premiership in 5 years?

[Kev Gee]

Looking a little distant at the moment Prince Abdullah?

You have to say the board have given Nigel some serious backing up to now.

What is it? 13-15 players signed?

 

[JJBlade]

You can sign 500 cheap players if they're not good enough, it will still only add up to signing two good quality players.

 

[Bladesman]

I doubt we will get there for a long long time.

 

[Lord Bos of Eckington.]

You can sign 500 cheap players if they're not good enough, it will still only add up to signing two good quality players.

The recipe for success and promotion seems to be sign good league 1 players with a mix of good loan signings from a higher division . Follow the same formula when in the championship and you are on to a winner . Whether you sign 5 or 500 players , quality is aways better than quantity and cream always rises to the top of the cup. Too much semi skinned and not enough cream in the side , but with the league being poor , we could still do it .

Premiership in five years . I cannot honestly say .I don't know were we will be week in week out with the blades. Lets aim for the championship this season and see where life takes us.

Pressure is mounting on Mr Clough . Lets hope COG makes the difference . Promotion this season , yes the premiership could be in sight . No promotion this year , forget it.

UTB

 

[GRUMPY BLADE]

The recipe for success and promotion seems to be sign good league 1 players with a mix of good loan signings from a higher division . Follow the same formula when in the championship and you are on to a winner . Whether you sign 5 or 500 players , quality is aways better than quantity and cream always rises to the top of the cup. Too much semi skinned and not enough cream in the side , but with the league being poor , we could still do it .

Premiership in five years . I cannot honestly say .I don't know were we will be week in week out with the blades. Lets aim for the championship this season and see where life takes us.

Pressure is mounting on Mr Clough . Lets hope COG makes the difference . Promotion this season , yes the premiership could be in sight . No promotion this year , forget it.

UTB

I've no desire to reach the Premiership but top ten Championship would delight me.

Don't take that as an opt out either McC, get thi hand in thi pocket.

 

[wizadry]

I think he got mixed up with the Championship in 5 years!

 

[Kenilworth]

Or the Northern Counties Prem?

 

[Bladesman]

Or the Northern Counties Prem?

That's a realistic target.

 

[Blade56]

Looking a little distant at the moment Prince Abdullah?

You have to say the board have given Nigel some serious backing up to now.

What is it? 13-15 players signed?

Someone once said Funny old game innit? How true, same goes for fans. We have always been supporters that will hound a manager if we are not doing well.
Funny though, NC comes along, buys players RL&C, makes us look like wannabe's in a piss poor league that we should be ripping apart and everyone is content to "give him time" admit "he's doing a job" "building" etc

Said it before THE KING HASN'T GOT ANY CLOTHES ON ffs

 

[GRUMPY BLADE]

That's a realistic target.

We'd fuck it up and get promoted instead.

 

[Worksop_Blade]

I've no desire to reach the Premiership but top ten Championship would delight me.

Don't take that as an opt out either McC, get thi hand in thi pocket.

Jesus Christ, people moan about the board lacking ambition.

Trip to Old Trafford to see the Blades' play some the world's best players in front of 80k?

Nah you're alright I'd rather visit the thunderdome of Football that is Griffin Park.

 

[Cyprus Blade]

Isn't 5 years about the time NC had to get Derby into the premiership from the bottom of the championship? Can't see it happening. 5 years maybe mid-table in championship.

 

[GRUMPY BLADE]

Jesus Christ, people moan about the board lacking ambition.

Trip to Old Trafford to see the Blades' play some the world's best players in front of 80k?

Nah you're alright I'd rather visit the thunderdome of Football that is Griffin Park.

I wouldn't be going to watch the worlds best players dive, I'd go to watch the Blades.

Never had any interest in the opposition unless we were beating the pigs.

 

[shorehamview]

Premier League and then Europe please. I'd quite like us to look a bit crap against Barcelona, instead of really crap against fucking Oldham.

 

[JJ Sefton]

Our next Premier League manager probably hasn't even been born yet.

 

[wizadry]

Premier League and then Europe please. I'd quite like us to look a bit crap against Barcelona, instead of really crap against fucking Oldham.

Our next Premier League manager probably hasn't even been born yet.

Iv'e got to admit these two posts have made me chuckle.Us Blades eh!

 

[robbiez666]

Premier League and then Europe please. I'd quite like us to look a bit crap against Barcelona, instead of really crap against fucking Oldham.

This sums up our fans. Satisfied with looking a bot crap against Barcelona. We should be beating teams like that, they don't even play a striker ffs. Hardly likely to score. I wish our supporters would show some ambition for once

 

[blade too long]

Looking a little distant at the moment Prince Abdullah?

You have to say the board have given Nigel some serious backing up to now.

What is it? 13-15 players signed?

looks miles better
than when he came , we were bottom of the table now we are in a play off spot, both hard facts

 

[Harry's Game]

I would take Championship in five years to be honest.

 

[Blade56]

I would take Championship in five years to be honest.

Keep it realistic ffs. Someone always has to go one step to far

 

[GRUMPY BLADE]

Jesus Christ, people moan about the board lacking ambition.

Trip to Old Trafford to see the Blades' play some the world's best players in front of 80k?

Nah you're alright I'd rather visit the thunderdome of Football that is Griffin Park.

If agreeing with this is a lack of ambition count me in, now fuck off to Old Trafford and enjoy it.

Cast your minds back to the recent past when the story of football and the supporters who breathe life into it was irrefutably accurate.
The narrative went something like this –

Once upon a time football was the working man’s game and men (predominantly) could take their kids each week and treat them to a programme and half-time pie while watching players who didn’t seemingly reside in an alien, gold-plated universe.
The son wants to bring a mate from school? No problem. Get permission from the parents and into the car they go.
Alternatively you could go with your mates; enjoy a few pints and sway and chant on the terraces, deafened by an electric atmosphere that crackled with passion and hatred in equal parts. Amidst the steam rising from the thronged bodies and the faint aroma of piss it was tribal in there. Exhilarating and brilliant.

One day a big bad wolf called Sky came along and threw a great big bag of money at the game thus ruining everything. Players’ wages spiralled into unimaginable lunacy, luring in mercenaries from abroad with little emotional link or loyalty to the club’s shirt. Each club’s bloodline of young local talent was severed forever – doing irreparable damage to the national side – while in the ticket office ‘our Barb’ was replaced by an automated service. These and hundreds of other examples meant the club that was once the sporting heartbeat of a community became, in time, a cold stone and steel edifice with delusions of grandeur.
Games meanwhile were switched from Saturday to Sunday to Monday on a television companies’ whim. That train ticket you purchased in advance for the weekend away hundreds of miles from home? I hope it’s redeemable because now it’s on a week night, necessitating time off work, further extortionate travel costs, not to mention a match ticket that’s a fifth of your weekly wage. All this to sit in a vacuous glorified library sitting on plastic seats surrounded by plastic tourists a few feet below guys in suits standing behind glass who have got in for free because their brother works for Heineken.
At least you get to enjoy a pint of Heineken yourself at half-time. In a plastic cup of course and on the concourse. You want to drink whilst watching the game? What are you, some kind of animal? Oh and that will be six quid please.
Your team loses 1-0 and they screech out ‘Just can’t Get Enough’ over the tannoy when the goal goes in.
Unfortunately there is no happy ever after to this tale as a few days later it starts all over again. The seasoncard that cost you over a grand and sustained grief from your partner is used to watch a player on a hundred times that a week limp off with mild fatigue before leaving the ground in a supercar usually only seen in Fast and Furious 7.
The end? There is no end.

The above has purposely been written as a fairy tale because that is slowly and maliciously how the past twenty-two years is being rebranded. The established narrative for how the beautiful game became the soulless, expensive, distant incarnation we all know it as today is perniciously being distorted as a work of fiction and worst of all it’s the ordinary supporters – the new villains of the piece – who are unintentionally aiding and abetting the outrageous lie.
Let me elaborate.
This week saw yet another example of supporters getting it in the neck as Villa Park saw its lowest attendance since 1999. Firstly stats be damned because sometimes you have to defer to empirical knowledge and I know from a lifetime of eating, shitting and breathing football that Villa fans are right up there with the best and most loyal around. They always take numbers away; the Holte End is a formidable roaring beast; and they cede to few for noise or passion. This despite enduring decades of unfulfilled hope, the complete absence of silverware, and Bosko Balaban.

The attendance for their fixture vs Southampton was 25,311 which, to my mind, represents a respectable return for a Monday night game, during a prolonged spell of poor football and results, a month before Christmas, and when tickets were £40 upwards. The tempting alternative of course was to stay at home, in front of a toasty fire, and watch the game on Sky and the figure suggests to me that all of the die-hards chose the first option while some of the fair-weather fans opted for the latter.
Considering the factors mentioned above who could blame them? Well, disgracefully some portions of the press could and did, along with rival supporters who gleefully scoffed and called them out for disloyalty on social media.
Sky themselves could barely hide their disgust at the empty seats which really is the height of hypocritical sadism and akin to offering someone a warm chocolate fudge cake then making snidey comments as they enjoy it. “Look at you eating that. You disgust us. You know you’re going to get fat right?”
Certainly the lowest attendance for fifteen years by a top flight club warrants some media glare. But surely the angle should have been how and why.

Why we’re sick and tired of being royally ripped off and taken for granted. Being expected to pay four times what fans in Germany do and that’s before you get to the over-priced excuse for a stadium hot dog.
How staging games on a Monday night inevitably lessens atmosphere. We’re not Americans and we’ve never bought into it.
How Sky are fucking killing the game that we love, bombarding us with sanitised, Rooney-obsessed hyperbole.
Instead – disgracefully – it was the supporters who took the blunt of it. Those protesting with their feet over Paul Lambert’s miserable tenure. Those unable to get out of work in time to travel into the congested city centre on a Monday evening. Those who cannot afford tickets in a sustained and cruel recession.
Lock them up and throw away the key I say.

This was only the latest in an increasing trend of fan scapegoating.
Recently we witnessed multi-millionaire Paul Scholes enjoying an all-expenses-paid hospitality-laden trip to the Etihad and wasting no time in laying into the Manchester City supporters for generating too little atmosphere for a Champions League game. Bizarrely this was uttered in his atmospheric monotone voice a half hour BEFORE the game was due to start and as he purveyed a half-empty stadium the former United schemer couldn’t resist having a further dig on City’s supposed lack of attendance.
Meanwhile supporters were busy navigating a gridlocked city centre, sweating on making the TV-friendly kick-off time, with a ticket in their pocket they’ve worried their overdraft to attain.
Over on Twitter Scholes’ ex-team-mate Rio Ferdinand dispensed with feigned serious analysis and openly mocked non-attending Blues. He tweeted “Big CL game and fans would rather Ramsey’s Kitchen”.
Is it only me who finds it somewhat sick when multi-millionaires – fabulously rich from the loyal support and merchandise-purchasing of the paying public – ridicule those who currently don’t have a pot to piss in through a bleak economy? Yet this is fast becoming the norm and is occurring unchallenged in a new narrative where Sky, Murdoch, and the Premier League are no longer the villains of what the sport has become. Rather it is us, the life and blood of the game, who are now apparently to blame for the banality of what passes for modern football.
That City match is particularly pertinent to myself. As a Blue I have travelled the length and breadth of the country watching pre-takeover dross and post-takeover wonderment. On this occasion two simultaneous bills arriving the day before the game meant I had a straightforward choice to make –attend the Roma game or eat that week. How was your pre-match hors d’oeuvres Scholes?

We’ve also recently seen Jose Mourinho turn on his own fans for their apparent lack of atmosphere – presumably they’re too busy reeling from the astronomical price of admission to the Bridge – while Emmanuel Adebayor took matters into the realms of the surreal by chiming in with criticism of Spurs fans.
When a player on £200k a week who is known for putting in the minimum of effort – and only then when the mood takes him – feels he can slag off supporters for enthusiastic shortcomings you just know the game is up.

I’m reluctant to haul the wider frame of politics into this but elsewhere in recent years we’ve witnessed often the sick and twisted strategy of blaming the victim for societies’ ills. While bankers gamble away our economy and spiral us into a 21st century depression and multi-billion corporations refuse to pay their tax it appears that the reason you and I are struggling at present is all the fault of a bloke trying to make ends meet by cleaning windows while on incapacity benefit.
The media relentlessly hound the poor, the ordinary, and anyone whose surname ends in a vowel yet give a free pass to the rich and powerful who are immorally screwing this country into the dust.
It appears this very same macabre master plan is now slowly seeping into football.
Yet, as if this wasn’t distasteful enough, there isn’t even solid grounding to the claims. While the average price of a Premier League matchday ticket has risen 15% since 2011 attendances continue to rise with grounds 96% full last term, an increase of 2.1% from the previous year.

As always we are more than doing our bit. As always we are going above and beyond.
As for atmosphere it is impossible to use statistical data to assess whether it is indeed quieting. But anyone who has attended a PL game in recent years will know all-too-well that everything is stacked against us in this regard.
When clubs threaten you with eviction if you have the temerity to stand – or even shout or become agitated in some cases – it is extremely difficult to rouse an electric atmosphere sitting in the plastic, sterile environment of someone else’s making.
Throughout the years we have been caged like animals, demonised as the scourge of society, baton-charged by foreign police, fleeced stupid, overcharged and under-appreciated. We are not taking the fall for this one.
The next time a club’s fanbase receives criticism for not filling its ground and jumping about wildly at a ludicrously-paid striker going through the motions please refrain from joining in. Stymie your every instinct to ‘bantz’ a rival. Instead consider the source. A manager with a motivational agenda. A deluded player living in a fantasy world. An ex-player pathetically trying to gain a reputation for straight-shooting. A media thoroughly bored of the old narrative. And overall a depressing reversion to assumed type that somehow the supporters are always to blame.

 

[blade too long]

All football is over analysed these days and it bores the pants off me , crowds are falling , not just because of hideous ticket prices but the overkill of live games.Theres football every night of the week available , and most of it pretty bland fare,
Its partly why I find slagging off our performances as poor , when you know there championship and prem games lauded as entertaining and thrilling on the ads turning out to be a cure for insomnia. I watched 2 spanish games this week and the throw ins were the highlight of one of them .
The use of satelite here allows me to get Andy Gray and Richard Keys again on bwin , Id forgotten what a pair of tedious pricks they are.
I reckon if theres 10 15 live games available each week that means theres 15 hours of inane pre amble and post game analysis, I really must get a life I keep thinking .
Plus when you see Ronaldo and Messi and the other 30m plus players, on tv its not helping when you go the Lane and watch a tussle against Crewe and subliminally think the quality is low here, course it is, Effort and determination , on post game analysis of our games replace words like star quality and natural ability , we have just now to accept that , and pray it gets better .

 

[Worksop_Blade]

Football is full of jealous bastards.

If you're not one of the 20 Premier League teams, generally a section of your fanbase will be jealous bastards making up excuses about how good the old days were.

The old days when people died at matches due to unsafe grounds, English teams couldn't play in Europe because the mongs couldn't stop fighting each other and Sheffield United were to borrow a phrase from a popular celebrity of the time "surprise, surprise" still shite.

It might upset you to know that every single senior member of staff at the Lane is dreaming of a return to the Premier League and if it means replacing turgid old timers with younger free spending fans they will and they won't give a shit about it.

Footballs moved on.

 

[GRUMPY BLADE]

.

Footballs moved on.

So glad it has?






I'm certainly not jealous of that lot, your welcome to it.



I'll stick to my memories then

 

[Worksop_Blade]

So glad it has?






I'm certainly not jealous of that lot, your welcome to it.



I'll stick to my memories then

Keep them,

We'll make new ones...

 

[GRUMPY BLADE]

Keep them,

We'll make new ones...

Looking forward to the Higdon hat trick tonight.