brummie

Yeah, but it was a stupid fucking idea which nobody was going to get behind. "Don't go to your seat till the eighth minute" to protest Lerner's 8 years in charge. Flawed on three counts. One, the first four years were decent. Two, people have paid 40 quid a pop, eight minutes is a lot to miss (well, yes, it should be, I mean, but actually is not, on account of watching us this season being like HAVING SOMEONE PUNCH YOU IN THE EYEBALLS FOR 90 MINUTES). Three, the club told everyone they'd turn off all the tellies in the concourse to the Holte end which usually show the match as soon as it kicked off. Fucking stupid idea.

Yup. Although the person who wrote "1 games" needs to be executed and have their corpse thrown off a bridge somewhere.

Just the 8 hours 42 minutes since our last league goal, then. Five league games in a row without scoring. One goal in our last seven league games. Still, Lambert is doing "an excellent job", so say most of the media. No conception of what it is like as a paying supporter to go and watch your team play for very nearly 9 hours and not score a single fucking goal. Next week, Bournemouth in the cup, who will beat us, get your money on it now, nailed-on. Then Chelsea and Arsenal. So I am going with that becoming 7 games without a single goal, and one goal in the last nine. But he still won't get the sack because the fucking idiot chairman does not give on tenth of one single fuck.

I bet there isn't.

Ginola when he played for us was the most un-arsed footballer I've ever seen. Signed by Doug, on his yacht in the south of France. Not a word to the manager until he rocked up for training.

Bring back the old one.

Have to say, you were monumentally lucky with Pardew's exit. I still can't believe how that sequence of events happened. You lucky bastards.

And he did the Charles Insomnia thing, too. To be fair, N'Zogbia is a lazy, useless cunt who generally looks week in, week out, like he needs to catch up on his sleep, so he may have had a point.

Twice? Really? I honestly didn't know that.

Brummie you've basically doomed us to MCleish there like. Not at all. I'm saying you're right at the start of this process still, and pretty much every club has moments of terror when certain names crop up, but you'd have to be extremely unlucky to find you have the only chairman as fucking steeeeeyyyyyoooooooopid as ours and end up flabbergasted by an appointment of such insanity.

Incidentally, there was an article in the Mirror today about Lerner's fuckwittedness, and it mentioned a top manager who was very interested in the job without naming him. That was Benitez.

I remember the summer of 2011 when we were looking for a new manager. We were agog with speculation that Ancelotti (who I believe was sat at home in his underpants watching Homes Under The Hammer all week) was going to get the job. That came to nothing (unsurprisingly). Then we heard (from the son of a director of the club who posted it on a forum) that Lerner had met with Rafa Benitez, Benitez wasn't just interested in the job, he'd actually *applied* for it. I remember that summer he was talking about how he wanted to get back into the game in England with "a project". It sounded ideal. Only, when Benitez told Lerner how much money he'd need to spend on the squad, Lerner cut the interview short. Then we heard that Steve McClaren had been approached, and were a bit concerned, only for him to get ruled out. Much relief ensued. Then we heard that Roberto Martinez had said he didn't want to interview, he wanted to stay at Wigan another year. And we all breathed a collective sigh of relief, musing as to how he couldn't understand how to make a defence work, and having just dodged relegation a lot wasn't really much of an achievement with a manger. Then I remember a mate of mine saying "you're not going to believe this, but I've been told we're speaking to ..." now, at this point, I absolutely guarantee you, you could have said to me "if you had to bet every single thing you own on one particular manager currently in a job not being the one I am going to complete this sentence with, who would it be?", I would have lumped it all on Alex McLeish. Every penny of it. Every last pfennig. Then he finished the sentence ... "Alex McLeish" I still, three years later, can not believe that a responsible adult like Lerner would think something like that could possibly work out. Anyway, my point is, you're really still at the start of your manager search. Yeah, names will come and go, and yes, I'm saying that things can really work out cretinously badly if your owner is a big enough tool, but by the same token, you have a very long way to go yet until you arrive at the level of "insane appointment". I reckon he'll get someone decent in.

It'll also be embarrassing because of the media spin.... 'they got the Geordie they wanted and it's done them no favors' The media will want you to get a British manager in, preferably one off the usual Yo Sushi style conveyor belt of undistinguished, not-won-anything, relic British managers that go from club to club. I suppose Carver might not be one of those names, but it is pretty much bang-on certain that he'd be one if he got your job. You just can't be a modern football manager without a range of skills, many of which don't involve football, these days. Which is something Martin O'Neill eventually discovered, I think. Even the man management bit alone is totally different. You have to deal with a range of players from all over the world and the tiny nuances in how you deal with them are massively important. The reason Ferguson got away with being relatively old school was that it was his empire, he built it in the first place, and also because he had a range of different coaches working under him, and wasn't afraid to move them on and replace them as the times changed. These days you just can't have the likes of Carver running things. It won't work.

Stone, but how old is he? *thigh slap*

I think, since the PL has come along, and then the Champions League and the financial divisions that causes, the premier league is divided into different types of clubs. There are those who can compete for the title realistically, or to get to, and stay in, the Champions League. There are those who traditionally are considered to be doing well to even be in the top flight (West Ham, Stoke, Albion, Swansea etc) There are those who have recently been promoted, for whom it is all a big adventure (Leicester, Burnley, Palace) Then there are those who are pretty much always in the top flight, who have - in the past competed for league titles - but now find themselves in a situation where it is impossible to even think of doing that any more - Villa, Newcastle, Everton, Spurs (no matter how they'd like to think otherwise) It is the fans of clubs like those four for whom the Premier League is the biggest killer. Just staying up is right at the bottom of expectations, haven't just been promoted so it isn't all a big adventure any more, can't hope to compete (unless they get insanely rich owners who fancy a go at it) - basically, stuck in a "it will never be like it used to be" rut, and in some cases run by people with sinking ambition. Not cool. the sad thing even this can't happen anymore not with FFP rules and you can bet UEFA would come down like a ton of bricks on any "upstart" club trying to pull it off now and premier league has those rules too so the guys already at the top would probably demand points deductions on any side who tried that trick to kick them out of their cozy little club. Of coarse the media would think we should all just be happy bathing in the reflected glory of the true elite All FFP did was pull up the ladder. Limits on how much, in percentage terms, you can increase your wage bill by year on year favour clubs who already have massive wage bills, for example.

I think, since the PL has come along, and then the Champions League and the financial divisions that causes, the premier league is divided into different types of clubs. There are those who can compete for the title realistically, or to get to, and stay in, the Champions League. There are those who traditionally are considered to be doing well to even be in the top flight (West Ham, Stoke, Albion, Swansea etc) There are those who have recently been promoted, for whom it is all a big adventure (Leicester, Burnley, Palace) Then there are those who are pretty much always in the top flight, who have - in the past competed for league titles - but now find themselves in a situation where it is impossible to even think of doing that any more - Villa, Newcastle, Everton, Spurs (no matter how they'd like to think otherwise) It is the fans of clubs like those four for whom the Premier League is the biggest killer. Just staying up is right at the bottom of expectations, haven't just been promoted so it isn't all a big adventure any more, can't hope to compete (unless they get insanely rich owners who fancy a go at it) - basically, stuck in a "it will never be like it used to be" rut, and in some cases run by people with sinking ambition. Not cool.

Uh-oh, the local press have finally, finally turned on Lambert. Bit of a savaging for him from the Birmingham Mail today (although not from the bloke who covers Villa for them, tellingly, as he'll not want to get barred from matches).

You have to wonder about his motivation, too. Is he going to Sunderland because they're the best option in footballing terms, or because they're the only people steeeeeyyyuuupid enough to agree to pay him £70,000 a week until he is 35? Maybe they wouldn't have been had Redknapp not got a performing striker already, but hey ho. Truly mindbendingly awful signing at that money.

Awful anti-aliasing on that hashtag #smoothyourtextbitches

A £14m package on a 32 year old is beyond fucking stupid. it's all very well that Sunderland fan quoted above tweeting "turned down club a, club b and club c for us", the reason is almost certainly that none of the others thought it'd be worth £14m to have a 32 year old play for you for three years. It reminds me of when Paul Merson was asked why he went to Boro, and he replied "the same reason anyone went to Boro back then - the money".

Can he score goals? That's not our problem. The goal scorers, I mean. The problem is we have absolutely no idea how to get them the ball.

yet you won't pay £2.5m for Scott Sinclair? In that case, good. Although, disappointingly, I believe we're signing him too.

We are apparently signing Carles Gil from Valencia for €4m

A new low from us today. Just awful. Fans singing "you don't know what you're doing" at Lambert. Properly turned now.

yet the CCTV footage from the hotel showing her not looking pissed and walking around fine enough should just be ignored, even though time-wise it is closer to the incident in question than when she was looking more pissed You've just totally ignored the point about the cctv footage and decided "she looks alright to me" and on the basis of that, Evans has been unfairly treated? Christ, no wonder rape is such a sensitive subject.