Taxi for Pompey

Its been quite quiet in my head lately, mostly just random bits of songs over and over but I thought I would write some more stuff down for all you lovely people.

I have 3 topics to talk about today, Pompey, Taxis and the Rugby.

So up first Portsmouth Football Club. I am really starting to think that the team have been reading my blog. As since I wrote about how fucked we were and the possibilities of League 1 action next season, they went unbeaten in February. So, well done guys. 1 draw and then 4 wins and 4 clean sheets on the bounce! That is an amazing run of results in one month and I really hope the league notice this and reward Steve Cotterill with the manager of the month award. I'm extremely happy with how things are going on the pitch at the moment and hope that they continue.
 Sky Sports News showed a special report on PFC the other night. It was an interesting watch although didn't overly show anything that us fans didn't know about. But anyway, hopefully the future is looking brighter. People are now talking about making the playoffs, my view is 'I don't want to get the playoffs'. My reasons for this are that we are still not financially backed by an owner who wants to run the club. And if we get back into the prem now, it is quite possible that stupid wages and transfer fees will be banded around and we could slip straight back into the awful situation we've been in not so long ago. Also I am enjoying travelling to different and smaller stadiums, paying reasonable prices for tickets and I'd like the team to be stable with long term players tied down before we try to make it in the big time again.
Still, I will leave Pompey alone now and hopefully will not need to write about them until the end of the season...fingers crossed.

Taxis. A great mode of transport when you need it and cant be bothered with buses/trains/walking etc. Prices of taxis have risen since i was a wee lad but that's understandable as the cost of living continues to increase. I admire taxi drivers for how they make their earnings, I certainly wouldn't want to drive drunk people around at 3am on a Saturday morning (especially from the people I saw last night!). And it annoyed me when people were moaning when we had the snow and ice and taxis were adding £1-£1.50 on top of the fare. If you don't want to pay the extra, Walk! They are doing a service in severe weather conditions that I sure as hell wouldn't drive in. During last Jan/Feb when we had the first snow I got a taxi from my friends house and the operator told me it would likely be around half an hour. That was fine by me as it was warm in my friends house and I wasn't in a rush. We decided to play some Fifa and by the time we had turned the Xbox on, there was a knock at the door and my taxi was there. So half hour was more like 3 minutes! Awesome. I gave the guy a £3 tip as I wanted to get rid of the change and was very grateful of his speedy service. So please don't moan at drivers when they are doing you a favour, unless they're a cunt. Then by all means give 'em hell.
But that story leads me onto my major gripe with taxi services. When you phone up and the operator says 'oh yeah, bout 5-10 mins' don't believe them! It winds me up when they do it because then you don't know whether to wait outside, by the window or if you've got time to cook a 3 course meal! Either have a system in place that allows you to know exactly how long its going to take or just say, I don't know.

But I cant be angry anymore as this morning has made me incredibly happy, and fortunately leads me into my third topic, the game of egg-chasing.
Firstly congratulations to England who have kept their Grand Slam 6 Nations dream alive by beating the current champions France yesterday. The final score was 17-9 and it was a fair reflection of the game. England played a sloppy penalty ridden first half but whatever Martin Johnson said at half time worked a treat. Almost from the restart we scored a try and held a solid defence for the rest of the game. Both teams could have had 2 tries in the second half but some extremely good officiating meant they were ruled out.
Secondly, it has always been a dream of mine to visit the home of English rugby, Twickenham stadium.
                         
This dream will become a reality on St Georges day this year when myself and Mikey T will go and watch London Wasps take on Bath in the Aviva Premiership. And if this wasn't enough, with tickets costing £20. I will be returning to Twickenham for my second visit just over a month later to watch the Aviva Premiership Final!! I was expecting this to cost a lot more however there were tickets available for £40 and this allows me to sit in the lower tier! I'm so happy that this chance has arisen and will be incredibly excited when the day rolls round.

That's all I wanted to say today. Many thanks for reading and I shall be back soon with more thoughts for your reading pleasure.

Humble Pie, well, the crust at least - Delays Possible

So last week I had a rant at PFC. Yesterday I travelled to Doncaster to watch us play Donny at the beautiful Keepmoat Stadium (if you get the chance to go, do it!!)
Especially as an opposition fan as the Donny fans didnt sing one song yesterday!! An awful showing from the home crowd.

And Pompey won. Not only did Pompey win, they kept a clean sheet. Not only did Pompey win and keep a clean sheet, they played very well!

So I retract the sentence that we're fucked from last week. We still need a lot sorting, especially in the boardroom but the team played well. They ran for each other, passed well (ish) and defended...ish.
But what was amazing was our first clean sheet since early Dec came when Carl Dickinson, Ibrahima Sonko and Aaron Mokoena didn't play! except CD coming on as an extra defender in the 83rd minute, but whatever. Lawrence was a good captain but needs to learn to keep passing instead of trying to twist and turn out of the middle of 4 players!

Our new loanee Jonathan Hogg was sent off in the 88th minute, this was very unfair as the deliberate handball only happened as he jumped. And as everyone says, when you jump your arms come up as leverage. but the reason it wasn't deliberate was Hogg turned his back to the ball as he jumped, so couldn't have seen where it was going and therefore couldn't move his hand to block it, therefore it wasn't deliberate. Just saying.

But a wins a win.

So well done lads, just keep playing like that please!!

That's enough about PFC as I spoke in length about them last week.

This week I wanted to talk about roadworks, I say talk, I mean rant.

There are a lot of roadworks going on at the moment. I don't mind if the government want to widen roads or improve surfaces, this is obviously a good thing yes?

Well yes but if you are going to start roadworks and lower the speed limit to 50mph with average speed checks along long stretches of roads. DO SOME FUCKING WORK!!!

Twice now this year, I have travelled North and returned the same day. Going up at 7am and coming home at around 6pm onwards. And there's no one at these works ever!! So why am I going 50mph on a 3 lane road when there's no one around?! Dumb asses!

Also, if your going to CLOSE a stretch of the m25 on a Saturday night, TELL PEOPLE!! So to let all my readers know, the m25 will be closed between junction 9 & 10 every Saturday from 10pm until 6am until the end of March 2011. This would have been good to know before the 4 lanes got pushed into 1, and of course all the idiots driving past thinking they can sneak in further up causes a bottleneck at the junction and so increases the delay.  Twats!!

I'm getting angry again now, so I will leave you all to your lives until I bother you again.

Thanks for reading and as always, comments welcome.

Portsmouth Football Club: A Disaster Story

If you do not like football, or PFC, stop reading now. This blog is about the club I have supported all my life and my feelings towards the situation we are in at the moment.

Right now there are 2 words I can use to explain what is happening with PFC, We're Fucked.

We haven't won a league game since 11/12/2010 away at Norwich, which was also the last time we kept a clean sheet. We haven't won at home since 30/10/2010. These are startling facts.

We are paying for a few seasons of success, an FA Cup win, our first forrage into European competition and some high Premier League finishing positions. This was an incredible time to be a Pompey fan but last year it began to unravel and this is why I am writing this blog.....
We were relegated from the Premier League last season following a points deduction from entering administration. I, for one, did not have a problem leaving the league with the situation we found ourselves. It gives us time to rebuild and restructure the club. This is beginning to happen, although the guy that owns the club, Balram Chanrai has said that he doesn't want to keep the club. However, if you do want to sell an asset you need to make it an attractive prospect to buyers. PFC are currently 5 points clear of the relegation zone. Not the kind of position I'd look at if I wanted to purchase a team. So, if I were Baloo, I'd invest some money into the team whilst I owned it. Maybe upgrade the facilities or buy a few low-grade players to show that we have a squad with a lot of depth. But that's just me.

One question I have been pondering this week is, Would relegation to League 1 be that terrible?

Understandably, revenue would likely drop. TV money would be less, gates and replica shirt sales would fall, although PFC do boast an extremely proud fanbase.  But, if the team did well in the league, as Brighton are this season, you would expect more fans to come to games. it would be interesting for fans to go to other grounds and likely cheaper than PL and championship tickets and travel. So, I am not adverse to dropping another league as long as the men upstairs are prepared for this and have some solutions to build a squad etc. As we would have to sell the likes of Nugent, Kitson, Lawrence and so on. But that can be helpful towards bringing in revenue and gambling on buying low budget players from the conference/lower leagues. There is also this funny little list that shows all the players who are currently available to sign for free, why haven't we looked at this and gambled on a couple of the younger players. Ill post a link to the list in a second but you will see that there are some players released from the likes of Notts Forest academy. Teams like this boast incredible standards from their academies so we should look into it! I know wages will be a matter but if you offer an unemployed 18yr old pro footballer 5k a week, I'm sure he'll bite your hand off! Anyway, here's the list. Free Players, right here.
This would be a great way to build a decent League 1 team and challenge for promotion on a budget.

Moving on to talk about the current "team". I really don't know where to begin!!
How about the fact that we have 2 very good championship players under contract who we wont play for the rest of the season?! Um, WHAT!!
The reason we wont be playing them is that if we do, they instantly get a new contract next season on their current wages (estimated 20-30k a week). Which we clearly wont be able to afford, especially if were relegated. However, I have a few options that could be discussed whilst these 2 are sitting around doing sod all.
1) Drop the clause, they both know our situation and I'm sure they would understand that right now we cant promise to be able to pay those wages next season.
2) Keep the clause but ask them to take a pay cut to 15k or whatever we can realistically afford.
3) Apparently teams were looking at Michael Brown in the January transfer window. If he isn't going to play the rest of the season, teams wont be able to see how he's performing. So, tell him and Hughesy to play to keep them in the shop window so to speak. And to keep tabs on any clubs interested in them.

As for the rest of our squad at the moment, STOP DROPPING YOUR HEADS WHEN YOU MISS OR CONCEDE! This is going to happen in a game of football. Yesterday, when Derby scored, Liam Lawrence went ballistic at the defence. This was understandable as we always make schoolboy errors to let other teams score. But, just shake it off, its a game, we conceded, fine. Get the ball back on the centre spot and go for it! We eventually equalized and that's fantastic. But, we now need to look at keeping clean sheets and winning games. Realistically we need to win the next 4 home games and hopefully pick up points away as well. To do this we really need a new back 4, Hreidarsson is getting old and does not have the pace to play at left back against pacy younger right midfielders he faces. Sonko, well, um, yeah that's enough said about him. Moko is a decent CB but keeps booting the ball forward rather than looking for an outlet, who has an excellent partnership with Ricardo Rocha (when he's fit) but shouldn't be captain. Halford is a good player but keeps on getting caught out with players running across him, this has happened in the last 2 games when we have conceded. Up front, Kitson is useless, flicking it on to nobody, I'm not sure what happened to him as he used to play well when he first arrived. Nugget is a good player who knows this is his level but needs target practice to know not to put it at the keeper every time.

That's enough for now I think. We really need to start playing well and do everything we can to win games and stay in the championship. Easier said than done I know but I will use the same argument that everyone in the pub uses. Your job is to play football, one dream a lot of people would love to come true. Your making money in a week that some people don't even make in a year. Think about the fans and play out of your skin for them.

So I bid you all farewell, I hope you enjoyed reading my gripes and possible solutions for the club.

I will always support PFC whether we're relegated or whatever happens.

                  Portsmouth til I die. Play up Pompey, Pompey Play up.