numpty

Doubt it. At his age, he's nothing to lose, however it turns out.

Did cross my mind too, but I don't see why the club wouldn't just have said so in the statement. Wouldn't have reflected at all badly on us, given they way they've arsed us around the past couple of days.

"Our management team" surely suggests Knox as well.

Departure confirmed on fishel site. http://www.motherwellfc.co.uk/index.php?op...&Itemid=133

Can't really see how, tbh. They have a vacancy, CB is obviously top of their list, and they're entitled to speak to him as often as they like until either he or somebody else accepts the job. If he goes, CB will have a lot more explaining to do to JB and the 'Well fans than Aberdeen will.

Makes Broonie's words in the first interview with Chico seem all the more carefully-chosen -- "if we're not going to Aberdeen, you can take it that we're not going anywhere else unless Motherwell get rid of us" (or words to that effect).... i.e. if he does go now, I don't think we can actually accuse him of going back on anything he's known to have said (rather than anything he's reported to have said).

Not until the speculative "he is certain to contact Milne today and tell him he will not be coming" becomes "he has contacted Milne today to tell him he will not be coming", surely

The impression I got at the time was that if we'd insisted on a contract, they wouldn't still be here anyway. Can't see that changing now.

It was disappointing, but I don't have nightmares about it. We certainly made enough chances to win the tie, but you just can't squander as many as we did against experienced European opposition and expect to win. If we played them half a dozen times, we'd probably have one once or twice, and unfortunately that night just wasn't one of them. I do fear that it's the best chance we'll have to qualify for the group stages for a very long time, though.

We played better football more consistently before "the O'Donnell situation" than after it. While I wasn't there to see it, from what I've heard, our performance in that Dundee Utd game was pretty much the peak not only of that season, but of the past several seasons.

Pretty standard tabloid style -- the Rancid's online articles are much the same. It doesn't look quite so stupid in print because the columns are narrower, and the paragraphs aren't separated by a blank line. But they obviously don't bother reformatting the copy for the website.

Can't think of anyone in the Scottish game off-hand, but no reason it needs to be somebody from the Scottish game, in theory -- the laws of the game are the same everywhere, and maybe bringing in somebody from outside with a less parochial perspective wouldn't be such a bad thing. Who knows, maybe it would even give the OF one less thing to be paranoid about, but I doubt it.

If they were required to police them every time they opened for business like they are football stadia, they probably would.

Presumably because those don't legally have to be policed.

Seems a bit unlikely. Wouldn't they have wondered why we weren't sending any referees over in exchange...?

They've already done that, surely?

Not that it applies to everyone on your list, but "furthering your career" doesn't necessarily mean "going to a bigger club" or "earning more money". Moving to a smaller/lesser club at which you'll be one of the most experienced and/or senior players could also be a good career move if you've got your heart set on being a club captain, or moving into coaching, for example.

Nope. Just think how bad some of the refereeing decisions were in the World Cup, and they were supposedly the world's best.

Only the individuals involved can decide that. Just like the rest of us in 'ordinary' jobs, for some the most important thing is just finding the most enjoyable environment for doing whatever it is they do, for some it's all about the money, and for others it's about trying to make a name for themselves and rising to the top of their chosen profession.

Worth a try perhaps, but I'd have thought infrastructure was the main issue. With eBay all the bid management and payment collection is done for you (albeit at some cost). If MFC were doing it on the fishel website, you'd have to pay somebody to add some extra functionality. If they were doing it here, you probably wouldn't be paying much short of a tenner's worth of somebody's time to administer the threads, figure out who'd won what, chase up payments etc. anyway. And a lot of people who might otherwise see it probably never would.

Have posted links in the forum over there.

To be fair, you were unlucky with the choice of game for the match sponsorship -- I don't expect anybody would want to bid on a match that might well not be happening on the specified date. For things like the shirts that aren't particularly time-sensitive, you might want to consider more than a 10-day auction to give more people a chance to find them (but obviously that does cost you more). As another way of getting word out, I presume you still have an email database from the weekly newsletters that stopped being sent out ages ago -- perhaps you could/should publicise the items that way, too? (With appropriate ways to opt-out, of course.)

Personally I'd be making the extra effort to go along (if I could) for the novelty value! Couldn't really give a monkeys about their strike, as long as the games are still on and being refereed by somebody to an adequate standard.

I don't believe for a second that we'd sell both of them to a club in the same league at the same time, unless the fees involved were too stupidly inflated to turn down.

To be fair, I don't think you can't realistically compare the refereeing of such different sports. For one thing, the laws of American football are lot more tightly defined, with each player only allowed to do certain things, tackle in specific ways etc., so in theory at least there's less left down to the referee's discretion. And in the NFL there are six officials on the pitch each doing a specific job and watching for specific infringements, not just one guy in the middle and a couple of guys running up and down the side. Even the NHL has four officials on the ice, and that's a much smaller playing area than a football pitch (yes it's a faster game, but the officials have ice skates on as well so they can move quicker too!)