English Premier League 2007/08

Simmo79 · Post by **Simmo79** » Fri Sep 05, 2008 9:23 am

yes you were. Must be like Christmas atm

Dasher39 · Post by **Dasher39** » Fri Sep 05, 2008 12:07 pm

A massive LOL @ Newcastle.

They just keep finding new ways to shoot themselves in the foot. Perhaps they could spend ₤10 from the same of James Milner, buy on Oxford Dictionary and look up the word "STABILITY" to find out what it means.

They so desperately want to be a big club, yet don't realise that it aint going to happen if they sack (or force a Manager to walk) the Manager every 6 months.

Come home big Dukes and get out of the hell hole that is the North East of England.

Waz · Post by **Waz** » Fri Sep 05, 2008 10:46 pm

Simmo79 wrote:yes you were. Must be like Christmas atm

Still waiting for us to screw it up some how. This IS city!

Karl · Post by **Karl** » Sun Oct 26, 2008 8:26 am

HULL CITY ARE ON TOP!

I cant believe it. 3-Nill Victory over the Baggies and the Tigers are on top of the EPL.
Man U drew 1-1 with Everton and Chelsea, Arsenal to play tonight.

Egan · Post by **Egan** » Sun Oct 26, 2008 4:00 pm

Karl wrote:HULL CITY ARE ON TOP!

I cant believe it. 3-Nill Victory over the Baggies and the Tigers are on top of the EPL.
Man U drew 1-1 with Everton and Chelsea, Arsenal to play tonight.

Meh, Bolton have done it all before...

I will be impressed if they stay top of the ladder...

Karl · Post by **Karl** » Thu Oct 30, 2008 11:12 am

If anyone missed the Arsenal-Tottenham game this morning they wont be happy. In what has been the best come back and best game of the season i have to say. Tottenham scoring two late goals to bring it to a 4-4 draw in what looked like a Victory for Tottenham. Goals scored in the 89th and 93rd min to draw level.

Simmo79 · Post by **Simmo79** » Thu Oct 30, 2008 11:14 am

f**k 'em. Was following live updates on the BBC site when I got into work and couldn't believe it

But saw Bentley's goal before I left. It's a real cracker from that c***

Dasher39 · Post by **Dasher39** » Thu Oct 30, 2008 11:28 am

How the f*ck did we throw that away?

F*cking pathetic.

Kelly_7 · Post by **Kelly_7** » Thu Oct 30, 2008 11:41 am

Karl wrote:HULL CITY ARE ON TOP!

I remember TAB were offering $5000 to 1 for Hull City to win the premiership at the start of the season.

Simmo79 · Post by **Simmo79** » Mon Jan 19, 2009 8:22 am

A bit of a melodramatic article but still raises good points.

AC Milan are the most internationally successful club in world football, with a prestige, history, class, and honour that most other teams can only dream of. Seventeen Scudetti, seven Champions League titles, three Intercontinental Cups, a never-ending list of past and current legends, including Rivera, Altafini, Baresi, Maldini, Van Basten, Ronaldinho - you could spend all day talking about the magnificent Milan.

Compare the Rossoneri to Manchester City. Two English league titles (in 1937 and 1968), and one European Cup Winners Cup in 1970, and that is pretty much the club’s history. The Citizens have not won a major honour for 40 years, nor have they even challenged, even dropping down to the third tier a decade ago, while their past greats such as Colin Bell and Francis Lee, despite being superb players, are hardly household continental names.

Milan are currently third in Serie A, with a realistic chance of fighting for the Scudetto. The most dominant club in the Champions League this decade, the Rossoneri are almost certain to return to Europe’s premier cup competition next season, and fight to win it. Meanwhile, Manchester City are floundering down in 15th place in the Premier League, just two points above the relegation zone. There is no hope of making the Champions League next season, while their only realistic chance of qualifying for Europe at all, will be to win the UEFA Cup this season.

Milan is one of the most revered cities in Europe, a capital of design and fashion, with culture, art, nightlife, and much, much more. Manchester, meanwhile, located far, far away from the centre of Europe, boasts nothing of cultural note, and hardly catches the eye like Milan, or even London, does.

So how could it be possible then that one of the world’s greatest footballers could move from the prestigious Milan to the plastic Manchester City?

The simple answer is: money.

The English Premier League, with its billionaire foreign owners, propaganda marketing, and obscene television deals, has already done enough to destroy the splendour and tradition of the beautiful game, and if this Kaka deal passes through, it will be the death of football.

This time, there may be no return.

Some of the financial figures being banded around are quite horrific. Kaka will earn €15m a year after tax, while Milan will reportedly receive a transfer fee in excess of €112 million. What has the world come to?

I must point out before I get floods of complaints from Premier League apologists that I have no grudge against English football. This is purely a moral stance against the direction the Premier League has taken over the past four or five years, specifically since Roman Abramovich entered onto these shores, and helped turn football into a circus.

With the world financial crisis, there was some hope in my mind that football, and the Premier League in particular, may take a step backwards and begin to regain some of its purity and soul, but the imminent Kaka deal emphatically suggests otherwise.

Milan should not escape criticism though. They have been tempted by the devil and, like Eve, they could not resist the juicy-looking apple. The second symbol of Milan, after Paolo Maldini, has been sacrificed for a pot of dirty money. What will the Milan fans at San Siro do tonight to protest? It should make interesting viewing.

Michel Platini is the President of UEFA, and he needs to immediately lay down laws to prevent rich owners from spending what their clubs, as businesses, do not make. Whether this will be possible remains to be seen, and it probably is already too late.

The day the transfer of Kaka to Manchester City goes through will be marked down in history as the day football died.

Don't have the orgininal source, it was pulled from TWGF.

Simmo79 · Post by **Simmo79** » Mon Feb 23, 2009 1:12 pm

something for the Leeds fans:-

Lying eighth in League One, feeding on dire fare recently, Leeds still boast the largest away following of any of the 72 Football League clubs. Many Premier League outfits would crave the commitment levels of Leeds' fans.

A team that graced the Champions League semi-finals only eight years ago, beating AC Milan and Lazio en route, have this season lost to Histon, MK Dons and Hereford United. And still their fans turn up, 2,000 trekking to Edgar Street on Tuesday for more misery.

As Hereford progressed to victory, the away contingent chorused "we're s*** and we're sick of it''. So many people have let them down, from past chairmen like Peter Ridsdale, to complacent players, to a decent striker in Jermaine Beckford foolishly getting himself sent off for elbowing, depriving Leeds of his prolific services for three games.

Commonsense dictates many fans would stay at home, saving their money during the Credit Crunch but they don't. The League kindly cranked up their computer yesterday to reveal that Leeds take on average 2,480 away. Only two Championship clubs, Sheffield United and Wolves, cracked 2,000.

"The presence of sizeable, noisy contingents of away supporters is a hugely important part of the spectacle of Football League matches,'' said a spokesman yesterday. "For Leeds United to take, on average, more than 2,000 fans to each League One match this season is a tremendous effort.''

Leeds have a good manager in Simon Grayson and some talented individuals, like Beckford, Fabian Delph and Luciano Becchio, but the team lack the collective spirit of fans for whom "marching on together'' is a mission statement as well as a chant.

Black humour abounds. During a cyber-chat on LeedsUnitedMad about current dark days, one fan enquired whether there was any light at the end of the tunnel. He was immediately emailed a photograph of an onrushing train.

And just when it seemed that a bruised club couldn't take any more kicks in comes a size 10 Doc Marten in the shape of "The Damned United''. Some Leeds diehards urge a boycott of the movie version of David Peace's controversial, award-winning book about Brian Clough's spiky 44-day stay at Elland Road.

"Saint Cloughy versus Dirty Leeds,'' predicted one fan, adding, "shove it where the sun don't shine''. Another lamented: "We are always the bad guys.'' The title hardly hints at Leeds being the good guys, but then Clough isn't really either. Leeds fans should go to see the film because it depicts an astonishing episode in their club's long, varied history.

The time for Leeds fans really to worry is when writers and film-makers do not raid the club for material, when Manchester United and Chelsea supporters stop mentioning them in chants. The time for the club to worry is when that passionate away following dips. Because without the fans, Leeds United are damned and doomed.

http://www.leedsunitedworld.co.uk/index ... topic=2043

Simmo79 · Post by **Simmo79** » Mon Mar 30, 2009 8:23 am

Jeremy Clarkson has stopped hating football and started following Chelsea. It was better when he hated football. From the Times:

You’re a bunch of overpaid nancies – and I love you

Over the years I have argued that football is a stupid game in which 22 overpaid nancy boys with idiotic hair run around a field attempting to kick an inflated sheep’s pancreas into some netting while an audience of several thousand van drivers beat one another over the head with bottles and chairs.

Nor could I understand how someone from Tooting could possibly support, say, Manchester United, a team sponsored by those hateful bastards at AIG and made up of players from Portugal, France, Holland and, in the case of Wayne Rooney, Walt Disney. Where’s the connection? What’s the point?

I have also suggested that it’s preposterous to have football stadiums in the middle of cities. Why should anyone be delayed by match traffic just so a handful of thugs can watch a Brazilian man falling over?

And as for those people who can’t cope if their team loses. Give me strength. If you get all teary-eyed just because someone from Latvia, playing in a town you’ve never been to, for an Arab you’ve never met, against some Italians you hate for no reason, has missed a penalty, how are you going to manage when you are diagnosed with cancer?

I have always hated football, but then one day, out of the blue, my son announced that he had become interested in Chelsea. This was a living nightmare. If he’d said that he’d become interested in smoking, I could have made all sorts of threats. If he’d said he’d become interested in homosexuality, we could have talked. But a football team? I had no answers. I didn’t even have any questions.

However, because he spent so much time watching football on television, I started pausing to watch. And I began to think that actually it’s a very beautiful game when it’s played properly. And that the offside rule, really, is no more complicated than the average power station. And then I started picking up bits of information from the commentators, which meant, for the first time ever, that when conversation with friends turned to football, I could join in, instead of sticking my fingers in my ears and singing sea shanties.

This meant that pretty soon people started asking if perhaps I’d like to go to a game. And that’s why last weekend I was at Stamford Bridge watching Chelsea demolish a team I used to call Manchester City. But that I now know is called Useless Money-Wasting Scum.

This was my first Premier League game and, ooh, it was good. When you’re there, rather than watching on television, you get an overall view, which means you can see how the game works. You notice that Frank Lampard is like a blackbird, always looking around to see where the hawks are. You see that Carvalho runs with his arms up, like a begging puppy, and you work out that Michael Essien always seems to be able to find a piece of the pitch that the Useless Scum either hadn’t noticed or were frightened of.

The other advantage of being there is that on television the microphones are positioned so you can’t hear the chants. I’d heard, of course, about this mass spontaneity over the years, usually when a team is playing Liverpool. “Sign on. Sign on. With a pen in your hand. Cos you’ll ne . . . ver get a job.” Or: “The wheels on your house go round and round. Round and round. Round and round.”

There are others too. Plymouth Argyll refer to any team they play as northern bastards. Then you have the Charlton fans who travelled down the M4 to Reading recently and, having failed to think of any suitable abuse, came up with: “What’s it like to live in Wales?”

The Chelsea fans topped all this last Sunday with a nonstop song, the lyrics of which were: “F*** off, Robinho. F*** off, Robinho. F*** off, Robinho.” I joined in wholeheartedly, even though I wasn’t entirely sure who Mr Robinho was and why I wanted him to eff off so much.

No matter. It was all so brilliantly working class. Or it would have been, had I not been seated in a private box just outside the no-jeans-allowed Armani Lounge, where I’d feasted on smoked salmon and quaffed bucks fizz before kickoff.

But I got a reminder of footballing’s outside-khazi and jumpers-for-goalposts roots when Chelsea scored. I turned and smiled a patronising smile at the man sitting behind me, the former Independent editor and all-round crap driver Simon Kelner. It turned out he was a big fan of the Scum and, honestly, I thought he was going to kick my head off.

I wouldn’t have blamed him. I used to be surprised that football fans fought one another. Now, though, having experienced the white heat of pride and tribalism first hand, I’m surprised they don’t any more.

After the game I was taken to the Chelsea dressing room so that I could admire all the players’ penises – many were very enormous indeed. I talked to Roman Abramovich, who was charming, and Lampard, who, having just run around for 90 minutes, still found the energy to get the entire team to sign my boy’s Chelsea shirt. I don’t do that for kids who come to the Top Gear studio and I’m supposed to be the public-school-educated toff.

So there we are, then. I am now a football fan. I know this because in one afternoon I learnt I’m not a football fan at all. I’m a fan of Chelsea. Chelsea are the only team that can play. Chelsea players have by far the most impressive reproductive organs. Stamford Bridge is my church. The men who play there are my Gods.

In short, I have a team, and that’s what’s always been missing. Because I was born in Doncaster.

Jeffles · Post by **Jeffles** » Mon Mar 30, 2009 8:31 am

The first five paragraphs were amusing.

beastjim · Post by **beastjim** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 11:27 pm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Liverpool_Beach_Ball

Jeffles · Post by **Jeffles** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 8:07 am

It's already been deleted.

What did it say?

On that incident, you've got to feel for Liverpool. I hope that kid fan of theirs that threw the ball on the field has been suitably dealt with. I'm no qualified ref but I knew about the foreign object rule. I think I'd seen it in a match.