zequist

Mind if I throw a few hypotheticals at you? Since you said that, I'm curious about your perspective on these scenarios now. Question #1: What's your view on teams that go into games against ManU or Chelsea intending to play 90 minutes of negative football and come out of it with a draw. Are you suggesting that those teams are being unethical by trying to steal 1 point instead of opening it up and attacking and going all out to "win," when they'd probably lose by 4 or 5 if they did that? Question #2: Which would you consider more ethical from a team: going balls to the wall trying to win every single game and finishing tenth because their first string has nothing left in the gas tank by April, or pacing themselves to a fifth place finish because they played their guys strategically all season and didn't always use their best available 11? Question #3: Hypothetical scenario. Let's say you have two league games coming up, against Team A on Thursday and Team B on Sunday. Your star striker is coming back from an injury and the team doctor tells you that he can only play in one of those two games - he could be selected on Thursday, but then there's no chance he'll be cleared to play on Sunday. The Thursday game might affect the title chase (which you aren't involved with), but means nothing to your team, while the Sunday game is a critical match against one of the teams you're competing with for a spot in Europe. So which game do you play him in - the first one that he's available for, or the one that's more important for your team?

Or 9 players, like 'pool did again this weekend in basically handing Fulham a "get out of relegation free" card. You think Curbs, Pardew, and Jewell weren't tearing their hair out when they saw the "best XI" that Rafa put out there on Saturday? But (as some of those managers have even said), those teams aren't where they are because Liverpool fielded a third-string side on Saturday - they are where they are because they haven't won enough games in the last nine months, and that's their own fault. Coming down the stretch here, Wigan's gone eight straight games (including five at home) without a win, and Charlton's gone six straight without a win. That's what's got them relegated or nearly relegated - if they take care of their own business on the field over the last 6-8 weeks then they don't have to worry about who Liverpool plays or doesn't play. If we had a big Euro match coming up and a game that meant nothing to us just a few days before it, would you want Moyes to play our big stars in the meaningless game and risk them getting fatigued and/or possibly injured, solely for Wigan's benefit? I sure wouldn't.

Well one thing's for sure, we are going to need more depth. All four of the teams in this year's UEFA Cup went into September with at least 29 players on their active rosters, and had enough to spare that they sent several out on loans, too. We have 26 roster players and nobody on loan right now, which - unless you're Chelsea and every one of your roster players are at or near world-class level - is not enough to handle both European and domestic campaigns. IMO we'd need to look at signing at least three or four guys this summer even if we brought all 26 back, and we already know that all 26 are not coming back.

There's a good article on this whole mess that appeared in the Guardian a few days ago, if you can follow all the legal twists and turns. Third-party deals that landed West Ham in the mire

I don't see anything in this match-throwing talk. Win or lose that match we're still going to Europe and ManU is still winning the title, so the net result is nothing. Chelsea can't blame us for their finishing second - they can blame being held to draws at home by Aston Villa, Reading, Fulham(!), and Bolton for that. And frankly, if we wanted to throw the damn thing then why would we recall Turner to do it, which would not only muck up Wednesday's playoff push and leave them with a legitimate grievance if this was a shady play, but more importantly risk messing with the head of one of our bright young stars by ordering him to throw a match? Not only would that make no sense, but it would be an incredibly stupid thing to do, and we all know that Moyes isn't stupid. No if we were going to deliberately tank it then we would've played Wright - which most people on here seemed to agree before the match would have been tantamount to conceding a loss anyway - and let him take the fall, since he's on his way out the door regardless.

Reading loss - FINAL Bolton loss - FINAL Liverpool loss - FINAL And Naysmith just scored. Can this get any better?

What a day for our boys! What a day for Watford to represent! What a day for me to be stuck at work! We just need to hold on and have Watford hold on through stoppage time, and Europe is ours...

I agree with you, but don't forget that in the pre-EPL days the Football League practiced fair distribution of revenue among all of its 92 clubs; the top clubs (including Everton) broke away and founded the Premiership in part because they felt entitled to keep more of that money for themselves, and they did it with the FA's backing and blessing. The FA sure didn't side with the little guys then, so why would you expect them to now? Funny thing to me as a Yank though is that you could pretty much substitute "NCAA," "NBA," or "MLB" for "FA" and you would be echoing the same complaints that we constantly make about our sanctioning bodies over here (especially the NCAA)...that they care more about the big market glamour teams like the New York Yankees or Ohio State who line the association's coffers every year than they do about about the plight of the rank-and-file. There was an old joke twenty years ago about Kentucky basketball (one of the NCAA's glamour teams) and Cleveland State basketball (one of the Rotherhams of the NCAA) when both of them were facing sanctions for breaking NCAA rules, and the joke went that the NCAA was so mad at Kentucky that they gave Cleveland State an extra-harsh punishment.

I have to second Joe's take. Cahill is one of my favorite players, not just on this team but in any sport. He's one of those glue guys, players with toughness and smarts who can do all the little things to help a team win, but he also has skills on offense, so that opposing teams have to account for him as a legitimate scoring threat in every match. There aren't many players who demonstrate both of those attributes consistently, but he is one of them. Don't forget that he was nominated for the Ballon D'Or last year, so obviously someone recognized how important he is to this team. The only thing I worry about with him is burnout - between the club season and the national team he hasn't had an offseason in about four years, and I wonder if that was partly to blame for some of the injury problems he had this season.

Rotherham got relegated from the Championship at the end of the 2004-05 season, and they were not in administration at the time - that was just a straight-up relegation. It was in the middle of the 2005-06 season that they announced they were having financial problems. Quoting from Wikipedia: "Early in 2006 it was announced that the club faced an uncertain future unless a funding gap in the region of £140,000 per month could be plugged. The problem was compounded as Rotherham do not own their ground (Ken Booth took ownership of Millmoor in return for clearing £3m of debt), and have no tangible assets - as a result administration would not be a viable option for them, as it has been for other clubs. This led to the launch of a "Save Our Millers" campaign, aiming to raise the £1m needed to complete the season. It was also estimated that another £1m was required to complete work on the new stand. Rotherham's South Yorkshire neighbours all offered their support. Sheffield United paid the wages of Stephen Quinn and Jonathan Forte during their successful loan spells at Millmoor, and also donated profits from the beam-back of the Sheffield derby on February 18 to Save The Millers. Many local clubs also held collections. An eleventh hour intervention by a consortium of local businessmen offering substantial investment and a new business plan averted a possible dissolution of the club. Dennis Coleman took over as Rotherham United chairman, and made an immediate positive impact. The final match of the 2005-06 season, home to MK Dons, was a winner-take-all relegation showdown. A scoreless draw, combined with a Hartlepool United draw with Port Vale, kept Rotherham up and consigned both MK Dons and Hartlepool to the drop. However, Rotherham were to start the following season with a penalty of minus 10 points as a result of their recent financial troubles." Doesn't sound like any sort of pro-Leeds/anti-Rotherham favoritism going on there to me; if anything it sounds like people went out of their way to help Rotherham (I wonder if the Blades would've been so generous about paying a Leeds player's wages?).

That's what I was thinking. Here we have the third place team in England meeting the third place team in Italy for the right to be crowned European champions. We're number three! Go team!

They had to know they were going down regardless, so it's smart of them to do it right away and take the penalty now instead of putting it off. 22nd or 24th this year doesn't make any difference, but 10 points next year could've been huge.

It actually isn't that complex once you see it in action - it's one of those things that's probably easier to demonstrate than it is to describe. One of my friends has a daughter whose boyfriend is a Brit (Arsenal fan, unfortunately), and she said that he picked up on how the NFL draft worked pretty quickly when it was on TV this past weekend. And if an Arsenal fan can get it, I KNOW an Everton fan can get it.

The draft is how young, up-and-coming talent is distributed to clubs in US sports. Over here, most teams don't have youth academies, and they aren't signing underage kids to developmental contracts or anything like that. Instead the kids play competitive sports for teams that are fielded by their high schools and/or their universities while they are still going to school, and many will also play in other organized amateur competitions during the summer. The only one that's a bit different is hockey, where most of the top players don't play for school teams, they go play in the junior hockey leagues up in Canada instead. Once the kids are done with school (or juniors) and ready to play professionally, they enter their names into the draft for their chosen sport, and are selected and signed by a professional team. The hockey draft is almost all 18 year olds, either from juniors or from Europe, but there are a few university players selected every year. The baseball draft is a mix of both. The NBA and NFL don't allow players to declare right out of high school. For domestic players, they all have to play for a university team first, either for at least one year (NBA) or at least three (NFL). There are several reasons why that is the case, but the most basic reason is that baseball and hockey have highly-developed minor league (basically reserve league) systems in place, so if a youngster isn't good enough to be on the parent club they can reserve him and say, "we'll help you work on your skills, and maybe in a few years you'll make our roster." The NBA and NFL don't have that support system (the NBA just started a very rudimentary minor league a few years ago; the NFL has nothing, unless you count NFL Europe). It's basically sink or swim in those leagues, so they rely on the universities to develop the players for them so that they're ready to play from the moment they get drafted. International players going into the NBA draft have a slightly different set of eligibility rules than the domestic players, but I'm not sure what those are because I'm not a big NBA guy. (Joe, do you know?) Now on the process of drafting itself, here are the basics of how it works (there are various complications, unique to each sport and how they set up their draft, that I'm not going to get into). Each league has one amateur draft per year, which is conducted during the offseason. The draft works as a tool for talent distribution, and it's designed to promote competitive balance within the league. It goes through a series of rounds, which can be anywhere from two (NBA basketball) to dozens (pro baseball). Each team gets one pick per round, and they pick in the same order each round. The worst team from the previous season gets the first pick in the draft (and thus, in theory, the best player available that year), the second-worst team gets the second pick, and so on. The league champion gets the last pick in each round, and at the end of the day each team comes away with x number of young players whom they now own the rights to. That's basically how it works, although there are some common wrinkles. Basketball and hockey, in order to give bad teams less incentive to deliberately tank their seasons, have introduced draft lotteries, where the non-playoff teams are put in a random drawing and the teams who are lucky enough to be drawn get to move up several spots or even get the #1 pick. Teams can also use their spots in the draft as commodities - it isn't unusual to see teams trade a player for one or more draft picks - the better the player, the more/better picks he will command. So a good team might say to a bad team, "hey, you know, we think Darren Bent could really help us out up front. If we gave you James Beattie and our draft picks in the first, fourth, and fifth rounds this year, would you consider trading him to us?" And the other team looks at the draft and sees that it's a deep one (lots of potential young talent available) and that they have a chance to dump a big salary, get a couple of extra young players, and maybe use the freed-up cash to sign an extra free agent or two this summer. So they say, "We'll consider trading him to you, but we don't like that package, how about you give us Anichebe and your third and fourth round picks instead?" And the good teams says, "No, we don't want to trade Victor, but what about..." and they go back and forth until they've agreed on some exchange of picks and/or players, or decide that they can't make it work. Teams aren't allowed to trade draft picks in baseball, but you see it all the time in the NBA, NHL, and NFL. Now it's important to note that in a draft format, teams are technically drafting for the exclusive negotiating rights to a particular player, rather than the player himself. There are rules in baseball and hockey, for instance, where if a team drafts a player but can't reach a contract agreement with him within a certain amount of time, they lose the rights to that player and he can go back into a later draft and be chosen by another team. Or with international players in hockey, they're not the exclusive property of the drafting team - they're free to go play (or keep playing) in Russia or Sweden or wherever. But if they ever decide they want to play in the NHL, they would have to sign with the team who holds their "NHL rights" (as it's phrased). NBA and NFL players can only be drafted once, but in those leagues if someone adamantly refuses to play for the team who drafted him (which does occasionally happen), they'll usually try to trade him for the best return they can get. The only US sport (not counting MLS) with anything similar to the way football teams manage talent is how baseball handles international players. Baseball teams have youth academies with developmental contracts and all of that, but they're all set up in foreign countries like Panama and the Dominican Republic, to mine the talent in those places (those players don't go through the draft either, they're just promoted when they're ready), and baseball also has to negotiate free-market transfer agreements to bring in senior international players, mainly from Japan and Korea. There was a big buzz in this country when the Boston Red Sox signed Daisuke Matsuzaka this past offseason because they paid over $50 million US to his Japanese team for his rights, which shattered the transfer fee record in this country. There is a fixed-market transfer arrangement in place in hockey, where any international team who loses a player to the NHL gets a flat-rate compensation of $200,000 US, even if the player is a future superstar. Hardly seems fair, but all the European leagues have agreed to it (the Russian League was the only one resisting, and they finally caved in and signed this week), so that's how it stands.

I agree with those who say we could use a natural left winger. I'm gonna throw a few names out there along with the question, which of these players would interest you most if you were the manager? Or would you rather have D'Alessandro over any of them? * Matthew Taylor, Portsmouth (8 goals, 4 assists this season; contract runs through 2010; were some rumors that Moyes was interested earlier this season) * Chris Brunt, Sheff Wed (10 goals, 10 assists this season; contract expires after next season; saw that he popped up on our transfer rumor board a few weeks ago, but has said - publicly, anyway - that he'd be happy to stay at Wednesday) * Jason Koumas, West Brom (9 goals, 13 assists this season; Welsh international can play left or central midfield; said last month that he wants to move to the Prem, and WBA's asking price is apparently around £4 million; Moyes inquired about him four years ago but WBA didn't want to sell him at the time; rumor mill says he's keen on going to Portsmouth, though) * Lee Cook, QPR (4 goals, 15 assists this season; contract runs through 2009; has been linked to a Premiership move, but QPR's Chairman said - publicly, anyway - that they don't want to sell him, which means their asking price is probably outrageous) * Gary McSheffrey, Birmingham (17 goals, 19 assists this season; contract runs through 2009; probably zero chance that BC would move him this offseason since he's their best player and they just got promoted, but I throw his name out there anyway just because Moyes supposedly had an eye on him when he was at Coventry) Oh, and count me in the camp that wouldn't mind signing Barton. I like the thought of adding his competitive fire to the squad, and as one of our sportswriters on this side of the pond has said, a team with one head case on the squad can usually keep him under control. It's when you put two head cases together on the same team that you're in trouble. Well we have no head cases right now so far as I can tell, so if we add one (Barton) we still ought to be alright.

Can't completely overlook Blackburn either. They're on 47 points with a game in hand right now, and since their last two games are against Tottenham and Reading, they still have an outside shot at sneaking into the 7th/8th mix too. It isn't likely, because they'd probably have to win out (which would put them at 56 points) to have a chance, but it isn't impossible either.

Oh, I wasn't suggesting that new stadium=success. On the contrary, there's nobody who knows the fallacy of that assumption better than I do. I've watched the new stadium/arena boom unfold here in the US over the last 15 years, and there were some teams over here who made the mistake of thinking that way, that a new stadium would be a panacea for all their poor decisions. What they found out is that badly run club in a new stadium is still a badly run club. What I *am* suggesting is that new stadium=a team that's more attractive to investors. It's a bit more complex than that, as who owns the stadium (the city or the team) and the financial terms of the team's stadium deal are also going to be looked at by any potential investor. But is it really a coincidence that nearly all of the recent takeovers and takeover rumors surround teams like Southampton, Arsenal, and Coventry, who all either have or are building new stadiums, or have firm plans in place to build one in the near future? I don't think it is. Even West Ham - when the Iranian and the Icelander first started jockeying to buy that club last year there was talk that they might move into the 2012 stadium after the Olympics. That's dead now, but Magnusson said just this week that he still intends to get a new stadium built for them (and has the London mayor's backing on it). Conversely, look at how long it took Ellis to finally find a buyer for Aston Villa - a team with an old stadium and no plans for replacement on the horizon. That team was on the market for over a year before anyone showed any interest, and while they were sitting there doing nothing, other teams like West Ham and Leicester City were getting two and three competing offers.

And the one thing that all of the clubs you just mentioned have in common is that they all have either new or rebuilt stadiums and the increased revenue potential that comes with that. Bolton's current stadium opened in 1997, Southampton's in 2001, City's in 2002, Newcastle's was given a makeover and a huge capacity bump in that same time frame. Plus Arsenal and Coventry, which have also both been the subject of American takeover rumors, just got their new digs, and RS (just bought by some Yanks, of course) will be getting theirs soon. And it isn't just Americans buying up teams who have or will be getting new stadiums; look at Sunderland, Leicester City, and Derby, all of which have also gotten new stadiums and subsequently been snapped up by new owners within the last few years. Moral of the story: if you build it, they will come...

Only 15 years, but in hockey terms that's almost an eternity...it's amazing how radically the game has changed since then. My family lived in Fremont, and I still vividly remember the first game I attended live, a 1-0 loss to Philly in March of '92. How about you - where were you living at the time? Nope. Florida is the Sunshine State, although I always thought that would have been a better nickname for California than "golden state" anyway. I'm not sure where "golden state" came from - probably either from the gold rush in the 1850's or from the state flower (the golden poppy).

Hey Joe - add one more to the list of Sharks supporters here! I grew up in the Bay Area and I've been a fan since the Cow Palace days.

Fratton Park would be demolished and a new 36,000 seater built near the dockyards, if everything goes according to plan. http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id...938&cc=5901

I've often thought that American sports leagues could benefit from having relegation. We have too many teams like the Kansas City Royals in baseball or the Detroit Lions in the NFL where their owners seem perfectly happy to make money hand-over-fist while their team stinks up the field every year. Threatening them with relegation would force them to (heaven forbid!) actually make an honest effort to be competitive, or else they'd lose their gravy train.

LOL! Nope, just a librarian who occasionally hits a slow day at work.

Updated magic numbers (combination of points we need to gain and/or they need to drop for us to finish ahead of them): Bolton - 9 Tottenham - 8 Reading – 6 Portsmouth - 5 Fortunately all these teams except Reading dropped points this weekend, so even with the loss we're still in decent shape. If we somehow win two of three, then we're in the UEFA Cup no matter what anyone else does. If we beat Portsmouth then we only need Reading to lose once (or Spurs to pick up a loss and a draw) to lock up a spot. If we beat Portsmouth and also snatch just one point from one of the other two games, then Reading would need to win out to catch us - even a draw would put them too far behind. We could technically lock up a spot as early as this weekend if we found a way to beat ManU and Reading and Portsmouth both lost. I'm not holding my breath for all three of those results to go our way, however, especially with Portsmouth and Reading both playing at home. Barring that miraculous set of circumstances, however, Portsmouth is definitely the most important remaining game right now because a victory is worth 6 points in the chase - 3 that we gain, and 3 that they lose - enough to completely eliminate them as a threat to us.

Well it sure sorted out Leeds, didn't it? They had that stretch of making the CL 3 or 4 years in a row, and then they miss for one year, and suddenly it all goes to hell. I'm going to be very interested to see what happens in Italy with Juventus - how big of an impact spending at least two seasons (this year and next) out of the CL has on them.