Steve K

Yes, it is, but the play-off is usually a fairly easy one, given the seedings and the relatively high rating of the PL. I was just musing as to whether this might be reduced at some point, from 3+1 to 3 or 2+1, if English teams don't start to do a bit better in the next few years. By the way, I'd thought I'd share with you all a brilliant idea I had the other day! There has long been discussion regarding the merits of the Europa League winners getting a place in the following year's Champions' League, so here's the logical next step. Are you ready? It deserves a line of its own: If the winners of the FA Cup come from the Football League (or lower), they should get instant promotion to the Premier League! I await your reasons for why this would be a bad thing. For any argument you give, I am confident that I can name 3 stupider ideas which have become reality in world football in the last 10 years.

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At the other end of the football wealth table, I'm finding it hard to muster up anything more that mild frustration about Chelsea's exit (and the manner of it) from the Champions' League last night. By all accounts, it was for long periods a scrappy, ill-tempered and unappealing spectacle. Definitely good time to pretend I was focused on the Premier League all along. Of course, there's now a very real possibility that there will be no English clubs at all in the quarter-finals of the CL. If that is so, and the same happens again, how long before UEFA decide that there shouldn't be 4 English teams in the competition? That's not a rhetorical question, by the way - I really don't know how often they review the merits of the various European leagues.

Fair enough - just thought he might have been given a shorter ban for his early guilty plea, unlike Evans' ludicrous attempt to deny something that had been seen by millions!

Equally puzzling - Johnny Evans denied the charge, even though he was found to have spat at Cisse, and he was banned for 6 games. Cisse admitting spitting back, apologised, and was banned for 7! You're right - however disgusting spitting is, there have been some absolutely horrendous fouls which have ended up in no worse than a 3-game ban. On the other hand, there were 2 sendings-off in yesterday's Villa/Baggies match, one of which wasn't a foul, and the other wasn't really a complete dive, although Grealish did make an absolute meal of a very minor touch. Of course, any ill-discipline from the players was rather overshadowed by the mindless behaviour of a sizeable minority of home fans. During the pitch invasion, there were some scary close-ups of the type of person you wouldn't want to meet in broad daylight, never mind a dark alley. One such idiot had had the brilliant idea of sticking a phaIIus to his bald pate, thus saving us the time and trouble of thinking up a suitable phrase to describe him.

Raiders of the Lost Ark Royal? The Templot of Doom?

I'm a Chelsea fan, as I've probably previously admitted here, and the most bizarre thing that occurred to me after this incident is that these self-proclaimed "racist and proud" idiots clearly haven't spent much time looking at the Chelsea team lately. With all the black players in the Blues' squad, you'd think that these oafs wouldn't have bothered to travel to Paris to watch the team play.

The second one's there in case you hit the first one by mistake...

Man City 1 Hull City 1 - mine's gone OK, too!

Don't worry - I got the gist of the joke in question, and even with the #####, it was rather amusing. It's just that what I found funniest was that, in their haste to cut and paste whatever they've just found on the internet, not everyone actually hits "preview" to see whether their gem will be censored into oblivion. And I could tell that this particular joke had been cut and pasted, not simply thought up on the spot, because it contained capital letters. Just a thought, though, as we're all having a jolly good laugh at the auto-censor's expense - is it being censored for a reason? Could it possibly be that, on a child-friendly model railway-themed website, the PTBs don't necessarily consider adult humour an essential part of the members' contributions?

Yes, at the moment it reads like a question from "Blankety Blank"...

I just got a call from 1975 - they want to know if they can have their joke back?

Is there not a special thread for Tim Vine's rejected one-liners?

I reckon 2014 was the year that diving cheesed me off more than anything in the PL. I'm a Chelsea fan, and my own club's players have let the game down in that regard, though probably no more so than any number of others. This year, though, is already shaping up to be the year of refereeing inconsistency. If we take Vertonghen's close-contact handball yesterday as a benchmark, the referee took the (quite right, in my view) decision that it was hand-to-ball. If the decision had gone the other way, Chelsea might have got a point or more, but the ref declared it unintentional, and I think that's right. By that token, if the same referee had been at Anfield, Liverpool's second penalty would not have been given, and Leicester might not still be rooted to the bottom of the table. I'm assuming, also, that a different ref would know the difference between Wes Morgan's face and his arm, so the first pen would never have been, either... Stoke, too, would have had a penalty, and that might have changed the result (impossible to say "would have", of course, as you never know how teams react to adversity). To be fair, I'd love the pundits on MOTD to actually read out loud one of the rules of the game each week. Let's establish once and for all what constitutes a handball, and what is meant by "intentional"! Once we all know what the rules are, we can be in a position to judge whether the referees are applying them. All I know right now is that they are not all interpreting them the same way, which could untimately make a nonsense of the league table.

Probably so, but even the most ardent adherent of the Corinthian spirit will have noticed the importance of the business side of sport these days. I'm not saying I like it - I don't - but I also don't believe that the new owners of the clubs mentioned were primarily influenced by a desire to cheese off the fans.

Incidentally, if some kindly soul manages to save Hereford, but only on the proviso that they move to Worcester (purely hypothetical, and fairly unlikely, I guess), how would we feel about that? Happy that the club continued, or bitter about the move, even though the alternative would be oblivion for Hereford FC? I'm sure that the owners of Wasps (and yes, the Dons, too) gave some thought to the feelings of the fans before making their decisions, but made the move all the same.

My point was that 10 years have passed, and MK Dons are no more a franchise than Man City or QPR, so perhaps a new insult is called for, if you really still feel you need one. As for "stealing", do you have a libel lawyer?

Absolutely - it would be nice to think that Hereford have some sort of future, even if the have to do a "Gretna" or similar. Incidentally, hasn't enough time passed for us to stop calling MK Dons "Franchise FC"? They've been in Milton Keynes for over 10 years, AFC Wimbledon are now a successful team in their own right (only about 30 league places, and one division, separating them now), so who is there left who should feel bitter? Wasps fans, perhaps...

Is that Frank Kelly as in "Father Jack"?

I'm sure that was Stan Boardman...

I seem to recall it was Paul Daniels, on his quiz "Wipeout".

Indeed - "Ball, or aerosol?" etc...

There's been much talk recently of the character of Mario Balotelli, and how he's not necessarily the kind that you'd want next to you in the trenches. Taking the WWI analogy to its logical extreme, he's the kind of bloke who would have been swapping helmets with the Germans in 1916... Anyway, first Southampton, now Bournemouth - strange things are happening on the South coast. Once again, taking things to their logical conclusions, I'm fully expecting Portsmouth to win their next match 8-0, so any Carlisle fans thinking of making the long journey to Fratton Park next Saturday might wish to reconsider!

Plenty of (slightly anachronistic) railway action in last night's rather excellent Doctor Who. A BR blue 08 in a shed with an old blue-and-grey coach, and a green DMU (SYP) in a tunnel doing a slightly unlikely speed.

The Sun Always Shines On TV - A-Ha