Bristol Oil Services

I think it has dawned on Steve that this pathway is working rather well for his players - nowhere > City > Bournemouth - but not so well for himself/his team/his prospects for hawking his team/Bristol Sports, so he's tweaked the "philosophy" and is buying a stair lift to heaven Bournemouth the Premier League, and not messing around anymore. He's running out of time, and as the lad in Grev Smythe park after (I think Walsall at home in the play offs in '88) said to Bob Crampton on HTV: "We don't wanna mess around, we wanna go up" as chaos and police rained about them. Tbf to that lad, we been messing about long enough now

He said: we can't go over .... we can't go under ... have to go through (it)

Yes, as first suggested by Michael Rosen, in the late 80s

I must say, I don't remember this myself either?

Not if we win the next two it doesn't

We'll do rather well in that Premier League, when we get there ....

Nige managed ok, working part-time (well, Saturday afternuns)

I remember MS Dony, he was a front foot sort of player ...

Top end bench

Yeah, I think we'll either do well, or not do very well. Just putting it out there ...

F+ck's sake, what about the Ladies Dave, they making a tiny profit in that Super League? And the basketball lot, they got more coming in than going out?

One of the Nolan sisters was the missus of Torquay manager Bruce "I predict a" Rioch. Torquay played their matches on Saturday evenings so everyone was a bit, er, tired and emotional - some had been hard at it from the Friday afternoon/evening; some got a bit carried away (ie in a boat) - by the final whistle and not best pleased with another ropey away effort from TC and the boys. In the absence of any local firm to take it out on the unfortunate Mrs Rioch took the brunt as she escaped the ground in a car and we poured out into the Torquay night. The car's suspension and shock absorbers were given a thorough examination, shall we say. It was in the national tabloids the following Monday. City would be in the local and national papers quite a bit back then for this sort of thing (not roughing up members of girl groups, just generally behaving appallingly at games). Not big, not clever; but 40 years on, quite funny. If I was writing a Bristol City "hoolie" book, that would be a centrepiece: we took it to one fifth of the Nolans. (Must've been pretty terrifying for Mrs Rioch, really shouldn't laugh about it, but always makes me chuckle. Hope she's ok).

What happened 40 years ago? What to commemorate from 1984? Well, 40 years ago this month we roughed up one fifth of the Nolans on a Saturday night down Torquay. Saturday night was fer fighting back then, and boy did we take it to just the one of the Nolans. Let's have a shirt for that one. Lest we forget.

Bottom half? Well, he's part of a top six defence though, along with Zak, Dickie & co. I don't know how many shots we allow the opposition and all that but only five other sides have conceded fewer. Max must've played his part. Big Nige certainly left us with a decent, one could say top end defence, a very solid base for Liam Manning to build upon and deliver or add the desired front foot/"sexy" football (which was perhaps not Nige's forte).

Any word from Matt Le Tiss on last night's very peculiar, very "strange" result?

That's why we NEED to, must, get to the Premier League. So that when we crash back into the Champ, Sky know who we are and are all over us.

Mute volume, turn on BBC Radio Local. Sorted.

Just need about 38/40 like this tonight between August and May one year in the next year or three, and we can all .... forgive Brian.

"It's a difficult place to go"

Alan there tonight?

Think Donovan was 68. Everyone in the enclosure had flowers in their hair that night ...

38,000 actually. The quarter final in '74 was an orderly, all-ticket 37,000, whilst the league game in '77 was an unruly, who-s-counting-tonight?, free fer all with 38,800 odd, allegedly.

"It doesn't work like that, mate"

If we had signed Bob Hatton from Luton, back in the day, then set out to sign say Micky Gynn from wherever he was (Posh, I think, GrahamC will confirm), then we could've had a recruitment based terrace song with a nod to Leonard Cohen: "First we sign Bob Hatton, then we sign Mick Gynn" although the football lads would probably have gone down the "take" road there, with a "First we take the Tote End, then we take the ..... "

.... it's coming like a ghost town, Dave. Too much fighting on the Matchdaythtead .....