JFK-1

Costing around $100 to see on pay per view in the US and about $30 in the UK. For what will be a total farce if Mayweather is still even half the fighter he was. Could be over inside 3 to 4 rounds. Though in saying that I used to pay to see Tyson in his prime knowing there was every chance he could put them away in the first minute.

Manchester United have re-signed Zlatan Ibrahimovic on a one-year contract. http://www.bbc.com/sport/football/41040655

I feel Rooney has made the right decision at the right time. He's at a point where little niggling knocks will become more common and take longer to shake off. He has to focus entirely on Everton though in saying that if it were me I would have in the back of my mind that if I hit a rich vein of form and one last chance at a world cup crops up and they come begging me to go along then I might reconsider.

But there's another side to that coin. With Motherwell he's often a lone wolf trying to take on an entire defence single handed and still getting goals. In our team he will be supported by a pack of assistants drawing bodies off creating more space/options for him. And at the ed of the day what else are we supposed to do? Never sign any strikers at all because what's the point when they will be playing against a wall of 10 men? If that were the case it would have been pointless signing Morelos too because I doubt he was playing against 10 man walls in Finland.

It's still early I suppose at just 3 games in but i'm definitely concerned about this since we appear to have shelled out around 3 million on him. He's hardly some lost boy far from home which could have been a valid excuse for young Morelos who appears to be just fine. He's a 27 year old adult and allegedly a professional footballer. This isn't a life sentence it's a few years earning good money doing what he presumably enjoys, playing football at a professional level then he can go home. Just start doing it already.

Depends what he's defining as one of the top payed players in the world. Top 100? Very possibly at that time which was before the big money TV deals began to materialise. If I remember correctly Gascoigne was on around 30K a week when he joined and you would have to guess he was one of the worlds top paid players. Keep in mind this was 20 years ago and even just a few years ago I saw it mentioned that the average EPL wage was around 35K or so a week. Yes the likes of Rooney were on much more but that's an elite top bracket not the average.

I presumed that to be a misunderstanding by the journalist who wrote this and what Kanchelkis actually meant was that Klos had a contract worth 4.5 million.

How did you form the opinion that the boy can have no effect on results? Personally I know nothing about him but i'm presuming the DoF does and if the boy can bring nothing to the team then he's not doing his job.

ANDREI KANCHELSKIS spent four years at Rangers, won five trophies and wrote his name into the history books. The Russian was one of a host of multi-million pound signings made by Dick Advocaat and he would delight the Ibrox crowd with his dazzling wing play and natural ability. There were as many highs as there were lows, though. In part one of a serialisation of his autobiography, ‘Russian Winters’, Kanchelskis details his stormy relationship with Advocaat, explains why Rangers failed in Europe and reveals all about an end of season trip to Marbella. RANGERS won five trophies in my first two years at Ibrox. Judged by that, Dick Advocaat, who people nicknamed ‘The Little General’ because of his size, seems a very good manager. However, I didn’t enjoy playing under him and found him a very arrogant man who smiled very little. He was not in the same class as Alex Ferguson, Claudio Ranieri or Valery Lobanovsky, although he probably imagined he was. Advocaat treated his players as if they were at a public school or a military academy. When we finished training we would go to Ibrox for lunch, which would be served at exactly two o’clock. Not five past, not five to, but at 2pm precisely. Latecomers were fined. You would only be allowed to start eating when Advocaat came into the room and wished everyone ‘bon appétit’ or whatever. You could not leave the dining room to go home until everyone had finished. I hadn’t had to obey those kinds of instructions since I was in the army and when I signed for Rangers I was approaching thirty years of age. I thought his favouritism towards the Dutch players at Ibrox was blatant and it scarred my attitude towards him. I trained hard but, whether rightly or wrongly, I thought that when he picked me for some games Advocaat wanted me to fail. Tactically, he was nowhere near as impressive as Ferguson. When I arrived at Ibrox, Rangers were as dominant in the Scottish Premier League as Manchester United had been in the Premier League when I’d left Old Trafford. However, Ferguson’s tactics were nearly always aggressive. He would always back Manchester United to outscore the opposition. Advocaat was generally far more cautious. When Rangers attacked, the instructions were generally to leave five in defence or well behind the ball. What gave Advocaat the edge over Celtic were the huge financial resources that David Murray made available to him. He paid a Scottish record transfer fee for me. He spent only slightly less – £4.5m – to bring Arthur Numan from PSV Eindhoven. He bought Ronald de Boer from Barcelona. He paid £5m to Feyenoord for Giovanni van Bronckhorst. Another £3.75m to AZ Alkmaar brought Fernando Ricksen to Ibrox. For what was a moderate league, that was a lot of money. Their goalkeeper, the German Stefan Klos, who had won the Champions League with Borussia Dortmund, had a salary of £4.5m, which made him one of the highest-paid players in world football. You cannot spend £80m with the kind of revenue streams that Rangers had at the turn of the century. The rot that led to the downfall of Glasgow Rangers began here. There were some good games but, given how much Murray had invested in the squad, there was not much of a return. The money that Advocaat spent was directly responsible for the club’s bankruptcy. Advocaat behaved like a man who had just come across a windfall and went shopping buying on impulse rather than thinking about what he needed. Players would be bought and then Advocaat would think about how they might be fitted into his team, when it should have been the other way round. There was a Dutch clique at Rangers who hung out together. I was friends with Stefan Klos and Billy Dodds. The one Dutchman I really got on with was Arthur Numan, but the rest kept their own company. Cliques at any club destroy an atmosphere and damage potential. Like Rangers, Van Gaal’s Barcelona won domestic trophies but did not perform in the Champions League. It was that kind of pro-Dutch atmosphere that brought my career at Ibrox to an end. In November 2000 I got into a fight on the training pitch with Fernando Ricksen. Advocaat was Dutch, Ricksen was Dutch, and I was the one who was blamed for starting it. I hadn’t: Ricksen had simply scythed me down and I had reacted, but that didn’t seem to matter. Usually, whenever two players square up to each other on the training ground, the manager or coach will send them both off. Now, the only person Advocaat told to go to the changing rooms was me. He had shown everyone on the pitch whose side he was on. Advocaat called me into his office and told me that I would be playing with the reserves at Aberdeen. My attitude about playing with the reserves was the same at Rangers as it had been at Manchester United. ‘I signed a contract to play in the first team not the reserves,’ I told him. Advocaat told me he needed numbers to make up the reserve team. ‘What size boots do you take?’ I asked him. ‘Forty-two.’ ‘Well in that case go and get a pair of size forty-two boots and make up the numbers yourself.’ Outside Ibrox, the coach had arrived to take the reserves to Aberdeen and by the bus Advocaat was waiting just to make sure I was on it. I wasn’t anywhere near Ibrox. I was at home, having dinner. An hour later a letter arrived, hand-delivered, informing me I had been fined a month’s wages. It was then that Advocaat’s attitude to me changed. From that moment on, he was looking for a way to get me out of Glasgow Rangers. During my time at Ibrox, Rangers accumulated the best footballers in Scotland but what they never really had was a team, and they suffered for that when Martin O’Neill took over at Celtic. O’Neill built a team and in his first season, Celtic won the treble and then retained the league title in 2002. By then, Advocaat was no longer manager. He had resigned in December 2001, when Rangers were twelve points behind Celtic. He did not, however, leave the club. They created a position for him of ‘general manager’ and they kept paying him until Advocaat found a new job as manager of the Dutch national team. David Murray had proved himself once more to be a very generous employer. Andrei Kanchelskis’ autobiography ‘Russian Winters’ is published by deCoubertin Books and costs £20 http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/sport/15487694.Andrei_Kanchelskis_on_Dick_Advocaat_s_Rangers_regime__his_war_with_the_Little_General_and_the_Dutch_contingent_at_Ibrox/

Liverpool 4-1 up on the night 6-2 on aggregate with little more than 10 minutes remaining as I type. Apparently the yahoos wanted Liverpool to go out which would have seen them seeded higher. Boohoo.

So what do we do? Never try anybody because everybody will play 10 men behind the ball? He's as good a bet as anything likely to be available at a reasonable price and netted 2 in one game against the unmentionables and another against the sheep when his team are likely playing 9 men behind the ball and he's up there battling it out alone against an entire defence. Everybody is a gamble but he has a proven record playing in a side creating little in the way of chances.

Moult got 15 league goals last season playing in a side battling to avoid relegation. Garner and Waghorn had 14 between them playing in a dominant side. It looks to me as if he is a good bet to score goals in the SPL and is younger than either Garner or Waghorn at 25.

Regarding forward options in case of injuries/suspension Moult might be worth a gamble and speaking of suspension that appears to me to be a distinct possibility in the case of Morelos in particular. He's a little bundle of aggression who wont take any shit from anybody and has already begun accumulating cards. Would be interesting to see him in there mixing it up with the equally awkward and aggressive Moult. Motherwell are so broke they might be persuaded for a relatively minor sum of a couple of hundred thousand or so.

As you say if anyone has any insight on whether or not this boy can be a top player it has to be Allen above anyone else. It was after all his job to monitor such things. What remains to be seen is if Pedro agrees. At the end of the day he is the man who picks the team.

A solid minimum second is an absolute must but it's way too early to be talking about changing managers. Personally I don't expect to see the very best of this team till into the second quarter. Pedro has to be given at least half the season to get this thing clicking.

All credit to your mother. I had a cousin who was born with downs syndrome and again her parents were told she probably wouldn't see 21 but she lived into her 40's with an elderly mother who herself departed within months of her daughters death. She appeared to just let go after that as if looking after her beloved daughter was her entire reason for still living.

Good decision at the right time in my opinion. He seems to be have been reinvigorated at his boyhood club Everton and that should be his focus for the future. And what does he have to prove? He's already England's all time top scorer. http://www.bbc.com/sport/football/41027204

Six of his signings started against Hearts and so far the team looks as good as anything out there with the proviso that they need to start putting away more chances. Hopefully that will come. Talk of being 20 points behind is a shade frivolous after just 3 league matches.

You're continually littering the forum with pointless threads which have already already been done to death elsewhere or are being discussed elsewhere. Transfer story? Right here at this link with over 200 pages already. http://www.gersnetonline.co.uk/vb/showthread.php?84946-The-Pre-Summer-2017-transfer-rumours-and-hearsay-all-inclusive-Thread

Hubs losing 2-0 at home to Hamilton. Hard old game 11v 11 when you don't have a 12th man in black.

Lost 3-2 but good post.

He gave Tav a yellow card for that. Presumably for getting back up too quickly.

As far as i'm concerned he did cost us the points. It's been said they were starting to come into it somewhat after being swamped by us early on but that happens in almost every match, the opposition always have a period of some play. Keep in mind that despite the fact we were reduced to 10 men and they were kicking and hauling us all over the park with impunity it still took an OG to get them a win and we could still have taken a point with just 10 men to their 12

I had a feeling this would be the outcome. Even the SFA don't have the brass neck to uphold this after the entire shambles of last week. They will settle for robbing us of the points and Stokes not red carded for a catalogue of blatant crimes.

As for the whining about alleged death threats on Lennon that's exactly what the mindless moron can expect when he decides to be so graphically offensive in public while holding an official position as a representative of a high profile football club. And beyond that if there had been crowd trouble due to his behaviour which is also a distinct possibility would that then be nothing to do with the jolly chappy either? This is a lifelong grunting thug both on and off the field. While manager at Bolton he made a knife threat against a woman and we're supposed to pity/respect this total cretin? Gimme a break. Neil Lennon: Bolton launch investigation following claim manager ‘made knife threat to woman’ http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/football-league/neil-lennon-bolton-launch-investigation-into-claim-manager-made-knife-threat-to-woman-a6780796.html