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Its the sort of stunt I've always laughed at in the past when the archetypal small clubs tried to pull it off, never thought we'd be reduced to that level

All I'll say is you can look forward to some great episodes :yes:

Ever since Bascombe had a thinly veiled pop at Rafa with his match report in our bad run last year, I'm not convinced he's exactly in the trusted journo camp anymore. Rafa lumping NOTW in the same category as the S*N shortly afterwards is a fair indication that any leaks he's getting at the moment won't be coming from Rafa anyway. Precious little quality available for wide areas at decent prices at the moment anyway

Its a shite idea, as is typical of most things eminating from Platini's mouth. Chelsea can make their debt disappear in about 5 minutes anyway. United's debt is driven by the ludicrous way in which they were bought rather than due to any "unfair" overspending in the transfer market, and Arsenal's debt is due to building a new stadium which you'd think UEFA would be trying to encourage given some of the shitholes we have to play in across the continent. I'd have no objections to bringing in some kind of policy to restrict clubs from spending beyond their means and distorting competition, but Chelsea are the only team in England doing that and they're just about the only English club this wouldn't affect.

Its good to see a few people appreciating B5 for a change, it mightn't have got huge viewing figures but it was an extremely influential show. The mid season finale for BSG aired in the US last night and will show on Sky on Tuesday, great episode, although now its not back until 2009 unfortunately

That would be my guess as well, plus he no doubt had to agree to a small summer budget as the price to pay when he persuaded the board to part with the money for Masch.

I think the mental block against the other members of the top 4 is a bit overblown, against the mancs fair enough, but we played Chelsea and Arsenal 4 times in the league this year and 4 times in the CL won 1 and drew 7 inside 90 mins, its not great but equally its not disastrous either. For all the focus on our attacking needs, if we'd not leaked so many soft goals this season we'd have put in a title challenge imho

Chelsea could just be refinanced with equity instead of debt anyway, so it would make little difference to them. Its a daft idea anyway, there's nothing wrong with debt to finance things like a new stadium, its when you're financing players with ever increasing debt that its more of an issue. Nobody seemed to care less when Madrid were doing it mind you

Gettign 4th isn't a huge achievement more like the minimum requirement in a season. With the bozos in charge now a season of winning the League Cup and missing out on 4th would probably see us turning into a selling club for the summer

Indeed and unfortunately I can't see us having a major budget to play with htis summer unless the ownership situation is resolved remarkably quickly :(

I'd agree with all of that, however I'd have thought that there is no guarantee Ayres would get the board position if Parry went, surely any new board members would need to be approved by the existing members of te board, who would still be stacked 3-2 against Hicks. To be honest if we sacked Parry and didn't replace him with anyone on the board I'd have no real complaints, but I'm not sure if that would be possible or not. They can all fuck off as far as I'm concerned they're as bad as each other, the only advantage Gillett has over Hicks is that he seems to be happy enough to piss off

Which would be a hell of a stick to beat him with if he'd inherited a decent team, the mancs spending won't look quite as good though if they ever go ahead and make the Tevez deal permanent as we've now done with Mascherano. I'm not saying we've been paupers, far from it, but anyone who thinks the team Rafa inherited didn't need a fortune spent on it is leaving in a dreamworld, and in the early summers we were in the position of having shedload of holes to fill with a relatively limited amount of cash. Even 2 seasons ago when we did push the mancs close, I'd say most would agree we had a lot more holes to fill than they did, their injury record that season was ludicrous by my recollection, and its odd that you focus on that season while ignoring the huge gap between us and united in the previous years, unfortunately Fergie's recent record in the transfer market has been good as well

We had 1 season where we got close to challenging in the middle of his tenure but then came the disastrous summer when we did splash the cash but did it poorly and the rest is history. For all Ged did spend significant amounts of cash he wasn't able to match the Mancs spending over his time in charge and they were also once again building on a stronger base, of course the fact that he largely spent poorly in the latter part of his time in charge didn't help

Its more a case of being able to improve the quality of an already strong squad whereas the one Rafa inherited was ordinary at best. If you want to have a pop at the signings we've made in the premiership era have a look at what we did under Souness. Evans and Houllier. The Evans years were the last time we were capable of spending as much or more than the other title challengers.