It is now time to switch to a new Money AM football blog as the world cup is now over and we all look to the future.....World cup 2010 is over, Bravo Espana, and Forlan, once again and bring on the new season !.....I never expected the last thread to be such a success...thanks all.... so this new one might go on for years without the need to edit the title...we shall see...

Thats good to hear that about Blackburn then Dil as I ended up doing them with Burnley on my handicap ant-post bet. They were 8/1 and Burnley 50/1.

Yeah always thought that Jones had something when I've seen him play, so maybe he's buckled down and grown up in the summer.

Cardiff now 2nd in table to Notts Forest with same points and goal difference but having scored one less goal.

Good news for you Stan is the appointment of Malky as Palarse manager. Only two relegation spots left to be decided now.

And just when it's going so well for us on the pitch Cardiff get involved in more off field drama.

Palace have withdrawn their job offer to Malky Mackay and Ian Moody has resigned from Palace after Cardiff submit a dossier to the FA detailing apparent wrong doings while at Cardiff.

Daily Mail report

Daily Mail have got everything regarding Cardiff City right over the last couple of season so the report is probably more accurate than the one in the mirror.

They got a mole in the club.

3 relegation places up for grabs again now and a lucky escape by Palace imo , sorry Stan.

Daft or shrewd? Hmmm?

Liverpool’s increasing desperation for a proven international forward has led them to explore the possibility of a surprise move for Mario Balotelli.

Barely a fortnight after Brendan Rodgers insisted that he was not interested in signing the controversial Italian, the Liverpool manager is now considering a loan deal to bring the 24-year-old back to the Premier League.

Balotelli’s club, AC Milan, are understood to have been made aware of Liverpool’s interest via a third party and the striker is now emerging as an alternative target after the Merseyside club grew frustrated in their ambitious pursuit of Radamel Falcao.

More on this, including loads of interesting comments, at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/liverpool/11047322/Liverpool-may-take-plunge-with-shock-move-to-bring-Mario-Balotelli-back-to-Premier-League.html

Never a dull moment as a Cardiff supporter these days then Dil eh?..

Stan , tweet from Paddypower :)

After a Daily Mail investigation where Malkay Mackay was exposed as a racist and sexist , he has now been offered a job as their editor.

On the Cardiff forum there are still a lot of huge Malkay fans who are always very vocal and which has been almost as divisive as the red/blue argument.

A lot of these guys are well connected to the club and also to Malkay and Moody.

Their silence since this news broke speaks volumes.

You couldn't make it up could you.

This is just the start , this going to run and run.

Moody has now offically resigned from Palace and the Malkay supporters on the forum (who also run it) have now admitted to knowing why he really got sacked months ago but decided to keep it quiet , probably to save face but are now being savaged by all and sundry.

Maybe our owner Vincent Tan isn't the villain we have all been led to believe.

You cannot be serious Dil? If some gobshite bought EFC and decided they would wear RED there would be blood on the streets. Trust me :O)

The Park End Stand - 20 years old this week
by Karl Masters | 21/08/2014 Comments (11) jump
It's 20 years yesterday since the Park End stand opened for its first League game, a 2-2 draw with Aston Villa on August 20, 1994.

Although a big improvement on the old 1906 built structure, it looks now to have been a massive missed opportunity. The original plans, unveiled in April 1991, were for a 10,000 seater double decker stand to line up and join the Bullens Road stand.

However, symptomatic of the depressing 'Dr David Marsh' era, the Board, including a certain Bill Kenwright, deemed it unlikely we would need a capacity of more than 40,000. So, instead a single tier 6,000 seat structure was built, costing a mere £2.3m, of which £1.8m was a grant from the Football Trust.

Even at the time, it seemed short sighted and we ended up with something not big enough, noticeably further back from the playing area than the Gwladys Street end, and out of keeping with all the other multi-tiered stands.

So, 20 years on, do you regard it as a missed opportunity of 4,000 extra fans at many games from a penny-pinching Board or a prudent move to get the stand replaced at the lowest possible cost?

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Peter Laing
1 Posted 21/08/2014 at 17:11:56 Spent one season in the Park End 2 years ago with my two boys (on their first junior season tickets) and didnt enjoy the experience and renewed last year in the Upper Glady. Terrible to trying to exit the stand from the back on the final whistle, generally a bit moody in terms of atmosphere and freezing cold with the sun shining towards the Glady when it makes a very rare appearance !
Steve Carse
2 Posted 21/08/2014 at 17:39:59 An awful stand, not befitting of our status and certainly out of sync with the rest of the ground. Far too small and bland. And amazingly, as I discovered with going to the preseason friendly there, smaller than the home goal stand at Tranmere!
As I recall it wasn't a matter of it being believed there was no need for it to be any bigger, rather the decision was, as usual, to do with affordability.

I notice that Cardiff have just added a tier to one of their stands at a cost of just a few million. Despite all the money coming into the club via new TV deals (£20m pa) there seems to be no inclination to address the capacity or the corporate facilities issues. Depressing.

Paul Hewitt
3 Posted 21/08/2014 at 17:46:41 Cant believe its been twenty years. Had a season ticket for 10 season in the Park End. I thought there was plans to make it bigger?
Phil Guyers
4 Posted 21/08/2014 at 17:45:00 That whole time of the early nineties was a massive missed opportunity from which we are only slowly RECOVERING even now. We helped to create the Premier League and then had absolutely no idea how to exploit the new situation to our advantage.
From being Champions in 1987, we really should have been relegated in 1994 and it has always baffled me how we managed to deteriorate so quickly. It seems to me that, once we had a couple of mediocre seasons, the board completely lost its nerve and budgeted for failure. The Park End stand was just one aspect of this totally unambitious policy - Brett Angell being another!

Mike Allison
5 Posted 21/08/2014 at 18:14:54 Steve that's because the plan is to move to a new stadium. You wouldn't undertake major building work on something you were planning to move out of.
What's depressing is that apparent lack of any progress whatsoever on a new stadium. We risk just going over old ground here, but despite the footprint difficulties I'm still convinced Goodison could be redeveloped into an excellent stadium of around 50,000. A bigger Park End would be a start.

Dave Williams
6 Posted 21/08/2014 at 20:19:11 Phil - we spent crazy money on mediocre players – eg.Cottee £2.3m, Nevin £900k, McDonald £500k, Newell £1.1m, Beagrie £750k – so when HK returned for his second stint there was nothing left in the pot. He sold our two remaining good players in McCall and Keown and proceeded to waste £1m of it on Mo Johnston.
A catalogue of poor management from Everton legends and zero support from the most inept board in our history.

That is why Moyes deserves a medal for how he pulled us around on a shoestring rather than the rubbish which some have written about him.

Paul Hewitt
7 Posted 21/08/2014 at 20:43:10 Phil, the reason things went down hill was the RS got us banned from Europe. I’m convinced Kendall would have stayed if we had been in Europe and things would have been different.
Danny Broderick
8 Posted 21/08/2014 at 21:03:44 4,000 extra seats paying £40 each 20 games a season = £3.2 million. If it costs £10 million to do, it's paid for itself within 3 years.
Fag paper maths, but however you work it out, it pays for itself within a few years as long as you sell the tickets. And seeing as we have sold 75% of tickets for this season already, it's not a massive leap of faith to say we would sell an extra few thousand every week. We might have cup runs, European nights, sponsorship around the sign, catering etc which would bring in money too.

If only the board had a bit of foresight...

Nick Entwistle
9 Posted 21/08/2014 at 21:14:08 It would look mundane even in Stadium TESCO. Never liked it.
Karl Masters
10 Posted 21/08/2014 at 22:11:27 Well, whether we stay at Goidison or not, every year that goes by I get more and more annoyed by the antics of our Board.
Yes, a complete lack of ambition back in the early 90's with the patronising Club Secretary, Jim Greenwood always good for pouring a bucket of cold water over any ideas to take the Club forward. As conservative a bunch of pepe as you could ever get. Complacent doesn't even begin to describe it in my opinion.

But today, there is talk of a new stadium, but with what capacity? 50,000 is not enough, 60,000 might be.

I get so tired of hearing people say we can't fill the stadium now, so where are all these fans coming from? Firstly, we already have more than enough fans to fill it, we just don't all go every week due to many factors, but not being able to buy tickets in groups of more than one or two puts you off taking the kids for a start, despite the generous children's proving structure. Obstructed views are another. I certainly don't want a 500 mile round trip to have a pillar blocking my view of the goal or the peering through a letterbox view of the Lower Bullens.

Sunderland's crowds more than doubled after the move to the Stadium Of Light, same for Southampton, Leicester, Derby, while Arsenal saw an instant gain of more than 20,000 fans a match. Man City's crowds went up 12,000 a match after leaving Maine Road and their team was crap. I do hope that we don't look back in another 20 years and regret having an inept Board......

Patrick Murphy
11 Posted 21/08/2014 at 22:31:29 Karl of course we could find 60,000 people to fill the ground if we had a good winning team and the prices were reasonable, although I happen to believe that 50-55k would be acceptable less than that and it probably wouldn't be worth the hassle. Remember the 1985 average gate was circa 32,000 but we could have pulled in excess of 50,000 on certain occasions if the ground had been permitted to hold so many.
I think we have a good hard-core of supporters and many more who would visit Goodison if they were guaranteed a good view of the game. Problems with the average age of the current fan-base may prove problematic in 10 to 20 years.

Chris , red aside Tan saved us from admin and has subsequently pumped millions in enabling Cardiff to reach Premier League for first time in 50 years. If some clown hadn't then blown a massive transfer budget on crap and players he never picked to play then we would probably still be there.

When Tan turns us back to blue and I believe he will at some point he will then be hailed a hero for what he has done for us.

Til then the fight goes on.

Needless to say i'm more concerned with Screaming Alice not having a manager yet, Sean Dyche is one of the obvious choices and would be a fool to go.. but that's what I said about oily Coyle.

Whoever they get it'll be better than if Malky had been appointed. Palace got a worse squad than we had last season and he would have played 10 in defence and Campbell (bought from Cardiff last month) flogging himself to death chasing hopeless courses up front with no support like he did last year.

Campbell deserves better.

As for the ongoing Malkygate drama :

His apology Friday for "2 or 3 texts" seems to be contradicted by a story that will run later today in the Daily Mail ( told u they got a mole inside our club).

The whole text crap is just a diversion imo and apparently one of the Sunday papers will reveal the truth about what all Cardiff fans are really interested in ... the sh^t players him and Moody bought and the stupid prices they paid for them !

My guess is it'll be a Sunday Mail exclusive !

And would you really hang a guy out to dry for 2 , 3 or 25 texts like that , its the bungs/fraud that are really being investigated.

Hands up all you ugly , fat , short , poofy , foreign English tw*t bast*rd retards who have ever posted , emailed or text me something that was inappropriate !

I have feelings too :-)

Watch Malkay's interview then read this.

Eye contact

Saving the real stuff til Sunday

If we lose today I bet Malkay gets the blame :)

Good luck whoever u support this weekend except of course Swansea.