Its not arrogance, ego or me saying im 100% correct - ive not said any of that, and im not sure how youve got that from one line where im trying to cut myself off from debating this topic any further because id merely be repeating myself, and hence wasting time. What you also need to realise is that although I initially replied to you, I also have the habit of replying to other posts/posters within the same reply. I dont mind debating if youre going to bring up some actual points that can be debated, which youve done, I was more pissed off at the childish replies on here that noone can "debate" with since theyre just one line comments bearing no relevance and followed up with a smiley or two. Yes, I do, otherwise I wouldnt be arguing any different. IMO we lost the title for several reasons, but most of all because we lacked the defence to win it, that was the key difference between us and ManU. Games like Blackburn away when Shearer and that other Geordie lad, Fenton or something like that, bagged two sitters iirc, with horrible defending, is what cost us big time. Too many away games like that that season. Bring some good defenders in and wed have been a different team. I was hoping at the time wed move for someone like Southgate, who imo we could have landed at the time had we put a good bid in, or one of the many highly rated defenders from Euro 96, like Thuram who looked really good (and others who have turned out shiite but also looked good, cant really remember them now). Instead, we got noone for the defence. Why? Because we spent all our money on one forward for a world record fee. The defence was shiite for a side looking to win the title. Any team in the Premiership could score against us, and easily so, completely different to the likes of ManU. It was a lower mid table defence, the reason why the stats would probably show that defence to be in the near the top is because the rest of the team was very good, and at times sublime - St James' was a fortress, many a team spent most of the game pegged back in their own half Obviously there are always other factors into why we failed to move forward since 95/96, no doubt the new board put a chokehold on the finances, which was probably why Keegan walked - but thats not what is being discussed - its whether or not we were right to spend 15mill on one forward, when the squad could have done with several players and the defence particularly needed a top class recruit. For example, the notion that Asprilla caused the side to be unbalanced - imo it was Gillespie's injury that did that, not Tino's arrival. Like the defence, Gillespie's injury and the resulting lack of cover cost us the title, although imo not as much of a factor as the defence. We went from a fluid, two flanked team, to one with an out of position player doing nowt on the right, and Ginola being the only true winger getting marked out of the game - which is why in the second half of that season, the likes of Ginola and Ferdinand were shiite in comparison to the first half. We needed another winger, I remember it took ages for Gillespie to get fit, and when he returned he was poor, a shadow of what he was previously - like us needing a defensive recruit, did we buy a replacement right winger? No, we bought another striker with all the money we had, and as you suggest, probably more than we had. Thats the thing, we wont ever know. It could be either way, but it pisses me off that people say with such certainty "wed have gone down". Of course wed have gone down if we hadnt had Shearer AND noone to replace him, but then thats a silly notion to think that without Shearer wed have just sat around doing nothing. Shephard has never been that thick to think wed do well without a decent goalscorer. If we hadnt bought Shearer in the first place, or had sold him at some point during the time we were shiite, wed have replaced him like weve replaced him today. Maybe we got lucky with Martins, but the point is that there are plenty of good forwards out there, ones that we either dont know about or dont watch regularly because theyre not in this country and rarely on telly, and its just not on to say theres absolutely noone. Who knows. Maybe we wouldve been the ones who signed the promising Vieri from Juve (following summer after 96), and not Athletico, and wed have been laughing it up when hed have been banging it in for fun, or maybe wed have gone for someone like Yorke, or Heskey, or someone shit. Who knows. Shearer deserves praise for what he did, but again, its not about what he did. Its about what Newcastle United did at a point when they had enough money to spend to break the world transfer record and a team that was lost the title because of inadequacies in the defence and an injury that upset the balance of the team in midfield. IMO, they spent the money wrongly, and the fact that Shearer had to keep us in this league just 2-3 seasons after we lost the title suggests that it was the wrong thing to do. Top class response, that, more like the usual you. I'll happily take all that on board as my recollection of the 95/96 season is shabby at best, which is why I asked those questions that I did. I can't really argue much of it back with you, which is a great shame, but surely there's someone else who can take up the debate without being a complete arsehole over it. It's a shame that there are posts like that on this board and all people can do to reply is take the piss and make daft comments. Granted, not everyone has the time/knowledge to debate like demons, but there are plenty on here who do. To anyone else who wishes to join in, or just back to Monkey... do you think it was the defensive players themselves that were poor, or was it the style of play that put too much pressure on them? From what I remember of that season, Albert somtimes went on darts forward and our fullbacks were hardly defensive-minded. Was it the personnel or was it the style of play that was our undoing? The right-winger (Gillespie) argument is one I've never heard before and I'd love to hear some other opinions about it from some more that are older than me. The 95/96 is fascinating to me looking back, I was only 9 at the time like, so can hardly speak with authority on that particular year (regarding the defence.) My main defence of signing Big Al is for what he did in those subsequent years here. I'm a fully paid up subscriber to the 'Phil Neville cost us the title' club. His challenge on Gillespie cost us the title. Well that and our strikers fondnes for putting every shot into Schmeichels chest rather than slip it through his legs when he did his star job routine. As to was Shearer a misake? Signing him no, allowing him to become as powerful as he did yes. Not selling him to Liverpool under Bobby, possibly. For what its worth I fully believe that if he hadn't knacked himself at Goodison we would have gone close in the league again. is injury ruined any chance of Tommason being successful and resulted in the game agaisnt PSV in the Champs League (home) where our strike force consisted of Rob Lee and JDT alternatig in making runs from midfield. One injury shaped at least 2 seasons, from which we still havent fully recovered despite the brief flirtation with the top under Bobby.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/07/uk_politics_enl_1170159528/img/1.jpg I'm not sure which one of those is the Casino "The casino would be based at Sportcity in the Beswick area, close to the City of Manchester Stadium. The proposed site will also contain an entertainment complex with a range of facilities such as a multi-purpose arena, a swimming pool, an urban sports venue, restaurants, bars, a nightclub and a hotel. " The most unrealistic photoshop job ever. There''s blue sky ffs, it always rains in Manchester. FACT