Grapeviney

I caught some of the Switzerland - Nth Ireland match in Basel the other night and the pitch there was as bad as the one in Honduras. Hard to fathom in this day and age, especially in Europe. The North London Derby is on this weekend at the very respectable time of 11.30pm Saturday night on SBS. Incredibly, Optus have got yet another free trial going, which means at least half of the season to date has been a give-away. I'm actually weighing up a quick, bucket list soccer trip to Europe in the new year. I figure with Spurs playing at Wembley this season, it will never be so easy to see them live again. Would try to go to matches at San Siro and the Camp Nou while I'm over there. Anyone done such a trip and have any advice?

Fair enough dc, i just don't see the club's behaviour as predatory in the same way you do, although I definitely agree that ht shouldn't have been docked that amount automatically and without notification in a year when it's gone through the roof. But on point 3, that's a consequence of our improvement from no-hopers to maybes. The GFG was basically worthless in the past, effectively making it a donation to the club. Now it's a real product and its value is always going to fluctuate relative to the likelihood of the MFC making the granny. Let's just hope we get to use it in 2018.

It's not about fair or unfair, it's simple market forces. When people are forking out thousands of dollars for limited GF tickets off scalpers and resellers, as Richmond fans were this year, then $299 insurance premium + ticket cost simply becomes the total cost you pay for a ticket. You're paying $300 now to avoid having to pay $1200 in GF week, or the $450-$650 price tag of a premium membership. Whichever way you do it, you've got to pay somewhere along the way. There's no point pricing the GFG at $75 and having 25,000 members subscribe to it if you only have 15,000 tickets. Edit: If we do make a GF and the allocation is undersubscribed then we will know the club has got the price point wrong, but I'd be surprised. If anything, it may go up in the future as the team improves and a GF appearance becomes a real possibility.

I know, but the cost of the ticket is both separate and irrelevant to the GFG, and the price of the former has no bearing on the latter. You're effectively paying insurance against having to scramble for a ticket when we do make it. @Diamond JimDon't know DJ, I have no idea how the allocation thing works at all.

Only the premium memberships, AFAIK. A ballot system gives people the option to avoid the cost f the GFG but still have some chance of getting a ticket. And I'm not saying everyone goes in it, but the if the club gets 15,000 tickets, it could set aside 2500 for a ballot and the remaining 12500 go to the premium members with the GFG. Dunno. Just thinking out loud.

It's a tough one hardtack, because the new cost of it is no doubt much closer to its real value than the cheap add-on it's been the past, when we had absolutely no chance of making finals, let alone the GF. The club could have basically given everyone the GFG for free without any risk at all. But with clubs allocated so few GF tickets, it's a matter of supply and demand and this is the only way to control demand. An alternative might be for the club to use part of its GF allocation in a ballot system, where members pay a smaller fee to go in the ballot rather than the high cost of the GFG?

You can add money, which is probably at the top of the list. Not sure about other categories, but my membership has gone up $50 - pretty steep (more than 8 per cent) in a single year. As a result, I haven't (yet) bought the 2 additional memberships I usually do for my niece and nephew, who live in Qld and support Brisbane. Also, one of the consequences of relatively low GA ticket prices, and the ease with which you can rock up to a game at the 'G at siren time, is that people feel comfortable taking a wait-and-see approach on on buying membership. Would be interested to hear if the price rise is an across-the-board thing or just in certain categories?

Would love to see them play PSG in the Champions League at some stage, goals galore.

Thought we were probably the better team on the day but there were few chances at either end, and they were able to capitalise on what was really our only defensive lapse of the game. The riddle of replacing Kane continues to plague Poch - Llorente has failed to fire so far, much like Janssen last year. Son is quality but not an outright striker.

It's pathetic Macca, bloody frustrating - I think I'm going to write to them and complain and see if it can't be rectified. I've tried through TuneIn too. As you say, it's amateurish from arguably the number 1 comp in the world. You'd think that if the local rights-holder (in this case EON) falls over, there'd be some provision for it to revert to TalkSport as the principal rights holder. Did you watch our Cup tie earlier in the week? Not all that dissimilar to the PL fixture a few weeks back, except this time the Hammers were able to complete the comeback. The shift in momentum was huge after the break. Probably helped Bilic earn a stay of execution, although I see you dropped 2 points in the dying seconds last night against Palace. Was a good night on the telly last night, with the Man U v Spurs game followed by Milan v Juve and then Bayern v Leipzig.

Interesting that Optus are running another free trial, the second one is as many months. Must be struggling with subscriptions. And @Macca this might explain the mystery of the TalkSport on/off situation, as it’s definitely been unavailable this weekend, even through the website, presumably to protect the Optus promotion.

Thread's been purged of the politics and insults - there's a general board for that.

Kouyate’s goal was great (both the ball in and the finish) but yep, too little too late, thought you could / should have played with more intensity and urgency when Aurelier was sent off.

Yeh it tends to be either feast or famine with Spurs, although I thought Dele was probably fractionally off-side on the first one.

@Macca Good news - Talk Sport website is working, Macca, but I’ll be listening to the TV commentary tonight as Peter Drury is one of my favourite callers. Edit: just saw your post, beat me to it

Hmmm I'll try again this weekend too. Perhaps I listened successfully through the computer / website last time and only tried the phone / app on the weekend. I like the radio call too, listened to most Spurs matches last year. As with the TV commentary, the standard puts our own (AFL) callers to shame.

I'm almost certain I listened through Talk Sport a couple of weeks ago Macca, but no such luck last weekend - was definitely blocked with an ad telling Australian listeners to go through EON. Did a little bit of hunting around and noticed others had the same problem (the Talk Sport app review page is full of Australians telling them to unblock it). I (think I) tried the website on the weekend, too, same problem as the app.

EON have gone bust and the British rights holder, TalkSport, have still got Australia on geo block, so there's no way to listen to the broadcast at the moment. Pretty pathetic situation, to be honest, as EON went belly up a few months ago so it really should have been sorted by now. The general standard of coverage here leaves a lot to be desired, especially for the EPL as one of the world's premier sporting leagues. The SBS match-of-the-round is neither the earliest game nor the best fixture, and Foxtel have either lost the rights to the English Championship or are no longer showing it, and we're getting Turkish football instead. Even the La Liga coverage is ordinary, with most games called from the studio rather than live at the ground, and very little atmosphere / crowd noise in the audio feed making for a very dull viewing experience. /end rant PS: Because of the aforementioned EON issue, I ended up following the match in a Spurs forum game-day thread - funny how similar it was to the Demonland game-day, with hysterical posters calling for good players to be banished to the moon on the back of a single mistake, and realists trying to talk them down off the ledge. Think it's time to (reluctantly) fork out for the Optus subscription.

Update: he can fly.

Spurs dropping to 6th, what gives @Macca? Not impressed with our swag of summer signings?

Hell yeah!! Welcome back, Jesse - hope you kick a bag!

Kicked 6 in his comeback game! Also celebrated his 40th on the weekend with a few of the boys.

Late last year Eddie slipped past Wiz on games / goals but their records are remarkably similar. Farmer played 249 games for 483 goals; Eddie has 14 more games and 27 more goals, with both averaging 1.94 goals a game. Milne's record surpasses both - 275 games for 574 goals at 2.09 goals a game. Interestingly, Jeffy (277 goals from 156 games) has more goals in fewer games than Cyril (273 goals from 185 games).

The Black Dog Institute does some excellent work in this space and there are lots of good resources on their website. They've also published this great book where depression sufferers tell their own stories from the first onset of the illness, through diagnosis and then into recovery / management. There's lots of great little tips in there about how to deal with it as people tell their own coping strategies and what they do to help them stay healthy. There's also a chapter written by the partners / families of those people where they talk about the strain that mental illness can have on relationships and different ways to mitigate it. There's a similar book on bipolar disorder which I've found to be really useful. Good luck mate! Like others on here, I'm happy to chat if you ever need someone to talk to.

With regard to Obama gags, one of the better ones came from The Onion satirical newspaper, which ran the following headline during his first presidential campaign: BLACK GUY ASKS NATION FOR CHANGE