Santa

Agree with the general sentiment that we need to stop poncing about.

What would Smurthwaite need a white wig for?

Moore could see what hand he was going to be dealt before he accepted the position. His job was to play it. It wasn’t a free hit.

Warren has let himself down here. Not only did he use a swear word but he also began a sentence with a conjunction.

If you have two midfielders in double figures then it should be the icing on the cake of at the very least a half decent season.

We really missed his goal.

I'd love to know what Moore's own thoughts are with regard to relegation. I'm sure his plan was to keep us up and he will have received assurances regarding his budget for next season when he came. Otherwise I don't think he comes in the first place. Being in League Two will not have been a contingency. I wonder if this changes his thinking as to whether he wants to even be here. If you had said to me not even a year ago that Darren Moore would be Port Vale manager I would have been amazed. Nor would I have believed how his stock had plummeted since he got Sheffield Wednesday through the play offs. However from his point of view he has made some pretty catastrophic career decisions in that time.

You can't see where everyone was when the ball was played as their keeper kicked it from his own half and everyone is out of shot. Their player who received the ball, runs from deep and as the camera pans across, Grant appears at the bottom left hand corner of the screen. It's a reasonable assumption that Grant is playing him on. There were a couple of their lads trotting back from offside positions but not active. It does my head in how some of our fans still have a very old school understanding of the offside rule and shout at the liner. Do they not watch football on TV?

There was a right time to sack Crosby but by early February it had been and gone. In the end he was sacked because Flitcroft was feeling the heat so he threw him under the bus.

I have been trying to work out whether Moore is part of the solution or part of the problem, and I can confidently say that I have absolutely no idea. However I’ve seen very little that makes a case for the former.

Because he got offered a job in Turkey.

The return fixture in December was dubbed El Sackico with both Crosby and Caldwell looking in danger.

Apologies don’t interest me. The blame game doesn’t interest me either, unless we’re taking learnings from it. They're all as pointless and empty as all the platitudes and the patting ourselves on the back under Flitcroft. All I want to see is a coherent plan going forward to put the horse back before the cart and be a well run and sustainable football club.

I genuinely don’t have a problem with Holland’s. The balti pie is great.

To some extent I have sympathy with the owners. Vale Park and the Railway Stand in particular is a money pit. We have had two decades of under investment and many things that needed to be renewed under V2001 or NS had been simply kicked down the road. Some of the other projects maybe we needed to decide if they were priorities, over and above say, winning games of football. A lot of money has been spent and very little has been added to the asset register.

Lightweight and out of his depth. Gore and Weir; what happens when you order replacements for Arblaster and Devine off wish dot com. I wonder if he even knows we’re in the relegation zone?

It’s been a really sobering week given the accounts have been published. We now know the extent that we are haemorrhaging money in order to be this bad. I do wonder if there are / have been too many hangers on taking the club for a ride. The club feels like it is being run like Factory Records. Every single director of the company with access to the P&L needs to take a good look in the mirror. None of this is sustainable.

I just have missed that part of Exodus

All the teams are down there for a reason. It’s a mini league and the least worst out of us, Burton and Cheltenham will stay up.

I don’t see Burton winning 4 out of 5 so I would be surprised if we needed 12 points to finish above them. As for Cheltenham, they would need 13 points out of 7 games to likely stay up on GD if we got 12 more points. That would have to be W3 D4 L0 or W4 D1. Cheltenham might be capable of 10 or 11 points in a best case scenario but they would do extremely well to get 13. I’m sticking my neck out but I’d be comfortable with 10 points, maybe 9 if our goal difference was better. That said there’s only five goals in it which could still be swung in our favour.

Yeah I was intending on travelling from Manchester as well. We'll have to hold our horses until Bolton in a couple of weeks.

Northern and TransPennine on strike Saturday so check your trains.

I hope so. If we do manage to stay up, Stockport and Wrexham being in the same league as us and fishing in the same pool for players (although they were probably doing that to some extent anyway) won't help matters. We're going to have to think outside the box.

A friend went up to Vale today but said they still hadn't arrived. There's supposed to be no Pay On The Day, but the club are asking Wigan if this can be relaxed, given the massive Horlicks they've managed to make of ticketing.