brummie

If you like proper beer, you need to go for a few in the Post Office Vaults and the Pure Bar, both of which are pretty much round the corner from the Wellington.

Swansea and Southampton are two clubs which have developed an ethos in terms of how they want to play over years, which has survived manager changes and lasts longer than any one manager or coach. Clubs like Newcastle or Villa don't have anything like the correct attitude in that department, mostly because they're run by people who understand money but don't get football. To paraphrase someone, they know the price of everything and the value of nothing. As a result of this, everything is short term. The upshot of this is that those clubs end up being good jobs for that seemingly endless roundabout of mediocre British managers who seem to become millionaires by going from one club to another with no discernible reason to keep getting jobs (Pardew, McLeish, Allardyce, Bruce etc etc).

Too right. This is Chamberlain Square in Birmingham. On the left is the Council House, a grade II* listed building. On the right is the Town Hall, a grade 1 listed building, built in the mid nineteenth century where everyone from Charles Dickens to Churchill spoke, where bands like Black Sabbath played some of their early gigs. http://www.britain-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/CN2FE1.jpg What used to be on the other side of this square (ie behind the person taking the picture): http://www.photobydjnorton.com/Library/Test160.jpg What is there now, built in the mid 1970s: http://www.birminghamroundabout.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/birmingham_central_library.jpg Truly revolting. Being demolished at the end of the year, thank fuck. John Madin built loads of this brutalist shit over Birmingham and he outlived almost every one of them. I for one would gladly push the plunger on this one. I appreciate that lots of the post war buildings went up due to the damage the Luftwaffe did, but when I hear London luvvies getting themselves all wound up about that horrible mess getting demolished, i want to puke. It is also right in the middle of the city centre, dividing it in two. The moaners are probably the same people who, for decades, sneered at that building. Oh well, sorry, I've gone off topic.

That's tremendously beautiful. I'm annoyed massivley on your behalf! I'M A GRIEF THIEF To give him his due - and this is five or six years ago when he still cared - Lerner was apparently livid when he read about what had been done. He fished out a lot of the original features in storage from the old stand (stuff like claret and blue stained glass windows, plus old fixtures and fittings) and had them installed in the new Trinity Road stand. He also, and this is impressive and just shows what a change he has undergone, when he read about the mosaics on the old stand, tracked down the Italian company who made the original, found out that the main bloke there's great grandson was still running the family business, and employed them to recreate (reinterpret) the mosaics on the back of the Holte End: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/02/20/article-0-0398A296000005DC-959_468x289.jpg He also spent £4m renovating the Holte pub at the back of the Holte End. It's a lovely Jacobean imitation (ie of the stately home the other side of the park next to the ground) building which at the start of the 1900s was also used to house some of the players in the boarding rooms upstairs. Under Ellis it was derelict, boarded up and falling down for years. Lerner turned it into this: http://www.groupdyer.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2047_1.jpg When I remind myself of things like that, Lerner's loss of interest looks even more stark.

Aye, not far. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00346/114790394_football_346024c.jpg There was an article in the Observer last year about how Liverpool are fucking people off by buying up surrounding houses one by one over the years and turning the area into an unliveable shit hole to put pressure on those who don't want to sell up. Found it: http://www.theguardian.com/football/gallery/2013/may/07/anfield-liverpool-in-pictures and this is the article. Well worth a read: http://www.theguardian.com/football/david-conn-inside-sport-blog/2013/may/06/anfield-liverpool-david-conn

I'll never forgive that fucking philistine Ellis for knocking down the old Trinity Road stand. The entrance was beautiful, and respected the fact it was practically in the gardens of a Jacobean stately home. I am sure we could have somehow redeveloped the stand but maintained the facade. One of the few remaining Archibald Leitch (the original God of football stand design) stands. I can only think of Craven Cottage and Ibrox that still have them. http://www.astonvilla.vitalfootball.co.uk/forum/profile/uploads/6090p.jpg http://www.whoateallthepies.tv/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/PA-504788.jpg http://freespace.virgin.net/d.barker/graphics/stein51.jpg

I know it's all very childish, but all that FHRITP stuff last night screwing up SSN's wank-a-thon was the highlight of the night. If you allow your reporters to be surrounded by mongs then you have no right at all to complain if they then decide to act like mongs. Yellow ties, fucking 'totalisers', constant updates on which players could be moving, pushing the odds via SkyBet, Big fucking Ben, Natalie Sawyer's latest yellow dress, Jim "the cunt" White. Put it all together, douse it in petrol, burn it and shoot the ashes to the Moon. It's an absolute twatfest. Pointing at that big fucking screen with the total spend on it and pretending it is exciting to see it so high rather than a pretty fucking sad indictment on the priorities of the modern world. I hate them all.

I know it's all very childish, but all that FHRITP stuff last night screwing up SSN's wank-a-thon was the highlight of the night.

Totally agree, Cleverley is SHITE. Oh, hang on *looks at twitter* Actually, he's alright as a loan move.

16m and 100k a week for Welbeck = mental.

I know this is really really pathetic and I am far too old to be amused by such puerile stuff, but I do find these people sticking dildos in SSN reporters ears, or shouting FHRITP to be absolutely hilarious. Fuck you, SSN, and your overhyped bullshit. I hope it means they have to stop doing this ridiculous training ground nonsense.

Villa's business over for the day. Just the £6.2m spent. Dreaming the dream.

The BBC see Savage as some sort of controversial national treasure who the public like hearing from. Almost the entirety of the rest of the country would gladly push him under a bus. It's like the BBC are in a reality distortion field.

Yeah...right. Hang on, "few could argue they've had a very good summer" - doesn't that mean not many people could argue you've done alright, ie you've had a poor summer? Or am i misunderstanding something?

You all thought he was the saviour after buying from deadly doug. He was for four years, until he got bored and started making Doug look like Abrahmovich.

Wellbeck is extremely meh. He's the sort of player who, if he'd signed for us, I'd have thought "meh" about. Wenger makes me laugh, though. Him being in Rome doing some charity match today of all days, and setting all those whining Tarquins off on twitter, moaning about him, nodding their heads every time that tit Piers Morgan tweets some cringemaking rubbish. Arsenal make me laugh. Just one of the increasing number of clubs which, over the last four years, have given me considerably more pleasure than the club I actually support.

That gross or net? Net. We haven't sold anyone. Oh, hang on, no we sold that useless potato headed t*** El-Amahdi to Feyenoord this morning for 800k, so that's just the £6.2m spent this window. More than us Jokes aside if anyone feels your pain it's us mate. Although you didn't finish last season with a squad you'd expect to see halfway down the championship I hate football.

"Arsenal fans hearing that Welbeck is having a medical at the club " http://i.imgur.com/DRYOv.gif

That gross or net? Net. We haven't sold anyone. Oh, hang on, no we sold that useless potato headed twat El-Amahdi to Feyenoord this morning for 800k, so that's just the £6.2m spent this window.

Looks like our total summer spend will be staying at £7m. And they wonder why nobody wants to go to the fucking games any more. I can't wait for Lerner to get the fuck out and sell up to someone who gives a bit of a shit.

I sort of get it, to be honest. It is the very fact that UEFA took a perfectly decent competition like the UEFA Cup, and butchered it, producing this absolute joke of a format. Now, maybe I am different on this because I can remember watching my club play in, and win, the European Cup (*obligatory mention*) so am tainted by this, but when we played in the final format of the UEFA Cup and then the EL under O'Neill, it had just been reduced to such a parody that it became boring. It started too early - I remember sitting in blazing July sunshine, watching us play Odense, and seemed to drag on forever, pointless fecking group matches against the likes of Mentalist Kharkiv or FC Boobtube of Slovenia. It just went on and on and on, and excited nobody. UEFA created that format thinking they'd have a television oriented second tier competition to cream it in from, but what they got was something that so few people wanted to see on telly, Channel 5 won the rights. Channel 5 don't win the rights to anything other than Big Brother and Home and Away. The excitement of potential European glory should be there for the likes of Hull, you're definitely right there, but if you look at the way they treat the competition, I honestly think it is down to UEFA butchering it in the first place. Incidentally, do Celtic now drop into the Europa League, effectively getting a third chance at European glory? How can you take that seriously?

Please, somebody deploy the brummie signal. I'm here. I don't believe we'd pay £8m for a player these days. Not a chance. We probably will buy him, but not for that much. He'd probably improve on Westwood, but that's not really the point, we need someone to create things from midfield, not someone who will be a vague improvement on some other player we already have, who doesn't create shit. Anyway, screw Villa, I don't care any more.

Fucking hell, Motson is all over the place, what's wrong with his intonation? All shouty when nothing is happening. Rambling on like he's having some sort of personal breakdown.

In fairness, our defending so far this season, whilst only on the basis of two matches, is infinitely better than it was last year. The absence of Baker and Clark has made a huge difference.

I think openly not giving a shit is worst. It's like "don't give a fuck, not going to even pretend I do". Depressing, the sooner he sells to someone who is even remotely bothered, the better. Till that happens it'll be season after season of arsing around the bottom half of the table like the fucking Albion or something.