Makom

For a £100 stake, you can insure yourself against Doomsday right now, netting you a profit of over £5,500 if laid right now (12/1, 4/9, 2/1).

I think it's time to start planning for the unthinkable. We go down. The SMB stay up. Boro go up. All I can suggest is lumping all your savings on a triple to lay it off, then if it does happen, use the winnings to spend the next season travelling around any country which has zero interest in football.

Collymore doing his nut - got told by a City fan at half time not to be so loud with his commentary in the second half. Modern football.

Any news on the SD protests? Or the 34 min stand up? Heard nowt about either, but been pretty zoned out all day due to an all night session.

(............................................) That's my textual representation of one long exhalation, the only thing that comes to mind when trying to think of something to say in this thread.

Tranmere relegated from the FL for the first time ever. Must be odd to be a lower league fan, I have absolutely no idea how to relate to that, having only ever known NUFC to be in the top two divisions.

Any truth in the rumour they're lining up Ched Evans as his replacement? I mean, I'm the one starting it, but it's true, right?

I liked the fact he said it had an impact on him, but only minimally. Which means that he alone is largely responsible for the defeat, either directly through incompetence, or because he can't get the players to play the way he wants.

Yup, go figure. It's almost as if the club is being run by people who don't know what they're doing.......

My proposals deliberately stayed away from doing anything that targeted SD directly, for reasons which really should have been blindingly obvious to anyone who was planning protests in a strategic and well thought out way, based on some basic research of Ashley and his methods/motivations. 1. There is nothing any NUFC protest group can do to damage SD's reputation or financial health, that hasn't already been tried before by competitors, the government, social reform campaigners, and even his own shareholders. 2. As I just said, when your business model is selling cheap tat and casting yourself as the maverick against the city's vanilla methods, there is no such thing as bad publicity. 3. Ashley just doesn't give a fuck. Targeting SD will therefore simply give him another avenue to demonstrate just how much he doesn't give fuck, thereby increasing the sense of futility about the campaign. 4. It actually gives Ashley an open goal against the protesters - he can now blame any future downturn in SD's fortunes (and therefore any lower bonuses in staff pockets) on the protests - and they can hardly say it's not their fault, because their goal here is clearly to hit SD's bottom line (either through direct boycott or via bad publicity) As I feared, this campaign is rapidly turning out to be badly conceived and poorly executed. There are other far more obvious avenues to pursue if the goal is to weaken Ashley by targeting his non-NUFC commercial activities. The relationship with Puma being the prime example. They're the only major sponsor with nothing to gain and everything to lose by being associated with Ashley.

N-O groupthink logic in action. This particular theory relies on the fact that because he got upset by previous protesting and decided to change his style of ownership from bumbling hobbyist to 'it's all about the balance sheet baby', somehow that's a victory. Anyone who has done even the most basic of research on Ashley, knows that when it comes to business, he thrives on being seen as the outsider, as the cause of conflict, as the person who goes against the grain. It will probably give him a raging hard-on to think of all those TV cameras outside his SD stores, getting his logo on the news. There's no such thing as bad publicity when your business model is knocking out cheap tat.

Being scared of diving the fans implies they are currently united, or that they are capable of uniting for a common cause, which as the boycott showed quite conclusively, they are not, and never will be if 'aye, but each man must do what he thinks is best' is the prevailing ethos. Some think the situation is already bad enough to forgoe a pre-paid ticket, others do not. But it doesn't take a genius to see that once a boycott is called, which side is doing more to show they don't support Ashley by not going. And wake up - nobody who boycotted was under any illusion it would affect Ashley - the aim was to send a message to everyone else (fence-sitting fans included) to raise awareness that he doesn't give a fuck, and if you don't do something, he's only going to continue not giving a fuck. 'You're either with us or against us' is frankly completely appropriate - nobody in the fan base needs any more time, or any more evidence, to realise what Ashley is, and what he does.

No, just point out the obvious - the purpose of a boycott is to empty the stadium. The aim of the boycott is to remove Mike Ashley. Ergo, we, the organisers, are of the opinion that anyone who enters the stadium, wants to lend their support to Ashley.

A true connoisseur does not sully his cheesy chips with anything.

That's fucked up that gif. Anyway, sauce or stfu.

I don't know as it's a long time since I put money in Ashley's pocket, but what state are we in regarding a sustained boycott beginning from game 1 of next season. Is anyone still on a 3 year deal, are there any rolling contracts in place anymore? Or is it the case that all STs for next season are yet to be paid for? And when's the deadline? What are the relevant dates, should Ashley try to scupper such a campaign with a bit of spending or a surprise new manager (totally unlikely, but good campaigns consider all possible scenarios). What I'm basically wondering is, when you set aside all the factors that were in play in this run in, of people having already paid for games and so feeling like they had to go, and people being worried that if they're not at the game we might lose and get relegated, what do people feel re. how likely is it that a call for a boycott would succeed? When the only issue presented to fans by the campaign is - if staying away for the upcoming season got Ashley out, are you prepared to strap on your big boy pants and take one for the team for as long as it takes? Are you willing to spend your Saturdays/Sundays/Monday nights doing something, anything, other than giving your implicit support to an ambitiousless, clueless, and heartless regime?

On the subject of silver linings, it would be nice to see if someone was able to calculate, based on the best estimate of the crowd, how many on the day tickets were sold for that match, compared to the average fixture last season. If it's say, a 75% decrease due to the boycott, that might be something worth portraying as the headline.

News to me. Coach not manager was the last reliable information I had. Sauce?

Errr....one of the reasons I criticised the boycott plan as envisaged by #stats was because I knew full well that there was no chance of there being more empty seats than not, because the prevailing attitude of most fans given past protests was pretty damn predictable - a mixture of apathy and 'support the team not the regime' wank. Add to that the obvious fact most of the people in the stadium have STs, then there was very little reason to expect anything else. And I've repeatedly said on here (and N-O), a successful boycott would have produced a near empty stadium that was instantly noticeable on Sky cameras as being not normal, even to the most uneducated observers. That was after all why a Sunday game was chosen. Before the boycott, people were circulating images of the AC Milan protest which showed an empty stand during a game, so that was clearly the goal. If AO.com didn't agree with that being the goal, they shouldn't really have muddled the message (and really, no, I'd fucking kill myself if I was anything like Wraith) I'm perfectly happy to settle for the second best, a better than expected reception by the media, who really did us a favour by side-stepping the stated goal of an empty stadium and focussng instead on why it was happening, without trotting out any of the usual stereotypes. But let's not kid ourselves here, 30,000 fans inside the stadium is not a show of united strength, it's confirmation of what most of us who long ago stopped giving Ashley any money, suspected about the mettle of those who still do. It strikes me as blindingly obvious that the whole point of a boycott is to not enter the stadium. It's been annoying as fuck to see the boycott organisers and those who 'lent their support' just going along with all this 'personal choice' crap being pushed by the vested interests of the Chron and all the other fuckers who make money out of favourable contacts with the regime. If they were serious about a boycott, then they should really have taken more of a 'your either with us or against us' stance, without being overly nobbish about it.

'the fuck are you on about man? I've no issue with that pic, it looks pretty much like what I saw on Sky when they showed the Leazes, combined with what others have shown what L7 was like. Your pic however, was of the Gallowgate, and it doesn't take a genius to see there's at least 50% more empty seats in that shot, if not much more.

LOL I followed that post and was thinking what a great writer you were.....

Welcome to the forum PTN. Us Mackem WUMs need to stick together. It's a viper's nest it really is. P.S. Pardew is imho going to easily prove to be the best manager we could have hoped for under Ashley's belt and braces regime. But he was a knacka. Hughton was class, but he was rejected by the regime for being a coach not a manager, just one of many of their stupifying decisions on the footballing side of things. And now we're looking at getting lumbered with Carver, who at best is a coach playing at manager.

#ShowYourArseInASportsDirectWindow is mine too. You all saw it. Hands off. If It works, I thought of it. If it doesn't work, I told you it wouldn't. I would have been a fucking awesome politician. In fact, I think my real name might be Brendan Rodgers, and I manage the greatest football team in the history of the world!!!!1111LFCBOSS#Winning

Oh my God. Are you outing yourself as the person who posted it on N-O as a serious suggestion? Please say yes. I would literally piss my pants if it was.

Oh right, you were actually serious? *slowly backs away shaking head* I suppose it would generate some media coverage if someone actually told the media it was happening and they could vox-pop some numpty grinning his face off outside an SD trying to explain about how this is all being done for local pride. But anyone who applies an ounce of sense can see the only outcome of this sort of protest is simply irritation - it's not going to affect any particular store's profits in any way, shape or form, no matter how you slice and dice where and when the protesters would be deployed, and the till staff being pissed off by this would be ordinary locals who are already presumably suicidal because they're reduced to work at SD. Now....on the other hand....if it was organised just as hashtag campaign - you tell people what to do and they just go and do it and hashtag/instagram it as happens with all these other stupid crazes these days, and if the suggested action was a little less annoying to staff but equally disruptive to business, then you might get something going, and it could snowball into something great and generate good media coverage or even disrupt business enough. Or it could turn into something ugly, generate horrendous coverage, and affect business (which people really shouldn't automatically assume is a PR win) To be honest, I wouldn't have the balls to unleash that beast. Maybe this is the real reason the AO.com folks are anonymous - so they can shield themselves from any unintended consequences should #ShowYourArseInASportsDirectWindow blow back on them hard. Fnarr Fnarr I really need to go to bed, I'm actually now mentally planning in my head how to do this, which is fucking insane.