Well that depends if Napoli lure away AVB and Madrid get Bale, then are you SURE that there will still be hope for us Lilywhites????
Don't think either will happen, you read too much about Spurs. If that happened we would just carry on we've not won anything for so long would it matter anyway. It's far harder for a club like Fulham to reach top 8 than for Spurs to drop out.
Yep! if it depresses you. Most of it's bullshit anyway. Football is an escape and an entertainment if I want to get depressed I'll look at the news (which most of the time I don't) I don't want to know who is killing who and what kind of cancer I am going to get or why the Gov feels the need to rob more of my money. COYS
I think we were more interested to see how pissed he was than what he was saying. Gud Efenin here ish the nooos...sh.
I could live with that ! Seriously though I don't see why you can't break into top 4 next season - especially if you keep Bale + maybe AVB does some transfer wheeling + dealing. Sounds like he wants to change his striker options?
Changes to Champions League rules agreed today could see Europe’s top nations having up to five teams in UEFA’s top club competition. From 2015, the Europa League winners as well as the European champions will qualify automatically for the following season’s Champions League, UEFA sources have confirmed to Press Association Sport. But if the Europa League is won by an English club, they will no longer take the qualification place of a team finishing fourth in the Barclays Premier League - as happened controversially with Tottenham last season when Chelsea won the Champions League but finished sixth. The principle was agreed by UEFA’s executive committee today and will be formally announced at the European governing body’s Congress in London tomorrow. The move is designed to make the Europa League more attractive and to persuade clubs to take the competition more seriously. The change to allow a maximum of five clubs also answers concerns from the European Clubs’ Association who felt that the chances of the Europa League winners taking a place away from clubs qualifying via the domestic league was unacceptably high. In the unlikely event of two clubs from the same country winning the Champions League and Europa League and both finishing outside of the domestic qualifying places, then those teams would still qualify for the Champions League but the side finishing fourth would miss out. So that's come to pass then, looks like you are on for at least a point off us this upcoming season Tigerrev...
So it's official, we will be the only English side to finish in the top 4 and not get into the CL. Typical
It doesn't come into effect until 2015-16, so maybe not... then again, its us, so we'll probably end up 4th next season and the season after that having seen L'Arse finish below us and win the bloody thing twice on the bounce. Then in the season that matters we'll end up fifth...
I think our players are better than most rate them. I was just doing the American thing of wandering through various stats and found some interesting ones: we as a club are third in one list and fourth in another in overall stat rating. Bale is the best player in the league, Jan the best defender by a considerable margin and fifth best player overall, Sandro 12th and Dembele 30th. Walker and Dawson also had some good numbers. (I mention these stats since they jibe pretty well with my opinion.) We had four periods where we dropped a lot of points, and the only one that involved a slightly healthy team was the spell of what looked like total exhaustion at the end of the Europa. We had early season chaos and major injury trouble this year, and maybe more importantly lack the playmaker we need to tie together our talented parts. If we get that first rate playmaker, I'm not convinced we need a striker, partly because he'd fit nicely into a 4-3-3 with Sandro and Dembele. And yet: sure, in the longer perspective, fifth is about where we should be, considering there are four teams with considerably more resources--unless of course, we continue to buy better. The other wildcard is Joe Lewis. How many hundreds of millions less will Spurs be worth in a number of years as a 5th/6th place team than as a fourth/fifth place team? Two? While neither he nor anyone else wants Spurs to turn into a deficit spender, so much money rests on keeping Bale and making semi-regular appearances in the CL he'll be desperate for it to happen, and a billion and desperation can find an answer or two sometimes.
