Yes I know the site was down for most of the morning (database problems and a powercut just as I was fixing it) and i know there are some dodgy characters (? etc.) showing up where pound signs and ampersands should be but give me a few hours and it’ll be sorted.

Cathy’s article about Julian Alsop and Banana-gate isn’t showing on the main page either which is strange but for those interested in dressing room / anal / banana style antics take a look here: Alsop Banana Incident for the story.

Bloody websites.

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.

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…”

In the words of Dad’s Army favourite Corporal Jones “Don’t Panic!” if you wander over to the SOTG football forums and find that a lot of the sub forums have disappeared. I’ve just moved all football chat into the forum cunningly titled “Football Chat” as I didn’t see the point in separating it all out and spreading all of it in distinct forums.

All we are interested in is talking about football so why not have it all in the one forum?

Maybe we’re a little early but we’ve given the site a new look for the impending New Year as we look to get back to our roots and focus on blogging more on SOTG next year. There’s so much going on in football every day that it’s hard to keep up with it some times but in future we’re planning on getting our views over on even more of the big talking points that are cropping up and enticing more of you lurkers to sign up for the forums and take the chat onto a new level on there.

Any bugs in the new design please let us know.

SOTG Admin

Who would have thought that we’d be here like this after a year?

Obviously we don’t like to talk too much about ourselves here at State of the Game but it would be extremely rude of me not to take this opportunity to thank all of the tireless writers and workers behind the scenes who have helped grow the site into what it is today - one of the fastest growing independent football discussion websites online.

To celebrate we’re giving a ?10 Amazon.co.uk gift certificate to the first reader who can answer this simple question:

Which former Manchester United and Southampton player completed last year’s London Marathon in five and a half days despite suffering from the dehabilitative disease Multiple Sclerosis?

(The answer is actually to be found on State of the Game so if you aren’t sure try searching through the site for it).

First person to send me the answer on the following contact form gets the gift certificate.

Good luck and happy birthday State of the Game!

EDIT: We have a winner!

The answer was of course Danny Wallace and the winner was James Anderson from Bolton who has a ?10 Amazon Gift Certificate winging it’s way to him as we speak.

Well done James!

Apologies if you find any broken links or errors on State of the Game over the next hour or so (up until around midday), we are in the middle of a software change and are working frantically behind the scenes to make sure that any disruption is minimal.

Thanks for your patience and keep reading

Alan
www.stateofthegame.co.uk

EDIT: 26th September 2006 - 11:39am

I’ve finished bridging the comments system between SOTG and the forums. Any problems you encounter please report them and let us know - Contact State of the Game

After another week spent sifting through the comments on SOTG to root out the bad seeds who just can’t help themselves but dish out uncalled for abuse to both writers and other readers I’ve decided that in future all debate and discussion will be better served on State of the Game Forums and comments will be closed from this moment on.

SOTG is evolving as anyone who has been involved as a writer or reader over the past year will know and we feel separating the discussion side of the site slightly from the articles will give us the best chance of getting some intelligent debate in the long run.

Registering for the forums only takes a few seconds and is completely free of charge, sign up now and get entered into September’s free prize draw for a signed copy of Alisdair Gold’s new football book “Ode To Jol - A Spurs Fan’s Diary” as well as getting involved in the discussion and football chat going on in the forums on a daily basis.

We really feel that this is a positive move for SOTG and hope that our loyal readers will agree.

All the best, keep reading our wonderful feature articles every day and get registered on the forums to get discussing and arguing like a group of old married couples about what’s happening day to day in the beautiful game

Alan
Editor, www.stateofthegame.co.uk

Let’s just say it’s been an entertaining hours’ viewing if nothing else although after all of the hype surrounding Panorama’s Football’s Dirty Secrets programme I really thought they would have had more real evidence and been able to make a real difference in cleaning up football at the highest level in England.

Sam Allardyce may well be sweating over what the next few days and weeks will bring for him after being outed as the main man for allegedly taking bungs or arranging for his son, football agent Craig, to take a bung while involved in transfer dealings with his dad’s employers, Bolton Wanderers. Agents Teni Yerima and Peter Harrison have been the main men on their side of the fence implicated and neither can honestly believe that their claims after being caught on camera saying that they could arrange illegal payments with many high ranking football managers will be ignored by the authorities simply because they are now claiming to have made everything up.

Harry Redknapp’s involvement in the show was also something of a let down as he merely alluded on camera that he would be interested in signing Blackburn Rovers defender Andy Todd, which is an infringement of the rules but hardly earth shattering in the scale of football corruption scandals that we’d been led to believe.

Harry’s former assistant, Kevin Bond, now with Newcastle United, came out a little worse after admitting in a recorded phone conversation that he and Harry would discuss the level of financial payoff they would like to receive from doing player transfers with the fictitious agency set up by Panorama.

Aside from Sam Allardyce’s continued involvement and mentions from the aforementioned corrupt agents, it was the camera footage of Chelsea youth team scout Frank Arnesen negotiating an illegal payment for a 15 year old Middlesbrough defender that really caught the eye. After the Ashley Cole saga last season Chelsea have a suspended sentence of a 3 point deduction hanging over them and surely this footage violates the terms on which they have been allowed to keep those points? As a Spurs fan I can only wonder at the kind of dealings Mr Arnesen did in our name when he revamped the playing squad in his time as Sporting Director a couple of summers ago.

Liverpool were another high profile club implicated in the illegal tapping up of the young Middlesbrough defender Nathan Porritt, the same player offered to Chelsea behind his club’s back by agent Peter Harrison.

The fact that so many clubs’, players’ and managers’ names were beeped out and censored shows just how sensitive the BBC have had to be about legal issues and with this in mind the Panorama programme sort of fizzled out rather than exploded the corrupt football world apart. We all know it goes on and when the industry closes ranks as well as it does it’s not likely that we’ll get to hear the full story any time soon.

Panorama scratched the surface but whether it ends Sam Allardyce’s career or that of any of the agents exposed within it remains to be seen.

Seeing as how you all enjoy the discussion and banter so much on our daily articles we’ve decided to give you another way to get involved in talking about all fo the major issues happening each and every day in the world of football - State of the Game Forums.

It’s FREE to register and takes less than a minute to get signed up and ready for action.

With all of the chat every day from the English, Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, Irish, European and International arenas you can be sure that nothing will get missed now on State of the Game Forums. Join up now, enter our CONTEST to win a free TOFFS football shirt and get into the football discussion mood.

Tantrums, arguments, disagreements and wild opinions aren’t banned - they’re mandatory at State of the Game Forums.