Big Onion

Indeed Ryder spat his dummy out when the NUSC email suggested Thomson House were now arse-licking the club. His embarrassingly childish and spiteful blog response made him look like a complete twat, as plenty people pointed out afterwards. He's achieving the remarkable feat of making Alan Oliver look good.

I'd be worried about letting a bloke who can barely control his own legs being let loose in a helicopter like

Owen, Martins and Bassong are the three players we most need to stay fit from here on in for me. I think and hope Owen's goals could, once again, be key to us staying up. I wonder who gets his helicopter once he's gone

It might be 'excellent' if you have the comprehension levels of a walnut He's saying negativity from the fans is responsible for us being where we are in the table. What an absolute fuckwit

Never backed a winner all day. Two placed horses and a placepot up for 25p (= about £30 ) returned about a third of what I staked today. Bollocks. But I'll win tomorrow [/mug]

'Please give us your money - we've fucked up but we'll be even worse if you stop coming'. Shower of useless bullshitting cunts.

Our status has fallen so far so fast it's hard to believe. I know we were treading water to an extent for a couple of seasons pre-Ashley but I still feel that for most fans, and the wider football community, there was the underlying feeling that if we got the right manager in we could be pushing for top six or so quite quickly. It can't be more than a couple of years ago Mourinho made that 'we always wait for Newcastle' remark, for example. No-one's waiting for us these days. I'm obviously talking specifically about perceptions here but they do count for something, certainly in terms of recruiting good players/managers and even more so as regards your general experience as a fan. I doubt there's a player on the books who seriously believes we'll be 'challenging for everything' in five years. Ashley seems to have done to us what he has a reputation for doing to 'brands' he acquires in his retail operations. It's so fucking depressing

If he's wanted by an ambitious club, he'll be away - as will any good player here. Because we're shit, and we're going nowhere, and everyone knows it.

'lol'

The Marvin Gaye/Tammi Terrell version of that track is absolutely perfect in every way Tammi Terrell apparently turned a lot of Motown heads, much to the annoyance of some of the other lasses. She had a stunning voice.

They should call it Window-Lickers Anonymous.

Fucking hell an anti-protest protest group 'Trying' being the operative word There's some right dingbats about mind.

16th of 18 Can't believe how badly it ran as I know it was fancied. Cost me a good few quid and a mate of mine a lot more. *crawls away*

Aye Though I found out after that the other thing I tipped went lame [/excuses self slightly]. Also the one I mentioned for Cheltenham further up (Michael Flips) is worrying me now. Mcoy was considering the ride but has chosen to go with Ainama instead I believe. It could also do with a fair bit more rain than now seems likely. *practices crawl*

I'm going to try and salvage a bit of damaged credibility by nominating Movesgoodenough e/w in the Imperial Cup (Sandown 3.10). 33s when I backed it earlier. If it bombs I promise to crawl away from this thread with my tail between my legs, never to return

I draw a line under the tenure of the old board. Ashley bought the club as it stood. If there was more debt than he'd bargained for (although it should be noted that Mort is on record saying they did do 'normal due diligence') my take on that is: so what? He's a trader, and has been on the right end of plenty of transactions amounting to far bigger sums than the inherited debt they never stop moaning about. That's business. And how much unknown debt could there have been? Apart from the sponsorship money being spent in advance for the Owen deal, there can't have been much. They would certainly have been aware of the outstanding £57mil or whatever it was on the stadium, and of outstanding payments for players bought previously. I'm personally sick to the back teeth of Ashley & co. crying poverty - why buy it if you can't afford to run it? (It's more a case of not being willing, rather than able, but whatever.) Investment in youth development for the long-term clearly makes sense from both a footballing and a financial point of view, but it's almost entirely pointless if you neglect the first priority, the first team, in the interim. Significant investment in the first team is something Ashley has singularly failed to do, and we're now seeing the folly of that as we're staring relegation in the face. This has absolutely nothing to do with Shepherd or Hall. Ashley has chosen to run the club on the cheap, no-one else. I'd guess that no more than ten or fifteen million invested in players this summer (the left-back Keegan wanted, and a replacement for Milner) would have averted the events of early September. That's no money at all in PL terms. The man simply doesn't understand football, and is trying to make the club fit the model when it should be the other way round. And his chosen personnel, Wise, Llambias and now Kinnear have been a disaster. Wise has no track record in his role, Llambias knows nothing at all about football and Kinnear is a joke appointment. All of them will walk away from this club without a backward glance when their time is up. Two seasons, two relegation battles - at this club, that's sheer incompetence.

Has one of the NUSC shagged your lass or what? Honest question

Love him as well. Only acted for the money so he could go on adventures iirc. Didn't he sail across the South Pacific with his kids once just for the craic? Something like that aye. I've only got sketchy bits of his story, which is why I want to know a bit more - the bones of it makes it all sound very interesting anyway. Now I've mentioned it I might have another go at Wanderer actually - I'd had a beer when I started it

I finally got round to getting a copy of a book I've meant to read for ages, Wanderer, Sterling Hayden's autobiography. He's one of my favourite actors and had an incredible life so I was looking forward to it. But this book is absolute torture, like swimming in blancmange. He fancies himself as a Conrad I suspect, but the result is a mess - I managed about 20 pages. I'm now looking for a decent biography

Aye credit where credit's due like, we never used to get these exciting last-gasp relegation battles

It's a world where, at some vague point in the future, we'll have an endless stream of world-class talent coming through to the first team, with Joe Kinnear standing proudly on the touchline admiring his young charges. Dennis Wise will be given the freedom of the city for services to the club (key collected on his behalf by a smiling Derek Llambias), and Mike Ashley is acheiving godlike status through driving the club towards the title and the CL through his visionary ideas

It's looking very much like West Brom gone, perm any two from us, smogs, Portsmouth and Stoke. The plus for us is we should have a much better squad to pick from over the last half-dozen games or so with plenty due back. The minus is our fixtures, probably the hardest overall, with the last one looking scary as fuck if it's still undecided. Stoke go to Arsenal like, but Portsmouth and the smogs play Wigan and West Ham respectively, who'll both probably be on their holidays by then. Also doing that predictor there seemed to be loads of games between the bottom six or seven clubs.

The Bassong quotes are from a while ago in a Gibson interview, but I don't think they were online. Fair play to Luke Edwards for including them in this morning's piece. Goes some way to making up for the pile of arse-licking crud he put his name to the other day (the £30mil budget less KK's pay-off piece). Maybe they're getting the message that most of us aren't impressed by the recent kid-glove treatment of Llambias's interviews.