Kennington Ram

2 minutes ago, Coconut's Beard said:

Unfortunately that isn't irrefutable evidence you could use to nail someone for lying, but thanks all the same ?

You are right, it isn't irrefutable, but it suggests Keogh's story is completely implausible, to the point where a decent hack should have done some work before printing it in a national. It's sort of their job?

36 minutes ago, Coconut's Beard said:

Can you tell me what these vids show please, and how they directly contradict the story in the paper?

I've only seen the ones of Bennett vomitting and tbh I can't really remember the full details of that.

I'm not asking as a means of defending Keogh, quite the opposite

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10017522/Derby-county-crash-shock-new-footage-players-slumped-chair-drink-drive-smash-arrest/

I mean, I suppose you cannot clearly see Keogh in this video (although The Sun says you can?), but you can see Lawrence is pissed and Bennett is passed out drunk. The Derby players appear to be together in a group.

Having been to the Joiners a fair few times, where is Keogh supposed to be then to be unaware of this?

 The journo should have done some homework.

Club should have been smarter than to leave itself vulnerable to being successfully sued by him, but this is a shoddy piece of journalism.

At no stage does the author question whether any of this is untrue.

Which most of it is! There are literally videos and photos from the night in competing papers that say otherwise.

I feel bad for his mental health issues, but i question whether the life coach is helping him to improve as a person if he is happy to front up to a national paper and lie to keep his career going.

For me, not welcome at the club again  while I'm a fan.

It is vaguely but probably not achievable, but there is nothing to be gained by giving up hope.

There are intangibles. The ppg calculation and normal points required total is valid, but a tight-knit team that steadily reels back the points deficit to 6 or so could (could!) just go on a winning hot streak and string 4 or 5 wins together when games come thick and fast in the new year, and then the morale could see it through.

Also, if other 2 other teams were to get deductions (Reading, ?) then it does become a lot more possible.

I can see why they would ask it, although obviously it's not really a sustainable approach for long. It gives the administrators a bit of time to figure out if Mel's comments on trending towards a sustainable business model are true and convert to reality when they're responsible for revenues and outgoings. Good crowds for fixtures in this period may help.

I worry that the Reading news means -21 is certain, as they will need to be seen to apply their rules equally. ?

On another note, if relegation is effectively decided each season due to the league's own poor governance and inability to negotiate with the EPL and Sky, you have to wonder if Rick Parry and Co should ask if they are in fact the problem.

The man is a fool, and he has failed the club and himself. He complains that Covid left the club £20m short, but has more or less detailed over £20m of bad decisions in his interview. Those bad decisions have been stacking up for years. As a fan, I had always believed he had those bad decisions covered, so ultimately it was simply at his own risk. Instead, he took the risks and then stacked the consequences on the club, and you, and me, and all the suppliers, staff and players who are now in jeopardy. Awful.

Anger really. Fan or not, Mel and co had a responsibility to ensure decisions they made could be backed up long term, and no matter how good something felt in the moment, they were custodians of something they supposedly loved with history.

They got a lot of leeway for those risks other owners wouldn't have received, precisely because they were fans.

That it has ended up like this is a deep and abiding shame, and although I appreciate losing that much money will not be nice and I am sure they are upset, they have failed.

I am also angry at the EFL for being so badly run it has allowed yet another club to go bust. What exactly do they do, other than negotiate bad TV deals and make things worse?

8 minutes ago, JarodyDCFC said:

He’s obviously incredibly talented but needs to improve his decision making because it let us down on a few occasions against Forest. He just needs to make his mind up quicker sometimes. I think him and Lawrence could form a real partnership up top based on what we saw yesterday. 

The thing is that he has spent stretches not really playing... if he is this capable basically coming in midway through pre season like that, he is going to thrive providing we keep the positivity up.

I have met plenty of people who didn't have the easiest upbringings and made mistakes in their early lives... Ravel is unlucky he was in the spotlight the whole time.

If it clicks this time and the ST article above is right, then I think he will be great for us.

Dreadful refereeing, particularly at the end. 

Same age as Alan Brazil.

Funny/sad/mad to think that Derby and Reading are potentially amongst several EFL clubs that could be featured on this, yet almost nobody has failed the Fit and Proper Test and the majority who have are small-time local businessmen, generally who've not been found guilty of anything in court?

Feel bad for Reading, as the EFL is now doing to them what they did to us. 

At what stage do the saps at the EFL ask the question as to whether they might be the common denominator?

49 minutes ago, DCFClks said:

Yes he's managed to get to a final and semi-final whilst only having to beat one (possibly two) top team(s) over two tournaments, how lucky can you get? I honestly think Sven could have done just as good, if not better than Southgate had he had the same opponents. 

Potters clearly a very good modern tactical coach who's already being linked to top teams. Why do England always seem to hire managers whose tactics are already 10 years out of date?

In tournaments, you make your own luck and this thing about easy runs is total rubbish. We qualified well, achieved a great seeding, and then played well against our group without serious injuries or overexertion. You win the 'easy' run by earning it.

Do you remember when we played the US, Algeria and Slovenia in 2010, and I think The Sun had the headline "EASY"?

Well, we finished second to the US and then came up against Germany immediately. The US played Ghana.

Mel rinsing the incompetents at the EFL for one last time:

Wish we hadn't been in this position but hopefully this is the beginning of the return from the brink.

When you run a sports league and you have to release interchangeable fixtures because you mangled the interpretation and enforcement of your own rules, surely you have to consider whether you're the problem...

That said really wish Mel and Co had at some stage decided not to take the piss. De-escalating it just a few years back would surely have just avoided this.

The EFL will be absolutely shocked when tomorrow's kids don't give a monkeys and clubs start folding. A top four league in terms of attendance and they cannot imagine how to possibly capitalise on it.

Every other form of digital entertainment has generally lowered the barriers to entry (gaming, TV, music) and then here are the geniuses at the EFL deciding the guys running Apple and Spotify don't know what they're up to.

Before we get the statement, as it won't change either way.

* Mel has done what other clubs have, just to the extreme. I wish he hadn't, but the EFL needs to take a long, hard look at why it took four years to get a grip on it, and the incentives for doing so.

* Retrospectively changing their advice and interpretation of the rules is deeply, deeply wrong.

* Rick Parry said something inane about clubs should use the pandemic to reset their business model a few months back, which was something so dumb as to surely prove conclusively he was unfit to be in the role altogether.

1 hour ago, Charlie George said:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/sportsnews/article-9563771/amp/Indonesian-Olympics-boss-linked-Erik-Alonsos-Derby-takeover-bid.html?__twitter_impression=true

Isn't this fraud, and actually quite serious?

1. Sort ownership. Stop treating the club like a distressed asset, so if selling takes time, let Rooney get on with it.

2. We urgently need two goal scoring forwards, one of which could be Gregory and ideally a young L1/L2 talent with something to prove. Also need minimum two CBs, possibly a third on loan.

3. Remaining recruitment should focus on not burning out young talent. Give them cover, protection.

4. Bielik needs a season to prove his fitness, so we should try and make the most of it and then probably sell him for a profit. But consider recruiting a viable backup now in case he is another Thorne.

5. Make a better start to the season. Even if heading for 14th a few decent results would go a long way to calming nerves.

1 minute ago, David said:

You can turn photos off for iCloud, just stores them on your device then. With the increased storage in phones now many will get by without. Obviously if you use multiple devices and want to sync then you need the cloud. 

Whilst I'm on this, all the drama around broadband companies not being honest with customers what speeds they should get, it's about time all phone companies separated storage for the operating system and default apps so if you buy a 32gb phone, 32gb is what you get.

16GB phones are being phased out now so not much of an issue but still, loada ****** that is

Yes, it is utter crap. Similarly, providers of internet capable devices should be required to provide a commitment to how regularly they'll issue security updates, and for how long. Android phones are the worst for this, but now that every TV, fridge etc is going online consumers should be able to buy a product with some confidence that their data won't end up in a Russian kid's basement.

12 minutes ago, David said:

Guess that's kinda cool, have no comeback for that one for once. Using it to lure people away from Samsung probably, cheeky tactic. 

Don't think 79p is too bad though, not as good as free but doesn't leave me feeling fleeced. 

Fair enough. 79p or iCloud itself on its own isn't that bad, but I guess my frustration is that it's an expensive phone already and the iCloud isn't massively inter-operable anyway. So auto-backing your photos to iCloud, asking you to pay and then limiting how you can then access them later just feels anti-consumer.

47 minutes ago, David said:

Bit surprised by this point, having just received my iCloud receipt today, 79p a month for 50gb. 5gb account is free.

Google Drive 15gb for free, $1.99pm for 100GB, $9.99pm for 1TB or  $99.99pm for 10TB

Dropbox 2gb free or £8pm for plus which gives you 1TB

Apple also offer 200gb for £2.50pm or 2TB for £6.99pm

Apple offer better prices, Google give the better free account which if you're under 15gb is fine but with backups, music and photos now that will soon get snapped up still

 

Put simply, if you buy a Pixel all your GDrive photos and video storage is unlimited. Whereas my girlfriend's iPhone is trying to back up her billion selfies to the iCloud and doesn't seem to be working because they want money.

For the rest of my stuff, I have 1tb of storage from Microsoft that I get with an Office subscription I'd pay for anyway - more than I will ever use.

I like a lot of Apple's stuff but I avoid it because it's not very inter-operable, and they do that primarily to sell more products rather than improve your life as a consumer. The "eco-system" is anti-consumer and seems increasingly so.

Apple TV is case in point. I have a very good Windows laptop (comparable to a Mac twice its price) that couldn't make much good use of one... but it can for my Chromecast that cost I think £25.

Same for the iPhone 7's lack of an audio port. I realise you can buy a splitter so you can charge and play audio at the same time, but why should I? The whole exercise is designed to sell Apple products, not help me.

I also hate the lack of versatility of the iPhone - lack of file structure etc has always just driven me crazy. I used to have a work iPhone and it just felt unnecessarily restricted compared to my personal old Samsung, to the point I'd often end up reverting to my personal phone to send complex emails etc.

I now have a Pixel. It's been great. It can do everything and more than an iPhone can, but the core smartphone experience is just as snappy as the iPhone. Google also gave me unlimited max resolution phone storage when I got it, which has been immensely useful and I'm reminded of every time my girlfriend complains her phone is nagging her about her maxxed out iCloud - again, fleecing customers.

So buying an iPad - even though it's the best tablet -to then spend a further £2k to get it to work properly, when I could buy a slightly worse alternative that works with other hardware better for half the price is a no brainer to me.

Just now, QuitYourJibbaJivin said:

I think Christie has cemented his place partly because we don't have anybody to replace him. Like others have said his contract is up at the end of the season, Keoghs was also up at the end of the season but they got that sorted out fairly quickly. Can't he sign for somebody for free in January? 

Based on my deep knowledge of Football Manager, I think he can sign a contract abroad but not domestically?