Augh!

When I was up buying mine last week I was told middle of this week, either Wednesday or Thursday.

Well it depends what you mean by soon. The next few years or so would seem unlikely considering the cost of fixing the undersoil heating last year and re-laying the pitch twice in little over a year. But in time the cost of the work to the pitch plus remedial work on the rest of the stadium will reach a point where the ongoing cost is so high that we would be no worse off building a new stadium and offsetting the cost with the sale of the land at Fir Park. If there's a good economic decision to be made about moving there is no way the board will keep us at a costly stadium for the sake of nostalgia. The property market is key to when we go. The value of that land is tied up with someone wanting to develop the land at Motherwell College and Fir Park Primary. As soon as that happens we'll be on the move.

It's seemed for the past few years that the fans have tacitly known that we'd be moving at some point in the medium term and that the club would be sort out a site and details at some point. If there hadn't been the drop in the property market 2 years ago or so then it might already have happened. The problems with the pitch and all we've heard about the rising costs of remedial work required on the Main Stand along with the recent new builds that clubs like St Mirren have moved into have just added to the feeling that the move is inevitable. The college and Fir Park school moving just make it more likely that as soon as property prices start going up then we're going to hear something concrete.

Don't gie them any ideas

I like them The away one is a bit plain but the home one is exactly what you'd want from a Motherwell top. Well done Motherwell. Any chance you'll let us buy them before you go and stick some big, ugly logo on the front of them?

Yes, we had recurring problems with the pitch. It might not have been as consistently bad before the ground-share but we've had problems ever since the under-soil heating went in. I don't really know what you're point is there, if we are to be moving away from Fir Park in next decade or so then would we not be better off putting in a pitch which we know can last for seven years (the number FIFA say the most recent artificial pitches will last for) rather than having to spend so much on remedial work to get the grass pitch playable every pre-season. A plastic pitch wouldn't be the ideal surface for any club to be playing football on but it would be better than the standard of surface we've had at Fir Park for the past few seasons, and could be got for the same amount of money we've spent to get a pitch that after only a few months looked as bad as it did. I don't have a clue about you're second point though, sorry. Don't see what link there could be there.

We really need to start looking at getting plastic pitches back in the SPL. Considering that the top standard of plastic pitch was being used in the Champions League this year and that cost about the same as it cost us to do all of that work last summer, this seems like the best solution. If we are looking at moving from Fir Park in the medium-to-long term a plastic pitch could tide us over until that happens and would get rid of the cost of relaying every season.

If it is Airdrie Savings Bank I doubt they would just let us put ASB on the shirts, no one would know what the fuck it stood for. The worst thing they could do with the strips would be to have the full name with a stupid oval with 'ASB' on it as well, like the thing St Johnstone had on their kit this year and that looked terrible.

Och That was a bastard enough to get there last year, but I won't have the car this time.

I'm very sorry if this has been covered somewhere else in this thread or in another, but will Fir Park be ready for mid-July? Not that I didn't enjoy spending a few evenings in Airdrie last year or anything like that

Seen the confirmation on the BBC there - Link I hadn't seen anything on the official website about that, maybe I had just missed it, anyone with any idea when we'll see the new kits?

Craig Brown on an interim basis BBC

I'm not sure about that. I don't think the problem is necessarily about any connection with Northern Irish Troubles or anything like that ... I think its more that it shows the club manager waving a machine gun. I understand if they want to create a bit of atmosphere by waving flags and banners and that at the opposition fans, it creates a bit of noise, maybe makes the place a bit intimidating for other teams and their fans. But there's maybe such a thing as going too far with the intimidation and maybe waving a flag that shows the club manager waving a machine gun is a bit too far? That said it is certainly quite a funny thing to see posted up on here Although if there has to be one which gets taken to games I vote for the 'Jim Gannon Loves Swords' one.

Its not really the same thing. You have to admit there is something quite ... gable-end about that flag.

Legality of a war is hard to ascertain. The inquiry going on just now is more about whether or not the government lied to parliament about the case for war, but even if it found the government had lied then that in itself would not make it an illegal war. What could would be if it were to be established that the governments of the aggressor nations (this inquiry granted will only be looking at the UK) did not do enough before the invasion to protect civilians in Iraq. This would contravene the Geneva Convention and in terms of what little actually makes up international law, this could make the invasion of Iraq "illegal." Even then it could take action by the ICJ to actually say if anyone in the UK government acted illegally. This is besides the point however. On the matter of whether or not the club should let in members of the armed forces in for free, give them season tickets, or some other offer I've sort of changed my position. Originally I was against this because although they do a difficult job so do plenty of other people and the ticket pricing structure of a football club shouldn't be based on how valuable someone thinks the fans job happens to be. Should prices be lowered for those in the Army, nurses and firemen but put up for bankers, civil servants and sociology students? These people are members of our society just as much as everyone else, so why should they get special treatment. It was a view I held and I can respect anyone who does hold this view now. But we do offers for school children (or I think we do, I don't pay as much attention to these things as I did when I was at school ), we run a work programme for people coming out of prisons, the club get involved in various things in the town - everytime I skim that Extra paper there always seems to be a couple of Motherwell players pictured alongside some local group doing whatever, they let OAPs and tax-dodgers students like me in for less. Giving something such as concessions or some free season tickets to people in the army or who have been in the army isn't special treatment, it's parity. Whatever you think of the wars, the country as a whole will have to rethink how they perceive war veterans as a result of them. Before they were old people who had fought during a time of total war which for many young people like me was decades before my birth and honestly quite distant as a result. Now though we have large numbers of people who have been left scarred for life as a result of war who are in their twenties and their teens. The debate over these wars, which I was and am against, will have long passed and we as a society will have large numbers of people who will always live with the result of it, and its something we have to get used to. Like one of the posters above said however, there has to be a line draw between respect and veneration of soldiers. The Sun newspaper in particular seems to attack people it is against for political reasons as being against "our boys". Doing so is itself disrespectful because it is the Sun newspapers politicising these people. They have established a situation where anyone who is against these wars, or any future wars as being against 'our troops', and it deadens the debate which has to exist as people don't want to be attacked for this. I don't mind if people didn't want to applaud at half time there on Saturday, in fact I think that it is healthy for there to be those who have their political opinions which stopped them from doing so. It would be wrong for anyone to try and pressure them into following the crowd and to clap when they didn't want to because these are "our boys." TLDR.

Does anyone know if they've actually sold one of those goalie tops yet? Haven't seen anyone wearing it for some reason.

Looks good I haven't been up to Fir Park to see it in person but maybe anyone who has will know if the stripes continue all the way around and are one the back too? I think the Aberdeen one has only got them on the front and has a plain back which seems to spoil it a wee bit. From what I've seen though this looks excellent. Haven't bought an away top in years but I might get this one

Jaime Murphy coming on

I wouldn't pay for this sort of thing. The highlights are already online on the BBC thing and presumably that'll be continuing on this season too. If they wanted to do a podcast type thing with interviews and club news and that then I would subscribe to it, they might be able to sell some advertising but I wouldn't be paying a direct debit for an online TV channel.

Is that Albania? Edit - need to refresh faster

Ah how could I forget Porter. Hopefully that would be enough to offset any loss this deal collapsing would entail. You've got to wonder how many teams in the SPL are going to be in a buying mood over the summer though if we do try to let players go. Even if Setanta do manage to make this payment that is due now clubs are going to be nervous about spending much money over the summer - might make it difficult if we try to offload Reynolds. We, along with just about every over SPL team, are going to be looking to clubs in the English Championship and lower to come in for some of our players.

I think you could possibly add us into that too. The Setanta money is a large part of our income. I'm not 100% sure about this but was Jim Patterson the last player we sold? If that is the case then we won't have had any big injections of cash for well over a year. The club are reporting an increase in sales of season tickets but you have to wonder how many will be new fans and how many will just be people looking to take advantage of the 10% offer that was going until the end of May. We really need either to get the money from Setanta or hope that we can get a deal with Sky or perhaps a split agreement like Sky/BBC BBC/STV or something and hope that whatever deal is signed won't be too far under the current deal in terms of cash we recieve. Otherwise it might not be that comfortable a season for us after all...

Finding data from football clubs to compare on how reliant they are on TV income seems to be difficult. Football-Finances seem to the best I can find on the internet. They collate figures published by SPL clubs and arrange them in a way that fans can compare what their clubs are spending across similar categories such as income, debt, staff wages and salaries etc. According to this site, of the clubs that publish a detailed breakdown of their incomes we are the most reliant on money from TV and radio broadcast deals. Only Motherwell, Aberdeen, Celtic, Hearts and Rangers publish this and of these teams we are the most reliant on broadcast money. 33% of our income would seem to be coming from TV and Radio money. Obviously it's hard to tell how severe a problem this could be as this site doesn't have information from other clubs which would be more comparable in terms of finances. That said a third of our income does seem to be too large an amount to assume that we will be unscathed if the Setanta deal does collapse.