Eddie Hitler

Does anybody know what state the Memorial ground stadium is in? I've not been there but from clips of the games (by their entertaining blogger) it looks pretty old but I didn't know how bad it was; I remember the state of the Goldstone Ground away for a midweeker before Brighton moved ground; it was crumbling with huge sections roped off for safety reasons. As The New Stadium has been the goal for a few years they will have done the absolute minimum maintenance so I was wondering how the stands are holding up.

Happy with that; would like to see Cox brought on at some stage prior to the 88th minute so we can actually see what he can do.

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I predict 0-0 and several of the players will be wearing gloves; the great jessies. (I'm not referring to you Aiden!)

havanatopia, how can you forget Hull's most famous (in his own opinion) resident? Ronnie Pickering, Ronnie Pickering!!, RONNIE PICKERING!!!

Very true Peter. At the moment we are drowning in the sticky-sweet honey of their latest pratfalls and disasters. They need to start spacing them out a bit so we're not expecting them all the time. They can start by behaving like a normal professional football club for the next month so that we can have an element of surprise when Higgs' doomed stadium appeal goes belly-up.

I think you can justifiably claim "unreasonable behaviour" over the last two years as grounds for divorce.

Jumpers for goalposts, white plastic garden chairs for seating, Santa's grotty grotto, you can take the club out of non-league but you can't take the non-league out of the club, Nick Higgs the lawyers' pension plan, horse-punching. Big up the Rovers! If you had to come up with a comedy version of a local rival then they would be pretty close to it. The popcorn is on standby for their next jolly jape.

How can I dislike a club that has given me so much laughter? Only yesterday I had to change my underwear after hearing their FA Cup result.

Do you think it's a deliberate running joke that they have to get a white plastic chair into every new signing photo? When The Comic Strip did Five Go Made in Dorset for every shot in Aunt Fanny's house there had to be a bottle of gin visible.

Caught anything yet?

I find them quite entertaining, be good if we had our equivalent of Jake doing the fan's eye view.

Well yes. Any court winnings were to do with the stadium which is separately owned by the directors. If they won enough then they might have given some to the team but they would have kept the lion's share.

You should stand up and say that at their AGM!

Oh yes, done that. I've never had a season ticket so viewed it as putting money into the club by other means. Not an investment although last time people were quoting share prices they had actually gone up.

Rivalry aside if they were floated on the stock market would you regard buying shares in Bristol Rovers or any loss-making fourth division club as a good investment? I wouldn't.

They're losing money with no prospect of making a profit. They may share this with the majority of clubs outside of the upper reaches of the premiership but it doesn't make them a "decent proposition to onlooking investors". Possibly somebody might want to buy the ground from the directors for development but the football side is a lemon.

You must be a lawyer! As a non-lawyer I see 80:20 as a very strong case rather than probabilities upon a dice roll.

QCs will give odds, they won't say that they're going to win. They may be saying you have a 60:40 chance of winning an appeal and that's good enough for Higgs. I have used QCs before and lost once when the QC estimated 80:20. They are very fallible. And expensive. The regional law firms are having a very thin time of it these days as the legal aid reforms have kicked in work has dried up and several have gone bust. I would have thought Burges Salmon would be equally affected and desperate to make up their income by taking on some big complex cases exactly like this one. Just sayin'...

I thought he did great, I haven't been so entertained for years.

He was useless at Notts County this season, spent force these days.

I think they will. Higgs is a certain type of businessman - an emotional one. In smaller companies this level of self-belief and wanting things works brilliantly. When it gets bigger and more complicated then rules are involved and just because your ego says you want something doesn't mean you're going to get it. He'll be shouting and banging the table in his total conviction that he is right and deserves to win; the rest of the board will go along with it, the lawyers will encourage him because they'll get another big payday, and they will lose again. I worked at one medium-sized company which had been built by the efforts of one man, yet ultimately his conviction that he could do no wrong nearly bankrupted the company through some big loss-making contracts he had signed up to; it got taken over with one big condition - that he left.

Is this a newspaper or an end of term project by a junior school?