In 1969 Sweden became the first country outside England to on a week to week basis show English football games. The program called Tipsextra was in the 1970's as big as it gets, followed by half of the Swedish population. As such an important institution it affected the whole society. As my dad and his friends kept watching the games every week and playing the pools, me and my brother grew up with it. At the age of five ,around 1977, we were in a small neighbourhood up in north western Sweden when I got a goodie bag by Santa claus on "christmas decoration day". Except some candy and fruit the bag contained a English football scarf. I was so lucky getting the right one!
In the mid eighties interest increased immensely when our football coach helped us ordering scarfs, pennants and replica shirts from London. Me and my brother started listenin to short wave radio every week. Striker partners Cottee/McAvennie became my heroes and my walls were covered by individual photos of the whole squad.
In 2004 I was part of the group starting the Swedish Fan Club "West Ham Fans Sweden". As Scandinavian Hammers is many ways a Norwegian fan club, we wanted something more local for us Swedes to make it easier to meet up. Since then we arrange at least two membership trips to England every season, as well as organizing pub meets in Stockholm and Gothenburg. In our membership lists I would guess we have a total of about 500 Swedish West Ham fans.
Next organized trip will probably be for the Hull game.

Does anyone have an opinion about the appeal? Could it be succesful? If not I want to see Stech given a chance. One game, one last look before we decide on him.
I think Boffin will be leaving us in the summer.

So they made us all believe it was another Torres who was on trial... NOT ;);) And he didn't make it. Why? Because Hammers is the best club around!!!

Interesting read about the Demba Ba contractual situation. I say it is ok to make mistakes like this as long as you learn from it and dont do it again. I guess I would be hard to figure this scenario out if you aren't prepared for it when going in to the negotiations.

Can't wait for you to publish the inverview, will be very interesting. Always great with first hand sources. Hopefully there will be more focus on whats to come than transfers etc that didnt happen. Our history is always important, but in this case only to help us understand the importance of making the right decision moving to the OS or staying at UP.

The most important thing, maybe in club history, coming up is of course the proposed move to the Olympic Stadium.
There have been a lot of talk about retractable seating and so on, and Im sure they are on the case. But not much have been said about how much they would want to make the arena "West Ham" So my question would be that.

"Will the club demand, in the deal with the OPLC, that it would be able to brand the arena with for example Claret n blue seats, or other hammers things like for example some version of the castle by the main entry." To make the place "ours" is very very important and the colour of the seating would be an extremely important part of that.

Mind you that the written "story" doesnt reveal the the long hesitang pause in the answer from DG that said a lot...

After listening to DG at Talksport you can easliy draw your own conclutions. But the fact is that there is a huge difference from "a no brainer to move there" approach just weeks ago to the, to say the least ,hesitant Gold in the interview. After getting a staight forward question "Do you want to move there?" it was not even close to a yes in his answer.
I believe either there need to be a big change from OPLC or we will say straight no to the OS.

The Parcel Force site by the West Ham tube station is still the dream for me. Imagine a 55 000+ arena that is ours with all the attributes. The problem with the land (gas etc) could surely be worked around.

Further Im starting to be a bit tired of people saying "were not being a 60 000 crowd club" Honestly, which club is without the people coming in for one or two games a year? Who think the bigger teams would fill their arenas with locals and just season ticket holders? Who are we trying to fool? Of course more people would come if we have a new cool arena that would be more accesable.

Maybe it is time to start contacting DG (Twitter etc?) as a lot of people did regarding El Hadji Diouf? I dont think we should get that much into details, only to address to him (the club) that we are in the drivinig seat now and therefore should be in a great position to negotiate something good. And if we cant get that we should tell them to stick it...
But one thing is certain, we do need to have more revenue to keep up with the big teams, especially with the new fair play rules stating that you can only spend as high as your revenue. That would mean the only way forward is more people at games or selling players with a good profit. Im definitely fed up with the latter.