congrats, enjoy the win.

i'm gutted.

--

thoughts on the pen?

Thanks

Check us being all civilised

Pen was fairly soft but by letter of the law it was a pen, 100% a free kick in middle of park so don't think anyone can complain much

only being civil cos i didn't lose any more money to you today

haha yeah **** forgot about that! damn you should have PM'd me

But yeah we were superb today and 2-0 a fair reflection imo

where in the law does it say you get a pen/fk for tripping up on your own feet?

also, Forbes must have thought he was Bougherra today - 7 fouls before he got booked.

and needless to say, that pitch is beyond a disgrace - it's an embarrassment.

tilt much

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMvvT0StT48

lol italy

awesome

Oldham did that to us once. ****s.

yeah, for the record, i thought the reaction was awesome, not so much the cause it

Anyone signing up for Euro tickets tomorrow? Anyone know how the draw works and which games are worth signing up for (ie. Games with the big teams).

lololololololol

Totally classless but why would you kick it out for an injured player these days? Leave the ref to do his job and have him stop the game if needed.

Disgraceful scenes to be honest. The goal: Shameful. The reaction: Undefendable.

I couldn't help but have a good laugh though.

interesting that Foggia are currently trained by the GOAT manager

idiot kicks his teams mascot, fans call him a murderer, has to get armed escort off the pitch to protect him from his own fans

You just saw that on SSN didn't you because so did I. I hate **** like that.

nah Kev, my connection at FIFA just informed me of this tragedy.

--

any of the Aussies Queensland Fury fans?

A-League restructured and they have been kicked out of the league over financial worries.

what sort of financial worries? - huge debts - owners pretending they have money but they don't (Portsmouth style)?

I was just about to post it smarty marty.

my cousins mates son is in Glasgow to play for Celtic V Rangers u16s (i'm not sure exactly when this is taking place, might be today but it could also have been yesterday), Celtic want him and have been after him for some time - Hull are also interested and have offered him a 2 year scholarship and 1 year pro terms - from what i've heard he is Celtic mad (like his dad).

apparently Hull have treated him better when visiting (shocker, not), but his heart is with Celtic.

hope it goes well for him.

/csb.

I hope that guy kicking the owl gets shot

Sounds like a fair and balanced punishment.

Well I obv wasn't being 100% serious but I hope he breaks a leg or something. Why people hurt animals for no gain I'll never know

Cliffnotes on North Queensland Fury situation in the last few years.

- A-League starts in 05-06, and the first four years only 8 teams are in the competition (Perth, Adelaide, Queensland Roar, Sydney, Newcastle, Central Coast, Melbourne and a Kiwi side) the first 4 years are general hassle free, except the Kiwi side gets disbanded and restarted in a different city in New Zealand. It was in Auckland, and is now based in Wellington with some games in Christchurch and other NZ places.

- After the first four seasons, where all clubs had to put up a large amount of starting capital to the league and basically had to show their work, the league decides to expand to 10 teams. For some reason the criteria for entering the league is let up a bit for these next teams to enter the league.

- For some cluster**** of a reason, they decide to change the number of teams in Queensland, third biggest state in Australia, from 1 team to 3 straight away. The new teams are North Queensland Fury (NQF), up in Townsville and not the worst spot to start a team, and Gold Coast (GC), which is very close to Brisbane and in general a horrible decision since Queensland Roar (now called Brisbane Roar for various reasons) is still somewhat breakeven in the market and Melbourne, a city of 4ish million people still only has 1 team at this time. (now two)

- First season is terrible for both NQF and GC for various reasons. NQF struggle on the pitch at times and in general lose a ******** of money. Robbie Fowler gets mega pissed and decides at the end of the season to piss off to my team Perth Glory. GC have laughable attendences and at one point decide to close off 3/4 of their stadium to save money on bills. Hilariously, the side the crowd is on is the camera side, so it looks like every game they play is behind closed doors. FWIW Queensland Roar, the original QLD team, averaged 13k the season before expansion, and the season after, averaged 8k while GC averaged 5k. Figure that one out...

- The owner of NQF bails because he is losing something like 50k a week in operation costs. The team goes under ownership of the FFA (governing body) and in general when this happens your team goes to ****, which happened this year. However, unlike when Perth and Adelaide went under FFA ownership, NQF were not allowed to attempt to resign there own players! Since almost all their best players (everyone bar David Williams, who some of you guys might remember from Brondby back in the day) were originally signed on two year contracts. This lead to all their best players eventually getting poached by other teams such as Pasfield, Cernak, Payne and a bunch of others, in a situation where NQF COULDNT EVEN NEGOTIATE terms, so ldo they all ended up leaving. This left the team with pretty much no players for next season, and if they had have been in the comp then they would have had a hard task to get a side together for this season.

- FFA said the club needed to get 1.5MM together to justify getting a licence, they didnt but were apperenetly pretty close. As such, they were given the banstick and next season will probably be a 10 team league rather then the 11 we had this year, when Melbourne Heart joined the league the year after the Qld teams did. (You might remember MH from Kevin Muscat's disgusting tackle on Adrian Zahra, ****)

Cliffs for those who dont care

- LOL A-League

I might also add that the A-League isnt like the EPL and the football league with promotion/relegation and the likes. It has been set up with a franchise based model with only 3 teams that started the A-League in 05-06 having actually existed in the previous version, the National Soccer League, those being Perth, Adelaide and Newcastle.

FWIW most of the clubs in the old NSL that had ethnic ties when it disbanded either went back to state leagues such as Melbourne Knights and South Melbourne or completely disbanded such as Parramatta Power.

The Australian football story over the last 10 years is actually a fascinating one, there was a great montage put together on a local program last year that I have still recorded on my TV at home, because its quite inspiring at times... mainly because of