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If it's a cynical foul it's still a red. Sure, but if the criterion is 'no opportunity of playing the ball', there are plenty of situations in which a player can disguise a cynical foul as an attempt which has some validity.

Ambivalent. This would be good in the first half of games, no-one likes the double penalty so early on tipping the balance of the game But in the last minutes of the second half, when the conversion rate for penalties in tight games drops from about 80% to 60%, the idea of an attempt to get the ball saving the player from the red card as well would make the cynical bring down an even better gamble. If anything, the punishment for that kind of thing should be increased. I have no idea how you could sort it out though, without something crazy like having a rule where any foul in the box by when there are no other opposing players between the ball and the goal meaning there isn't a keeper for the penalty - which would put the conversion at at 100%, totally swinging it the other way.

Don't know why I feel so confident about that at the moment. Could still happen.... I had a little pipe on that: http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/8605/multijy.jpg Spend a hundred of it building a hedge though. Still, good call.

£5 on Liverpool 0-2 Stoke and Liverpool 1-2 Stoke @ Half time, both 100-1.

Both. And both anytime. Those bell-ends at betfair have settled it as an OG though.

Haussler in play @ 70-1 for the Cycling Worlds.

His own little Wansee Conference, lamenting that that their great contribution in service of the Reich will forever remain unwritten...

From The Guardian: Relegation to the Championship cost Newcastle £33.5m of revenues. Costs were cut by £23.6m but at the same time Barclays sought repayment of £25m of loans. That dual impact of reduced revenues and squeezed finance would have killed most other clubs, but, housed within Mike Ashley's £1.6bn-a-year turnover MASH Holdings that also contains Sports Direct, Newcastle survived. Ashley advanced £38m that year to ensure the Magpies a smooth rebound to the top flight. Things have clearly improved. Last month Barclays loaned Newcastle their season's Premier League monies in advance, having apparently also extended their overdraft in March. Growing debt is normally a sign of distress; Newcastle's paradox is that the level of their external debt is a thermometer for their on-pitch health. Increasing overdrafts? Money loaned in advance? Why on earth would we do that? I'd think this must be bullshit, if it wasn't so banal that it wouldn't be worth making up!

An interesting defence of his guys by Ferguson: "As far as I am concerned my medical staff is one of the main reasons why we have been so successful over the last few years." One of the main reasons? A little flash in which we see the reality of 'medical help' in football.

Have gone for two eight-leg many-permutation multiples on games being draws in Europa League. Early season/unfamiliar foes/resting first team players/cagey start to group games/only 2 CL games had more than 1 goal between sides/wish we were in the Champions League, not in Bratislava on a Thursday/get a point on the board = draws, hopefully.

Bristol Rovers 3-2 @ 40/1 Port Vale 3-2 @ 28/1 AFC Telford 3-1 @ 18/1 Gateshead 3-0 @ 12/1 Darlington 3-1 @ 16/1 in various multiples

Rotherham 2-1 and 3-0.

Maybe things will be better after the business in this window. From the afterword of Micheal Lewis' Moneyball: Toronto was closer to a pure case study. Ricciardi, the new GM, had done what every enlightened GM will eventually do: fire a lot of scouts, hire someone comfortable with statistical analysis (Keith Law from baseballprospectus - a Web site, for cryin' out loud), and begin to trade for value, ruthlessly. He dumped as many high-priced players as he could and replaced them with a lot of lower-priced ones-and began winning more games. His biggest problem was finding teams willing to take bloated stars off his hands. (His best day all year, he told me, was when George Stein-brenner watched a Yankee right fielder drop a fly ball, blew a fuse, and demanded the Yankees buy Raul Mondesi off the Jays.) He slashed the Jays' payroll from $90 million to $55 million. In an efficient market, if you cut your payroll by 40 percent, you would expect to lose a lot more games. That's not what happened, of course. What happened was that the Jays went, overnight, from being a depressing group of highly paid underachievers to an exciting team. They were younger, cheaper, and better.

1. Once the wages of certain players go up, the rest will want to follow, so the leap is actually huge: the kind of increases the article mentions would double their expenditure on wages. 2. You also get into a situation in which players who are no longer wanted are more likely to sit on their contracts rather than moving if they are surplus to requirements. Once a player has failed in a top5 club, they aren't easy to move on to anyone willing to match their wages. Unless you are being 'bankrolled', either by an investor or short term loans, this is unsustainable. Transfer fees in general also get lower, because the total value of a transfer to a club (as we sadly learn under Mike's regime) is wages + fee, and if wages need to increase, fee goes down. 3. If you go for it anyway, even in the best case, you end up in a 5 horse race for the title, where you compete with other teams who have the same strategy as you. A quick aside, I think they will be better this season than last. In the three games I've seen, the first touch they are taking is now forward and they look to release the ball quickly. Last season it was always sideways and they were rather ponderous, moving the ball left to right rather than forward. Their way of playing had become a bit staid.

First hapless bet of the season: Over 4.5 & 5.5 goals in the France - Portugal U20 game. 12-1 and 33-1. 3-3 last time they played.

Premiership Winners: Man City Runners Up: Liverpool 3rd: Arsenal 4th: Chelsea Europa: Man Utd, Newcastle Utd Relegation: Blackburn, Wigan, Swansea Over Achievers: Newcastle Utd Under Performers: Man Utd Top Goal Scorer: Ba Break Out Year: Cleverly Season to Forget: Gerrard PFA Player of the Year: Yaya Toure PFA Young Player of the Year: Smalling FWA Player of the Year: Yaya Toure Where will NUFC finish?: 6th Domestic Championship Promotion: Blackpool, West Ham Play Off Winners: Birmingham FA Cup: Liverpool League Cup: Birmingham World La Liga winner: Real Madrid Serie A winner: Roma Bundesliga: Wolfsburg Champions League: Arsenal World Player of the Year: Casillas Olympic Gold Medal: France Other First Prem manager to quit/be sacked/'mutual consent': Bruce NUFC's top scorer: Ba Will an away team win a penalty at Old Trafford this season: yes

Since the removal of Keegan the stripping out of the club of anyone who represents the 'footballing establishment' has been inevitable. Its a good thing that it is finally over today: we can look forward. The reality of a football club to the supporters, to us who love the sign and the proper name; this is nothing like the reality of the club to Ashley and Lambias, two mechanics greasing an abstract machine which monetises signification. What they want to ensure is that the club runs as transparently and efficiently as possible according to their own understanding of it: an understanding which is based on exchanges of money*. As such, it has been necessary to cut out these little islands of resistance, bastions of molar identity like Hughton, Nolan or Barton who try to become loci of power (the value of power is unpredictable, incalculable). Ashley has already faced the worst possible scenario – relegation, and has learned that the club can essentially survive through it. Knowledge that this can happen despite a Faustian pact with the establishment (Shearer!) has given him to freedom to try and cut himself away from orthodoxy. Essentially, he is in a position where the underlying reality (the finance) allows him to try and reform the club according to his own principles. Good. Most of the received opinion which silts up football culture sits between nonsense and platitude. Let's welcome this chance to get beyond this monster called 'football' which becomes like: “A kind of spider of imperative and finality hidden behind the great web, the greater net of causality – we could say, with Charles the Bold when he opposed Louis XI, “I fight the universal spider” (Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals). Can we not say, along with Mike, lets fight the spider of banal conventionality in football, this morass of ex-pros who think that their skill with a ball translates into a natural monopoly of all decision making and management functions around the game? The loss of Barton is the jettisoning of the past, and who the fuck wants the past to repeat itself over again? Just because it happened last season, is that sufficient reason to will its return? Anything could happen next season, we've thrown the dice up at noon and will not see them fall until midnight. For my part, I'm glad that we've taken his risk. On the up, 6th. * What is at the base of Ashley’s obsession with the performance-related bonus? Exactly this same impulse. Ashley wants motivation to stem from the possibility of pure exchange – money – rather than from some loyalty to the idea.

I love this bet, I'm going to be all over the tour next week but with the new system for sprints and the few uphill finishes, 66-1 with the each way for top 3 is such a sweet price. I've got a covering bet on Denis Galimzyanov too, I think he's almost as fast as Cavendish in a flat finish.

Analysis of sporting metrics was initially an outsider pursuit, something undertaken by academics in public forums away from the professional side of the game. With that kind of 'open' debate, it advanced quite quickly, until it was demonstratively useful. That was when it infected the professional side of the game. In soccer, the demand for metric analysis of this type came before there was significant academic inquiry into the issue. The clubs basically approached the statisticians, rather than the other way around, and asked them to work on soccer. Most of the big clubs employ experts in the field, but due to the huge amounts of money involved in big-time football and the relatively small circle of experts, there is little public knowledge of their effectiveness. No-one shares their findings in journals and there is very little information available. This leads to the general scepticism about the efficacy of these kinds of analyses. In fact, some of them are very effective, the guy who does it for Arsenal is apparently the genius of the practice, but his work is owned by the club, and he isn't in a position to show the inner workings of what he does.

for win, top 5 and top 10 @ US Open KT Kim (400, 44, 20) SM Bae (960, 90, 44) and H Fujita (970, 85, 42) and a set of less rational bets on R Dinwiddie.

As soon as you posted that, I put a fiver on Ireland at 4/1. So thank you And for my next trick: Romania to beat Brazil @ 25-1. Romania have no manager and no good players, against Brazil who are playing Ronaldo in a kind of International/testimonial hybrid. God knows what'll happen, so 25-1 seems fair. Edit: Ronaldo just playing 15mins, otherwise the Brazil squad looks strong.

Italy to steamroller Ireland. Quite a few Championship players in the team: Ireland: Forde (Millwall); McShane (Hull City) - capt, St Ledger (Preston NE), O'Dea (Celtic) or Kelly (Fulham), Ward (Wolves); Coleman (Everton), Andrews (Blackburn Rovers), Foley (Wolves), Hunt (Wolves) or Lawrence (Portsmouth); Keogh (Wolves), Long (Reading). Italy: Viviano (Bologna); Cassani (Palermo), Gamberini (Fiorentina), Chiellini (Juventus), Criscito (Genoa); Nocerino (Palermo), Pirlo (Juventus), Marchisio (Juventus); Montolivo (Fiorentina); Rossi (Villarreal), Pazzini (Inter)

Relying on odds calculating program tonight, though it seems almost as broken as my instincts: Lorient 2 - 0 Marseille Bilbao 1 - 2 Malaga Barcelona 3 - 0 Deportivo Valencia 2 - 1 Levante Zaragoza 1 - 2 Espanyol

Chelsea 1 : 3 Newcastle £10 @ 180.00 Upset of the millennium on the way.

Should have had a look into today's stage rather than just thinking that it's a flat one. The Bayern bet got it back, though. 50 € profit for the day stays. The profile didn't look too bad in terms of gradient, I wish I'd seen those fucking hairpins though.