orangecity23

Mo wasn't even brought here by his own choice, he was people smuggled in and forced to be a domestic servant. He had to keep quiet about his background and early life because he was terrified he'd have his British citizenship taken away and he'd get deported. Poor guy hadn't even seen his Mum and brothers for years until he tracked them down for that documentary a while back.

Another thing to convince me that there's a sizeable number of very rich people who watch dystopian cyberpunk sci-fi and just think "neat, I reckon we should try that" whilst completely missing the point.

We could really have done with some of those underlapping runs from his position like Ndidi does tonight, especially with them trying to double up on Fatawu so much, but Casadei didn't seem to be too keen to make any.

I've often wondered if the final evolution of VAR for refereeing would be AI based, as it would offer a means of "standardising" the officiating. All the bolded bits about shortcomings sound a) completely plausible b) very much like the existing standard of VAR Seriously though, imagine trying to put together a training set to teach it what a handball was. "Oh, it's not working properly, what clips did you train with?" "I've got Wes Morgan vs Liverpool, Rob Holding does YMCA LCFC vs Arsenal, and Craig Dawson punchs the ball into the net, LCFC vs West Ham". "It's allowing you to play basketball, and awarding a penalty every time someone heads a cross clear". Plus the way AI learns makes it very good at finding underlying patterns in big data sets - imagine it "learning" from existing ref clips that the correct action to make is to award everything in favour of Man Utd. Media would probably be very happy with the outcome, Gary Neville would think the AI had everything spot on.

They are resurfacing the road there, the sign says the night closures will go on for 4 weeks

I'm at work and the thought of Danny Ward sitting alone in a room at ACLgrave with one of these signs on the door has got me suppressing the giggles

BBC article on us winning the appeal is linked on wiki, and still readable all these years later http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/l/leicester_city/2264274.stm

Look at the Wikipedia article I posted. 2 million is the entire tv budget for championship teams at the time. He got more than an entire season of TV revenue, and then on top of that the TV revenue disappeared! It was a lot of money back then.

They did. From Wikipedia. Effect on football clubs ITV Digital's collapse contributed to Bradford City F.C. being put into administration Following the proposed Football League merger, with the lucrative finances it proposed, ITV Digital's collapse had a large effect on many football clubs. Bradford City F.C. was one of the affected, and its debt forced it into administration in May 2002.[61][62] Barnsley F.C. also entered administration in October 2002, despite the club making a profit for the twelve years prior to the collapse of ITV Digital.[63][64] Barnsley had budgeted on the basis that the money from the ITV Digital deal would be received, leaving a £2.5 million shortfall in their accounts when the broadcaster collapsed.[64] Clubs were forced to slash staff, and some players were forced to be sold as they were unable to pay them. Some clubs increased ticket prices for fans to offset the losses.[65] The rights to show Football League matches were resold to Sky Sports for £95 million for the next four years compared to £315 million over three years from ITV Digital, leading to a reduction from £2 million per season to £700,000 in broadcasting revenue for First Division clubs.[66][67] In total, fourteen Football League clubs were placed in administration within four years of the collapse of ITV Digital, compared to four in the four years before.[67] Just 15% of all the clubs in the Football League in admin as a result of ITV going under then. You've got "the plan" all wrong as well. The club was promoted under O'Neill, and started planning a new stadium in 1998, but plans for Bede Island fell through, and the KP wasn't completed until 2002. So the plan was - get promoted, consolidate club in top league, then plan and build a new stadium during the O'Neill years, the clubs most successful period to date where we were a well established Premier League team. If this wasn't a "sensible" time to build a new ground, when exactly should a club of our size planned a new ground? 10 years in the prem? 20 years? Never, as we can never fully rule out relegation so we should have stayed at Filbert Street forever? The problems arose due to Peter Tayor making a horlicks of succeeding O'Neill, then going on to blow all the Heskey and Lennon cash on dross. And even before he finished stuffing everything up, the season before we went down he had us top of the league at one stage, and on a long FA Cup run (that he eventually stuffed up against Wycombe). So to sum it up - we didn't "spend big" until AFTER promotion. Even when we were up, we hardly paid large transfer fees for anyone (under O'Neill, the highest fees paid were for the likes of Eadie and Elliott, and you are still talking <£2 million), and even when Taylor spent more later, it was funded by the 16 million of fees received for Heskey and Lennon. As has previously been explained, the biggest expense was the ground, and it was planned during a stable period of top flight football. Were you actually following the club during this period, or was this before your time? It was quite the memorable period at the time, things like the Bede Island plans falling through, were all over the Mercury at the time.

John's "Who Are You" debut might be the best debut since Joe Dodoo's in the league cup under Ranieri. Sensational stuff.

It was Neil Warnock's Sheffield United. He complained. A lot. Demanded a points deduction. We finished 12 points ahead of them - so a 10 point deduction would have done naff all. Also, bare in mind, we went into admin partly because ITV digital collapsed and the league lost its TV revenue - a bit unprecedented. Fast forward many years. Neil Warniock is Crystal Palace manager. They went into admin. Warnock complained the 10 points deduction was "unfair".

VAR requires having a lot more refs. Based on our current Championship games, they don't have enough decent refs to actualy referee the games they are already playing. If you have to scrape the barrel even lower to find an extra 3 VAR officials per game - can you imagine the calibre of officials they'll be deploying? We'd be lucky if the get through a weekend's fixtures without half of them choking on their whistles.

Southgate also called up Mason Mount when he was in the championship at Derby as well. However, he overlooked Madison at the same time, as he "didn't have enough prem experience". The guy also called up Jake Livermore on multiple occasions, so you don't really know what on earth he'll do with midfielders, it's like he lives in a parallel world.

Yeah, back when it was US steel. Was only out there for a month or so putting in some new automation, but we managed to get a bit of touristing in at the weekends, as they were nice enough to not bother rolling on Saturdays and Sundays. So there's nothing better to do than pop down to Niagara falls, or Niagara on the Lake, or the botanical gardens, or the CN tower.... Was the middle of summer as well, so the weather was very nice too. Certainly one of the nicer steel mill towns in the world I've been to! Edit: it's actually back to being called Stelco again, they got flogged off by us steel a few years back.

I did some work over at the steel works in Hamilton a few years back, and now I'm finding out I missed out on an old warplane museum. Gutting.

The EFL FFP rules were introduced right after we'd spent a whole load of money under Sven and had an inflated wage bill. That implementation of the rules was specifically designed and deployed quickly with the intention that we would fail them. In the promotion season, we barely spent anything, we signed Dean Hammond, Wasyl on a free transfer then later on Kevin Phillips and Mahrez (such financial irresponsibility, this transfer ). We cut spending right back, and took advantage of some loopholes, but I don't think thats a bad thing, in the context of rules being designed expressly by your rival teams in the league to deliberately set you up to fail them based on money already spent before the rules were introduced at short notice. Of course, most clubs in the Championship have since fallen foul of EFL FFP rules at some point since, so people in glass houses and all that. Almost every team in the Championship runs at a loss trying to chase after the big bucks in the Prem, the whole thing is a house of cards waiting to fall down at some point. I think I read that even Luton made a loss last season, with their tiny wage bill - ultimately, the Championship just isn't a viable league to be in for any extended period of time. Prem FFP is a completely different kettle of fish, in a league where the revenues are orders of magnitude higher, the rules much looser, and the punishments (so far) are non existent. If Everton have managed to fall foul of even that, then they should be punished. Of course, the entire financial system at the top of football, and the way the big 6 clubs and their super league pals are given a free ride to bigger commercial revenues and an express pass for the cash machine that is the Champions League is another matter entirely.

Yes, that Vi Dempster step down at the time seemed strange too. I was shocked she's back at the top again. Seemed very much like a scapegoat, SPS has a habit of putting himself out front and centre every time something goes right, then miraculously having "no knowledge" of anything going wrong (like the massive failings in social care) in the city, even if it's his own assistant mayor's dealing with issues, he makes out like they operate in a vacuum and keep him in the dark.

Oh, I agree absolutely that's a more wide scale issue with social care funding, and it's only going to get worse, the changing of age demographics means there will be big issues funding enough care for the elderly as well, and nobody really has a solution beyond flogging off their houses if they own them - except, that's not a long term solution as in the future we will have more elderly folks who don't own houses outright due to the inflation of house prices in this country. Feels like everything is slowly falling apart really. I was just doing a cheap dig at Soulsby for his posing in the papers as some kind of responsible financial controller.

Looking forward to the inevtiable influx of Leeds fans on this forum this week telling us all just how good Farke is, and how dangerous their wingers are, and how much better than Ricardo Luke Ayling is, whilst being super patronising about our players/manager/ground/ownership/fans/city etc. Hopefully followed by us getting a win, and them all disappearing, or re-appearing to tell us how hard done by they were by the ref, and how deflected or lucky our goals were, and that they "definitely won the singing".

Good to see Soulsby cracking down on non-essential spending over 5k. That should help sort things out. Shame he didn't bring this in around the time the council gave a 150K to renovate cultural quarter buildings that his daughter opened a bar in: (but that was ok, as a different councilor made the decision, except nobody mentioned the daughter's bar to her) https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/leicester-news/councillor-i-not-know-mayors-711251 All good though, as the council (headed by SPS, also featuring: Assistant mayor one of his other daughters) conducted an independent investigation into itself (remember when Labour was so concerned at a national level about Boris Johnson being investigated by his own employees? Shame they don't practice what they preach on the local level) and found everything hunky dory. https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/leicester-news/no-evidence-sir-peter-soulsby-758063 And it didn't matter anyway, as the bar folded anyway https://www.business-live.co.uk/enterprise/shock-two-big-leicester-bars-17127466 Still, sorted out all that non-essential spending though, so no need to join up with Derby and Nottingham.

So on consecutive goal kicks, Begovic took it from the opposite side to where it went out, then developed an "injury". 2 minutes stoppage time, no booking for timewasting incoming then.

All starts with us giving it away from our own throw in.

Plus, when they are actually letting you do 70mph for a bit, they don't display the national symbol (or they flash it up for a few seconds). They just turn the display off. So you have to drive past a few before feeling like you can do 70, and you haven't just driven under a broken one. Balls to the M6.

Ah well, all's well that ends well. Good job to get the result in the bag and another 3 points on the board. If those shots that hit the post went in it in the first half it would have been a lot more comfortable.

Derby fans? Need to get that renamed the Third tier podcast then.