Or Rangers!

Wrong.

Whilst I don't begrudge Neill for having ambitions to play for a club that challenges for titles and so on, but his constant contact with the media is very annoying. All he is doing is making himself look a bit arrogant, and that he doesn't give a monkey's about his current club. I wish he said his bit at the beginning of the season, and left it at that.

My thoughts exactly.

Well, as a man who apparently wears a skirt, I'd like to say firstly that I'm immensely proud of Scotland for a battling display where we rode our luck, took our chance and then defended like hell; and secondly that the England result didn't bother me one way or the other.

It was very good, if a little confused. There are three particular sequences, all filmed in one take each, that are worth going for alone.

Check out Richard Cheese - lounge singer with interesting tastes!

Baby Got Back

Homepage

The cover of that god-awful Disturbed song Sickness that featured in the new Dawn of the Dead was amazing.

I saw Children of Men yesterday. Breathtaking.

Hoping to see The Departed before too long.

Where you in that Jack Daniels (?) pub before the game - the one where the Celtic fans came in.

Now that's an well-organised pub - home supporters in the bar, away supporters in the lounge. Great football pub.

Strange, the worst atmospheres I've experienced at SPL games have always been in the East Stand at Fir Park (Motherwell), having been to Parkhead and Ibrox several times. It all depends which element of any given support you're sitting among.

Not a bad draw at all. Newcastle and Spurs' groups look almost suited to the Champions League.

Hooray, a good, old-fashioned, internet flame fest starting!

Incidentally, Souness never had much success as a manager after Rangers. He presided over Liverpools decline from giants to some form of dwarf, managed to spend a lot of cash and get Rovers relegated (although in fairness he was in charge when we got back into the prem) and his time at Newcastle could be kindly described as "a shambles". Whether or not her dislike of him was sectarian, it was certainly prescient

Wonder what'll happen if Sparky likes the look of some of the Rangers players?

I very briefly thought Tugay4England had gone completely mental there.

MOTD wasn't a good reflection of the game.

The one chance everyone seems to be referring to is when Euell went right through the middle of Neill and Zurab and missed the target when 1 on 1 with Brad. That one moment was not a microcosm of the game as a whole.

Noticeable that Ooijer was further up the field at that moment taking care of Yakubu I think. 99% of the time he seemed to boss the back line - as others have said a really encouraging performance from him on Saturday with some great interceptions with his head and on the ground.

On this evidence Henchoz won't get near the side and the idiot Todd will be off in January.

I didn't get to see Sky's extended highlights, so I won't pretend to have a full grasp of how the game went, but the defence parting like that - happened at least twice - is the sort of unforced error that better teams than Boro will exploit, no matter how good our overall play is. I'm not trying to trying to rain on our proverbial parade, more just trying occupy the middle ground between the usual "We lost! This is the end!/We won! Champion's League, here we come!" posts.

Having seen the highlights on Saturday night, it looks like there are still a few kinks in the defence that need to be ironed out. Someone said a few pages back they were at times doing an imitation of a pair of curtains - not 'arf, mate.

I saw The Misfits last night, and I'm practically deaf in my left ear. Good gig, even excusing the fact that Jerry Only is a horrendous singer (and that there are more Black Flag members in the band than actual Misfits these days ).

Numpty. Its Zurab crapiness thats making Oijer and the rest of the back four dodgy.

Wait, Zurab forced Oojier into hauling down Terry on his debut? Zurab caused him to get brutalised by Drogba's pace? Give me a break.

Disclaimer: This is not an Oojier-bashing post.

Good result, with important factors like the first away win (and goal!), Nonda scoring on his first start, a good Oojier performance (so I hear) and a clean sheet making for a very satisfying and encouraging Saturday afternoon.

I highly recommend it. I've had mine for well over a year and have still only used around 2% of my inbox despite only ever having deleted the odd bit of spam that sneaks through the very effective filter.

Out of interest I've been recomended to read Orson Scott Card's series The Tales of Alvin Maker. If anyone has read them could they tell me if they thought they were any good and if they were 'deep'. books (I can't do deep fiction, I like my reading to move at a fast pace.)

I've read the first three. They move fairly quickly but are very oddly paced books. The first book has only six chapters but takes place over about ten years. Similarly around nine years are skipped in the space between two chapters in the third book.

The first book, Seventh Son, is something of an appetiser for the rest of the series. I thoroughly enjoyed the second book, Red Prophet (there is a twenty page period towards the end that ranks highly among the best things I've ever read) and though the third was good. I've been thinking about going back to the series lately.

Anyway, intiligent but briskly written stories. Recommended.

Darren Peacock a snip at £4 million

I'm baffled as to who would cite Nathan Blake as worst ever signing - not the best, but not too bad either and scored some goals in our promotion season. Remember quite a few he scored, including one at Gillingham after we'd won promotion. So, not a hero but hardly deserves to be lumped with Davies and Grabbi.

....

at £5.3million, Christian Dailly, were all awful.

Blake and Dailly weren't awful players for us, but in terms of value for money they were bad, bad signings. As I said a few posts up, the transfer market was going mental around that time, I guess those two signings were pretty indicative of the whole situation.

I've always liked Dailly as a player, but the fact that we sold him for £1.75m only a few seasons later tells its own story.

I have a Megadrive emulator and play whenever I feel a bout of nostalgia. I still love the Sonic games and the second Ecco the Dolphin game is another goodie. I'm not sure if its because I played the second one more as a young 'un, but the first one is impossible! From about the second or third level onwards (out of about twenty-five!) its banging your head off the monitor material.

sutton has some good qualities, i would complain if we got him

Depends what we'd be paying him, but I agree he'd have something to offer.

Southend 3

B Paynter 87

L Hunt 89

F Eastwood 90

Brighton 2

D Cox 71

A El-Abd 90

Bloody hell!

Flippin' heck!

Please tell me it went 0-1, 1-1, 2-1, 2-2, 3-2 rather than getting to 3-1 followed by a consolation. Pleeeease.

Its really got to be Davies, hasn't it? He cost about half a million more than Grabbi (£6.7m->£7.25m), so that's my justification.

The money we paid for him and Blake was indicitave of how crazy football was going between the late 90s and early 2000s.

Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly

Gragh. If I see another band/artist with an oh-so-cute name like this (see: you Say Party! We Say Die!, Help! She Can't Swim etc) I think my head might actually explode.

I managed to miss the first half on Sky's highlights and had to watch MOTD to catch any of it. I think I was spared a stress related ulcer having all that condensed into a few minutes. Not since we got beaten in the UEFA Cup by the Turksih club a few years ago have I seen a Rovers defence look so utterly inept. I dread to think what would have happened to us without those those two delightfully jammy goals.

The second half showed a lot of promise though and Hughes deserves immense credit for turning it around. The Axe did exactly the job we had been needing in the first 45 and Nonda looked pretty sharp - that turn he made near the end was exquisite. Props as well to Morten for being alert enough to move so quickly for the throw-in that led to the third goal.

Hopefully finally getting a bit of luck will spur the boys on. We've proved we can score goals, I just hope the defence can get its collective act together sharpish.