Straggler

Nandos is pretty sucky as far as i'm concerned. Dry, uninspired chain restaurant food. Very little in the way of fresh ingredients used. As far removed from real Mexican food as a chips in curry is from genuine Indian food.

If you run out of parma violets you could always chow down on some potpourri. Don't they make those extra large ones that you can find in a blokes urinal?

Adriana Lima or Aida Yespica are my personal favourites, but Megan Fox does absolutely float my boat and can happily be classed as totally stunning.

Is a cow cut in half art? Is a crisp made of dough a cake? It's a silly argument to say that the shape and packaging make a difference. Hula Hoops don't look like potatoe neither do skips. I'm darn sure monster munch and onion rings are crisps too, despite names that would suggest otherwise. I could stick a tampax up my arse and call it a vagina, but the same sh*t would still come out.

Barry for me every time. A decade of consistent class, calmness and being a top performer in the team cannot be overlooked because Petrov had one good season.

Benitez wins for me. Harry ran him very close, but I think Harry is a natural tosser where Benitez is naturally good at nothing and really had to work at being that big a tosser.

I would use the one bear and go for the score draw. Taken to 30,000 ft and dropped, admittedly with a great deal of precision I believe a single bear at terminal velocity would do sufficient damage to finish off a T-rex. For the win I would include a second bear who has a simple not getting eaten until impact time brief.

Barry is a very good player and I'll miss him when he is gone. However it won't bother me. Good players come and go, Barry will be replaced, we will get better and worse than him in this team and none of us will agree on which is which. Barry has done his time, he has done us proud and if he feels the time has come to move on then good luck to him (providing he does it in the right way).

And there was me thinking this was going to be about the inflationary pressures of literally printing more money. This is what we are doing as a nation right now to spend us out of trouble. We'll all have more money, but it will be worth less (or worthless depending on how bad things get). When it comes to student fee's I don't think we should be hiking up the costs. Investing in education makes this a better place for all of us. The more bright, educated, talented people we have the nicer a place this will be to live. It's no different to investing in the arts, or apprenteships, or sport, or healthcare for that matter. There are around only 500,000 people in the UK that earn over £100,000 a year, I went to uni, I sure as hell don't earn that, most of my colleagues likewise are graduates, but earn similar salaries to me. The idea that a degree = wealth is a little stretched in my view an will penalise those that get educated in the less financially rewarding courses. Compare the average salary of a history graduate (such as myself) to the law graduate (my sister) then lump them with the same amount of debt and you will see a deeply unproportional tax. Call me old fashioned if you will, but getting the rich to pay more and the poor less would work just fine, it's called income tax and is based on your ability to pay. Your parents paid their tax's so you could go to uni, you will pay for the next generation to go. I also don't want to see the cost of this dumped on middle income Britain like everything else seems to be. Cost of living is already stupidly high in this country. The rich find clever accountants so they don't have to pay, the poor by definition are unable to pay so the burden always seems to fall on the guy in the middle. Not rich enough to get out enough, but well enough off to pay.

Baseball is ace! It may have virtually no action given the length of the game, but the on occasion the breathless explosion of speed, skill, athletasism and no shortage of talent can be exhilerating. It is the tension that the slow speed of the game can build up that helps those short flashes of brilliance be all the more exciting. It is a triumph of mind, body and tactics to win a game of baseball especially in the latter stages of the world series where the difference between winning and loosing can be a matter of fractions and so much of the game is played in the head. Pitcher vs hitter is not just one man against the other, it is an entire training staff honing all their accumulated knowledge into one man, who has to assimilate everything they have learned, operate under the most terrific pressure and deliver with immense precision in a fraction of a second. The only things that sadden me about the game are the player strikes and the wide spread use of drugs. Seeing the achievments of truly great players in the past being surpassed by less than worthy players now thanks to artificial means just feels like cheating. At the heart of it though baseball is a great game. I am a Brit by the way and the first game of baseball I saw was the definition of tedium. Give the game a chance, learn a little of what makes a good player and why in a game of individual battles the best team is not always that with the best players and you may just get it. edited once for spelling (I am dyslexic, so excuse me for the ones I miss)

I believe Chelsea will win. First up is the problem of having played on Wednesday night. They will be much better rested and prepared for this game than we will be. Chelsea have a new coach, which I fear will make this pretty much as good a game as Chelsea will play this season. Morale will be only lifted for a short time as managerial uncertainty and ego problems will again erode confidence and team spirit in the Chelsea dressing room, but it will be lifted for this one crucial game. Villa will be jaded they, Chelsea will be up for it, I can see us giving away a bad goal or two simply as a consequence of heavy legs. The next 7 or 8 games are going to be so very hard, it will be a huge effort to come out of them with anything like the form we have going in. Not what I want to write, but I just don't see how such a small squad can maintain such a high energy game for so long. If we loose the energy we'll loose the game.

I don't believe she even looks all that good. She is one of the most over hyped singers of all time. Her voice has little range, she is at best an average dancer, her looks are again average, her songs are the definitions of pop banality, yet somehow she seems to be considered to be special. I don't find her offensive or anything, it's just I don't get what she brings to the party that other artists aren't already doing better.

Brady is still claiming that she is helping police with their enquiries. Sounds all nice and voluntary, but she seems to have missed out the part where she got arrested. If she had not turned up, plod would have been knocking at her door and escorting her down the yard whether she wanted it or not. Also being out on bail is not the same as being allowed to go home. I guess it is one way of coping, to just pretend that nothing bad is ahppening.

Spot on Sir. This is the reason I still watch football, when in the last years of Ellis I was ready to walk away from the sport as a whole. That this approach has bought with it success is a truly wonderful vindication. Sadly I was going to turn to cricket and rugby to get my fill of solid sport for sports sake, played with honour and decency. However the undignified grasping for money that is going on in cricket now may have me looking further afield still for my third sport.

60 just laid off at my place of work. Not me thankfully, but we were all ticket holders for that particular raffle. The official line is that they won't need to do anything like this again, but 6 weeks ago there was no need for redundancies at all. In the next 6 weeks, who knows.

straggler001 Also a FIFA player. And chess

I'm never fight for my country, I don't feel I have a strong enough bond with England to do so. However, given that my family reside here and if they were under threat... I'd rather be on the front line fighting the enemy as far away from my home as possible with a gun in my hand and my brothers in arms around me than on my front lawn with my pool cue keeping the new Nazis from the door.

If we're all gods children, what's so special about Jesus?

A lovely article, worth saying and worth saying well. All achieved here. All I would add is my endorsement to these words and my own personal thanks. Thanks

Personally I am a fan of the old Liverpool rejects. Saunders, Staunton, Houghton were all quality. Less said about Collymore and Baros the better though I suppose. Weird now I have typed them but the two recent ones that failed came in with much bigger reputations than the older boys before who all did well in their way. I would hope that Finnan could be our next Staunton and Barry can be Liverpools next Pennant

Does this article seriously suggest that there will be senior players rested. That is a pretty bloody poor state of affairs given that we need to rest players before the season has started. Hate to think what the state of play will be in January.

Yes please, if just to get Finnan in. I thought Barry was overpriced at 15 mllion, not that I wanted to sell him, I just would not want to pay that much for him if the tables were turned and we were buying

I would applaud the man, he is a gent and has behaved as a pro at this club for a decade. Whatever his reasons for leaving who am I to resent him for it after a career like that with us.

Doesn't the idea of introducing ID cards incrementally just mean that it will be done in such small chunks that we won't notice that the law is in place until it is too late? Make each bit so small that it makes you look small and petty every time you make a stand. Eventually we are told that we are 90% of the way there and might as well finish the job off as so much has been invested in getting us this far. Sounds a bit like amending existing European treaties until it looks like a European Constitution without having to go through the nasty inconvenience of referendums. Why prevent perfectly useless and unwanted legeslation from passing just because the unwashed masses don't want it? Poiliticians all know better than us anyway, after all that is why we voted for them isn't it?

Please let it be Shearer. I have voted for him because they belong together strugging at the bottom. I don't think he will take it though as he knows there is nothing to gain and everything to loose. I don't think anyone on that list will take the job, I can't imagine too many coaches will want it.