MATCH OFF - Aldershot v Torquay United - 29/12/12

[Southampton Gull]

I've amended the thread title to alert people to the fact the game is off.

There will always be differences of opinion on here and for the most part I find that healthy for debate. To add to what Nick has said, he's right that Fonda and myself rarely agreed but I've always had total respect for how he argued his point and rarely did it ever stoop to throwing petty insults at each other, perhaps because we get on very well socially but more likely because we could both accept an alternative view to our own.

I don't post as much as I used to but that's purely down to more demands of my free time than previously and also because I get to less games than I have in recent seasons. I still enjoy reading the site as much as I ever did though.

Happy New Year to everyone !!

[tktufc91]

Disappointed but safety of the players is paramount. Don't know how many we would have taken but I am sure it would have been over the 500 mark. No doubt I'll make the re-arranged tuesday night fixture. I always enjoy singing away at Aldershot, hopefully some important players will return from injury and we'll be at full strength by the time we face City and the Shots again.

[AustrianAndyGull]

I agree Nick that it is petty and 'unsociable' to post things in capitals and with swear words and eclamation marks and things and i apologise for that now and have many times in the past. If i'm honest i struggle big time to communicate effectively when put under pressure and i have difficulty in keeping calm. It is something i am aware of and something which i have learned to live with even though it affects my life on a daily basis. I am frequently leaving jobs because i have difficulties dealing with people who seriously annoy me or get me angry and my issues have caused me lots of problems. That is the way i am. Call me a thicko if you wish for not knowing how to control myself but we aren't all the same. I cannot handle confrontation as i cannot calmly and effectively communicate my way out of an intense heated situation, i'm not weird, i'm not thick nor am i a knuckledragger. That is the way my brain reacts to these stimuli and the CNS reacts as appropriate.

I wouldn't go around just lamping someone in the face with a glass bottle because obviously that is cowardly, unacceptable, brutal and i WOULD be a knuckledragger if i did that. That is not what i do. I do however have very strong opinions based on what i believe is common sense, fair and striaght down the line and nowadays we are in the minority. I do complain a lot on here and other boards but that is because lots of things in daily life which people do and think nothing of i find unacceptable and people wind me up. People who chuck litter out of their windows, use their mobiles whilst driving, don't say thanks when you hold the door open for them etc etc. These people should be fined £5000 to be paid in full within the week or they serve a week in prison. Then they wouldn't do it again i can more or less guarantee. Everyone is too soft and the country is screwed because of it and that is why i see players like Bodin being paid when they aren't very good and doing the job they are paid to do. I accept it is an extreme point of view but that is how i see it. We are always making excuses for every little thing and it annoys me to death.

As for the Aldershot game being off. I agree with Dazgull ( surprise ) we had a break then played Plymouth who we couldn't beat. Plymouth had played Accy on the saturday in hard game but i wouldn't expect us to be fresh v Wimbledon on new years day. We may be a bit more fitter but if Wombles have more desire and will to win then it means nowt.

[AustrianAndyGull]

I am true to myself and as an example, i recently packed in a job at Dogs Trust at one of there multimillion pound rehoming centres. I was on about £18k which is the most i've ever been paid but after a while i sussed things out, they were swimming in cash and bizarre things were happening and the dogs were not their main priority. I got the job because i wanted stray and abandoned dogs to be retrained and rehomed and i thought everyone was working to the same hymnsheet. Not a bit of it. Money does funny things to people and once you are on the gravy train then it can be hard to get off. I never got on it and will never get on it so i had my formal complaints and left. I got paid to do the best for the dogs but it seemed no f*cker else did. I've got 15 years experience in the animal welfare sector and even that is starting to sicken me given the amount of cash wasted. If you want t cushy job then get into charities ( at the top end ) and you'll be made for life.

I cannot live a lie so i do what needs to be done. In this case leave a job that pays £18k and go back to being skint. I may be stupid and i may be dumb. But i can sleep at night.

( with the help of a case of Tribute though! ) :~D

[robbotufc]

love going to aldershot would of been the first saturday match for a few years..

[chunkygull]

="austrianandygull"]I am true to myself and as an example, i recently packed in a job at Dogs Trust at one of there multimillion pound rehoming centres. I was on about £18k which is the most i've ever been paid but after a while i sussed things out, they were swimming in cash and bizarre things were happening and the dogs were not their main priority. I got the job because i wanted stray and abandoned dogs to be retrained and rehomed and i thought everyone was working to the same hymnsheet. Not a bit of it. Money does funny things to people and once you are on the gravy train then it can be hard to get off. I never got on it and will never get on it so i had my formal complaints and left. I got paid to do the best for the dogs but it seemed no f*cker else did. I've got 15 years experience in the animal welfare sector and even that is starting to sicken me given the amount of cash wasted. If you want t cushy job then get into charities ( at the top end ) and you'll be made for life.

I cannot live a lie so i do what needs to be done. In this case leave a job that pays £18k and go back to being skint. I may be stupid and i may be dumb. But i can sleep at night.

is there no organisation or governing body you could "blow the whistle" to about these people or report these things to a newspaper or something.sounds like these people ought to be made an example of and possibly banged up for fraud.

[ferrarilover]

Cheers for the support Coley!

Us negative moaners better stick together otherwise we will have a site full of people that agree with each other.

Matt, you say that if Coley and myself want to see our team win every week then we should support Man Utd. That is the very trap that Nick and others fell into and i don't wish to be misunderstood my good man.

I want to watch a team that ATTEMPTS to win every week, if we did this and lost then i would find it perfectly acceptable. The entertainment value of the match itself is just as important as the victory and although i would be happy scraping wins out of nothing ( like what happened a lot last season and was dull ) i would rather see us draw or lose trying to win. Wins are not the be all and end all ( although i may not be saying that if we were in the bottom two! :~D ) but the manner in which you go about trying to achieve those wins is. Hoping to nick the odd goal here and there and further hoping that we can hang onto it is not a viable or workable tactic and Ling still hasn't worked this out yet.

Arguably for all our injuries and suspensions and loss of players over the summer we shouldn't be continuing to fill like for like just so Ling is able to continue with a game plan that is archaic, even for league 2. Like i have said before, there are times and places for drab 'see if we can nick something' games and during the course of a season we will see a few but to have that as an actual tactic each week is disturbing.

Even more disturbing is our away performances which all season have all followed a similar pattern. We won at York but had a couple of chances which we scored, they could have had a hatful with better finishing and it is the kind of sustained pressure that other teams have against US during games that i want to see reversed. I want to see US have large portions of sustained pressure and dangerous attacks but we seem to have brief spells and it fizzles out.

We do attempt to win, Andy, we just don't attempt to win by scoring hundreds of goals. That is for the likes of Port Vale and it is working well for them, but then, last year, it didn't. With the players we have (which we have because they were the best we could get taking into account all the various determining factors), we are not in a position to take the attitude that we will simply score one more than the oppo, regardless of how many that may require us to get. We haven't got a Tom Pope or, for that matter, a Jamie Cureton, we aren't a team who can pile forward and worry about defending later. Sure, that would be lovely, and it sure as hell would be more entertaining (the 4-3 over Aldershot is testament to that), but then , the tables would be turned and we would have people here saying that it's no good replying on Rene to get a hat-trick every week, because one week he won't, then we'll love 6-0, then where will we be?

In football, unless you're one of the Holy Grail who have the ability to score loads and concede none (Barcelona, Real and Man Utd, although the latter is seemingly faultering this year) you are pretty much forced to pick a method and stick to it. Northampton have chosen to buy as many giants as they can and hammer the ball long, Southend similar. Rotherham have a lot of good ball players, but they are fragile and do not like it away from home on a snowy February Tuesday. Cheltenham have chosen pace, pace and more pace. What ML has done for us is set us up to be as solid defensively as we can be and hope to win games with some careful forward play and rock solid rigidity. Sadly, this plan has its flaws just like any other and we are seeing the flaws exposed more this season than we did last.

In point of fact, it's working pretty well. I know ifs and buts are largely pointless, but had we managed to resist both NTFC and PAFC for a combined total of about 3 more minutes (just over 1.5% longer than we actually did), we would be sat now in 6th place, above big spending Rotherham and with a game in hand (perhaps 2, come 1700 Saturday) on a number of those above us. That's no disgrace for a team who, with Bodin playing, basically turns out every week with 10 men.

Coley, I am happy with how we are because I can see the realities of life. We are not going to swan about knocking 4 and 5 past teams, that's just not what I turn up expecting to see. Sure, it would be lovely, but it's not going to happen. If you're turning up on a blind date and expecting someone with the wit and charm of Bill Clinton, the smarts of Steven Fry and the looks of Taylor Swift, you're going to be sorely disappointed when you're presented with Susan Boyle*. It's the same at Plainmoor. Pitch up full in the knowledge that it won't be pretty and it won't be high scoring, but it might just be a means to an end to get us through this season unscathed and have a better run at it next year. We are presently doing a little bit of building for the future and our money is going in that direction. We now have a ground that will last as long as was planned for the Third Reich and we are soon to have a training ground to match. These things will show their true benefit three years from now, not tomorrow.
In order to be promoted from a division, a team must already be a club performing at a level of those already in the division above. Teams that go up (from anywhere to anywhere) must have in place every element to the standard of an average club in the division into which they are being promoted, otherwise they are doomed from the start. What we will have shortly is a ground and a training facility to allow us to step straight into L1. These are two of the biggest, most expensive elements of the whole thing. We already have a manager who can cut it at L1, we have a number of players who can do likewise. We need just the final few ingredients (like the training ground) and we will be ready to step up and survive. Be cool brother, we aren't going down and, right now, going up is a step too far for us. Suck up these couple of years of relative inauspiciousness (which, given the ride we've been on over the last 5 or 6 years doesn't seem quite such a hardship) and prepare for the good times to come.

Matt.

*A point of note, I wasn't sure of her name (popular culture is not my strong suit), so I Googled the phrase "Scottish singer, very ugly" and her name popped up.

[bixieupnorth]

we've got a squad that can play great football, but for one reason or another they rarely do, it must be partly down to mr lings advice, but its time to let the team play their socks off, ball on the floor, pass and move, pace on the wings as we know they can do so well

i completely side with andy here, the shackles need to be thrown off, yeah its good to win games thru being cagey, but we arent even doing that very often these days

[bixieupnorth]

i'm not weird, i'm not thick nor am i a knuckledragger.

opinions please super and from those others that have met him??!!

[bixieupnorth]

thats shocking to hear about the dogs trust business, i give them a monthly donation, not good to hear that things arent as dogcentric as i imagined they would be?

perhaps you could start a thread elsewhere on here so us dogowners can get this looked into?

[AustrianAndyGull]

Matt, you make me laugh son!

And chunkygull, they aren't committing fraud. Everything they do to raise is cash is done exceptionally well, is exceptionally clever and they make a fortune doing it that way. Folk who sponsor a dog each month get a nice yellow sticker in for their car and a card that says 'thank you' from the dog ( who can't speak obviously ). They don't know that some of the money they donate is needlessly and recklessly wasted and if they saw the frivolous waste of resources then they would be shocked. Unlike the RSPCA who need funds to pay for prosecutions, investigations as well as running animal centres, Dogs Trust is just dogs and nothing else and it doesn't get involved in anything else. All they do is take dogs in and rehome them out. It is simple for them to raise the cash as it is such a simple ideal - to get a dog a home. An ideal which many dog lovers will buy into. They can then build these state of the art kennels and centres which are fantastic for the dogs don't get me wrong, but every visitor that turns up to one is blown away by their perception of how well the dogs must be looked after if the organisation have all this cash and facilities. So they give more money. It's a brand and we had a 3 week induction going on about branding and this that and the other. They build the kennels so spacious and aesthetically pleasing for the dogs? Or because it looks good to the public? Meanwhile down the road at a local kennels, they are trying to get by hand to mouth and doing exactly the same job but with archaic kennels and facilities that look sh*t so people don't want to visit and get upset. In places like these it's just a case of getting the dog out to the most suitable home as quickly as possible to avoid further unecessary stress and behavioural sterotypies that can't be reversed.

I'm going on a bit but when i was forced to walk a jack russell terrier outside in the searing heat for over 2 hours on the grand opening day just so some dignitaries could have it and others paraded around in a room full of people ( no stress for the dog there then ) for a few seconds to take photos for the local rags and media it didn't sit well with me. Not least because only hours earlier these dogs had arrived at our centre following an overnight van and ferry journey cooped up in a transit cage surrounded by other dogs. They had no idea where they were, had no idea who WE were and they were exhausted and stressed up and they had to endure that by people who say they care! What if one of the dogs had bitten a handler because it was totally stressed to f*ck!? It would have been pts , put to sleep because it had bitten through no fault of it's own just so some suited up posh faggots could quaff champagne and say 'oh isn't he cute?' and have a photo with it. That was the first of a cartload of situations that i found were unacceptable and compromised dog welfare and i can't really go into it as i may get sued, hell i've got nothing so i'm not sure what good suing me will do. I jacked it in as my standards and morals were higher than theirs. I mean, how many rehoming centres in the uk have an electrical vehicle recharging point?!! Dog food, toys, enrichment, stimulation, exercise, companionship, veterinary care and careful handling are all that are needed NOT poncy sh*t like that!! URGH!!!

[AustrianAndyGull]

thats shocking to hear about the dogs trust business, i give them a monthly donation, not good to hear that things arent as dogcentric as i imagined they would be?

perhaps you could start a thread elsewhere on here so us dogowners can get this looked into?

If i were you Bix i would donate cash to your local BRANCH animal centre. I believe it is Sheffield at Attercliffe? Not many people know that most RSPCA centres are 'branch run' and DO NOT receive any money whatsoever from the RSPCA main funds at all. They have to generate all their own money and run themselves accordingly. This was a shock to many people who used to bring in cheques to my local centre when i worked there or sent them to head office meant for us and they would write 'RSPCA' on the cheque payee bit. They didn't know that if they didn't put RSPCA Sheffield Branch on it or whatever branch they meant the money for, the cash would just be swallowed up in hq funds and their local centre wouldn't see a penny of it.

Branch run centres are always run at capacity ( animals ) and at a financial loss but they keep ticking over. They can barely afford to heat the buildings and pay staff in most cases and they rely heavily on donations of cash, food and goods to get by. The facilities at some branches are pretty bad althought the best care is given in a bad situation and they do their best. I believe Sheffield is anew centre which is quite modern but only because the council had to build a bypass through the old shelter ( which i worked at on Spring Street ) and so the RSPCA sheffield got a fair whack from the council to move and therefore thay could build a new centre. Other centres like York, Chesterfield, Bradford, Derby i could go on are not so fortunate and have to manage with antiquated facilities. They take in all species of animals, not just dogs.

All in all it is a dodgy world even when it comes to animal charities but i urge you to donate to the places that really NEED it and not top places like Dogs Trust who have it spilling from their arses.

[Trojan 67]

Neither us or Aldershot have a scheduled fixture for January 5th. This date for the rearranged fixture ?

[Dave]

Real shame was looking forward to this game, well it will do some favours on the injury front, though will add to Brian Saah's frustrations no doubt, as he still has 1 match of his suspension to serve.

As for the forum I still get as much enjoyment out of it now as I allways have, not posted so much of late due to quite a few problems at home which have needed my attention(nearly all sorted) and being a night shift retail worker, December is never a good month still just a few days left and normality will return .

We do seem however to have gone around in circles and some subjects though. I have made the mistake of attacking some posters opinions and posting styles in the past, I realised a while ago now that for a forum to be succsessful it needs a range of different opinions and posting styles, if we all agreed heck what a boring place it would become.

Do agree with Nick if you have opinions constantly attacked if will put people off posting, we should be able to dissagree with out restorting to shouting or name calling, and I hope Nick and others keep posting, if you have an opinion however popular or unpopular you think it may be, please share it with us.

[AustrianAndyGull]

This would be a good date to reschedule for Troj ( if their pitch holds up to the further deluge expected this weekend and next week that is or it may be off again ). It is great for me for this game to be postponed as i might be able to make the rearranged match depending on what date it was. I couldn't go tomorrow due to being totally skint.