Bristol Oil Services

We've only managed two promotions from the second tier to the top division in 120 odd years, it's nowhere near enough and something of an embarrassment for a club of our support and standing. A promotion to the top level would provide the level of excitement and create the kind of memories that no L1 promotion will ever do. It would also cement a generation of support for decades to come, like many of the miserable old moaners on here that can remember 1976. It's absolutely worth hoping for and striving to achieve.

Which just goes to show how good our judgement is .......

Any relation to Blackie Gray?

What do I hope for? I'm not sure I should say, I think it better for now that I just be careful what I wish for ....

Let us count the ways ....

Atmosphere is not really about people singing specific songs, it's more to do with them just making a bloody racket in response to lively events on the pitch, encouraging the team forward, encouraging the team to attack, putting pressure on the officials, hounding an opponent. Just shouting come on or even something more guttural and primal. Just making some noise. Rrrrraaaaggghhh!! Unfortunately, the limp style of modern football mostly centred around the halfway line going sideways and back between central defenders and wing/full backs and the keeper sends many to their phones, their daydreams or the concourse. What we need to get an atmosphere at AG is not more or different or old songs, what we need is action in the final third and a busy visiting goalkeeper and a visibly up for it and energised team putting the opposition on the back foot for sustained periods, their woodwork rattling as the ball pings about their penalty area. But we don't see anything of the sort at AG for anywhere near long enough in any game, and so for long long periods of time we sit and stare as we pass it about just inside our half across the halfway line (with a bloke three rows behind you bellowing into the silence: "Get it forward!") or we watch the opposition with their £83m squad dominating the ball and bearing down on our back five and Max time and again. There's just not enough of the sort of football at the right end of the pitch that might wake us from our West Country slumber and get us out of our seats to make the sort of atmosphere that Leeds fans will make at Elland Road (like when they came back from 2 down to draw 2:2 with us a few years ago; when do we ever bombard the opposition like that at AG? Not even the time we came back from 2 down to Leeds to draw 2:2 at home but then we had "atmosphere" that night, as Leeds "f*cked it up") Because Leeds have £83m of players, and they have the ball; we have £8.3m of players, and we keep giving them the ball. It's partly the modern style of overly coached "idealogical" halfway-line-and-back-to-the-keeper (then hoof!) football, partly having poorer players than the opposition and so not having the ball and so unable to pin them in and put them under pressure, and three parts Bristolian/West Country indifference. Plus smart phones. And the lack of belief that there's really anything going on here at the moment, the sense of going around in circles, and the sense of aimless drift.

Chelsea FFP - For facksake Pochettino

It would've gone to penalties .......

Too emotional

Woops, sorry; slap me on the patio. All the same, them Manc bands, mind

No, get them to run the joint. Poacher turnt goalkeeper

Shop lifters of the West Country: unite, and take over the club shop.

Been calling Maidstone "Made of Stone" lately, so expect that one to pop up somewhere on here during the 5th round (keeps me amused)

Yeah, he was happy in a drunken haze of football stats, analysis and video clips but he's miserable now

Stick with it, kidder. The week where it's us in the Prem scoring 8 in two games gets ever closer, by the decade.

Twine central (occasionally leftish) .... Bird more central?

It's like that every other home game at Plymouth this season ...

Enid Blyton wrote "Mr Meddle's Muddles" in 2009/10 about Steve Lansdown and the Coppell/David James years ....

Goal-hanger Abbey?

Tbf, until we actually do or achieve something then to clubs like yer Derbys we will always be a bit of a nothing club. It's not the most outlandish slur that could be laid at our door.

In Jane Austen's Prowed & Prejudice, Mr Bennet, facing the ignominy of his youngest daughter's disgrace with the cad Whickham, says to his favourite child Elizabeth: "For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?" which is pretty much Bristol football and this forum in a nutshell.

Good read, that. Thanks. "Data is not predestination." I like football to be, still, about the intangibles, the art as well as science of coaching or management. "Are you up for the fight, Liam?" As we are quite probably neither going up or down this season, getting all het up about results now is daft, we will get a better idea about LM after he's had a summer window and a pre-season, before the Saturday-Tuesday-Saturday-Tuesday kicks in and the recovery-meetings-play-recovery-meetings Klopp refers to.

What stays with me watching that is the sound of the crowd anticipating a certain goal that does not materialise: "Yeaaa-hhh .... ohhh! " Sums up 87/88, sums up the 1980s, the last 40 years ..... proper ball boys back then mind, City ski hats, kicking the ball out of the back of the net, celebrating with the players

Aye. Last time I bought the local Sunday Independent for example was 4 May 2014, I still have it in fact. And no, @Never to the dark side, you can't have it.

That was a thing of beauty, but an impossible standard to maintain.