peasepud

That's very generous pud. What's mrs pud cooking and what's your address? Serious question though, at the start of the season you stated that you would not pay another penny to Ashley and would not attend another game while hes here. Now that you've changed tack and are praising the bloke then i assume you'll be handing over your hard earned spondoolik and chanting his name? I would argue that its not Ashley thats kept us afloat this season but the 40k+ that attend week in week out, without our cash then the fat man would have had to stick his hand in his pocket to cover even more losses, without our support then the team may not have done so well in the league. Or to put it another way, without those very unreasonable fans paying him their cash to voice their oppinion then the shady casino bloke would be out of a job. Finally CT, you actually slagged off the NUST because we wouldnt protest, do you now agree that the decision was a right one for the future of the football club?

I assume CT that your new found respect for our regime will mean we'll see you and your family on Saturday?

People buy their STs in July and they'll expect it to be spent in the Transfer window, get it in in March and the mugs......I mean fans will have forgot it even existed come August. And he has the gall to slag Shepherd off for spending upfront Sponsorship money on an England striker.

Words fail me, they really do.

Your mams house

Depending on how you make the excel doc, there should be some tools to pull data from excel to MySQL. I can host database and website, if it should be needed. I'm still waiting for that webcrawler to reconstruct the original website, but it's taking a bit longer than i assumed. Drop em into csv files and we'll create a database for them, I'll set up a toontastic one and give priviledges to those working on it so if anyone interested can PM me with details of what they can do/are willing to them we'll look to get it going again. Once its built then we'll pull some pages together and keep em updated.

Just had a semaphore...... 1921 want their joke back.

RIP

I wonder if any club has ever gone into administration, lost 9 points and still been promoted as Champions?

You know my views on Stoke as a whole, a drug addled shithole of a town with a football club whos fans are still in the 70s. The "town centre" makes Shields Road look like Regent Street. I too saw them putting him in the ambulance and the reaction of the scum in that corner was beyond belief, it that had been here or anywhere else for that matter he'd have got a standing ovation as he passed. I was there for the FA Cup game two seasons ago and the fans in that corner were just the same, no interest in the game merely stood there baiting us. Handful of fat 15 year olds thinking theyre the next Chelsea Headhunters

so what you're saying is that hes actually eligible for the award? I dont see any shortlist there merely a chance to vote for any player. That gives me 5 or 6 Toon players befoe Carroll then.

Look the toilet belongs to someone else. I would never dream of using a toilet that did even if it’s a very nice toilet and one would be most pleased to perch their cheeks upon its seat. So they go to train and if a player needs a shit halfway through they have to go home for the dump?

Portsmouth fans are convinced that they're part of some massive money laundering scam and most are now resigned to the belief that this isnt the end of it. They think that the club will die and they'll have to start again from scratch. Terrible stuff tbh. less than two years after winning the FA Cup and you dont exist.

If we're losing £500k per week and dont go up then Id think its fairly nailed on that we'll be put into administration at the end of the season. Gates, sponsorship and corporate deals next season will be well down on this one, the first year in the Championship is exciting, its new, its seeing us win because we're one of 3 teams who are better equipped. Next season we'll be also rans behind whoever comes down. Fans will remember just how shite playing in the league and how demoralising not getting promoted was and will vote with their feet.

To totally steal HFs analogy, your argument is basically. :mental: Its that kind of attitude that the likes of Ashley thrives on. Its like saying that someone was attacked after getting into a taxi therefore lets not take the chance and all walk home at 2am through country roads.

His wife gave me permission to take over the stuff and carry it on, trouble was she didnt have the passwords which, at the time would have meant everything was basically to be copied over by hand. I have to admit since then I forgot about it. If people on here are willing to help out with it though then I'll dig it back out and take a look at screen-scraping the whole site into some form of database.

He certainly does and yes the players got us relegated. Even upping one of their piss poor performances would have kept us up. However in the fullness of time we may be viewed as lucky to have gone down. (as long as we get back up) Are you bi-polar?

You put those names up giving the impression they were home grown talent, costing peanuts yet they were virtually £40m for the two!

I think people seem to believe that Ashley bought the club and on day 2 was told "oh theres another £150m debt you didnt know about". Thats not the case, he knew exactly what the debt position was, he merely didnt know that some of it had to be paid back immediately.

Despair when I see these arguments tbh, Pud. A chairman's job isn't to blindly do what the fans want or to try and be popular, they're in a completely different position to the supporter. Supporters are entitled to be complete mongs and can call for every short-term extortionate trophy signing they want as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't provide a chairman with a defence to allegations of incompetence if they adopt the same strategy for success, even if it is popular at the time. "Will this £20 million signing please the fans?" Just stop and imagine a top Premiership club being run along those lines. Doesn't happen. The fact that this is acceptable ex post facto rationalisation for us speaks volumes tbh. What I was getting at is the fact people come on now moaning that Shepherd spent too much money yet if back then the Makems had been spending that kind of dosh while we were frugal then the likes of this place would have imploded and been screaming for him to spend the cash. I also dont think that a chairman/ owner should buy players because it looks good or will placate the fans, purchases should be the managers decision and based on how they'll enhance the squad. Hindsight is a wonderful thing regarding players purchased though. Owen, Smith etc all looked to be good players before they came to us. LMs argument that Shepherd backed his managers is valid, he spent the money chasing the dream of success rather than thinking "5 years down the line we could be skint and buying Leon friggin Best". Give me that any day.

That in itself is enough for me.

That was the only shock to him, he knew how much the debt was, he merely wasnt told that some of it was payable following any sale of the club. He then decided to pay off the bank loan(s) as well. imo merely to make the club more attractive to potential buyers.

I think what he's saying is though that recession etc. has severely cut the amount of spare cash Ashley has hanging around. That said, the thing that really restricted this more than anything was tying up so much capital unnecessarily in clearing the debts with one fell swoop. Absolutely no need to do this and it compounded our problems last January, when we needed a quality player or two coming in and it also meant the impact of relegation was that bit greater imo. I think i recall reading debt had to be paid off because the mortgage on the ground expansion was non-transferable. That wasnt all of it though, Im sure it was only about £60m??? the rest he decided to pay off without any actual urgent need. Plus people seem to often ignore the fact that he paid off debts in the form of loans then increased the overdraft which came at a much higher % rate.

I think what he's saying is though that recession etc. has severely cut the amount of spare cash Ashley has hanging around. That said, the thing that really restricted this more than anything was tying up so much capital unnecessarily in clearing the debts with one fell swoop. Absolutely no need to do this and it compounded our problems last January, when we needed a quality player or two coming in and it also meant the impact of relegation was that bit greater imo. By his own admission though, Ashley only ever intended to invest £20m per year in the club, using that on top of any profit made to fund purchases etc. Nobody can tell me that a man worth £800m following the impact of the recession could see that as a problem.

If theres oil there then yeah, the Yanks will storm in.