NEW!! WHITBY WHITES PODCAST-DOWNLOAD NOW-CLICK ON THE ‘OUR PODCAST’ BUTTON ON THE MENU BAR… OR JUST CLICK HERE!!!

Also Avaliable For Download on iTunes in the next few days

• TECNICAL GLITCHES SO FAR

• Regular audio jumps

They were just about coming to terms with relegation, but now the kit has really hit the fan.

Just when the Geordies thought life couldn’t get any worse, along came the unveiling of Newcastle’s new yellow strip, which prompted more scoffing than Big Sam at a doughnut convention.

One fan likened it to a deckchair on Blackpool beach, while another described it as “a side-on view of a custard cream”. The official club website preferred to describe the strip as a “stylish new change kit”, although it was unclear how many supporters had taken up the ’20% off’ introductory offer plastered all over the front page.

Mark Jensen, editor of fanzine The Mag, was a model of diplomacy as he admitted: “It’s certainly different!”

Jensen told The Daily Telegraph: “My take on kits is as long as they’re not red and white, I’m not really that bothered. There’s certainly no chance of getting lost in the snow when we play Barnsley in December.”

Other fans were not so forgiving. Joe on the Tyne Talk messageboard said: “I think I just threw up a bit”, while lostmekeys observed: “This from a guy who made a billion quid selling t-shirts.”

But while the photoshop whizzkids had a field day (right) and The Sun quickly trotted out their worst kits of all time feature, it seemed the players were quite happy with the ‘yellow peril’. A statement from kit makers Adidas read: “The feedback from both the players and the club has been extremely positive – vibrant colours are very popular at the moment.”

And the kit also had the backing of Ryan Jenkins, a (wait for it) Sunderland fan. He said: “It’s really appalling – I love it. It looks like Norwich and Blackpool got into a fight and this was the leftovers. Newcastle will have to call themselves the Toongerines.”

In the words of Coldplay’s Chris Martin: “Oh what a thing to do – and it was all yellow.”

Newcastle fans weren’t the only ones getting shirty over their new strip. Man Utd supporters were demanding an inquest into their latest jersey, a month before it is due to hit the shops.

The traditional red shirt is emblazoned with a black chevron, apparently to mark the centenary of Old Trafford, although fans moaned it was more suited to rugby league. On the bright side, at least Paul Scholes will be allowed six tackles next season.

Fans on United forum Talking Reds were struggling to find any positives. Under the topic heading ‘Who let a drunk person design the kit?’, Gavinio suggested the new design was the real reason Ronaldo left (and with Real Madrid reportedly inserting a £1bn transfer clause into his contract, he’s unlikely to be back in a hurry – chevron or no chevron).

But while the two Uniteds got in a lather about their strips, spare a thought for poor old Stockport County, who may not have a kit for the coming season due to an ongoing debt problem. Never mind, chaps, if the protests in Manchester and Newcastle grow any louder, you may have a couple to choose from come August.

Meanwhile over at Celtic there was a shirt problem of a different kind. When six-year-old fan Matthew Smith asked to get the name of new goalkeeper Lukasz Zaluska on the back of his top, the staff in the club shop admitted they had never heard of the Pole.

Matthew said: “I told them he was joining in the summer from Dundee United and the shop manager had to go on the internet to find out how to spell his name.” I must admit I’ve never heard of him either, but it will come in quite handy next time I play Scrabble.

Over at Wimbledon (yes it’s been a slow news week) Roger Federer entered the fray wearing a gold-braided white military jacket with a giant matching handbag. According to Nike, the outfit “retained the stylistic cues which make him stand out from the other players.” I prefer the shortened version – ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’.

Andy Murray was doing his best to lose his moody tag by turning up for practice wearing a cricket helmet and Twittering about snack names for tennis players. Prawn Borg, Egg Rusedski and Lleyton Chewit were among my favourites (incidentally Lleyton backwards is, curiously, ‘Not yell’) but Boris Double-decker might need a bit more work. I’ll throw one in for the older viewers – Chilli Nastase anyone?

But the revelation of the tournament thus far came from John Kettley on Radio Wimbledon, who confessed his ringtone was…John Kettley Is A Weatherman.

Almost as funny as the ‘Liverpool sign Bent’ viral doing the rounds (above) and the joke Twittered by Gavin and Stacey star Matthew Horne: “Earlier today I saw a Newcastle season-ticket nailed to a tree. I thought ‘I’m having that!’ ‘cos you can never have enough nails, can you?”

Before I go, a quick congratulations to John Terry, who has just been voted Daddy of the Year. Word of warning though, JT – last year’s winner was…Peter Andre.

And finally, you may have heard about the release of the BBC bigwigs’ expenses claims (no I haven’t, before anyone asks). The one that particularly caught my eye was the invoice for £14.99 submitted by Deputy Director-General Mark Byford for a QPR history book. Shocking I’m sure you’ll agree – £14.99 for that?! I could have provided him with what he needed for free, using one sentence – League Cup winners 1967.

The June interview has now been posted on the website, and this month it’s the tall ex-defender John McLelland. Thank you to John for doing the interview, and to Lorna Tinker for passing on the questions. Next months interviewee will be revealed this coming week.

Ever wondered why you have had to travel the length of the country on a wet Tuesday night to watch your team in action?

Or you haven’t played at home on Boxing Day for the last three years?

Like me, you’ve probably just blamed the fixture computer, that mythical piece of technology that determines where you will be and when throughout the football season.

I have always imagined it to be some great beast of a machine like bertha, firing out tickertape full of fixtures while some overworked scientist desperately tries to make sense of the information spewing forth.

The fixtures for the 2009-2010 season are released at 1000 BST on Wednesday and last week I spoke to some of the key people involved in the formation of the schedule.

I wanted to find out exactly how the fixture list is put together and just how difficult a job it is. Needless to say, I spent a large chunk of last weekend in a dark and cool room as my brain tried to come to terms with its most serious case of information overload since I asked my wife to point out my most obvious flaws.

Putting the fixture list together is incredibly complex – with a whole series of factors ensuring it is an increasingly difficult task.

Just to give you one example; every club is paired with another in regard to when they play their home and away fixtures. This is done for a number of reasons, one being so that clubs like Everton and Liverpool do not play at home on the same weekend.

West Ham, it turns out, are paired with Dagenham and Redbridge. But for reasons of revenue Southend request they do not play at home on the same day as the Hammers as they believe it impacts upon their attendance.

Southend, though, are in Essex, as are Colchester, so they cannot play together on the same weekend. Colchester share stewards with Ipswich so those two clubs also request they do not play home games on the same weekend. Transport links dictate Ipswich and Norwich do not play together on the same weekend either. In other words, when West Ham play at home can have an impact on when a club as far away as Norwich (108.8 miles) play their home fixtures. And there are 12 other professional clubs in London….

Confused? Read on and I guarantee you will be.

The compilation of the fixture list is done jointly between the Premier League and the Football League. The whole process starts upwards of a year in advance when Fifa and Uefa release their match calendars but work starts in earnest in the final months of the previous season.

The Football League, for example, sends out a questionnaire to all their clubs in March. This is a club’s opportunity to request specific dates they would like to avoid and what other team they would like to be paired with. The questionnaire is jointly signed off by the police and also reflects their concerns – issues such as ensuring high-profile matches do not clash with big events in a city.

During this time the main man in the process – Glenn Thompson of Atos Origin, an international IT services company, – starts the process he describes as sequencing.

For most of the year Glenn works as an IT professional in Scotland but he has been compiling the fixtures since the 1993-94 season and describes the task both as an enormous puzzle and his summer job. He is the man who owns the laptop that is the fixture computer.

Sequencing involves mapping out on what days all the fixtures will take place and the pattern of home and away games that a team will play.

There are rules governing sequencing – for example clubs will play no more than two home games consecutively and, with one eye on the financial situation at lower league clubs, the games either side of an FA Cup fixture should not both be away from home.

But slotting all the fixtures into the calendar is becoming more and more difficult.

Paul Snellgrove is the Football League fixtures officer. I get the impression he is a very amiable man but mention the fixture calendar and it quickly becomes obvious this is a complicating factor in his life.

The increase in European club competition fixtures – with the inaugural Europa League next season – is eating into the available space; as are international friendlies and World Cup qualifiers. Next season is followed by the World Cup so the campaign ends early. The Champions League final next season takes place on a Saturday, eating into another weekend when Premier League fixtures cannot be played.

Out of necessity, next season’s play-off finals are split across two weekends, with the Championship finale taking place on the same day as the Champions League final.

There are 10 rounds of midweek Championship fixtures to squeeze in, six for League One and League Two and four in the Premier League. Then you have the FA Cup, the Carling Cup and the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy.

The process of sequencing took Thompson 10 days this year – and once the season finished he plotted his pairings into a grid and started wading through the lists of requests from the clubs and the police. Snellgrove estimated there were about 90 this year from the Premier and Football League clubs, while on average Thompson reckons about 80% of the home and away requests are accommodated.

He also manually creates the fixtures for Boxing Day and 28 December to try to minimise the travelling distance for fans. As Thompson readily admits, the computer has no concept of the distance between grounds.

Once the sequencing and plotting was finished – are you still with me here? – Thompson fed all the information into the programme on his laptop. The methodology was created in 1982 and was updated a decade ago. Way back when the computer was a desktop based in Wilmslow and compiling a division’s fixtures was an overnight job. These days it can knock out a division in 5-10 minutes.

Five days after the Championship play-off final Thompson produced his first draft of the fixtures. From that moment onwards it was all a case of refinement, refinement, refinement, with Thompson returning to his computer 30-40 times to try to improve his list.

These might include issues such as potentially sensitive fixtures being played on the opening or final weekends of the season and derby fixtures taking place in midweek.

As Snellgrove puts it: “There is a huge amount of information crunched – by the time the fixtures actually come out the original list has been changed goodness knows how many times.”

At this stage only Thompson sees the list, as he adjusts and tweaks it until he comes up with a calendar that he is happy to take to the Premier League and the Football League.

Last Wednesday, Thompson headed to Preston where he met with both the governing bodies – and a further process of refinement took place over the following days.

Thompson reckons he does the job because he enjoys it and derives great satisfaction from producing a body of work that has a very tangible end product. But it must be an agonising, head-scratching process that slowly strips you of the will to live.

For instance, every time a fixture is changed it affects at least seven other fixtures and can easily impact on as many as 48.

Ian Todd is the president of the Football Supporters’ Federation and sits on the fixtures working party that meets to discuss Thompson’s list. One year he objected to Morecambe playing at Dagenham and Redbridge in midweek. They tried to alter the fixture but found out that it would negatively impact on so many other games that what Todd calls “the least worst option” was to maintain the status quo.

The fixtures working party met last Saturday to discuss this year’s calendar. In addition to Todd, Thompson and Snellgrove, the Premier League and Football Association are represented as well as people from the top flight, Championship, League One and League Two clubs.

Todd estimates he has between 30-45 minutes to scan the fixtures and point out any concerns that might impact negatively on supporters.

Monday involves a meeting with various police chiefs and the British Transport Police. Again, there are potential issues here that had never crossed my mind. They look at potential logistical problems such as whether there will be too many fans from different clubs all heading to one train station in London for a particular set of fixtures on any given weekend.

On Tuesday the list will be signed off and on Wednesday morning we will all see the fruits of a lot of hard work.

Not everyone will be happy but Snellgrove is confident that if certain clubs’ requests have not been accommodated then at least he will be able to explain why.

Thompson sometimes has nightmares about the job but always hopes to produce a list that is balanced and neutral. He reckons this year’s list will not be the best they have produced but will be far from the worst.

The story doesn’t end there.

Over the following week Snellgrove will deal with requests by clubs to switch days. Clubs cannot move a game away from an allocated weekend but they can switch the day of the match. Cheltenham, for example, often play a home game on a Friday when there is a clash with the horse racing festival.

Thompson will start dealing with reserve fixtures, academy games and feeder leagues to the Blue Square Premier.

This year when I see some ridiculous fixtures my club have been asked to play I hope I show a little bit more understanding. Though I seriously doubt it.

Jason William Robert Crowe (born 30 September 1978 in Sidcup, Greater London) is an English footballer. He is currently contracted to Leeds United, after signing on a free transfer from Northampton Town on 16th June 2009.

Arsenal

Crowe started his career as a trainee at Arsenal, although he was unable to break into the first team with veteran right back Lee Dixon usually occupying the slot. He made his debut as substitute in a League Cup tie against Birmingham City on October 14, 1997 but was sent off after just 33 seconds by referee Uriah Rennie for a foul on Martin O’Connor; it was the fastest debut sending-off in English football history.[1] He played a further two matches for Arsenal (one in the League Cup, another in the FA Cup); after a loan spell at Crystal Palace he moved to Portsmouth in July 1999.

Portsmouth

After joining Portsmouth for a fee of £1,000,000, Crowe played 29 games during his first season at the club before being transfer-listed by Tony Pulis at the start of the 2000-01 season. Crowe joined Brentford on loan, and played 9 League games for the Bees before returning to Portsmouth where he made a further 24 appearances for Pompey. During his third season with Portsmouth, Crowe made 23 appearances and scored his first goal for the club during a 2-2 draw with Wolves at Molineux. In his final season at Portsmouth, Crowe played in 17 games and scored 4 goals for the club. After winning promotion to the Premier League, Crowe was one of five players to be released by Portsmouth manager Harry Redknapp.

Grimsby Town

After his release by Portsmouth, Crowe joined relegated team Grimsby Town on a two-year contract. Grimsby were relegated again during the 2003-04 season, Crowe’s first at the club where he made 36 appearances. During his second season with Grimsby, Crowe played in 40 games and scored 4 goals. With his contract exprining in the summer of 2004, Crowe was offered a new deal by Grimsby but also wanted to listen to other contract offers. Crowe eventually agreed a contract at Northampton Town.

Northampton Town

Crowe initially signed a two-year contract with the Cobblers and won promotion during his first season at the club in which he made 46 appearances and scored 2 goals. Crowe signed a two-year extension to his contract during June 2007. Crowe was offered another new contract with Northampton after the club were relegated to League Two on the final day of the 2008-09 season after a 3-0 defeat to Leeds United.

Leeds United

It was announced on the sixteenth of June 2009 that Jason left Northampton and joined Leeds United on a free transfer on July 1st, 2009.

Former Arsenal youngster Jason Crowe is set to become Leeds United’s first signing of the summer after agreeing terms to join the club on July 1.

The 30-year-old right-back has spent the past four seasons at Northampton, making almost 200 appearances, but his contract at Sixfields expires on June 30 and he has agreed a move to Elland Road.

Crowe started out at Arsenal, making three appearances for Arsene Wenger’s side, and after a loan move to Crystal Palace, he commanded a £1m fee when he moved from Highbury to Portsmouth in the summer of 1999.

The Sidcup-born player, who can play at right-back, centre-backor central midfield, made almost 100 appearances for Pompey, had a short loan spell at Brentford, and enjoyed a period with Grimsby before linking up with Northampton.

United manager Simon Grayson said: “I’m delighted Jason has agreed to join us. There was a lot of interest in him and we’ve beaten a number of clubs to get him.

“He’s a versatile right-back, and he’s been a very consistent performer over the last couple of seasons.

“He has good experience, having started with Arsenal and playing regularly for Portsmouth.

“I see Jason as another valuable member of our squad with the aim being to get promoted next season.”

Following the signing of Jason Crowe, the club will not be continuing discussions with Frazer Richardson, who is out of contract on June 30.

hi everyone,

I would just like to say thank you to everyone who has viewed the website since it was set up in February. I would also like to say a big thank you to everyone who has contributed to the website with blogs and write-ups. Another thank you goes to Glenn Kilpatrik for setting this website, none of this would be possible if he hadn’t of set this site up.

Thanks again, and I hope to see you out in force next season… BRING ON THE EXETER!!!

The Whitby Whites Annual General Meeting is on Thursday 2nd July at Whitby Rugby Club.

Future Meeting Dates:
Thursday 4th June 2009
Thursday 2nd July 2009 (AGM)
Thursday 6th August 2009
Thursday 3rd September 2009
Thursday 1st October 2009
Thursday 5th November 2009
Thursday 3rd December 2009