Decent piece of work by Macbeth and some good follow-up. Newcastle are in some difficulty if the wage bill has jumped by £185K a week (£8m a year). It explains why their Board is unwilling to pay off Souness for £3m! Add getting rid of his backroom staff and recruiting replacements with compensation and Newcastle could easily be looking at a bill of £6m which would just about wipe out their projected net worth of £7m. Two conspiracy thoughts- I wonder if Newcastle will try to pin some bungs allegations on Souness and get rid of him that way. Also, it could be argued as one of the posters has done that FF is driving down the worth of NUFC to take it over. At the end of the day, Newcastle are miles away from the Leeds situation. They still have tradeable assets in Owen, Parker and Given and are not bereft of players with any value and still over £100m in pressing creditors which is where Leeds found themselves. Anyway, I am feeling a bit more optimistic about Saturday's game but it will be tough to get three points up there.

This link should carry a heath warning. Those who find others' misfortune funny should wear a truss to avoid rupture whilst laughing. Anybody of a depressive nature should avoid open windows, busy roads or railway lines.

Obviously you have no concept of the insurance and civil liability risks that would entail blue phil.

The funny thing is the biometric data. It is pretty asccurate but not 100%. If you are using it in a criminal trial, a 99% chance of nailing the suspect would seem pretty good using DNA evidence. But transpose that to a population of 60 million and 600,000 people (or everybody in Burnley, Blackburn, Preston and Bolton) are suddenly not who they think they are according to their ID card! Sorry folks, ID cards do not work. Perhaps it is not surprising that the IT industry's most respected commentators are amongst the people most vehemently opposed to ID cards.

I was careful not to mention Hughes by name in my original post but your reply shows that if the FA went on pure footballing grounds, Hughes is the strongest home grown manager currently working there is to chose from. As we both know, football takes a back seat in these considerations. Oh and by the way, I was waiting for someone to post what salothsar has just written. I bet the leading line in questioning was a classic: "That Owen only went to Newcastle for the money, he cannot possibly be happy there. Another drink, Sven?" "Yes".

I agree Joey, it is completely unthinkable that there would be a non-English manager of the English national team. Just out of interest, would you rate Hughes as a Manager higher than Pearce?

Arsenal boasting about how expensive their seats will be. Their match day income will be twelve times greater than the Rovers'. Rather re-enforces the campaign to get a more even distribution of the Sky money. After all, they wouldn't earn £3m per match to watch eleven men playing with themselves.

1) Steven Reid, Michael Gray, Lucas Neill and (since his most recent return to the team) Andy Todd have all shown marked improvements over recent form which is great news for Rovers and reflected in our rise up the table and the greater entertainment value coming from the team. 2) Steven Reid has been putting some fantastic performances in at times in central midfield. Hopefully these will develop into 90 minute performances. 3) Reid can shoot- he has always been able to do so. He got the monkey off his back by that fantastic strike at Wigan. Now he needs to hit the target more regularly. Having MGP around- the most deadly accurate hard striker of a ball I've seen in blue and white since Shearer at his prime- sets a very good benchmark for Reid to aspire to. 4) There will come a game when every one of Reid's howitzers are either on target or very close to. It's inevitably going to happen. Then he'll be closed down every game after that creating a lot more space up front when we are attacking.

Just like I want Ferguson to go early, so I want Sven out straight after the World Cup. There is a young British Manager who has international management experience, is doing brilliantly well at his club, clearly has the respect and admiration of a squad of internationals at that club where he gets what he wants and motivates them well and is the perfect gentleman in front of the press with no known "bagage" in his private life. And we all know who that is... Hopefully he will be overlooked by both England and the Mancs if the change comes soon enough.

Danns scored yet again tonight. With a bit of luck, Colchester will get promoted and we could be on for a decent sell-on figure.

Of our cup-tied loanees, Douglas is in the Leeds team against Wigan tonight and Gallagher has hit the bar and missed a sitter for Stoke who trail Tamworth.

Oh what a conundrum. Heskey is having his knee X-rayed and could be out for the season, Bruce really really wants Lovenkrands but he's somebody else's so he is humming and hawing about whether to spend ALL his £1.5m BIG transfer budget on Euell who hasn't started a game yet this season because of injuries. Meanwhilst Euell who had expected to be agreeing personal terms and signing for BIG CLUB has started talking to Steve McLaren. Couldn't happen to a nicer chap at a bigger club...

Nine out injured according to the Geordie paper.

But this being the Cup, the money is divided between the Rovers, the League and the Glazers.

Unhappy campers. Bust up between Ronaldo and van Nistelrooyd.

Spot on Hughesy. The lad used to score regularly for Millwall so he can strike accurately with power from distance in a match as well as in training.

To be honest, I think there is a decent chance Cristina will get off having seen the incident now. Quite apart from our chances in the Carling Cup, I think England's chances in the World Cup would be massively improved if Rooney gets hauled up before the FA for his behaviour. Jeff Winter has commented that at the World Cup, there will be a massive clampdown on referee dissent and that the Prem has gone soft in this area. Routine yellows for foul and abusive language will be red cards over there and not only Rooney amongst the England squad has a lot of work to do to curb his behaviour. Ferdinand would have walked for his protests on Saturday for instance. However, after producing a report of the first leg which made my Maltese drinking companions seem level headed neutral observers in comparisson, UWS has come up with an even better report of the Manchester derby.

Probably the best thing that could happen to the Dingles if Kirby doesn't pocket the proceeds. It's early enough in the window for Cotterill to get a new team with the proceeds. I'm surprised at Sheff U though- they should be buying for the Premiership now as Warnock bought a team to get out of their current division last summer. They don't need another clodhopper. Unless they have shed loads of cash, Sheff U are next season's Sunderland.

No doubt there will be headlines one way or another about Rooney and Ferguson when the Referees reports are analysed by the FA at lunch time. Ferguson has said that Scholes is out for another two weeks with blurred vision.

Good points. I have this nightmare that having Ronaldo suspended will actually strengthen the Mancs against us. Elsewhere, there is a post saying that MGP's goals to games ratio is better than Duff's. The guy is a great left midfielder. Let's not do a Souness and play him out of position.

Savage did his own press conference! That's two extremely pro-Rovers (or is it anti-Big Sam) articles from the Guardian/Observer.

We can dream about Rovers winning at Newcastle, Pompey winning at Brum and ending the careers of two of the less popular managers around but I cannot see it happening. We had a record of not winning at St James's almost as bad as Newcastle's record of not winning trophies (well worse than their record of not winning domestic trophies) until Gallagher punched the ball in a couple of seasons back. I think this is going to have to be a case of getting Kuqi to bully their back line like he did at Boro. They are big lads so its a big ask but in the absence of Bellamy, its going to have to be brawn as well as Dickov's iritation to unsettle them. We'll need to keep it vey tight at the back and not let their midfield get on top to avoid wave after wave of kamikaze attacks whilst the Geordies bay them on. Another big ask to stop Sherer from beating Milburn's record against us but if we do we stand a more than decent chance of nicking it. However, 1-1 is the likeliest result.

I am sure when Gav made the bet, he didn't think we'd get 18,000 for the Bolton game. In my books, 23,000 is a bad gate for that one! We used to get 20,000 home gates against Bolton when our average for other games was 8,000. The Liverpool game will also be a poor attendance. The Premiership have it scheduled to be played on the day of the Hillsborough Disaster so the scousers are campaigning to get it moved. If the League doesn't move this fixture, it means we will be playing Liverpool at exactly the same time the memorial service is being held at Anfield and the Liverpool fans will have organised a boycott of our game.

The existing XI moved the ball around really well stretching the Bolton midfield and back line. I think people are getting hung up with the 0-0 score line and missing how we played for long passages of the game. Before Nakata was sent off, we scarcely had 40% posession. After he went we had 60%. All those corners and off-target attempts on goal had to come from somewhere!

Boro fans are begging England to fire Sven and take McLaren.