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Fearing That It Could Actually Be There Year...
I have just had a terrible vision, please pray with me that it does not happen...
So it's pre-season 2008/2009, who will win the Premier League next year?
Well...Of the top four, Chelsea have a new manager and seem to be on the verge of leaking players like rats from a ship and buying in players who will need at least a season to blend in (Robinho), ManYoo have lost their tactical brains, which has seemed to be red nose's major shortcoming in years when they have not performed and they are possibly losing the odious twit Ronaldo, Arsenal are potentially losing four of their better performers but on the flip side there is Liverpool...
Solid performances from their main stars in the Euros, potential strengthening of the team from Barry, players settled after their first year (Babel for instance). Boardroom disputes settled...
No, no, no please don't make me say it, dear god noooooooooooooo...
It could be their year...
Could you imagine if they do win it, oh god it will be awful.
Rafa will be a genius (after they called for his sacking at the end of last season) they will all bleat on about 19 times.
But in all seriousness the above points should make it a lot closer this year, and even Citeh could throw the cat amongst the pigeons in terms of points dropped etc.
All in all it looks like a very promising year.
Phil Smith, Sheffield
Dear Tim Collins...
Mate, don't waste your time complaining to the BBC.
Arguing with them is like having a discussion with a religious nutter.
For every argument you put forward they have a convincing - at least to themselves - counter position. For every fact you put up, they have one of their own. They are the masters of empty rhetoric; they are self-justifying, self-regarding and sickeningly self-righteous (if you don't believe me, spend some time listening to the hysterical shamfest that is Feedback on Radio 4).
And surprisingly, despite drawing the majority of their executives from Oxbridge, they are stupid, shallow, and lazy. Whether it's sport, comedy, general entertainment or even serious drama, their selection process is seemingly conducted through exclusive dinner parties. How else could one explain the strange fact that they often cast the same people over and over again?
Should any foreign scholar of TV undertake a serious appraisal of English Culture, he would no doubt come to the conclusion that there are only a couple of authors, four or five comedians and a handful of actors from which to choose in the whole country.
Complain to the BBC? Forget it. You simply cannot win.
Steve, London
...I like Mark Lawrenson.. and Hansen...and I don't really mind Shearer...and I don't even work for the BBC!
I think you have set your sights too high by judging commentators on the number of 'meaningful insights' into football they make. Perhaps you ought to start off with a more basic aim: just push for a set of commentators that can get their audience through a full 90 minutes without being plain bloody irritating. You could get the ball rolling by organising some sort of fanatical death squad to go after Clive Tyldesley and Andy Grey. I'd be more than happy to provide the ninja suits and the sandwiches.
Andy, Grantham, LFC fan
Arsenal's Real Justification For Price Hike
Yes we need to put up prices as we are planning to sell the club in the next three years and need to improve our balance sheet and reduce our debt. We also think it better to have incremental rises rather a big jump which means that while we are spending less and less on the team, prices will continue to rise. We haven't put prices up for four years because quite frankly prices were already too high and we cut costs everywhere else to account for the lack of price rises.
Also the past four years have been dross mainly but let's not dwell on that. We also present good value when compared to others as we include Champions League tickets in the price but if we fall out of the top 4 we will continue to charge the same and hope that no-one notices. Think of it as an insurance policy. What people haven't noticed is that despite the high prices, the quality of the team is sadly lacking which is fine as we have saved lots of lovely money from all those overpaid stars like Denis Berghoff and that King Henry VIII guy.
It's great that we can still charge our fans top dollar for a sub-standard product as there are so many mugs on the season ticket waiting list. We can afford people giving up their season tickets in the knowledge that some other mugs will gladly take their place and hand over their money to us for the privilege of subsidising our players' footballing education. All this money saved from selling all our good players and replacing them with youngsters or inferior players can be used to reduce the debt for our selling of the club which will make us even more lovely money.
Under no circumstances are we to use the extra money from gate receipts to give into mercenary players to whom we are still paying below market rate wages. Furthermore, none of the extra money is to be used for transfers as we have enough sub-standard players to just about keep us in the top four until we sell. After that who cares what happens to Arsenal apart from those mugs that continue to pour money into the club?
Kos
Liverpool Should Buy Bentley
Why doesn't Rafa Benitez do a player-exchange between Jermaine Pennant with David Bentley and maybe throw in £8-10million cash, instead of chasing the useless Gareth Barry at £18million ?
He has done enough to unsettle Gareth Barry at Aston Villa and it is time to call Martin O'Neill's bluff.
Also, with Paul Ince (a former Reds player), I am sure a reasonable deal is possible.
James How?, Singapore
Ronaldo Should Watch True Legend
If Alex Ferguson (or any United fans) wants to see whether Cristiano Ronaldo has any inkling of staying at United to become a legend they should send him a tape of the Sky programme on Ryan Giggs. If this doesn't make his mind up for him and bring shivers down his spine he has no soul and is destined to leave, putting all the transfer talk to sleep! That is all.
Red (LFC But still respects a legend) Dublin
On Arsenal And England...
They say sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, yet Toby Bentley's email is a good example with which to argue otherwise.
To say Arsenal are good for the English game by producing five mediocre players not good enough to get in their own first team and who have been involved in transfers between equally mediocre teams (Chelsea and Liverpool aside), and yet have it come off as genuine praise for their impact on the English game is a skilful art.
Sir, I salute you!
Rob, Bristol
....Toby listed a number of players L'Arse have produced (Sidwell, Muamba, Harper, Bentley, Pennant) and how they are all now valuable players (£37 millions worth), I think the point would be that they were not produced to that level by Arsenal but by other clubs.
Not quite sure how they did it but Chelsea have turned Sidwell into a £5 million pound player and Blackburn are in the process of trousering 15 big ones for Bentley. So the Arsenal system has not done quite as well as it might have done has it??
If for instance Arse were to sell Fabregas now for £30 million, would that all be due to Barcelona's incredible academy??
How long are these players classed as being Arsenal's...if Bentley was sold on in two years for £50million (unlikely but you never know), would this be down to Arsenal as well???
I'm not trying to put down Arsenal specifically, merely pointing out that Reading probably had a much larger part to play in producing two of these players and as such deserved the financial rewards (unfortunately for them they missed out on Sidwell's cash, but deserve it).
Incidentally, everyone scoffed at Chelsea signing Sidwell and Ben Haim last summer as freebies, now they are both supposedly £5 million in the bank, Roman's not so stupid after all.
Chris Harley
...In reply to Toby Bentley, I would first like to point out that Jermaine Pennant is a product of Notts County's academy system, not Arsenal's.
However, is Toby trying to claim that if these players hadn't signed for Arsenal they wouldn't have signed for anybody? How can having less first-team games at Arsenal between them than you can count on a leper's fingers be somehow construed as good for the English game? If they hadn't been swept up in Arsenal's attempt to sign every youth player on the planet, they would have had far more first-team experience under their belts if they had played for another club than they had by the time they'd left Arsenal.
Next Toby Bentley will be claiming that Hitler was the only thing that stood between Europe and War in 1939.
Roy Driscoll
No More Eboue, Thank You...
CP (Will Nasri be any use at all?), London wrote in to support the lad who questioned Eboue's slip from the radar, then posed another question as he was signing off: 'Will Nasri be any use at all?' You already answered your own question. Nasri (and Vela...) will be the reason that Emmanuel Eboue's masquerade as a winger is over, firmly planted back on the bench as an unused substitute, only there as an emergency back-up to Sagna and Clichy.
James (Now, can we just get Adebayor out?) Haire
We Think He's Accusing Us Of Being Racist
So Paul Ince takes his job at Blackburn on 22 June and declares that he wants to keep hold of his best players. I think he, along with the rest of us, knows that is at best unlikely but still an opening declaration of intent.
Then in the last few days of June and into July Ince sets about his new job - organising the return to pre-season and a training camp in Germany. He's also made the sensible decision to restructure his backroom staff, bringing in Archie Knox as first-team coach and investing in a defensive coach by appointing Nigel Winterburn yesterday. Any comments he's made to the press are the (hopeful) reiterations that he intends to keep his best players, Cruz, Bentley, Freidel. Ince also wins his opening game, albeit at Macclesfield.
So he's barely three weeks into the job and he's already been pelted with criticism for his transfer policies, first the Fowler and then yesterday, Sarah Winterburn's highly assumptive piece about Ince 'letting' Scott Carson join Stoke. First of all, nobody has joined anybody yet - the market is a stand-off as buyers and sellers hold off for the best price. There has also been very little movement as the players have barely put down their golf clubs and mojitos in Puerto Banus.
Fowler hasn't signed a thing and I suspect Ince is using this situation to make a point to his current strikers - a little kick-up the arse that doesn't cost a penny. Then today he denies he is looking at Paul Robinson and, again, declares he wants to keep Friedel. Maybe Ince is a manager that prefers to conduct his business outside of the papers - something which I admire and saves a lot of bullshit gossip columns. Maybe Ince isn't bothered about impressing journalists and doesn't want to have 'friends' in the media, unlike Martin "isn't he great craic?!" O'Neill.
It was said that Ince made history when he became the first black Englishman to manage a top-flight english team. But what good is that if Winterburn (Sarah), et al. don't even give it a month of the closed season before questioning his intelligence and creating an atmosphere of discontent among the daft minority of Blackburn fans that believe what they read?
Maybe John Barnes had a point.
Chris Kelly, West London
A Lament From A Wrexham Fan
Leicester supporting Sanjay has got some cheek. All of the clubs he mentions as being 'mis-managed' have been docked points, because of Leicester playing the system that was in place at the time. They wiped their debts by going into administration, won promotion to the Premier League, and promptly wasted much of their new-found wealth on a number of mediocre players, such as an ageing Les Ferdinand. Obviously this was rather galling, especially to those more financially prudent clubs, so the new rules regarding administration were changed to try and stop clubs exploiting such loopholes again. Unfortunately this has had the effect of kicking clubs in the nuts while they were down.
My own club, Wrexham, were relegated after being docked 10 points. We'd have stayed up if we'd kept those points, with (the universally hated) MK Dons going down in our place. This obviously has a huge knock-on effect, with less TV money coming into the club, lower attendences as the football is of a lower quality, and as contracts are generally smaller in length in the lower leagues, the loss of key assets. For example, we lost Carlos Edwards for nothing at the end of the season, and just a year later he was sold on for £1.5m. That £1.5m would have cleared half our current debt at this moment in time. He may not have stayed even if we had stayed up, but our relegation would've influenced his decision to leave.
I shan't deny that we weren't mismanaged; we had a tyrant in control of the club who wanted to ruin us for the sake of making himself a quick couple of million. But its not as if we endeavoured to 'live the dream' like Leeds. I can't remember the last time we spent more than a nominal fee for a player. And I imagine we had a couple of players on large wages (such as Darren Ferguson), but these players seemed happy enough playing at a reduced rate when we were in financial strife.
Clubs afflicted by unethical types should stick together, and the FA should be doing more to safeguard clubs. I realise football is a business, which often operates by a survival of the fittest mandate, but the vast majority of the clubs in the league have been operating for the best part of a hundred years, so there's no reason to suggest this can't continue in the future. Instead of whitewashing all these clubs as 'mis-managed' however, and saying that they deserve to be where they are because of the whims of a couple of directors or chairmen, we supporters should be sticking together to make sure that we can safeguard our clubs' futures, and to ensure that fewer clubs endure the hell of administration and the treat of extinction.
Ed (I complained to the BBC because Lawro didn't know who Huntetlaar was, despite him winning the Golden Shoe that season, and was fobbed off like everyone else) Greening
No You're Not The Only One. Marion?
Am I the only one who wants to know how Marion got on with the blokes who replied to her thinly veiled personal add?!
Steve (SWM with GSOH) Spencer
