All down with the Hammers in 2003, hence my surprise at philipl's statement regarding relegated clubs and the crapness of their players.

Only just saw that, and had to comment: What do J Cole, M Carrick, G Johnson, J Defoe, F Kanoute, England's David James and Trevor Sinclair have in common?

Quite harsh, really. If Dunn could be rehabilitated - and there's only one way to find out if that's possible - it would be the best thing Hughes could possibly do for most Rovers supporters. Just because the guy has been unlucky with injuries and fell foul of Souness, doesn't mean you should write him off. Maybe an progressive, intelligent, sympathetic manager like Hughes is what he needs. And if not Hughes, would you be happy to see Dunn rediscover his career at Bolton?

A bunch of Liverpool fans attacked the ambulance carrying Smith to hospital. They kept that one pretty quiet at the weekend.

I suppose having your defenders play among loads of divots would be an equal disadvantage for the home team, too. Whatever a club does to maximise their chances at half-time is all part of the game - home advantage and all that. It's no different from the home fans booing and waving during penalties, or the away team getting the dressing room with rusty nails poking out of the benches.

Sometimes a little spittle is more than justified - Frank Rijkaard gobbing a lungful into the back of Voller's mullet remains one of the greatest football images for me.

each to his own, I suppose

Well, if it puts out half as much heat as the 360, it'll be able to flash fry a steak in two minutes flat.

I wish it didn't look so much like a Bang & Olufsen design! Still, if they're going to make a gigantic console, let's hope there's room for some soundproofing inside. I got an Xbox 360 last week, and it's ridiculously noisy when it's spinning a game disc - my girlfriend thought the washing machine was on.

The BBC cut away from the replays as soon as the full nastiness became apparent, despite Lawrenson. The Sun has the full story today, along with close-up pics and 'bone through sock' quotes from Smith. Not for the squeamish!

Anything you might read about possible release dates and pricing is completely made up. Look, I'll start a rumour: PS3 will launch worldwide between September and November 2006. UK price will be £250 Hard drive will be extra, and will enable PVR functions The controller won't be that batarang thing they showed last year. Take your pick!

If you don't mind getting an Amiga emulator going, this remains one of the best football games ever made: Sensible World of Soccer. For me, it's a lot more fun than the 3D efforts like FIFA or PES, where you can never be sure if a goal is down to your own skill or the computer's assistance. Plus it has a Champ Man database of pretty much every player in world football from 1995. Well worth the effort of tracking it down and getting it running on a PC (actually not too hard if you've used emulators before). Edit: aaaaand it was mentioned right at the top of the thread.

I sincerely hope the NotW/Sun doesn't have the cheek to print England flags and declare themselves 'official' England newspaper this summer. Bunch of simple-minded idiots.

True. And by the time the next HD movie format has been decided, companies will want to sell us something else. Seen these HVD discs? One terabyte of storage. We'll be playing games on a Star Trek holodeck soon enough.

It's strange that you're all claiming this stuff isn't necessary. You should work for Nintendo - they say that flashy HD graphics aren't necessary. In fact, they used to say that CDs weren't necessary either. You're into gaming, right? Someone's offering you a tech that might just facilitate a new kind of immersiveness in games... So why say it's pointless simply because Microsoft wasn't able to adopt it? If they had waited six or eight months before launching the 360, they would have used HD-DVD. Would you have said that was a waste of money or a great piece of forward thinking?

Out of those, the only one that looks massively better than anything on Xbox 1 is Call Of Duty - and if a short, simple war game produced for 360's launch eats 7GB, it looks like developers will run our of space sooner rather than later. Most importantly for gamers, the best title of this generation (GTA) won't be possible on 360 if Rockstar keeps to its promise of making full use of the space on a Blu-Ray disc. Remember when Bill Gates claimed that '640k ought to be enough for anybody'? And the Commodore 64 used an elephant in its adverts, to show how gargantuan its memory was? And it seemed like there was absolutely no way you could ever fill a 20MB hard drive?

Nope, you're wrong. If you're looking for a leap in quality to truly justify the term 'next-gen' then you need to set developers free from current storage limitations. Sure, not many have run into problems with standard DVDs on the last generation of consoles, but now you're talking about faster machines with several times the memory, running high-def textures and streaming 5.1 channel audio as standard. DVD is no longer enough for that.

That link is nonsense. You won't find many game developers who are happy with having to squeeze their code onto a DVD. Look at GTA San Andreas - a PS2 title that's absolutely crammed onto a standard DVD. With high-def graphic data and better quality sound on the new-gen consoles, you couldn't do a game like that on a single 360 DVD. The only reason 360 uses ordinary DVDs is because it was rushed to market. Too late to change anything now but the kind of games that will be possible on PS3 will make their 360 equivalents look weak. PS I'm no fanboy. I'll probably have both of them, plus a Revolution.

PS3 might actually be worth it. The 360 is 'just' a games console, but the PS3 will be half the price of the cheapest dedicated Blu-Ray player when it comes out.

£270 for a console is amazingly steep. I was thinking of selling my ordinary Xbox to help fund it, but they're not worth much on Ebay these days. Hurry up, PS3!

Spokesman for Pioneer (manufacturers of the Blu-Ray drive) claim there will be 4-7million PS3s shipped this year. Like the Xbox 360, it may well be another six months after launch before most people can get their hands on them.

Glad to hear romance is as alive and well among supporters as it is among chairmen.

I didn't mean he hasn't justified his place, but it could be counter-productive to play him. They have this excellent striker who they'll be allowed to use for maybe a handful of games, and then he'll be gone. The team will be much weaker because of the void he leaves behind, and even if they could afford a replacement of equal quality, there's no chance of attracting that sort of player. What if we had the next Maradona at Blackburn, the team started to look like a Champions League side with him in it, and then his agent effectively said 'get ready to kiss him goodbye'? We'd never be able to replace him, and the transfer fee would be no consolation to the average supporter.

Regardless of whether Theo Walcott is the next Wayne Rooney or just another Jermaine Pennant, this transfer saga pretty much sums up what's wrong with football. Southampton find and develop an excellent prospect, and the fans have every right to be looking forward to seeing a player who might get them promoted and form the basis of a decent side. But thanks to the power of money and its agents, the only reason Walcott ever turned out in a Southampton shirt was to put him in the shop window. There was no chance of him ever playing more than a handful of games there - he was put in the team simply to prove to the Big Boys that he was as good as the Southampton PR machine said he was. Job done. So what's the point of a club like Southampton even existing? If this happened to Blackburn, I can't imagine ever going to a game again.

How could you expect appearance money -- or any kind of fee -- for a player who has been completely useless since 2002?