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havanatopia

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Everything posted by havanatopia

  1. Cannot disagree with that either. Maggers and Pack both were poor in their decision making. As a previous poster mentioned; we were cruising to the extent we were becoming too casual. We paid the ultimate price when the game turned on a sixpence. From that moment on I could only see the game going one way.
  2. You firstly rub people up the wrong way then, when people get tired of it, you either throw your toys out of the pram, become insulting or lie just as you are doing now. I suggest you take a breather from otib for a while. You are extremely tiresome and childish.
  3. It was but that is what decent goalkeepers do day in day out. Fielding has done this before so I question his ability to make those critical decisions and make them correctly. We all have flaws, that is his and it cost us.
  4. Actually, if you think about it, Frankie should have let the player by; at least then we would have 1 more player on the pitch.
  5. According to the Daily Mail:- Even those who live there will admit that Wolverhampton is not the most glamorous of destinations. After decades at the heart of Britain's industrial revolution no one would expect it to be. But not even they thought it would be named as one of the worst places to live in the entire world. Eight years after the old market town was awarded city status the renowned Lonely Planet guide yesterday branded it the fifth worst city on the globe. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1239478/Wolverhampton-named-fifth-WORST-city-planet.html#ixzz52kxhMPNU Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook Personally, I think such 'league tables' on such subjects are meaningless and small minded. I am surprised and disappointed the Lonely Planet do this.
  6. Wolverhampton city centre falls outside of the area traditionally known as the Black Country, although some districts such as Bilston and Heath Town and the Willenhall side of Wolverhampton fall within the Black Country coalfields, leading to confusion as to whether the entire city falls within the region. Therefore, since part of it does, I believe it can be considered inside the Black Country.
  7. I hope on this festive and new year weekend everybody has enjoyed a warm, hearty and joyful Christmas. I was pipped to the post with the Boxing day match day and was going to briefly reflect on my first game as a City fan so I will do it now; the 5-0 win over Coventry City in 1978 when I was a nipper. There were 22,354 at the old Ashton Gate watching in awe at Joe Royle banging in the goals. A remarkably similar crowd, 23,116, watched us beat Reading earlier this week. I truly believe City will be back in the top flight of English football very soon. Interestingly Royle scored in every round of the League Cup in the year our next cup opponents won the trophy, 1977. More on that story soon. City played Wolves six times in our last ascent and journey to the old First Division. And like our overall record against todays opponents we did not fair too well, losing four of them and only winning once. In fact overall we have won just 15 games against a Wolves tally of 35. We have never played Wolves on December 30th and regardless of that, records count for nothing. This season Jamie McAllister 'saw huge positives' from City's 3-3 draw at Molineux on September 12th in what for Wolves was a rather poor attendance of just 23,000; something City will very likely surpass this evening. The fixture is poised to be a cracker. The timing of it, along with Cardiff City very gracefully doing their bit to ensure it is a top of the table clash, battling it out live for national and international television viewing pleasure, could not have been better scripted. This is the pride of the West Country versus the mining heartland of the Black Country. This is the stable, long term investment vision of a Bristolian versus the splash the cash get promoted fast Hong Kong Chinese Fosun Group majoring in insurance and investments. Fosun’s ultimate vision is to provide clients with a one-stop solution integrating wealth, health and happiness. Lofty ambitions indeed. On the 20th of December this year they bought out Asahi's stake in Tsingtao Beer for HK$6.6 billion; Are they expecting an excuse to celebrate in the field of sport anytime soon? It does look highly likely that Wolves will be playing Premier League football next season where they rightly feel they deserve to be having spent the bulk of their existence yet, like us, they did reside for 2 seasons in Division 4 in the 1980's. We missed out playing them. As a youngster I never really liked Wolves and reflecting back on that now I cannot really understand why. I had a generally positive feeling toward West Brom and Aston Villa and broadly neutral with Birmingham City but Wolves held a rather unhealthy dislike in my mind. Bizarre, I must say. Perhaps, as a child, I found the colour of their kit repulsive and in later years I think that was rather cemented when Steve Bull would terrorise defences with a clearly washed out 'gold' shirt. Strange how certain obscure and unimportant things remain in the mind and taint or twist our view of things and so it remains. I was rather sad when Villa and the Baggies fell into Chinese hands but somewhat more sanguine when Wolves went the same way. Birmingham had long fallen and was a bemusement when Carson Yeuong was shackled by the Hong Kong authorities. The West Midlands is all Chinese now save for Jeff Bonser's Walsall; with their neighbours all gone the unlikely prospect of a third tier team falling into foreign hands, especially Chinese, has perhaps increased marginally. Hold out Jeff! Fair play to the new owners of Wolves though, buying a club for £45 million and heavily investing in a manager and players; for one West Midlands club it seems to be going according to plan which is a lot more one can currently say for Birmingham, West Brom and even Aston Villa. The day when football clubs are predominantly owned by people who hail from these shores may have gone and we can lament that at will but, pride aside, bringing money into England can only be good. We must only hope that President Xi's aim for China to invest and dominate the game of football does not mean taking control of overseas leagues as well, however, I fear it might and we should at least be wary of it. In the meantime we can but beat these foreign owned scoundrels on the pitch. I hope that includes today. Enjoy the game folks, I certainly will; let us roar the team on to a deserved victory and move the club front and centre. And a very happy new year to you all.
  8. If Port Said Red is right i was probably impartial enough not to have used terms such as 'easy on the eye'. I was not painting a Turner in other words.
  9. Close to Sandown Park near Esher Green in Surrey lies the shortest trunk road in Britain. The A3009 is a mere 170 yards long. As delusions of grandeur go this must be the pinnacle as far as main roads are concerned. The rather aptly named Ebenezer Place, meanwhile, is officially recognised as the shortest road in the world located in Wick, Scotland. The A6011 is less well known for any records but at only 2.1 miles long remains one of the shortest A roads in the UK. The A6011 was formerly part of the A52, before that road was moved onto a nearby ring road. The road has three western termini. The A6011 runs along Meadow Lane, Nottingham, from the A60 north of Trent Bridge to a roundabout on the A612. There's also a spur along County Road past Notts County's football ground back to the A60. The mainline turns off Meadow Lane and crosses the Trent over Lady Bay Bridge (where parts of Smiley's People were filmed) and passing the City Ground (the two are the closest pair of grounds in England as many reading this will know). A signalled junction with the A6520 joins us to the former route of the A52. We now pass between Lady Bay and West Bridgford, before becoming dual carriageway. There's a signalled junction to access the National Watersports Centre (at Holme Pierrepont) before the road ends on meeting the A52 at a roundabout in Gamston. A certain Edgar Purnell Hooley was passing a tar works in 1901 when he noticed a barrel of tar had been spilled and, to reduce the mess, someone had dumped gravel on it. A year later he patented the process and the first road to be tarmacked was the A6011 or, back then, called the Radcliffe Road in West Bridgford. Tarmac was not invented by the Scotsman John Macadam. Nottingham has given the world a lot of things such as discoveries that led to the Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine or MRI Scanner invented by the recently and sadly departed Sir Peter Mansfield of the University of Nottingham with Paul Lauterbur from the University of Illinois. When Mansfield presented his ideas at a symposium in 1977, he recalls facing a silent audience. Sir Peter wasn't entirely surprised, since his method could theoretically speed up the process of producing images from an hour to a fraction of a second. Nottingham also gave us Ibuprofen discovered by Dr. Stewart Adams in 1961; Turning on the taps is a fairly everyday thing, but the technology has its origins in Nottingham. Arnold-born Thomas Hawksley was an engineer for the Nottingham Waterworks Company and developed the first high-pressure water supply at Trent Bridge; Okay, in health terms this shouldn't be in here. But Player's began as a small shop in Beast Market Hill in 1860 and went on to become one of Nottingham’s best-known brands. John Player was the first tobacconist to offer pre-packaged tobacco. Before this, smokers would have to buy it loose by weight; It is pretty hard to imagine a time without traffic lights, but after seeing thousands killed on the roads, in 1866 Nottingham High School pupil John Peake Knight set about trying to solve the problem. His system had a revolving gas-powered lantern with a red and a green light with the first one placed near the House of Commons in London; Lace made by machine has played an important role in the industrial life of Nottingham since the 1760s when net was first made on the stocking frame. By the early 1900's Nottingham was the lace capital of the world with one third of the entire population earning their living in the trade, two thirds of them women. The trade may be a shadow of its former self but lace is woven into the fabric of the city; Yes, the Sally or Salvation Army was founded in the East End of London, but it was the brainchild of Sneinton man William Booth. As well as whipping out the instruments to play Christmas songs, the Salvation Army is also one of the biggest distributors of humanitarian aid in the world; HP Source from 1895; The Video Cassette Recorder from 1963 and more bizarely the Flying Bedstead from 1953 which, remarkably, was a precursor to the Hawker Harrier Jump Jet prematurely retired by the Government and looked liked this.. Arguably far more important than all of those things is Nottingham's 'Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem' an 1189 pub purporting to be the oldest in England, not the UK. Perhaps when we visit the City Ground next year a fan or three can pay the place a visit pre or post match and report back to us all. AND.. TO FOOTBALL....... ....That other passion for all of us on this forum are a few other firsts for Nottingham. We of course know all about County being the oldest club but Forest hold a few interesting statistics of their own. Over the Trent from Nottingham based County, in West Bridgford, Nottingham Forest were the first team to wear shin pads and introduce goal nets and crossbars, and a whistle for the referee most of which was down to one man; Forest chairman Sam Weller Widdowson, who previously played for the team and indeed cricket for Nottinghamshire, introduced the novel idea of defending. He played a 2-3-5 formation, with the 3 in the midfield known as half backs, being largely defensive, rather than a 1-2-7 which most teams used. Earlier in his career Widdowson was credited with those shin pads, having cut them down from cricket pads and tying them to the outside of his football stockings. Initially ridiculed they soon caught on and are, to this day, regulation. When Widdowson later became a referee he officiated the first ever match that used goal nets. Widdowson is perhaps one of the most underrated and uncelebrated innovators of the game. He played once for England in an international against Scotland in 1880 with England going down to a 9 goal thriller 5-4. Born in April 1851, sixth of 10 children, Widdowson was named after Sam Weller from The Pickwick Papers, his father’s favourite Dickens character. He was 14 when Forest were formed in 1865, 15 when he became a regular member of the side and 22 when he was made captain in 1873, promptly introducing a new formation that was to become the default in English football at least until Herbert Chapman came up with the WM system in the 1920s. This involved, according to the Evening Post, “one goalkeeper, two backs, three half-backs and five forwards, with himself as sole leader of the attack. In this line-up the second centre forward dropped back to the centre of the half-back line to act as a purveyor of passes down the middle of the field to the attackers.” A 'purveyor' of passes; what an exquisite use of the word in describing a footballer at work on the field of play. And Widdowson was to be involved in more novelties: in 1878 the FA used a match between his Forest side and Sheffield’s Norfolk FC to trial for the first time an alternative to the referee’s white flag, which officials used to wave when displeased, and then asked for his thoughts on the experiment. Following his positive feedback, the whistle was formally introduced. “No man did more than this famous all-rounder to bring careful thought and inventive genius to the game,” wrote the Nottingham Evening Post in 1950. “But then everything Sam Weller Widdowson did in sport had the hallmark of class, and the brilliance of a genius.” Nottingham Forest did not see such genius again perhaps until its most successful manager of all time came along, Brian Clough and I wrote a fair few paragraphs of this dour yet erudite man in a previous Match Day. Mark Warburton presides over the 2017 Forest team which are yet to draw a match this season. Will Forest fancy their chances at Ashton Gate today? We expect a victory but 'there are no easy games' as we all know which we often repeat to ourselves like a mantra, but it is very true especially in this Championship division. Enjoy the match today.
  10. Either that or Wagstaff has fallen way down the football pyramid.
  11. Don't give all your secrets away Cityal - you might find you get hooked on this stuff and have enough material to write a book on it. I find there is surprisingly little comprehensive and accurate and up to date material out there.
  12. Lets not forget the barren landscape of old industrial Avonmouth; looking at Red Raw's posting of that brilliant map below we can safely say that those chemical complexes of Avonmouth are Gas lands. Literally and figuratively. They do like living up to their name it seems. I notice there is a Zinc Road, The Esso Terminal, a Household waste centre and even Portable Toilets Ltd off St Andrews Road so now we know. Not a single City season ticket holder in that wasteland; its all Gas.
  13. Bert Tann... In parts you had me going there until you said 'Embassy in St Helier' ; you lost your credibility then me babber. Amusing read though .
  14. Here we go.. The whole team will be reeled out.... Stuart Sinbad
  15. I really think this discussion about tents could actually be the precursor to the Gas playing in the desert of Jordan. With their quality, strength in depth and clearly talented manager they could even win the title of Jordan's Premier League. After all Al Faisaly seem to win it every year. They must be desperate for somebody else to win it. Go get em Rovers. And since all the teams in their 12 team Premier league are called Al something we should really christian Rovers from this day forth as Al-Gas. Full of hot air indeed.
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