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The last sentence is the key element. Trävëllmän Hämäläinen being on the books for 8 years was 6 years too long. No disrespect to Aaron Drewe, who's apparently a nice lad, but if you're not progressing to the first team after 3 years, are you suddenly going to crack it in the next 3?
We seem to get so gob-bummed by EPPP in cases like Harvey Elliot and Gilchrist that long contracts are more a liability than fiscally prudent insurance.
Let's see if we get 10,000 ticketless fans rocking up at noon for a day on the vodka and charlie before trying to gib in by forcing the gates. Mad fer it lah.
Easily countered by pointing out the ones that end up at Rangers are either a) clapped-out old warhorses here for a final cashout (Rio Ferdinand, Park Ji-sung), b) callow young children whose experience amounts to "cookin' at rondo" on billiard-like academy pitches (Sean Goss, Will Keane, "Nards" Nardiello) or c) were genuinely shìt and stole a living from both clubs (Fábio, Macheda).
Beware when casually using a-c) to shoot a poster down as they may invoke the "Danny Simpson Paradox" (evidence an ex Man Utd player can come here and be good, at least until the PlayDoh-jowelled manager releases him to play a back 3 he has neither the players nor intelligence to execute).
"Just Back..." (posted at 16:47): signifies either a) the poster has something controversial to say and wants to back it up with the patina of respect of having been to a game they weren't at or b) the poster lives in the club shop.
IIRC outdoor smoking rules are promulgated at state level so it varies, but it's usually some variation of forbidden within 5-10m of a bar or restaurant. At Taronga Zoo (Sydney), there was a smoking area but it's situated at the bottom of the 25° incline hill the zoo is built on. I rolled down there for one, gasped my way back up and didn't return for a second. A level of subtlety there you don't often associate with the Aussies.
I think tax on fags is set nationally and you weren't getting much change from $35 for a pack last time I was there (~£20). My master plan of buying a carton of 200 in Dubai for $10 to get around this lasted as long as it took for them to open my hand luggage and tell me to either pay the duty on them ($350) or bin them (guarantee the customs lads smoked them).
The key thing there is the element of choice. The places I take my family and the places I drink with my mates are polar opposites but that's by choice. If you want to drink somewhere where chang is being hoovered in the toilets, shoplifters are selling meat by the bag and a plastered painter called Del keeps cornering you to tell you why his wife left and his kids hate him, that's your choice.
On the original topic, I stopped smoking nearly 18months ago after 25yrs. I'd average around 10-15 fags a day and double that drinking, especially in a sunny day, in a pub garden, ideally one with a big screen showing live sport.
During one of the May bank holidays last year, the weather was perfect so went out with mates on an all-dayer. As the pub I was in does table service in the garden, I only moved from the garden table to pìss and ended up chain-smoking nearly 60 cigarettes. That's fùcking rank on it's own, but my overriding sense at the time was "fùck me I've dropped £50 on fags in a day" (I smoked B&H Gold).
The long-winded point I'm trying to make is the ability (or not) to smoke in the garden was irrelevant to me - I'd have smoked the same amount had I had to walk the 6ft out the gate to smoke on the road. My stop-trigger - and it'll be different for everyone - was I might as well have set fire to that £50.
If this government raised the price of tobacco to make smoking prohibitively expensive (as the Aussies have), or raised the minimum age to effectively outlaw smoking (as the Kiwis are doing), then fair enough. Banning smoking in pub gardens is nothing more than an attack on the hospitality industry that will achieve next to nothing other than accelerating the closure of thousands more pubs and their inevitable conversion into flats.
Good luck to anyone trying to stop. Believe in yourself and you'll get there.
This very scheme persists in one station only on the network and that is Fulham Broadway. Every fortnight or so, hordes of illiterate mouth-breathers descend upon this station in a migratory wave sociologists cannot understand. Some have evolved enough to roar "CHELTH" sporadically and for no apparent reason.
For a time, even pictures of club captains, leaders and legends in full kit confused the horde, so these were augmented with a man-made odour of corruption and failure to indicate it was time to disembark.
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