On Saturday 6th January Forest welcomed fifteen overpaid, poncing, self deluded footballers to the City Ground then we stuck it up ?em Jonsey and they didn?t like it!

It?s becoming a feature of this season that following an emphatic defeat the group have displayed a certain ?bouncebackability? with an emphatic response. None more so than that win over Charlton off the back of a drumming from Oldham.

When the draw was made, many at the City Ground would have been rubbing their hands in glee as the game had all the ingredients for an upset. Yet with the arrival of Alan Pardew at the Valley I feared that the fire would have been re-ignited under a team playing aggressive attacking football ? everything this Forest team would have hated.
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Ahh, the FA Cup 3rd round. The REAL Theatre of Dreams. Where crowds sit and watch the Chelsea’s and the Man Utd’s battle against the Tamworth’s and Kidderminster’s of this world. And occasionally, you get the hard hitter. The early clash. And this one was a peach.

Liverpool vs Arsenal. Now Arsenal have absolutely dominated the FA Cup over the last 5 years, winning 3 times out of 5. They must be experts. But Liverpool are the holders, after Gerrard almost single handedly piloted the win last year, with a gunman’s shot that ripped open the intestines of West Ham and lay their entrails to the Gods. That still sends glorious shivers up my spine.

So the match started at the Liverpool stronghold, Anfield. Almost an unfair advantage, considering that once Liverpool didn’t lose in that magical stadium for 3 years. But as the scarily tanned Gary Lineker introduced the players walking onto the pitch, I felt pretty good.
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There was a time in the not too distant past when the transfer window would have filled me with hope, expectation and that feeling of nervous excitement that usually means a broken F4 key on your keyboard and far too much time spent on football messageboards waiting for In The Know’s to post their ever so secret scraps from football’s top tables as transfers were secretly wheeled and dealed behind not quite closed doors.

These days it leaves me cold and bored which is probably more a consequence of Spurs traditional lack of imagination in the transfer market (more of a last minute trolley dash to the bargain bins than a carefully planned strategy) but mostly because of the tabloid newspapers.

Pre-internet I lived for The Sun, The Mirror and Daily Star, for the tidbits they fed us about potential signings and the supposed top secret deals they were able to let us know about. These days I don’t waste my time or money on them as it’s become plainly obvious that they’ve developed a Random Transfer Rumour Generator and just let it run over the transfer window with no need for truth or accountability to get in the way of making up rumours to satisfy the lustful demands of mugs like the rest of us who just can’t help dreaming about our clubs landing the big metaphorical fish.
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At the beginning of last year, while visiting a friend in Manchester I decided to make the most of the opportunity and head down to Old Trafford. Manchester United is a club steeped in history, and the on-site museum ensured that I was reminded of this. The Munich air crash of 1958 followed by European success ten years later, the troublesome seventies and the Fergie Era ? The stories which had been written on the football field were being treasured and told to a younger generation some 50 feet away. However the one display that dominated the ground floor of the club museum was a tribute to the then recently deceased George Best. It served as a poignant reminder of a Northern Ireland connection with arguably the most famous club in the world. Indeed a glance at the museum?s International honours list shows an impressive number of players who have represented both the Red Devils and Northern Ireland. No club can boast more Ulster representatives than the Manchester outfit.

Whilst George Best is undoubtedly the most recognisable link, no fewer than 28 players have appeared in both the Red and Green shirts, notching up over 750 caps between them. Recognisable names like Best, Sammy McIlroy and Jimmy Nicholl jump out from the engraved list. History makers too such as John Peden who scored Ireland?s first hat trick and Norman Whiteside who became the youngest ever player to appear in a World Cup in 1982. Survivors of the Munich disaster, Harry Gregg and Jackie Blanchflower are names held in high esteem on both sides of the Irish Sea. The crash ended Blanchflower?s career and Gregg became a named associated with courage, although the big Coleraine man is quick to stifle any attempts to label him a hero. It is true he should be remembered for his performances between the sticks, yet many people seek to define him through what he did that night on the runway.
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Comments have been open again on State of the Game for two days and already I’m sick of having to keep pointing out our policy on what we’ll accept as comments.

1) No unnecessary swearing - I enjoy the use of many swear words in normal conversation and online but if your comment contains any unnecessary ones you’ll be binned.

2) No personal attacks on writers or other commenters - This is the golden rule, break it and your comment goes straight to the bin wasting both your time and mine. Time is precious, don’t waste it.

3) Stay on topic - Comment on the post or issues raised by other commenters, deviate into the realms of “my club’s bigger/better/tougher than your club” and you’ll find your comment binned. We appreciate debate on the issues raised, we hate petty digs from keyboard warriors with no relevance to the issues at hand.

4) Be nice to each other - This follows on from the no personal attacks point. You may be infuriated by what the writer has said and we expect that in some cases, football is a very emotive subject for all of us. Before you type a tough guy response about pummelling the writer’s head in or advising them not to give up their day job (how original btw) take a deep breath and think about whether you would say the same things to the person if you met them in the pub and were discussing the same issue. Sitting behind a computer monitor is no excuse for not acting in a civilised manner.

Stick to these guidelines and we’ll be fine. Mess about and break them and you’ll find your comment in the bin, persist and you’ll find your IP address logged and blocked.

What this boils down to is this: if you are a sensible person capable of sensible discussion then please comment on SOTG, if not, we don’t want your type around here so kindly move along.

It really is only a matter of time before “the special one” receives his marching orders, that’s if he doesn’t do the honourable thing and leave on his own accord before then. His tenure at Chelsea has been filled with controversy not to mention FA intervention and if the Blues fail to lift the title this season then I feel its game over for Mourinho.

The man has brought two back to back titles to Stamford Bridge but it seems that his seemingly unbeatable elite gang of players are starting to come apart at the seams. What exactly is it that has went wrong for Mourinho though? Is it his fall out with Abramovich that is interfering with the morale of the players? Is it his rather large mouth which is prone to outbursts which attract criticism from the rest of the footballing world? Or is it, despite having one of the largest cash reserves in modern day football, he has simply failed to purchase quality players that can fit into the club?

Lets look at the bare facts. Mourninho has paid some hefty transfer fees not to mention wages for super flops such as Wright-Philips, Shevchenko, Kalou, Kezman, Del Horno, Ballack and the list goes on. These players have failed to achieve a portion of their potential whilst at Chelsea and therefore it raises the question of what went wrong? Personally I believe that a good deal of the blame must rest on the shoulders of Mourinho. His public criticism of Shevchenko was full of childlike petulance and although I’m not advocating the Arsene Wenger “my players are perfect” school of thought I do think that he went too far in his condemnations of the Ukrainian star and that his managerial integrity has been undermined as a result.
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It was always going to be a gutsy move by the Rangers manager to front up to fan favourite and star player Barry Ferguson and ultimately it seems to have led to Paul Le Guen’s removal from his post at Ibrox today, supposedly by mutual consent.

As Fraser said in his piece yesterday there can be only one and obviously David Murray (sorry, Sir David Murray) has surveyed the sheer horror of Rangers season so far and decided to back Barry Ferguson rather than his manager.
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2006 was a good year for the Green and White Army.

It was a year that saw an unlikely victory over Spain along with a battling draw in Denmark added to credible victories over Estonia, Finland and Latvia. It was a year which saw end times on the international scene for seasoned veteran Colin Murdock, with James Quinn likely to follow suit shortly. It was a year where Michael Duff, Chris Baird and especially Stephen Craigan have gained glowing recognition for their efforts, with some fine individual performances. Yet perhaps when we look back in five years time at 2006, it will be seen as a year in which many of our young stars began to shine. Sammy Clingan, Kyle Lafferty and Jonny Evans all made their international debuts, and all have been huge successes in the eyes of the Windsor Park faithful. And with all three playing regular League football, the future looks very bright indeed for Northern Ireland. The re-introduction of the under-21s has surely been a catalyst in this sudden burst of youth, and there is hope that there will be many more gems to be uncovered. So, who can we expect to see breaking onto the international scene in 2007 and beyond?
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It?s taken me a little while to come to terms with the Christmas Woe Ho we?ve had at Nottingham Forest. It is as if Santa came down that chimney, ate the mince pie, drunk the sherry and nicked all the prezzies then left naught but a traditional Yule log in the fire place. After being such good people all year you have to feel the injustice of being completely shat upon at the end of it.

Not that losing a seven point lead and slipping into third in the league really bothers me that much. It may be the kick up the backside that our increasingly complacent-looking squad require, although the way we have bottled it combined with our less than average penalty record this season does not bode well if we need to go through the back door via the play-offs to get out of this division.
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New Year, new broom and all that so I’ve made the executive decision to split the two sides of the State of the Game house and make the blog a proper blog again and put the forum onto it’s own branded domain.

Having the two together was a bold move in many ways as it meant that a lot of one off readers would be put off from commenting on threads as they would have to register for the forum but I originally felt that this would be a good thing and weed out many of the idiots (for want of a better word) who just comment swear words and insults and in this respect it worked very well.

However, I feel now that the system wasn’t really serving the blog articles or the forum as a whole in the way it should and so we come to this - comments are back on in traditional form on stateof thegame.co.uk and the forum with it’s 160+ members and nearly 3,000 posts is getting ready for a move to a domain of it’s own so we can concentrate on it fully in the way we should.

More news on this when I get it sorted but in the meantime, comment away but please keep it clean. I won’t have insults or too many unnecessary swearwords. Stay on topic and have a good discussion, take it too far and you will have wasted your time typing an insulting comment and my time moderating it. “Keep it clean folks, let’s keep it clean…”