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ottawa_lfc

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Everything posted by ottawa_lfc

  1. Brilliant ranting. And spot on too - well done. Souness needs his head seeing to for what he said.
  2. Not a worry - I'll keep with the subscription too, even if there is an increase. Pretty insane how prices are going up--it's not your fault the rise has been excessive, so if it helps, I am definitely happy to pay the difference.
  3. Dave, Couple of things. 1) Are they sent Printed Paper Rate, it is usually cheaper. 2) I'd be happy to cough up the difference for what I paid and what it costs you to send--not sure how many overseas people buy, but others may be too. For PDFs, no way for me. I read the mag on the bog, so am not dragging my PC in every time I have a crap. It's basically the only time I am off the computer...
  4. He did, "Walk Alone" came out in the late 80s/early 90s. Having said that, it was full of footballer speak. I'd love to see it properly ghost-written - by someone like Brian Reade, for example. Top bloke.
  5. El Hadji Diouf - I actually believed the hype about him during the world cup.
  6. Er, yes... Spain, Turkey, Portugal...
  7. Think he misread it - and I agree fully with what you said
  8. I like you. I'd rep you again if I could.
  9. I want Rafa to stay. Tell me. What would you have done?
  10. Read this shite - what a cunt he is: Just let me add, that it is that hypocritical arseshagger that built an team around Roy Keane, whose entire game was about bullying referees. Disgusted Sir Alex Ferguson claims press is blinded by 'mist of venom' | Football | The Guardian Disgusted Sir Alex Ferguson claims press is blinded by 'mist of venom' • United manager criticises coverage of Bayern defeat • Munich players 'bullied young referee' Still nursing the wounds from Manchester United's controversial elimination from the Champions League, Sir Alex Ferguson rounded on what he called a "mist of venom" surrounding the club. The United manager was aggrieved that the excellence of his side's first-half performance against Bayern Munich had been forgotten amid his comments that the way Bayern's players had surrounded the referee in a successful attempt to get Rafael da Silva dismissed was "typical Germans". "The most important thing about Wednesday night's game is how well we played. But you have lost that in the mist of your venom," he told reporters at the club's training ground at Carrington. "The Germans let themselves down in the way they behaved by getting the boy sent off. If they don't recognise that, there is nothing I can do about that. It was totally unfair – they bullied a young referee into it." "He [Rafael] has barely touched him. [Franck] Ribéry did more to him than he did to Ribéry. The issue was how the Germans reacted; they knew the boy was on a yellow card, they surrounded the referee. We see that happen time and time again with players waving an imaginary card to the referee – and he succumbed. "I don't know if it was last season or the season before, but there was a referee's edict that anyone showing an imaginary card should themselves be booked. Well, there were six that should have been booked. What has been lost in all this is our performance. We were 3-0 up and it could have been 5-0. We were magnificent and that has been lost just because you want a headline about what I say about the Germans. That is disgusting, absolutely disgusting. The players deserved some praise from you lot because their performance was outstanding. At the end of the game you are forced by Uefa rules to do a television interview. It is a bad time to do it." Ferguson has always been suspicious of flash interviews conducted immediately after the final whistle when emotions are at their height. His sometime mentor Jock Stein told him a manager should wait at least 48 hours before commenting on a controversial game. And he has long been suspicious of the club's press corps, whom he accused of celebrating United's defeat in last year's European Cup final. "Someone told me the other day that when the press came back from the Rome final [against Barcelona] they were all delighted," he said. "They were on the press bus and pleased that we lost. It is disappointing when there is a British team in a European final and even one member of the British press wants us to lose. Someone on the bus told me he was absolutely disgusted at the behaviour of the British press at the European Cup final and he had no reason to lie to me." His accusations carried echoes of an incident in December 2005 when Ferguson was appalled by suggestions that some journalists flying back with the team from Lisbon after United's elimination from the Champions League by Benfica ordered champagne. Ferguson did not comment on reports in the Guardian that Manchester United's debt had meant they were unable to fund a bid for the Valencia forward David Villa. The signing of the 21-year-old Javier Hernández and the Fulham centre-half Chris Smalling is evidence that Manchester United's transfer policy will be aimed at younger, cheaper footballers. "There is always conjecture about players," Ferguson said. "Last summer it was Ribéry and Karim Benzema, and he was one of the targets that we set out to get because he was 21, and now it is David Villa. I am sure by the end of the season there will be half a dozen more." Ferguson has admitted he did not bring Benzema to Old Trafford because he thought the €35m (£30.7m) fee Real Madrid paid Lyon was inflated, adding that United had to move swiftly to sign Hernández from Chivas de Guadalajara once he made the Mexican national squad because his price was in danger of rising. "That created a problem for us," he said, "because, if he went to the World Cup and did well, we were going to lose him." The manager was adamant that Wayne Rooney would play no part against Blackburn on Sunday after aggravating his ankle injury at Old Trafford against Bayern in a match that Ferguson had said the striker would miss. However Rooney's wife, Coleen, at Aintree for the Grand National meeting, suggested the England international was making a typically rapid recovery. "He is fine and his ankle is fine," she said. "He has been into training today."
  11. Many football hooligans have switched from the grounds to the internet | Louise Taylor | Football | The Guardian Many football hooligans have switched from the grounds to the internet Anonymous cyber bullies are seeking to trash the reputations of players, managers and others in the sport By Louise Taylor As a small child I lived in Lebanon for a while. At my strict Beirut school, talking, uninvited, during lessons invariably led to a strip of Sellotape being stuck across your mouth. Punishments can rarely have been more effective; quite apart from instantly silencing miscreants, the pain of the tape's eventual removal – it hurts – proved a disincentive to reoffending. The deployment of such a brutally old-fashioned classroom calming device would cost teachers their careers today but you sometimes wonder if the general concept might not be ripe for adaptation elsewhere. If only certain football fans' fingers could be tightly gaffer-taped together whenever the urge to begin blogging or tweeting about their latest bête noire overtook them, the world might become a nicer – and saner – place. While the internet remains a wonderful invention, football supporters and the web are an increasingly noxious mix. With stewards and police no longer turning persistently deaf ears to racist or homophobic abuse inside grounds, a warped, and militantly vociferous, minority have moved from shouting venom to typing toxic thoughts before pressing Send. Others, meanwhile, simply prefer making hi-tech mischief. There have been two notable recent examples of such trends. At Newcastle United the alleged altercation between Andy Carroll and Steven Taylor, which left Taylor nursing a doubly broken jaw and feeding through a straw, prompted a surfeit of septic, completely unfounded, rumours on some Newcastle supporters' sites. If Newcastle's enduring, ill-advised, silence on the Taylor-Carroll affair is a pollutant at the heart of an otherwise renascent club, Aston Villa were dumbfounded last week when fans' forums began buzzing with chatter concerning Martin O'Neill's supposedly imminent departure in the wake of Villa's 7-1 thrashing by Chelsea. All it took was a post beginning: "I don't know if this is true but ..." on VillaTalk for the rumour to develop "legs" long enough to ensure its replication on national radio stations and newspaper websites. When the furore subsided and the manager was discovered to be still wearing a Villa tracksuit, O'Neill asked a pertinent question. "Really, is this how the media works?" His subsequent self-proclaimed ignorance about the blogosphere's existence and a laptop's basic functions may appear disingenuous but it is not entirely implausible that O'Neill has better things to do than fritter time online. Other managers are simply too obsessed with downloading their beloved Prozone stats first-hand to remain computer illiterate. Once logged on, few can resist a little surfing and often find monitoring fan opinion becomes an uncomfortably compulsive reading habit. Frequently, it is also a recipe for understandable depression. There is an unfairness inherent in seeing people ridiculed and their reputations trashed by anonymous, factually challenged, half-wits who would probably never dare say "boo" to the object of their vitriol's face. Even worse, the suspicion is that witch-hunts are sometimes manufactured by the same numbskull submitting multiple comments via different usernames. Constructive criticism is healthily democratic but a cross-section of football fan sites contain far too many posts which seem not merely worryingly childish but cruel and, often, cringe-inducingly crude. With contributors shielding their true identities by hiding behind silly names such as BeansOnToast or BigCheese and many forums unmoderated or slackly policed, they are also cowardly. A modern equivalent of poison pen letters. How many bloggers would be happy for their wives or employers to know precisely what they have been writing? The time has come for the game's ruling bodies to initiate a national "Online Respect" campaign designed to modify an uncomfortably harsh climate of web ranting. Richard Bevan, the impressive chief executive of the League Managers Association, could be the right man to coordinate a project which might involve David Beckham, Wayne Rooney and Fabio Capello reminding everyone that cyber bullying is sad. Steven Taylor may even be persuaded to explain what being a victim feels like. Naive idealism? Well, things change. When I lived in Beirut, Lebanon was on the brink of civil war. Today it's peaceful, welcoming and most travel writers' "hot" new destination for 2010.
  12. That's why I voted yes. It seemed that B'ham actually stopped concentrating once Torres was off & we battered them. But as you say, whether that was due to Torres going off or would have happened anyway, we'll never know.
  13. So you don't think taking off Torres took balls? We were MUCH more creative after Ngog came on. Taking off Torres opened them up - they started to push forward more and we finally had space in the middle. It was a brave decision, and it did make a difference to the shape of the team. I'd have put Aquilani on sooner - 10/15 minutes sooner - and probably started with Babel instead of Benayoun. But he went out with a reaonably attacking line up against a good side.
  14. not yet he hasn't.... we've lost 2-1 twice...
  15. Mourinho wouldn't win a title with Man City, no matter how much he spent. He goes where he can pad his cv. He did exceptionally well at Porto, and deserves a hell of a lot of credit for that. Then he came to Chelsea at the perfect time -- when Chelsea were changing the way clubs were spending in England, went to Inter because they were champions and he had shitloads of money to spend... He's a good laugh, amusing when he is elsewhere. And a good manager. But he wouldn't last five minutes here the way the club is run at the moment.
  16. Not a bad line up - Aquilani could have started, but I think it is quite attacking and reckon Kuyt will score.
  17. non match goer and Benitez supporter I blame Hicks and Gillett
  18. good post, agree fully. O'Neill is excellent at building a team for a season to start. Then when teams suss out what he is doing, he can't react. He doesn't have the tactical acumen and that's why his seasons - like Curbishley's - start well and end up in mid table. Plus he is a nasty spiteful little cunt who deserves a kick in gonads. Apart from that, he's a top manager.
  19. Fucking hell - that is typical referee's behaviour though -- once the players have been sprayed. He must be half French - strutting after them like some sort of demented Napoleon figure.
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