GRcade

Oblomov Boblomov wrote:Keep it up, Forest .

I didn't manage to catch the game - did Ward get any kind of reception from the City Ground faithful? He will always be a Ram .

He was pretty well received to be honest. Totally anonymous for the entire match, mind. We were pretty poor, relying on Antonio way too much. Brighton weren't much cop either. Both teams look like struggling this season.

Most of the team was pretty anonymous to be fair, thought Ward looked like the type of niggly player that we've needed for a while though.

If we get Gardner back, then Tesche isn't too much of a miss, but that is a big if. The Michael Frey deal is key now. We cannot rely on Blackstock at all, and though I thought Walker looked promising last night, it would be too much of an ask to build our attack round him at the moment.

Luckily, we still have a few options to come back in - Osborn, Pinillos and Reid should be available pretty soon and hopefully Britt can have an impact in the second half of the season. I'm writing Cohen off for the year though.

So, anyone fancy a guess as to how much time will dedicated to the other leagues on soccer Saturday today?? 15-20 mins?
Would say its a shame that the prem starts at the same time as the other leagues, but lets face it, they'd still spend the same amount of time on the prem

Was supposed to be at Rovers vs Wolves today but went out and got fairly drunk instead. Slept through my brother trying to wake me up. Bodes well for my season ticket of course.

evanswolves wrote:So, anyone fancy a guess as to how much time will dedicated to the other leagues on soccer Saturday today?? 15-20 mins?
Would say its a shame that the prem starts at the same time as the other leagues, but lets face it, they'd still spend the same amount of time on the prem

Wow, was I optimistic!!

evanswolves wrote:

evanswolves wrote:So, anyone fancy a guess as to how much time will dedicated to the other leagues on soccer Saturday today?? 15-20 mins?
Would say its a shame that the prem starts at the same time as the other leagues, but lets face it, they'd still spend the same amount of time on the prem

Wow, was I optimistic!!

BBC are fairly good at making it a bit more equal. Well, better than Sky anyway.

To be honest - and I am not just saying this because my team is outside the top flight - but I am getting a bit sick of the PL exposure and greed.

Not the competition itself per se, but how it is run. Obviously from its very inception it has been separate from the Football League, with a view to make the bigger, more popular teams richer, but it is getting worse and worse.

Did you know, for example, that apparently the PL force the Football League to donate any fines incurred by its clubs to charity? Instead of going back into the system, or into a pot that is distributed amongst the other teams in that division.

Everything the PL seems to do, is purely to make those 20 clubs richer, at the expensive of the others under them.

So you have a ridiculously top-heavy league, and the gaps between them and the others gets bigger. Where even mediocre do-nothing teams like Sunderland (nothing against them, just the first side to spring to mind) are going to get rich beyond their wildest dreams, purely for finishing between 14th-17th in the past few years. And doing nothing else.

Why can't the ludicrous TV money be split between the 92 clubs, to get some parity and financial stability through the footballing pyramid?

Obviously that can't happen, as the PL is only concerned about itself.

The more I think about it, the more I really hate the fact our top league is so separate from the rest.

The media take this attitude too. You get a bit of Championship focus, but it barely amounts to nothing. You get small mentions here and there, and you get a bit of attention when the promotion race hots up, which tells you that most of the interest is purely on what three teams get up their next season. What is obviously is that pundits and writers are often clueless on what is actually going on in the league.

I am just sick of it being the Premier League or nothing. I spent some down time at work looking for Championship i opinion, predictions or analysis and got none. Likewise listening to audio stuff.

It just basically treats the PL as the holy land and the rest as a footballing black hole, where we kick pig skin balls about and play in the street, in a scene straight from Elizabethan England.

Which is an outdated view. There are some massive clubs down there and, at the moment, the best teams in the Championship can easily beat the bottom five or six PL clubs. The top seven or eight in our league last season, for example, should be fancied to beat Sunderland or Newcastle at home.

Anyway, talking about the Championship, for some reason, I have a feeling Wolves might go up automatically.

If Cora stops being a selfish bastard and sells us Rhodes, we could have a chance. Then Rovers could use the massive transfer fee to break their embargo and sign a few players, joining us via the play offs. We'll loan Rhodes back for those three games.

Derby probably have the best squad in the league, mind.

strawberry floating hell.

EDIT: Come on!

strawberry float's sake. Started the same way we finished last season. Two injury substitutions in the first half, including Will Hughes making his way off the pitch on a stretcher .

FFS

I really hope Sheff Wed don't challenge for promotion. I don't like the way the new owners have started running the club.

And, whilst I know this is a bit hypocritical given our £5m signing of Downing (though we have had quite a spartan four years or so before this, when the chairman hasn't just thrown money at things), but I don't like the idea of them getting mega-rich owners and immediately going up.

Hence why, despite wanting Rhodes as he would guarantee a certain number of goals and possibly see us up, I am a little uneasy about spending £14m. It alters people's perceptions of your club, as we have seen by Sean Dyche moaning about Derby and Boro's spending.

This is Burnley, who have been in the PL twice since we were both there. And both Derby and Boro have been quite frugal recently. I think Mowbray's third most-expensive signing was something like £500k, which shows what we spent in his three years here.

Gibson has stepped it up under Karanka a little (though most of our big signings prior to Downing were about £2m) but only because there is a sense that we are close and that it may push us over the line. We didn't come from nowhere due to a big pot of cash.

Parksey wrote:I really hope Sheff Wed don't challenge for promotion. I don't like the way the new owners have started running the club.

It's just gone to 2-0 but they haven't played much better than us today. I can't see them challenging for promotion based on how they have played today.

Wouldn't say we've been frugal, Parksey. Considering the circumstances and our expenditure if we don't get top two we will have underachieved.

We've been crap so far and with Clement making defensively minded substitutions despite a wealth of attacking quality on the bench you can count on another season of disappointment, this time with added shame.

You had been frugal prior to this year or the season before?

Both of our clubs have probably stepped up the spending in the past 12 months, but before they we were hardly big-spenders.

Spending has been ramped up largely due to our improved performances and standings in the league too. Not just pumped in because it is there.

And, crucially, both of our clubs have towed the line with FFP. Though it's a load of crap anyway.

Ah, by 'recently' I assumed you meant more... recent .

Heskey proving too much for us, apparently .

Bolton down to ten men, apparently the Derby players were pleading with the referee not to send him off.

Footballs gooseberry fool, can we go back to pre-season?

This thread's been busier than the PL over this afternoon's 3pm kick offs.

Either that means we are all real fans or, because we all aren't at games, it's full of plastics.

I didn't even realize we weren't playing until tomorrow until I skyped my parents on Thursday.