nice article on Danny Baker, Everton and Luxembourg

and Wales U21

and nishlord has an excellent piece on jimmy sirrel

This WSC cover had my first instance of "Who the fuck is that?" that I can remember. I was pretty sure the ginger chap was Butt but as for the weird-looking bloke on the right, I had no idea. How long has Owen been looking like that, for goodness' sake?

since he realised he can't sprint any more so had better bulk up (possibly shearer whispered this idea in his ear.)

all part of the new manly owen, trying to dispel the image of a man with paper hamstrings.

i still think making everyone refer to him as MIKE would have had the same effect and been a lot easier.

Little help please. The photo montage on pages 24-25, i can see neville scholes and beckham, but who is the other youth player?

a couple of slimey references to Uncle Jack Walker and a half-sneering article about Blackburn Rovers attempts at cultural diversity aside, its a good issue

liked the article by david conn about franny lee at man city

Haven't really had the chance to thumb through it properly yet, but hearty congratulations from the guy from Football Filter, who made WSC's "Site Of The Month".

Only a matter of time, 200%.

I have spent much of the last two years keeping my fingers crossed that WSC will ignore THP, for fear of getting ripped to shreds over my spelling errors, hopeless inconsistencies and general tendency to ramble on too much to not much effect. Never meet your idols, that's what I say.

Haha. Last week I had two threads on two separate message boards saying how shit my blog is and what a cunt I am. This is the closest I will ever get to an award. I was lapping it up, like a thirsty cat.

Having said that, my hard-hitting piece on the credit crunch and the recession will surely earn me some sort of Pulitzer to go alongside my Young Journalist Of The Year award.

I don't get very much criticism at all, largely because I'm at pains to emphasise that, you know, it doesn't really matter that much in the overall scheme of things.

Your piece about the credit crunch, by the way, is spot on in its inference. Just as people that didn't run up £100,000 worth of debt on credit cards and take out mortgages that they can't afford if interest rates go up don't have much to worry about it all unless they suffer something drastic like losing their jobs, so football clubs that have been running themselves prudently and haven't been borrowing massively beyond their means don't have much to fear from it all unless their income drops massively.

The problem for the clubs that have been prudently run (such as FC United) is this: there is no reward for having not got yourself into a ton of debt over the last few years. I, for example, have built up a tiny nest of savings and acted responsibly throughout the last ten years of madness. I would still probably need to find a £15,000 deposit and have to pay a higher interest rate if I wanted to buy a flat now because mortgages are so much harder to find than they were a couple of years ago. So we can't, even though we can comfortably afford it now.

FC United may raise, say, £1m towards a new ground, but they may still need to borrow to get a plot of land and a ground that they actually want, and will also find this more difficult because of the recklessness of others. Football isn't considered, by banks, to be the safest investment in the world, and FCUM would have to pay a significantly higher interest rate than they would have done if they'd just said, "Yeah, we want to borrow £5m and it doesn't matter whether we can repay it or not" a couple of years ago. Crazy.

We need to raise £500k apparently. Most of the cash is coming from grants and funding.

Are the council onside with this, then?

Yeah. I think it's largely going to be a council owned facility. I can't remember the ins and outs of it, but it's something along those lines.