maybe_next_year

Look at all those banners

put on that £20 offer also: Man City -1/Liverpool -2/ Sunderland £2 and £1 on each. Everton/Arsenal double £2 and a silly .93p on all 5 to make my account on a nice round number

9 --------- Shola.

Satka? another defender and one that hasn't really stood out in the reserves, brilliant

Howay the banners

"what they don't want is for us to go out and drably play and win 1-0 and maybe finish half way up the table" Its like he's predicted the future

Its the hope that kills you in the end

Hans man, so many questions that need to remain unanswered

Sounds like they're all singing and dancing to me? Same tbh. fair enough, I could only hear them clapping lightly, but i am only listening on the radio. sounded better after the 4th goal mind.

just gone 3-0 up to put them top of the league going into the last day of the season. fans respond with mild applause

2-0.

finally!

How much does that come to? £51? got Ronaldo in a pack today, cheeky fuckers putting the free starting players in packs too.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27051215 The run-up to a World Cup is a time when children start collecting football stickers and cards. But there are also adults who get worryingly misty-eyed, including Ian Shoesmith. I rip the packets of stickers open with all the excitement and anticipation of the 10-year-old boy that I used to be, and inhale their long-forgotten but oh-so-familiar odour of glue mixed with sticky tape and paper. Instantly, I'm back in 1986 and my penultimate year at primary school, when the most important thing in my life was how an England squad featuring Gary Lineker, Peter Shilton and John Barnes would fare at the World Cup. I am a 38-year-old father with a mortgage and a four-year-old son, Danny. But my childhood passion - the thrill of racing to the paper shop, handing over all of my pocket money, desperate to be greeted by the mulleted head of a Soviet-bloc defender - is dismissed, out-of-hand, by my son. But I will persist in collecting them - for when he changes his mind. I'm most definitely not collecting them for myself. Definitely not. There are lots of grown-ups in the same boat. Adam Carroll-Smith is one of them. The 29-year-old comedy writer from Southsea in Hampshire came across a 1996 sticker album and was desperate to complete his collection. Rather than merely finding the six missing stickers, however, he tracked down the likes of Lars Bohinen, Stuart Ripley and Philippe Albert in person before recording the whole experience in a book. "It was before my now five-month-old daughter was born - it was a goodbye to that pre-child, feckless time of my life," he says. "Stickers are very evocative of our childhood and have a kind of naivety about them. It's that thing about buying them and seeing a flash of [1990s Derby County striker] Paulo Wanchope when you rip open the packet." It's easier to hide adult nostalgia when you have a child who is genuinely interested in the stickers. Mark Jensen, editor of the Newcastle United fanzine themag.co.uk, is 48 and has a 10-year-old son. "For about four years he would do them all the time - the cards as well as the stickers," he says. "They were even banned at his school because of all of the arguments they caused. Some kids turned out to be far shrewder investors than others and rip other kids off by swapping the shiny stickers for normal ones and stuff like that." Jensen notes that adult family members were often surprisingly keen to buy the stickers themselves, and they remember the ecstasies and agonies of their childhood collecting. "I do remember when I was a kid that there was a conspiracy story that some stickers were impossible to collect - there must be zillions of almost-completed albums out there," he says. "Nowadays I've heard of 'virtual stickers' but they are the antithesis to collecting in my view - you need the physical experience of opening the packet, all of your mates crowding round you to see what you've got." Carol Mavor, a professor in visual arts at Manchester University, writes about the nostalgia of childhood. "Stickers are very tactile and old-fashioned," she says. "The humanity of touch is also very powerful. That's why people love wooden toys, for example, because they have a unique feel, smell and are real." Anything up to 15% of children's toys are actually bought by adults for themselves, estimates Richard Gottlieb, publisher of globaltoynews.com and a "play industry consultant". Adults don't want to let go of their childhood completely, says Mavor. "It seems, without being overly morbid, to be so far away from death, work and the other obligations of adulthood. As adults, we think of ourselves as different people from our childhood selves - the whole world was open to us and it was a free and more creative life." It's down to sentimental attachment, says Felix Economakis, a chartered psychologist. "Little objects from childhood are imbued with meaning because they remind us of people who may no longer be with us - it's an association with the past through rose-tinted spectacles." When I think of football stickers, the first person I think of is my late grandad, helping me complete an album while my nana was making chip butties in the kitchen. There may be a gender difference, Economakis explains. "Men are more into lists, while women tend to collect something with sentimental value. For men, partly it's about status, and collecting for the sake of it." He also believes that collecting is "quite a solitary activity". But is it? For me, part of the fun of collecting football stickers was always about swapping duplicate stickers with my mates. Indeed, the chant of "Got! Got! NEED!" while flipping through your handful of stickers has even become a hashtag in the Twitter playground. And although the hairstyles and wages of modern-day footballers are barely recognisable from the stars of yesteryear, the fundamentals of collecting remain. There's the dreaded multiple duplicate - the player whose face seemingly greets you every time you open a fresh packet of stickers. For me it was former Scotland defender Maurice Malpas. I'm sure he's a lovely bloke - he's certainly a living legend among Dundee United fans - but his memory brings me out in a cold sweat. Carroll-Smith slowly spells out each syllable of a former Manchester United and Wales utility man. "Clayton Blackmore," he shudders. "I absolutely loathed him. He just seemed to follow me around like a stalker. To this day, whenever I go to Wales I half expect to see him standing there." So when you come across some obscure Costa Rican squad player for the 20th time this summer, remember that you are not alone. Fellow addicts are there to help - at a price. They're desperate to trade their mug shot of Iran's goalkeeper, after all.

fuck sake, using the money we got for Cabaye as proof players don't regress under Pardew

We haven't got the budget to cover the Nigerian space programme - something no one in the west has ever said before. The money left over from the poster campaign should cover it

hahaha brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

Suarez and Gerrard look like they're about to cry

seems rediculous for the standard, but i expected to be ripped off by Wembley prices really.

bigger club? yes, but also a job a manager should avoid, terrible team and an owner as tight as ours. Think they'll really struggle next year, wouldn't surprise me if they went down.

at the moment for a manager, I wouldn't say Villa would be a better job than the mackems. Both have terrible teams but only sunderland has an owner willing to spend some serious cash in the summer.

what I'd like: Cabella Redmond Ince 2 new strikers then a case of one in, one out. what I'll get: Colback, Bardsley, Pardew laughing in my face and some big lumpy striker ( but not a useful one, like Bony)

eushi gutierrez ‏@Eushiguti Protected Tweets 2h some #Norwich fans are proper aggressive .. No as nice as #NewcastleFans #theToon #loveForTheteam always

Overheard A woman working there today, said there would be an announcement after the end of the season about the existing stadium plans. I suspect either the woman in question knows nowt (most likely) or any plans might be dependant on promotion.

Think our protest would be much more effective if we got his Mrs involved actually, get her to boo him every time he tries something, until he gives up and goes and hides in his chair in the living room.