sir roger

I feel sorry for any Liverpool fans with a touch of schizophrenia following these threads as a Mata/Cazorla/Etoo rumour is immediately followed by a Jay Bothroyd one.

I think Villa will end up paying compensation to Birmingham ( A couple of million at least ), and with McLeish presumably getting a rise from his £1.6m salary at Brum, surely Lerner could have found a better manager with a budget of @ £8m over 3 years.

Ha Ha It was £65 & we got a little payment card to pay in a few quid every Friday. It wasn't all glamour, we nearly lost a pupil down Gaping Ghyll on a geography trip to Yorkshire in the worst weather I have ever seen before or since. Luckily some lads grabbed him & I grabbed his clipboard with the obligatory piece of plastic over it.

I hope we can sort this Doni deal out, as we are down to our last fifteen goalies now.

Nolan is linking back up with Allardyce who has presumably told him he will build the team around him & he gets the security of a 5 yr contract ( According to the Mirror Newcastle offered an extra year to his present 2, no wage increase but a bonus system for top ten finish ) Joey Barton is supposedly their top-paid player on £60k per week so I assume that is simply a financial decision with Ben Arfa available this year & that Gosling lad they stole off Everton fit now. I think Newcastle have a problem in that they have been so anti-Ashley for so long that he probably doesn't care about the fans now as long as they turn up & is probably playing a medium-term game of paying his loans off with sales like Carroll ( giving Pardew about half of the money to buy ) , and looking to sell the club in a year or two.

We'll hardly see it. It's not the end of the world.

I went on a school trip to Palma Nova in the late-70's and while we were there a teacher found out that there was a pre-season tournament on at the local stadium so we got a trip together.Turned out to be one of the best footballing experiences of my life. It was a 4 team tournament with the local team, a Belgian team ( might have been Lokeren ) Real Madrid & Flamengo. The third-place play off was unsurprisingly the first 2 named & to be honest I spent most of the time absorbing the different atmosphere of the crowd and the chants etc. Then it was Zico & his mates against Franco's finest with the crowd firmly behind the more local team. Flamengo went 2-0 up pretty quickly with Zico getting a purler, at which point the referee went a bit weird and started sending Brazilian players off at random intervals so they had to play the second half with 8 men. They simply defended in numbers & passed whenever they could to Zico who seemed to keep the ball for minutes on end with the Madrid players getting more and more frustrated and trying to kick lumps off him. The best bit was that the crowd had changed support completely due to the obvious refereeing bias & were now supporting Flamengo to a man. They hung on to win 2-1 and did a lap of honour with one of those trophies sized ridiculously large to hide how little anybody cared about it & I managed to get to the front and shake Zico's hand as he went past.

Do they come with a matching jester's hat ?

Heard some talk on the radio that we are looking at Enrique & Gutierez for a combined £22m. Hopefully it's bollocks ( Enrique happy enough at £7/£8m max. )

Interested in the earlier post about Newcastle players. Wondering if we are looking at Gutierrez due to Villa's valuation of Downing. He's a funny one is Jonas, sometimes he looks the bees knees but sometimes he looks very ordinary. Very tactically disciplined though & always sticks to his wing for Newcastle. Should be a lot cheaper than Downing I would assume.

Very poor, boring stuff from England. Sturridge was good, defence was Ok & Henderson was neat & tidy if no more, but the rest of them, Jesus wept. I peaked in the Zingari League in the mid-80's & I'm still a better player than Michael Mancienne or Danny Rose. How Sinclair & Albrighton can't get starts when chancers like this can, makes me question Pearce's sanity.

I'm happy with him as long as we don't go past £15m & add-ons.

We'll leave the Mike Gatting 'turtle-soup' gag to one side as well.

Every time I see him, my mind goes back to that brilliant caption in the fanzine a while back suggesting he was hiding his Auto-mart magazine as Capello approaches him for tactical input.

They have been excellent. The only thing I don't like is that they have picked up on the Barca/Real/Spain entitlement thing where if you breathe on them they go down screaming & waving imaginary cards. Mata's reaction & card in the first half to a nothing challenge was ridiculous & him going back to the ref giving a sarcastic thumbs-up when he booked a Czech later was ill-advised & could have had him sent off.

At the risk of bringing the thread back to the point, I have found that a fleece ends up sodden and matted when at festivals etc & would suggest a rainproof- type jacket like a Helly Hansen / Regatta / Trespass. Still as warm & a lot lighter. Depending on whether you worry about where you shop, you can pay a fair bit for them or try the likes of TJ Hughes.

I'm not a fan of Beyonce, but she is fantastic in concert. Not sure it will carry over onto an festival stage though. That Sunday line-up is pretty poor generally on the main stage. Friday could be funny if Morrissey gets word that one of the audience had a kebab last week and storms off.

TLW - ' More cunts than you could shake a stick at '

Anybody can make a few mistimed tackles that look nasty, but the sheer amount of very poor tackles that Scholes was involved in makes his claim that they were never deliberate, ridiculous. If he truly hasn't hurt anybody badly it is only through sheer luck.

They had the cheek to accuse us of going public on Adam in January when I have never heard us say a peep, but every time I watch SSN either Oyston or Holloway are updating us on the likelihood of the deal. Oyston looks like he smells of pasties.

I am not sure this latest Ed Milliband initiative ' Labour was thought of as the party of benefit scroungers' will help at all. It won't gain many middle-class votes & will put the backs up of a lot of traditional Labour voters. I suppose it's what you expect when policy is being determined by people who have spent their whole adult lives in 'meetings', practising corporate-speak & studying pie-charts and have no real affiliation with the majority of their voters. It is looking more and more that 'The Thick of It' was actually a documentary.

I thought Stevie had a similar op & he has been out for months ?

I can't see how Collymore or McAteer are anywhere near the most disappointing signings when you look at some of the detritus involved in our inward transfers. Collymore was excellent for us and although a moody bastard we should not have got rid of him. Seems strange looking back that we bombed him out for living in Dudley when the likes of Owen can play for Newcastle & live in North Wales. McAteer was fine & pulled his tripe out in whatever position we played him. Diouf would probably be mine in that I thought we were ready to finally make the move to win the title & watched him in the World Cup & thought he might be the ' final piece of the jigsaw'. That worked out well.

Still very young for a centre-back & has hardly played in his correct position since he got here. I think he has something about him & hope he fills out a bit in his time at Rangers & comes back a better player next season. Can't agree with the earlier poster's suggestion that Ayala is better than him. Ayala is very aggressive in the air but very ordinary otherwise.

I know he is a fat bastard, but is that a Richmond skinless sausage he is holding there.