dockers_strike

It's a myth all investors want a majority shareholding or nothing. FSG itself is made up of minority shareholders. They get the benefit of being in a bigger group able to invest in professional sports without full ownership. David Moores was majority shareholder of the club. At one point he 'only' owned 51% of the club meaning others owned 49% but couldnt outvote him. They retained their investment until he sold to the 2 cowboys.

To answer your question, the way I see it is, do you want to be the best 'cheater' just to make sure you win? An anecdote: Ive been running for the best part of 35 years. Im not an athlete, I just do it to try and keep my weight down and hopefully stay healthier to live longer. Ive kept a log and time of each run as I did it. As Ive got older, invariably Ive slowed down and doing my distances has got a lot harder. But, I could have cheated whenever I wanted and pressed the start \ stop button on my stopwatch later when starting and earlier when finishing to cut my times so they remain similar to what they were 10 years ago never mind 5. But what's the point? I'll have cheated, known my running times were false and cheated myself. I may as well not bothered. I dont get why others see wanting the club to cheat the same as others but have slagged them off for doing so makes it worthwhile devoting time, effort and money to watching the game.

Hint F5 and often. Everton are an absolute mess. Every time it looks like they have sunk to their lowest point, they somehow find a way to showcase another level of ineptitude. To sell one of their few assets, Anthony Gordon, to Newcastle United for £40 million without an immediate replacement lined up is an epic failure of leadership from the top, impacting on transfer strategy. It would be incomprehensible at the best of times. If the club was in mid-table pushing towards the top six you would scarcely believe they would self-inflict such damage to their ambitions. To do that when the team is 19th and in dire need of quality to avoid relegation defies belief. If the club fails to recover and goes down everyone involved in this almighty cock-up - from majority shareholder Farhad Moshiri to the boardroom executives Bill Kenwright, chief executive Denise Barrett-Baxendale and sporting director Kevin Thelwell - will be held responsible. There ought to be a full and frank explanation as to how and why Everton are the only club fighting relegation who have come out of the transfer window with a weaker squad, otherwise positions are untenable. I called them the worst run club in the country on Monday Night Football ten days ago. Some people disagreed. I have been proven right. We can all accept the club was hampered by financial restraints and the fact Everton are an unattractive destination at the moment, but forget the fact they had no new faces on the morning of February 1. It was staggering they had no deals in place by January 1, when the side was already in deep trouble and Frank Lampard was on borrowed time. What was going on between September 1 and the opening of the transfer window? Why was Moshiri promising a new striker if no guarantee could be made? Was Thelwell working with his hands tied behind his back, or is he simply another misjudged appointment, unable to get deals over the line? There will be no hiding place when the fans gather at Goodison Park on Saturday demanding answers. Since the last home game I have felt the current Everton regime has reached the point of no return. Over the last few years my belief has been that the ultimate responsibility lies with Moshiri. He is the one who appoints board members and sporting directors and is supposed to be deferring key responsibilities within the organisation. We have seen countless examples of him failing to respect any kind of structure, too often acting like he is the sporting director when it comes to approaching and interviewing managers. There is no way ex-sporting director Marcel Brands suggested Carlo Ancelotti or Rafael Benitez should be Everton manager. Equally, there is no way Thelwell was compiling a list of possible replacements for Lampard with Marcelo Bielsa’s name on the list, let alone top of it. Sean Dyche will manage his first game as Everton manager on Saturday Credit: GETTY IMAGES An owner hiring key personnel only to go down a different path is the recipe for the kind of dysfunction which has contaminated Everton for seven years. Every time decisions backfire - and almost all of them have since 2016 - it feels like someone within the club is blaming someone else. Moshiri claimed in an interview this week he is not responsible for buying players. That inevitably leads to Thelwell’s door, and before him his predecessors Brands and Steve Walsh. There is never any collective responsibility. That also overlooks how much external influence there has been with recruitment decisions. It is no surprise Everton fans have been asking who the real power brokers at the club are whenever they read about Moshiri's former business associate, Alisher Usmanov, apparently hovering in the background when previous managerial decisions were taken, despite his status being only as a sponsor Since Usmanov was sanctioned in the wake of the clampdown on Russian-backed oligarchs, Everton’s financial problems have become a source of greater focus and it is deeply worrying as to what the future holds unless Moshiri's search for investment is successful. But any sympathy I had for fellow board members such as Kenwright, Barrett-Baxendale and most recently Thelwell has gradually evaporated because there is a choice for them in the situation Everton are in. If they feel they are being unfairly held accountable they ought to use their influence to communicate to the supporters exactly how and why the club is in its current state. If they really feel they are blameless and their presence has prevented a full-scale descent into chaos, perhaps it is time to take stock, look at the carnage around them and ask if their presence is a help or hindrance? Either they are guilty of underplaying their influence, or self-interest has overtaken the broader needs of the club. Everyone can see the enduring involvement of chairman Kenwright at Everton is causing further division among the fanbase. History will be unforgiving if the board members are not on the right side of it. Given the gravity of Everton’s situation, if the root of the problem is elsewhere and they are being wrongly blamed, some of them should have left on a matter of principle years ago. Instead, the perception is the board took a stance against their own fans when they issued a statement before the last home game suggesting executives did not feel safe attending Goodison. Every Evertonian I know felt unfairly branded amid accusations of protests being taken too far. That has created a greater wedge and it is difficult to see how that will be fixed. Seven years of mayhem threatens to end in the ultimate calamity Everton did at least make one January acquisition in the form of Sean Dyche. For all the need and enthusiasm for new players on deadline day, nobody is more important than the manager. I think Dyche is a good appointment and the right fit for Everton, the move for Bielsa making no sense given the demanding style of football he wants would have taken months to fine tune. Moshiri is fortunate that Bielsa is such a man of principle he could refuse whatever financial incentives were offered. Dyche will give the supporters what they demand with a team in his image; hard-working, no-nonsense, trying to simplify the game to maximise the full potential of the squad. Some managers can be unfairly branded because there is nothing exotic about them and what you see is what you get. Dyche comes into that category. He deserves respect for his amazing work at Burnley and there was no-one available better equipped than him to get Everton out of trouble. Whether he succeeds or fails, he deserves at least 18 months in the job, either rebuilding in the Premier League this summer or entrusted to get Everton back into it. Dyche could not have had a tougher start to his Goodison career, but the first 48 hours have given him one advantage. If Everton stay up, it will be almost entirely thanks to his management of a limited, unbalanced squad. If they go down, it will have almost nothing to do with him as seven years of mayhem threatens to end in the ultimate calamity.

No you didnt. You just kept banging the owners out drum all the time.

Well, it's all gone tits up since this 'news' hit the shit fan, hasnt it? Hard to think that just 6 months ago or maybe even less, the picture of the club was like that of a swan serenely swimming along a mill pond flat water way even if unseen, it was paddling ungainly as fuck to move along. Now, we seem a bit like a ship being blown off course in a typhoon with a broken rudder and engine that can only go in reverse and laboured at that. Since this news broke on the back of some hack in the US, picked up by Ornstein(?) and given legs by countless media outlets, the twatterati and the perenial FSG Out crew, just about everything connected with the club has gone wrong. We shouldnt be surprised really. You look at other clubs that have had ongoing ownership issue and they became or are right basket cases. They might be lower league clubs but you look at Blackpool, Oldham, Forest etc who all had ownership issues in the past that co incided with them becoming basket cases if only for a period of time until they were resolved. Newcastle are a classic case. Yeah, their new owners have spent but on the pitch, they're punching well above their weight with quite ordinary players. I dont think we're in that state but it kind of shows what can happen when everyone isnt pulling in the same direction. Ive no idea if the proposed sale guff has influenced supposedly key people at the club to jump ship for fear of being pushed if the club was sold. It baffles me how Ward for example, said not 12 months ago he was in his dream job only to jib it 12 months later. The medical department has been a complete mess although that can be said of it before the sale news broke. I think we've been unlucky with the number of players getting injured in games. It's part and parcel of the game. But we also seem to pick up an awful lot of injuries in training. We also seem to get the best treatment wrong too often and seem reluctant to put players under the knife and get it done with. Instead we give it time then, 3 months down the line when the player still isnt right, get them down to The Spire and hey presto, the player is now out longer! The transfer strategy has turned a bit pants as well. I hate it when we seem to buy a player to stop him going to united or spurs or chelsea. While we did well with Diaz, I always remember the King and Glen fucking Hysen. Buy a player on the back of a few World Cup Final games? Phil fucking Babb! The Melo loan, WTF? Nothing against the boy, it seems he did everything in an effort to get fit, too much in fact that he broke himself doing so. I hate the loan system and dont think PL clubs should be allowed to bring a player in on loan except a keeper in emergencies. Me old ma used to say strike while the iron is hot so if we want a player, get in there and make it fucking happen. Leave it for a year and everyone else is sniffing around. They know we wont generally give new signings a wedge starting with two hundred thousand never mind three and know how easy it is to trump us. The club must be very confident of signing Bellingham and holding as much cash back for that. Im not convinced we're signing Bellingham even if we do meet Dortmund's valuation. Real, city, united and outsiders chelsea and newcastle can afford the fee and give him a bigger wedge than we could offer. But Ive also noticed the elephant in the room as our form has tanked. Loads are giving it the owners, the players even Lijnders book and his influence. I dont think there's any single reason we are where we are. I do think Jurgen needs to look objectively where we are, what the problems are and address them. Are the problems centered on the players or, have some of his coaching and backroom staff gone a bit stale? I dont believe Lijnders book spilled our secrets to any oppos coaching staff that they didnt already know, the same as I dont believe Jurgen's appearance on that Monday Night Show gave oppo managers etc info they didnt already know. There are signs he is addressing some of these problems and maybe he should have been a bit more proactive rather than reactive? We've got that fucking hill to climb again but, I think we're going to find it a lot harder this time with so many questions going unanswered.

She's Jurgen's Montse.

Sound as ever, Ronnie.

Why do I get the feeling this apology is spoken through gritted teeth?

He didnt get it in training. He picked it up during the Brighton game apparently.

Another spot on report, Dave. Think you summed everything up very well.

Fucking joke the way chelsea's 'new regime' have been given a free FFP exemption just because they replaced filthy Russian money. Nothing has fucking changed at that club and the authorities to FFP is beyond a fucking joke.

Agree with your first para, Ronnie. As for Fabinho, that 'tackle' had all the hallmarks of a player out of form, self confidence and having a total brainfart. Im not defending him as we all know he escaped a red card there but, I think he showed in that moment that there's something wrong with many of our 'senior' players right now. What that is, I have my suspicions and I guess only time will tell. What does seem certain to me is we arent getting better. We might give a better performance one game but the next, we're back to square one. I read elsewhere another decent poster say we shouldnt concentrate on yesterday's result too much. But football is results based and Id rather we played badly and won rather than play great and lose. Whichever way we look at it, Jurgen has a massive task on his hands.

Agree with both Jules and Brownie's early comments, we're not taking steps forward. Brighton first came from a corner after Konate headed the ball out under no pressure and supposedly trying to head it out for a throw in. Their second came from a free kick against Robbo after both he and Mac Allister jumped in feet off the ground tackle. Im seeing some shit that we should have had 3 red cards(!), Fabinho, Konate 2nd booking for that shove in the 2nd half, not sure where some think a 3rd should have been given.

Nope. If you'd bothered to read all my comments, you'd know what I meant and that my comments include Mo and Gakpo. Just stick to your Henderson baiting.

Suarez scored 4 league goals in 13 appearances after he joined in the January. I dont know how many more he got on target that the keeper saved or came back off the post. Im fed up repeating myself. Im not talking just pure goals. His finishing isnt to the standard of Owen, Torres or Suarez. I hope his finishing improves.

Nope because you're deliberately ignoring what Im saying. In our current side, fewer chances will be made for him to finish. I get that. But when he has the ball and is in front of goal, too many of his shots go high or wide. Even if Owen, Torres and Suarez in their first season were playing in this side, they'd score more than Darwin because they were better finishers.

Spectacularly misses the point I made about finishing. Hope the boy comes good and his finishing improves.

How many goals do you think a first season Owen, Torres or Suarez would get in this side? Id say they'd still score loads even if the number of chances were few because they could strike the ball cleanly and get it on target. Ive seen elsewhere someone say they were confident he'd score 25 a season. Wish I could say I was that confident.

Id chop my right bollock off to have Div and or Taki back.

Watching this Wrexham game, we should nick their throw in coach because their lad is bombing them into the Sheffield penalty box!

Isnt it 9 goals? 5 in PL, 3 in CL and 1 Community Shield?

Are you serious? One cost us over £65m and one is a 22 year old who you wouldnt say was pulling up any trees despite him being a local lad.

We've just spent over £100m in the last couple of windows on Nunez and Gakpo, 2 players who frankly look like you wouldnt pay £50m for the pair!

Got what we deserved there which, was fuck all. All too often especially in that 2nd half we wanted to set up the perfect goal inside the oppos box and no one takes a fucking shot! It's always lay the ball back to someone else who them squares it to someone else who then loses possession. Dont they realise Brighton got a spawny equaliser because the oppos had a shot from outside a crowded box and the big lumbering cunt got a touch on it to deflect it past Alli? Dont shoot and you wont score. I love Jurgen but I fail to see what he's trying to achieve with this front players. Gakpo, Mo and Nunez look what they are, 3 individual players each doing their own thing. There is fuck all link up between them and they dont seem on the same wavelength. The team isnt playing well but I dont see how that means Gakpo, Nunez and Mo cannot take a shot, hit the ball cleanly or even get the thing on fucking target when in front of goal. People can say Nunez, Gakpo and Mo arent playing well because the team isnt playing well. All three of them look like fish out of water, like they've never played up front before and dont know what their teammate wants in terms of ball to feet or to run onto. Thank fuck Im not arsed about the domestic cups else Id be fucking fuming at the result.

Well taken goal by Harvey. Once again VAR tries to find any reason to rule out our goal. Coote a cunt for booking Bajcetic for that tackle, he didnt even have a word with the Brighton player who left something on Alli on a corner before that. Konate, another 50 pence shaped head in our defence. Shocking he put that ball out for a corner when intending it for a throw in and resulted in Brighton's spawny equaliser.