areNOTwhatTHEYseem

My point was that it didn't end like the Cardiff game because last night's ref didn't give every tackle as a freekick against us and didn't allow blatant cheating to stand. We may not have played scintillating football in either game, but neither Cardiff or Stoke created many clear chances and we kept both at arm's length pretty effectively...except for the intervention by Friday's ref.

Fox's cross from the right flank which Harris nearly got on the end of was a beauty.

That's the difference a competent ref makes.

Dawson is now entering Nuhiu territory on Owlstalk. There'll be a thread about him after every game he starts, one way or the other.

That's the one. Cheers. He took it from being an admittedly amusing free-for-all towards something a bit more interesting and orderly.

I quite liked the pie recommendations, too.

It annoys me far more than it should that Sky are still using the wrong version of our badge.

I almost miss the days of the free-for-all scramble to post the 'OFFICIAL' Matchday thread. It was always entertaining to sit back and watch as people edged it earlier and earlier in a desperate attempt to garner some attention and easy pluses. I especially liked it when there were two or three competing 'Official Matchday Threads' and the respective OPs would appear in each other's threads to claim theirs as the rightful winner, then retreat in order to desperately bump their own thread in the hope that the other one would get locked or merged under their banner! My memory's a bit hazy - once it settled down to a widely-accepted thread starter, we've got @Lord Snooty, who was preceded by @pauli, but who was it before him? I'm sure there was someone else.

Well they can't have it both ways, can they? Either Hillsborough's been unsafe for the past few decades without SYP and the council doing anything about it, or it's been safe the whole time.

If they claimed that, it would open them up to a world of pain. I didn't start attending matches at Hillsborough until '91. If the ground were fundamentally unsafe for the entirety of my football-watching life, I'd like to think that the police and any relevant council bodies whose responsibility it is to ensure the ground is safe would have noticed and acted upon this before now. To have allowed me and tens of thousands of others to have attended hundreds of games in an unsafe stadium without any such restrictions in place for the past three decades would be tantamount to negligence. Unless these measures aren't really necessary, of course?

We could all take our shoes off and stand around in the club carpark for a bit? Seriously, I don't know what the best way of responding is, but whatever we do, we need to ensure that we raise our objections without giving the authorities an opportunity to paint us or our club in a bad light. If we do, you can guarantee that they'll capitalise on it. We need to win the PR war if we're going to exert some pressure on them. It would be great if one of our local journalists could do a bit of investigating, ask a few pertinent questions, and expose the ridiculous restrictions the club is operating under to a wider audience. Come on, Dom - now's your time to shine...

'Keith - you seen that tw*t doing star jumps in front of the keeper?' 'Yeah, dude. Reckon he could be interfering with play?' 'Nah, he's alright.'

As tempting as it is to fall into criticism of our previous transfer dealings when you consider this, I'm going to see it as evidence that we're finally getting our act together and doing the kind of business we need to if we're going to avoid further P&S issues.

Tomorrow's training session needs to be entirely dedicated to making the most of minimal contact and getting in the ref's face en mass. 'Come on, lads - Ash Baker's playing the role of ref - get in his face and scream. I can't hear you!'

Mr Flat Owl was well known for his brutally honest school reports. The parents of his Reception class sometimes found them a tad harsh, though.