holystove

cahill will show schwarzer who's the best aussie in the prem .. 2-0 to us .. cahill both.

couldn't care less about what happens to newcastle.

why not go in for Nani on loan, Fergy gets on with moyes and im sure he would loan us him because Park & Anderson get in the team before him.

that would be great as a winger .. another player i've always loved on the wing is Joaquin .. anyone know anything about his availability?

i wonder if pienaar would have the same impact playing from the right .. he's so good at cutting inside and creating things in the middle of the field.

still wouldn't mind if there was a GK out there that could put some pressure on howard .. i think he's been poor quite a few games this season.

Player of The Season - JAGS

Young Player of the Season - FELLAINI

Players' Player of the Season - JAGS

Goal of the Season - Fellaini scoring the 1-1 against ManU, placed perfectly in the corner, outjumping Vidic and Ferdinand and then celebrating by kissing the badge.. all after Rooney behaved like a wanker and Neville made the best tackle ever on Ronaldo.

have a good one Steve.. congrats.

boonen caught using cocaine -again- .. although it's not an illegal substance in cycling (it actually has an adverse effect on your conditioning) he is set to face criminal charges.. last time prosecution offered him a deal with strict conditions, which he now obviously broke by using cocaine again..

such a shame.. the pressure must have gotten to him.

what we need is a creativity from a healthy arteta, goal scoring from a healthy yakubu and our other strikers to remain healthy .. our youngsters -rodwell vaughan fellaini gosling- will be a year older (and better) next year ..

our two top scorers this season are both our attacking midfielders which says enough about how hit by injuries our strikers were..

all we need is

1/ a right winger

2/ health

3/ another year experience

if we can get those three, with the last being a given, a champions league spot is definitely ours to loose.

lol look at joey yobo go .. he just passed baadhi in the standings! couple more and anichebe is toast.

if that's true that's great news .. a right winger with a good cross! it's exactly what we need.. he's a decent player and on a free would make him a great great signing.

i'm sure moyes will fix his work ethic.

voted Cahill for his hard work against Jenas ...

disappointing game really.. could have caught Aston Villa... shame <_< .

the youngster (rodwell, fellaini and gosling) aren't as omnipresent in the game as you would have hoped..

glad neville is on RB ... we'll see a lot of good crosses coming in from that side now ... cahill and fellaini will get chances!

he was just ok at schalke .. maybe he got a lot better since then but i don't see much added value.. if he comes over we could move neville back to RB, seeing how poulsen is a defensive CM.

My views on the refferee:

 

*there was a fault in the box, but the ref put it outside the box,this is a mistake, but forgivable. agreed maybe he should have been closer, i don't know what his position was

*the handball from pique, i'm not sure ,but i thought it hits is body first, and then his arm. and from what distance was that, 2,3 meters?

Disputable, but not shocking.

*the second handball was certainly not deliberate, his arm was turning away from the bal behind the defenders body, so again disputable.

 

this ofcourse all adds up, but looking at them individually no supershocking decisions imo

 

*The biggest mistake, the one you all seem to have forgotten: THE RED CARD

ffs lads, not even one of you thought that might be a worth mentioning?

*and no one here noticed the fault form essien on messi? if that wasn't a red one, I don't know what is.

 

Its a shame they aren't playing the CL final imo, but only because that's going to make them want to win the fa cup more, not because of the ref.

I would have to agree with that .. especially that Essien deserved a red card for that hard foul.

The only penalty I can see is the handball by Picque .. which should also have been seen by the assistant referee and it definitely was a penalty..

Barca should have finished the game with 11 men..

Chelsea played 180 mins of defensive football, i think they could have scored 5 goals against that weak Barca defense if only they had attacked more .. I see it as a mistake by Hiddink.

all in all, a Barca - ManU final is what one would call a dream final.

hm it's getting a bit out of hand..

Controversial referee Tom Henning Ovrebo was understood to have been smuggled out of the country by police after receiving a number of death threats. Police were said to be so concerned about his safety that they changed his hotel before organising his secret exit from Britain.

http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id...gue&cc=5739

.

well they'll be rested for the FA cup final now <_< .. that'll be a tough game.

it wasn't a red card, but one of those fouls certainly could have been a penalty.. especially the Picque handball.. didn't feel like the last one was a foul.

really hoping for a Barca - ManU final now .. in my mind the two best teams in Europe this year, would be an epic final.

I'm not all that up to date with what can be done with these kinds of forums, but is it possible to give a "Top 3" for each match?

Gomes will be the key factor for me, he's absolutely shite. Total waste of fuckin' money for them.

haven't watched him too much this year with the spurs, but at PSV last couple of years he was a great asset.. I think he'll definitely will come good for them.

i'm hoping we play better than the last couple of weeks and get a 2-0 win.. Jo and Jo.

Congratulations! Quite the milestone.

1st of all, trying to turn the EU into a massive country is so far into the future that to think that football is a stop gap for it is completely a non-factor.

2nd, football is NOT the same as any other bussiness, and players are NOT like other workers. That fact has been been made very clear ever since the bosman law came into effect. There's and ever increasing gap between big and small, but unlike bussinesses, clubs can't buy other clubs, can't move their headquarters to a different country, clubs are limited to their countries laws and regulations, plus their FA's laws and regulations, and add to that the EU's laws and regulations. while companies can move factories and the like to other countries and get cheaper labour, and advantageous tax incentives, clubs cannot. And yet, the EU persists on ignoring that football is a world onto itself, and that their laws that promote free movement are in fact descriminating against players IN THEIR OWN COUNTRIES.

 

You say that we cannot discriminate between a citizen born in the EU from a citizen born in England, for example. But the simple fact is that it's cheaper to get foreign players than it is to get the home grown kind, and that, not only is discrimination, it also does not protect their right to work.

 

There's teams here that practically don't field a single portuguese player, and there's clubs in malta and romenia that are pretty much all portuguese. Where's the logic in that???

 

Besides, most players that play in EU countries have or are close to having EU nationality as well, even if they're from Cameroon, Brazil or Argentina. A lot of them can get double citizenship fairly easy anyways, since there's tons of emmigrants there, so in effect, there's no limits.

Messi does not count as a non-EU player, and he's just 21, Ronaldo could ask for english citizenship, since he's been in the UK for 5 years, so how do you stop it??

 

What the EU is doing is simply ignoring the fact that football can't follow the same rules as normal bussinesses, because it'll be it's downfall, they're ignoring the problems it presents to it's member states' citizens, putting their european citizenship above their country's, and they're in effect dennying a joint effort by the governing bodies to solve this, i.e., UEFA and FIFA.

If you exclude this, the only chance will be a solution akin to what the americans have, transfer limits, salary caps, etc., but I sensirely doubt any FA can pull THAT off.

ok you're correct that football could be considered something different than a regular business. said commissioner has chosen not to see it that way. i'm also not advocating a united states of europe, but in the field of cross-border employment, the EU has the competence to decide. seems like people in different Member States haven't yet come to grips with the fact that a lot of legislation these days doesn't come from their own national parliament but are mostly measures toward market integration taken by the commission, council and/or european parliament.

i don't totally understand why it's cheaper for for example Benfica to employ an Italian, than it is to employ a Portugese.. could you explain that, does that have to do with social security payments or something? in any case it must be because of national taxation.. so i'm guessing the fault lies with national authorities on that issue(?).

same goes for the issue of getting EU-citizenship. The EU doesn't give citizenship, it's the member states that grant citizenship.. if Deco gets Portuguese citizenship, I as a Belgian don't have a problem with that although by Portugal deciding to give Deco Portuguese citizenship, him and me now share european citizenship.. If Ronaldo wants UK citizenship, how can you have a problem with that? If he meets the requirements and he wants to have UK citizenship, then who has the right to deny him?

Portugal has a much stronger league than Malta, so inferior Portuguese players have to go abroad to get work, seems logical to me.. don't really see a problem with that.. The same with the Premier League. It's the best league in the world so every player -in the world- wants to play there. You even see an influx in foreign ownership of English teams. As a fan i would want to watch the best players possible regardless of their nationality. It's the reason why i follow the EPL rather than the belgian league.

anyway i fully accept your premise that football teams could be treated differently, even though in my mind i don't see the added value of that...

..

I don't agree with the comparison to NAFTA, in the field we are talking about a comparison to the USA is much more correct vis-a-vis the level of integration between different states.. and a californian not being allowed to play in NY would at the very least strike an american as an "odd" rule.

This is the current state of EU law, like it or not..

..

It is however an anomaly to have different national leagues operating in one european market.. then you get problems like we're talking about now.. where development and investments don't always pay off for the teams due to the freedom of their players to choose where to go.

anyway i'll shut up now, i think we've reached common ground .

... but I suspect that Fellaini would be ahead under that system as well.

so we need a system to avoid that .. hmmm

well maybe we can start by giving each English player a 1 vote headstart just to make it work for efctaxi .. even our coach is scottish , where will it end?

or here's what you could do : just have the MOTM as it is now, but don't count up the votes. Just register as "this guy won that week". Then at the end of the season, have a new poll. Give the data on who won different MOTM throughout the year, so people can remember how certain games went. That'll be the player of the year poll. I'm sure in this season, jags would win in such a scenario. So there's a system in which an English player wins, and Fellaini might not even crack the top 5.

That has to be illegal it surely breaches some form of law its fairly similar to the 6+5 rule in some respects.

well there's only Egyptian law to be considered .. i don't think Egypt has entered into any enforceable international agreements on this subject.

But i'm sure FIFA or the African FA can ban them from international play if they think it's necessary.

It is however the most ridiculous solution to a GK problem I have ever heard. .. and i hope the FA doesn't do the same thing seeing how England pretty much has the same problem.. I fear for Tim Howard .

God I hope this is true. I don't like Crouch at all and would much prefer Jo here.

And if this means Man City won't be throwing money at Zigic or Pavlyuchenko, even better.

I dissagree. This EU law has enabled things like arsenal, with 90% foreign players, and benfica, with 87% foreign players to be a reality. And what does it get them? benfica has a youth program whitch they intend on beeing like ours, and yet they put at most one of their kids in the 1st team, while we put 2 or 3 per year. We play with at least 6 portuguese players, and yesterday we even had 9, while benfica has played various games with 1-2 portguese players, and had no portuguese players in the pitch at one time this season, a 1st for such an historic club.

 

In treating football and football clubs like any other bussiness, the EU is beeing descriminatory itself, because it's failing to protect the rights of the players born in those countries. By ignoring that football is not a bussiness like they perseve it, they're killing it.

 

The only alternative would be transfer limits and salary caps, and I don't see anyone agreeing on that...

well the idea is in the area of employment to look at EU citizenship rather than which Member State you are from .. you could implement the 6+5 rule applying to non-EU citizens.

from the EU's point of view a player of Sporting that came through the youth program of Austria Wien is the same as one that came through the youth program of Benfica, allthough one is portugese and one is Austrian they're both EU citizens and you can't discriminate amongst EU-citizens ..

and that is my whole problem with the 6+5 rule, it takes away from the fact that the EU is in this process of unification and tearing down barriers to free movement and then FIFA tries to implement an new barrier amongst different Member States.

to me it's the same thing as a player born in London not being allowed to play for Everton because there's already two guys from Ipswich and four from Birmingham playing for Everton. (although i do realize that for some people that might be taking it a step too far, it's just how i see the EU in the areas where it has been given exclusive competences).

Claude Debussy - Arabesque No. 1.