Liverpool still won't win the premiership (2007/08 edition)

Oh, and Sunderland for a Top 10 finish.

Oh, and Allardyce gone by January.

Nah, Allardyce to miss out on Europe by one point then to be fired three games into the 08/09 season

At least the West Ham players know each other - it could take months for Sven to put together a cohesive squad out of a load of disparate foreign players bought in the space of a fortnight.

Fulham have spent £20m! How did that happen?

I'm trying to reconcile this late "start of the summer" feeling with this early start to the season and it's not really working.

Allardyce will be around for ages. They're not going to let him bring half his Bolton backroom team with him just to sack him after a season.

If Newcastle are bottom 3 for any length of time, which I can see, he'll go. That job is horrible and near impossible.

Reading and Everton are the only two teams to have not signed a striker off-season.

Allardyce will be around for ages. They're not going to let him bring half his Bolton backroom team with him just to sack him after a season.

You've gotta remember that Allardyce doesn't have the fans on-side, all it's going to take is a couple of bad results, or the chance of Europe to vanish, and they're all going to start chanting for Keegan or Shearer or Sid the Sexist for manager.

laffing at underachieving Newcastle will never ever get old. and yeah, Everton could well stage a relegation challenge.

I suppose I'm hedging my bets on Newcastle due to not really knowing what the new board will do. Not having to deal with Freddy Shepherd is a bonus.

Also Allardyce has generally bought well over the summer - could do with a couple more defenders but Capaca is a strong signing.

Top marks to The Sun for the headline in the "Hossam Ghaly's transfer to Birmingham cancelled after he refuses to run in training" story:

WALK LIKE AN EGYPTIAN

kenny dalglish on the top 10 predictions...
http://tinyurl.com/2t4x5u

King Kenny's Premiership Top Prediction

1. MANCHESTER UNITED
2. LIVERPOOL
3. CHELSEA
4. TOTTENHAM HOTSPUR
5. ARSENAL
6. EVERTON
7. WEST HAM
8. PORTSMOUTH
9. BLACKBURN ROVERS
10. NEWCASTLE UNITED

King Kenny's on Krack

Free Setanta forever on Virgin Media telly, hurrah! Except I'm moving to a non-cabled area in three weeks, boo!

Kenny's gone mad! West Ham in seventh?

Saturday: AFCWvFCUM
A great day out apart from the strange smell of sewagehttp://i147.photobucket.com/albums/r299/crunchydog_2006/AFCWpenalty.jpg
Sunday: Wemberlee
http://i147.photobucket.com/albums/r299/crunchydog_2006/wemberlee.jpg

I got AFC Wimbledon into the Championship on FM2007, btw.

What did you think of Wembley?

Better than I thought it would be. I was one row from the back, so right up at the top, and it's pretty steep there, but you've still got a decent view. In fact the view was great compared to the equivalent seats at Old Trafford (where you're crammed in like sardines and the roof comes down so steeply that you can barely see the far touchline, never mind the rest of the stadium).

Don't think I've ever been so high up in a ground, or had so much leg room. What about the atmosphere? It was rubbish at the cup final.

I've got vertigo even looking at that Wembley photo.

Matt, you've left yourself wide open for a Spurs gag there.

The atmosphere was alright really. At least it started off boisterously for both halves and then died away after half an hour or so. I suppose that's the difference you get when all the tickets go to supporters instead of corporate sponsors / regional FA officials etc. (and also the effect of several hours drining lager in baking sunshine). You're right about the legroom: normally you feel they've just tried to fit as many seats in the ground as possible, but this was spacious.

did you have a pie? they're nice but not worth the queue or the price

My mate had one. It didn't look appetizing at all.

i have a feeling you only get "free" santana on virgin of you've got the [scuse me] XL telly package, which we don't, so to get sultana we'd have to pay an extra £9 a month, although banana are showing a lot of conference blue square premier (retch) matches...

...cheer dickie.

argh, it's not even that simple, as the cost of our sky sports package would come down if our telly pack got more expensive...

(clearly i am rly just doing this to get to watch the baseball on NASN ;))

Ooh explain how the baseball ties in?

In what way was breaking up the TV rights supposed to be better for the Great British Consumer again?

stop them consuming hopefully

It means you get a legitimate excuse to go to the pub more.

If you're on XL package with Virgin you get the Setanta Sports package except for NASN (which is baseball heaven) for free. If you're on a smaller package you pay £8? a month and NASN is included. To get NASN if you're XL means you have to shell out the £8 a month as well. (if that makes sense)

Breaking up the TV rights means you can get some live Premiership football for less than a tenner a month on freeview and you don't have to give your money to Uncle Rupert in the process.

If I see an entire Premiership game live on TV this season I'll be surprised.

Why pay for Sky when you watch it in Chinese for free? They'd better not have closed that site down in the summer...

hmm if you can get it to actually work...

It only let me down a couple of times last season. But when it did, it was very frustrating.

were you using PPLive?

Sometimes Sopcast and sometimes one another that I can't recall.

were they showing the Sky Game cause occassionally they screen different games abroad...

wait, whut? i don't get NASN with the XL pack??? man, i'm SO p!ssed off with virgin since they dropped sky and sky sports news anyways, maybe i'll ring them up and tell them i'm going to sky unless they are very very nice to me (ie free baseball)...

the site i use seems to have pretty much every game played that night/day, including non-Sky prem, serie a, bundesliga, la liga. the quality is shite and sometimes it'll cut out mid-pass, but that adds to the fun and is still better than martin tyler.

Why do you want to watch baseball, you nutjobs?

I recorded last night's "Football Years" which was 1980/1981 and I am just going to watch that every week for the duration of the season.

I also watched that New York Cosmos documentary and thought well, what a lot of fuss about nothing.

So how about that whole Spurs breaking the Big Four thing, then?

I think the initial giddy rush of enthusiasm and optimism in every Spurs fan evaporated the moment they saw that team sheet. Forty odd million spent and Paul Stalteri and Anthony Gardner are still managing to make the team. No width at all either.

Plus, I already hate this man:

http://www.expressandstar.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/mcshane1.jpg

Sunderland will be absolutely fine in the Premiership by the looks of things.

mcshane wouldn't have looked as good if the ref hadn't seemed determined to allow as many niggly fouls on berbatov as possible.

and, ok, nobody wanted to see gardner or stalteri on the team sheet yesterday (let alone tainio on he right wing, come on BMJ this doesn't work) but to be fair the real problem yesterday was the rank performance from jenas in midfield, i've never seen a spurs player look less interested. does he think he's still at newcastle or something?

i'm glad i predicted blackburn to finish above us, as i'm sure at this stage spurs are gonna finish below fifth. i don't understand the optimism when we haven't signed a single player to solve our problem area, and blew a wad on positions that weren't a priority.

bmj out!

/rant

At least Arsenal are a goal down.

Also, Birmingham to pull off a gritty draw against Chelsea. I'm calling it.

jens lehmann ftw

what a tw@! that is a beautiful thing.

birmingham going for the roller-coaster draw instead, by the looks of things.

Goalies arsing things up = comedy gold (unless it's your team's goalie)

Great moment just now: Alan Green says "Reading must be hoping that they'll get a set-piece, and that Kitson, with hsi ability in the air, could possibly nick them all three points" and then Kitson gets sent off three seconds later.

I've played Dave Kitson at Scrabble, FYI.

Did he get within 200 points?