brummie

Sorrento and Positano are nice and the people are much friendlier. The Amalfi coast is truly beautiful. Naples is an exciting but also utterly insane city. I'd advise everyone who gets the chance to visit it. Not to live in it, mind.

Really looking forward to this. I'd like to think Lambert picked up some of this Dortmund ethos, that way of doing things. Even if he fails, it makes it more interesting.

It is obviously going to cost more to keep him. If he's on 60k a week and has three years left (thanks, McFuck, you fucking fuck) then that's pretty straightforward maths.

Staying on at club as development coach, working with Sid Cowans and the kids. http://www.avfc.co.uk/page/NewsDetail/0,,10265~3187739,00.html

Um... Benteke. I don't want to come over all "we're not good enough", but he's getting a lot of interest and we're not as attractive as we should be... Benteke will stay this coming season, have a good world cup, and take his pick of where he wants to go, to be honest. That's how good he potentially is. He's only young and has lots of rough edges to lose still, but he's significantly better than Andy Carroll (who went to Liverpool for five times as much as we paid for Benteke, and probably earns three times as much as Benteke does). Andy Carroll is significantly better at being English though. He's the absolute perfect Martin O'Neill signing.

Um... Benteke. I don't want to come over all "we're not good enough", but he's getting a lot of interest and we're not as attractive as we should be... Benteke will stay this coming season, have a good world cup, and take his pick of where he wants to go, to be honest. That's how good he potentially is. He's only young and has lots of rough edges to lose still, but he's significantly better than Andy Carroll (who went to Liverpool for five times as much as we paid for Benteke, and probably earns three times as much as Benteke does).

McLeish was nuts to give a 36 year old keeper a five year contract. Utter fucking nuts. Given is a good keeper and deserves to be starting matches, not on his arse on the bench. Unfortunately, though his brilliant shot stopping saved us numerous times under McLeish, Guzan has been miles better this season. Commands his area way, way better than Given ever did.

I'm not, I'm just saying it's not as high as people think it is. From '92 until '99 our net spend was about £25million. We won five league titles, three FA cups and a Champions League in that period. Quite a few teams, including Newcastle, Arsenal and Liverpool, outspent us by quite a bit then. Villa, Chelsea, Spurs and Everton spent roughly the same. We hardly bought the trophies when everyone else spent the same or more. Pointing out you spent a lot of money is not the same as suggesting you bought the trophies.

I imagine the vast majority of clubs wouldn't pay anything like that, and rightly so, too. More and more clubs will be moving in that direction - away from the mental salaries.

Eh? How much did you spend net last season, then? Net? There's also no point looking at net spend per season since the PL began, because that was over 20 years ago - when the record transfer fee was a little over five million. Nobody is denying that Ferguson's trophy haul is brilliant, it is, but you've also spent a lot of money in doing it. Don't go making yourselves out to be some kind of slightly spendier version of Everton.

Trying to maneouvre his fat arse through the door marked EXIT by all accounts. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/aston-villa-richard-dunne-told-3897597 Shame. Had one exceptional season for us, then ruined it with his lack of professionalism. He was always shockingly out of shape at the start of seasons. I believe he was actually the heaviest player in the PL, and it is not remotely surprising.

So have I. He shouldn't be doing it all in public, and so emotionally, though. That's going to end in a bad place.

I bet that's on Gove's list of subjects. About six pages lower than classical greek, latin and British Empire Studies, the gigantic fucking anachronism.

MON whilst with us also never used to believe in things like extra training sessions after a defeat. In fact, his reaction to a bad defeat was to send everyone home for a few days. Can't remember which departing player it was, but one of the bozos we have shipped out recently said that if they got beaten on a Saturday, they'd quite frequently not have to train till Wednesday, and they wouldn't see the manager at all till Thursday. Basically, he'd just let Bibs and Cones (Walford and Robertson's nicknames from the players) 'organise' the training. That is probably why Houllier was so shocked by the lack of professionalism, and why certain players (two easy to guess first choice defenders) rolled up to training one day still pissed, and why a team bonding day ended up with a first team squad member punching Gordon Cowans. If there's one member of the Villa coaching staff over the last few years you don't want to be punching, it is Cowans. You also do have to wonder how much discipline there was around when MON got into a training ground fight with Nigel Reo-Coker.

I can easily understand that - a car is a single, usually high value purchase for which the vast majority of people would struggle to find the cash in one lump. Like a house, for example. The high interest rate loans thing is a totally different kettle of fish because it targets the vulnerable, financially troubled sectors of society by dangling the option of very fast availability of cash, at an exorbitant interest rate. Kind of ironic, given the fact that the most financially prudent of us can't generate any income from savings because, errrm, the interest rate is so low. Good point re booze companies and gambling operations sponsoring football clubs by Benwell Lad, but I was actually talking about Wonga in a non football sponsorship sense.

As a rule of thumb, whenever "trickle down" is mentioned in financial terms, it never happens, and is really just used as a moral justification for extremely wealthy organisations or people to stay extremely wealthy.

If you're thick enough to take a loan out with Wonga you deserve everything you get. Sometimes people don't have a choice. Exactly, and that is why Wonga do so well. Personally, I think the sort of interest rates they charge are entirely unacceptable - it is a dressed up form of money sharking as usually practised by criminals - but I feel pity for people who are forced into that situation where they have no option but to use Wonga. Assigning some sort of fault at those who use them isn't the answer. Regulating and limiting their voracious financial abuse of those people is.

Now they've survived, they are faced with the reality of having an unproven league one nutjob as their manager. That is going to be very interesting to watch next season.

The England shirt looks like a German national team shirt, circa Gerd Muller era. Maybe we've decided that we don't need a root and branch reform of our game to be like Germany, we can just make our shirts look like theirs.

Mental eh? The blokes a proven winner, far better than the manager we have or could reasonably hope for should the current one get the boot. And he's basically saying come and get me. Yet in a few short months we'll still be lumping the ball and losing at home to cardiff. Benitez interviewed for our job when - inexplicably - we appointed McLeish. Lerner cut the interview short because Benitez made it clear he wasn't going to take any job which didn't come with a significant chunk of transfer money to spend. I suspect he'd still insist on that.

It is nigh on impossible to compare managers from different eras, because they are operating in what is practically different sports. To be a successful manager these days you need entirely different skills. Clough, for example, would never get away today with talking to the way he did to his players. In fact, he didn't get away with it at Leeds. These days, every team is a Leeds in that sense. The stat that for me always illustrates how much the game has changed is that when we won the league (as if the fact we won the league at all doesn't say enough) in 80-81 we used 14 players all season. These days you can use 14 different players in a single match. Ferguson's record is incredible, but I do wonder how much he was assisted by the timing, in that shortly after he rocked up at Man United, the PL began, which funnelled more and more money into the game. There's no doubt that Man United have benefitted from the PL more than any other club. I also think we pick managers according to our age and affiliations. Personally, for example, I would pick Clough as the greatest of the lot, but I am aware that is shaped by my own personal memories of what he actually did with Forest at the time - a club that had never amounted to much becoming double European Cup winners just beggars belief. That was an achievement that can never happen again, a club of that ilk will never win things like that again, and football is way, way poorer as a result. We'll never see a manager achieve what Clough did in his time, mainly because these days it is quite literally impossible to win championships without huge financial backing.

Gary did explain that it was the best from every month tbf. They should have invented a "new' 13th month to fit it in, if you ask me, it was that good.

"He really is a fantastic guy" "Especially that bit in his autobiography when he was going to get his gangster mates to cripple Lucas Neill in the Trafford Centre. What a pro"

Carragher's voice ha ha ha. He's just woken my slumbering cat up. She's been asleep for at least an hour, too.

Ha ha, Downing, you massive, massive CUNT.