Off Topic Bill Nicholson Arms

My sympathies.


"More interesting will be to see how many tickets will go onto Stubhub and how many empty seats there will be if we have a ''minnow'' in our group."

This has been discussed before.
It will be far worse if the FA held loads of seats back for their cronies + away fans.

 

My biggest gripe is that spurs have been pushing their membership scheme all summer. So anyone joining now ( in our last season at WHL and with CL football) gets an equal chance as the rest of us for seeing these games.
How many new members will turn out to be touts? How many of those tickets will be on sale out side Wembley and on various websites?
The only fair way was to give Wednesday and Thursday this week to those who were members before last season started. They (rightly) gave season ticket holders a week before opening it up to members so could and should have given longer standing members and advantage as a loyalty reward.
We have supported the team through the good and bad times and deserved first chance to get CL tickets. To be honest the club should look at city. They did a similar thing when they got into the CL and welcomed all and now (cos they weren't actual fans but more like tourists) they are having to advertise their season tickets in the national media as the tourists are moving on due to their lack of success compared to a few years back. Spurs need to look after those of us who are loyal fans but can't get season tickets (work commitments, family life, health, money etc). I do not expect to get tickets for all the big occasions but do expect to be respected as a loyal spurs fan by the club...and they failed to do that to all of us yesterday.
In the end I emailed the club with my complaints and solution... not ghats it will change what happened but it may make them really think what they will do next season so maybe it would be an idea for others who have the time to also contact them.
Sorry to rant!
Hope everyone who tried to get a ticket was successful.
Coys

 

You're right in many ways colin. The biggest difference between our situation and City's is that London - and especially a stadium as iconic as Wembley - will always have a steady stream of thousands of tourists to keep bums on seats. It ruins the atmosphere, but the men in the ivory towers balance the books.

 

On paper, there should be nothing to have prevented an online priority queueing scheme being used.
Perhaps there was, and that is why things went as they did (constant re-organising as people
came and went) .

Touting etc is wholly unacceptable for these tickets. The club got a fair deal for the packages.
Hopefully the FA allocated enough to the club so that all potential members could be sorted,
and then the rabble like me could fight over the remainder.

If people cannot / decline to go to any game, then if are selling your seat then have the
courtesy to do so at face value.

 

England back to being useless at cricket

 

Or Pakistan back to being good?

 

Jenas doing his best Alli impersonation....


http://amp.twimg.com/v/fb63fc1a-f5d7-4b13-9c85-c4b5000f96c3

 

Is it bad that I misread that as "Jesus doing his best Alli impersonation"?

 

It's like that 1970s graffiti...
Jesus saves but Hoddle scores from the rebound

 

Drugs and the Olympics etc.

Anyone else uncomfortable with Lizzie Armistead getting into the Olympics effectively via a technicality? Whatever the reasons the athlete gets three chances to take a test, and I don't think there should be many circumstances where they can get away with not doing so. The punishment in fact is somewhat lenient. I might be tempted to argue that missing three tests should carry the assumption of a failed test - after all we don't know what an actual cheat would do. We have certainly seen a number of them claim all sorts of innocent stories before being proven as cheats. It's sad if the athlete subsequently banned for three misses is actually clean, but you can be sure that a number of Russian athletes have been banned from these Olympics have been clean, because of the greater good (well the greater guilt actually) and I have no problem with that. In fact I think the balance of evidence should be shifted to an athlete having to prove they are clean in order to participate rather than the world doping agency having to prove they are a cheat. If an athlete hasn't been tested in a year (as Armistead hasn't) then you simply don't get in.

I also remember that there was a lot of talk about doping before the London games (not on this scale though) but it died down when the games opened (at least on TV). The interesting thing was that I was out walking one evening and listening to a women's middle distance race on Five Live, and one of the commentators, who I believe was a coach rather than ex-athlete (wish I could remember who) effectively implied that the race we were hearing was not clean. He was saying that whilst most events / distances had been cleaned up, it was almost like different sectors had been affected differently and women's middle distance was still behind in cleaning up. It was quite different from the TV perspective!

I think again that the drugs discussion will disappear off the TV once the games starts, but what happens if Gatlin (unbelievably a twice banned "athlete") beats Bolt in the 100 metres, arguably the games most iconic event? The Olympic organisers must be crapping themselves about that!

 

I don't agree on Armistead. If you have to submit to random drug testing at odd times then if the testing authority doesn't follow the rules then you shouldn't get a fail. Or put it another way, she risked being banned on a technicality. I hate the way in all aspects of the modern world that the innocent have to change their lifestyle because of the actions of a few cheats.
Why do you think she hasn't been tested in a year? In her personal statement she claims to have been tested 16 times this year.

 

I'm sure that, should Lizzie Armistead get a gold medal, everyone will conveniently forget that she shouldn't be at the Olympics - after all, people were quick to forget that Christine Ohuruogu was a drugs cheat when she won one in Beijing...

 

Didn't she get tested the day after one of the failures?
There has to be a bar to measure whether a genuine/adequate attempt to test someone has been made, and it appears there wasn't in this case. However if she were Russian, I suspect she'd get less sympathy.

 

I'll admit I hadn't heard that. In fact it would be good if "journalists" provided fuller information with their stories. Clearly three missed tests in a year but 16 clear tests is a lot different circumstances than three missed tests and no others. It's presumably more complex than though, with testing in and outside of competition presumably being relevant. I suspect that a drugs cheat would do their doping during their sports off-season when they maximised training, and be relatively clean (or more easily masked) when they get tested immediately after they've just competed at something.

 

The issue with doping in cycling is the regimes where you are taking stuff en masse
in the close season or a few days before key events. So the random aspect is
important because the substances may be gone when you are tested during events.

 

This may be a dumb question, but how is that specific to cycling? Surely that applies to almost any sport?

 

Dunno whether there is a common set of properties (how long they are detectable for,
how long you must stop using them before competition begins for real) .

Steroids was the tool of choice for athetics etc to get that extra muscle mass.
In cycling, EPO because it enhances the endurance aspect.

 

Good news. Milner has retired from international football

 

There was another version.....

Hoddle has found God. That must have been one hell of a pass!!