I kind of see what Vol's saying about foreign players in England. I think there are too many, particularly the crap ones who add nothing to English football and just block young English players' progress. However, why would a British/English player particularly care about Charlton just because they come from this country? The number of players we've had who are actually Charlton fans is pretty small. Almost all players see the clubs they play for merely as an employer, although that doesn't mean they don't give their all. We've had English players who were awful and who couldn't give a toss, and we've had foreign players who've run their bollocks into the ground for Charlton, like Kermorgant and Di Canio. And vice versa. I would call someone like Kermorgant or Hreidarsson proper Charlton. Ditto Steve Gritt. For me being foreign isn't a bar to being proper Charlton, though I understand that others feel differently.
You could apply this to immigration too. Why do we import people to work in coffee shops and pound shops when we have plenty of youngsters sitting on the dole doing nothing? Some say our youngsters are feckless and don't want to work, which is racist bullshit in itself, yet we have the talent in this country to fill most positions. So crap footballers equate to crap immigration, and it's time we only cherry-picked the best for the good of this nation's (and national team's) future. Can you see the parallels?
Spot on Ponders. The latest immigration outrage recently saw Pret A Manger admit that they are recruiting their sandwich makers from Hungary...while one million of our own kids are too thick or lazy to work having left school. That fact will have Eddie spluttering into his guacamole pasta.
M&S, the bastion of liberal Britain, has also recruited heavily from Hungary to fill its sandwich-making plant in Northampton. Does that mean there are no dole queues in Northampton and its catchment area? A Hungarian worker with a wife and two kids can work 40 hours per week on minimum wage and pay £33 in tax and NI, yet he can claim up to £330 per week in benefits. I make that a £297 loss per week. Or is my calculator faulty?
Pret didn't advertise the jobs locally though. There are loads of kids who are literally working for nothing in internships, so why would pret assume that they wouldn't work for the minimum wage?
Ponders said: Then Vol said: I don't know quite what to make of this. It does seem very odd that M&S and Pret would recruit from other countries. Is it that our youngsters don't want to do these jobs? Going back to the original point of this thread - why has no-one asked what FHB is doing buying a Charlton calendar anyway? Surely no self-respecting adult would do that, unless it's for his kids.
Started buying them for FHB jnr 15 years ago, but the fact that he's that much older coupled with our revolving-door recruitment policy means there's no real incentive now. Time to break the habit!
