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Post by Macmoish on Nov 10, 2011 14:02:19 GMT
GUARDIAN
Competition to find football's worst toilets hit by vote-rigging claim• Some fans discovered to be voting up to 30 times • Winning club will receive a £100k toilet makeoverA competition to establish which English football ground has the worst toilets was temporarily suspended over allegations of vote-rigging. The Biggest Loosers competition was put on hold after it emerged that some fans had voted up to 30 times in an effort to secure the prize – a £100,000 toilet makeover – for their club. Alan Hardy, the chief executive of Oldham, who currently trail behind Ebbsfleet United in the voting, told the Manchester Evening News: "They had to cancel it because people were cheating. I think some fans were voting more than 30 times. "This is a wonderful opportunity for us. The money has just not been there in the past to revamp the toilets. I have been here for 31 years and some of the toilets are still the same now as they were then. I would urge all of our fans to get voting." The competition's spokeswoman, Janet Bentick, told the paper: "It became clear quite quickly that some fans had managed to get around the security checks and were making multiple votes for their team. "I suppose it is testament to how passionately they feel about having new facilities installed at their clubs but it breached our terms and conditions. We are back up and running now and we are confident this won't happen again." Oldham face competition from Aldershot Town, Barnsley, Barrow, Bradford City, Ebbsfleet United, Exeter City, Plymouth Argyle, Sc**thorpe United and Sheffield United. The poll remains open until 5 January, and the winners will be announced in February. www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/nov/10/poll-football-toilets-vote-rigging?newsfeed=trueTaking the p*ss. Worst toilet competition suspended over vote-rigging scandalwww.joe.ie/football/football-news/taking-the-pss-worst-toilet-competition-suspended-over-vote-rigging-scandal-0017588-1A competition to determine the worst toilet at English football grounds has been suspended because of a vote-rigging scandal. The organisers of the competition, appropriately titled the Biggest Loosers, went potty when it emerged that fans of some clubs had voted up to 30 times in an effort to win the prize – a £100,000 makeover for the facilities at their club. Oldham are currently number two in the voting, Ebbsfleet United are number one (we’re not sure who’s in turd) and Oldham chief executive Alan Hardy spoke of his disgust at the scandal to the Manchester Evening News, who got the big splash on the story. "They had to cancel it because people were cheating. I think some fans were voting more than 30 times,” he said. "This is a wonderful opportunity for us. The money has just not been there in the past to revamp the toilets. I have been here for 31 years and some of the toilets are still the same now as they were then. I would urge all of our fans to get voting." Competition spokeswoman, Janet Bentick, added: "It became clear quite quickly that some fans had managed to get around the security checks and were making multiple votes for their team. "I suppose it is testament to how passionately they feel about having new facilities installed at their clubs but it breached our terms and conditions. We are back up and running now and we are confident this won't happen again." Although it is evident that the cistern was indeed flawed, fans are now able to register their votes again, although competition organisers will have to keep a closer eye on the log book in future, lest the competition goes down the toilet once again. The poll remains open until 5 January, and the winners will be announced in February. Oldham face competition from Aldershot Town, Barnsley, Barrow, Bradford City, Ebbsfleet United, Exeter City, Plymouth Argyle, Sc**thorpe United and Sheffield United to see which club will be made flush with cash to update their lavatory facilities, although organisers have admitted that this year's competitors have been bog standard to say the least.
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Post by Macmoish on Nov 10, 2011 14:04:59 GMT
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Post by Jon Doeman on Nov 10, 2011 15:16:28 GMT
strewth
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Post by Macmoish on Nov 11, 2011 8:26:16 GMT
And on related subject... Guardian/Harry Pearson
All cisterns must be go for England's team at Euro 2012
The national team's continual failures at major competitions can usually be traced back to a lack of basic creature comforts
Just as a thoroughbred horse can be sent into a frothing sweat of fear by the sight of a carrier bag in a hedge, so the highly tuned English footballer is likely to find the sight of a misshapen breakfast roll precipitating an existential crisis. This is why the FA has spent so much time identifying the ideal spot for Fabio Capello's squad to bed down during next summer's European Championship. However, for keen students of the many and varied ways our national team have found to fail over the past four decades, details of the team's accommodation in Krakow was intriguing, less for what was included as for what was missing. Doubtless, in the interest of team morale, not a word was said about the bathrooms. This has long been an area of major concern for the England management. Because it is well known to those of us close to insiders that Wayne Rooney's catastrophic lack of form in South Africa was not caused by impending tabloid revelations, but by severe constipation resulting from an irrational fear that crocodiles living in the Rustenberg sewage system might dart round the U-bend and bite his bottom during a "sit-down". The mind of the English footballer is closely linked to his bowels, as anybody who listened to the post-match interviews during the 2010 World Cup will testify. Doubtless Adrian Bevington and his team are already ensuring that the Krakow lavatories flush with a rising swoosh that is at once intriguingly foreign and yet not so cacophonously weird as to affect Ashley Cole's regularity. Such attention to detail is not new. For the 2003 Rugby World Cup in Australia, Sir Clive Woodward insisted on fitting centrifuges to the underside of all plugholes in the England team's Sydney hotel, so that water would gurgle down the same way it does in the northern hemisphere. "Clive was very much attuned to the psychology of his players," recalled Alex Brief, England's fridge-magnet analyst on that successful trip. "Though he was well aware that the counter-clockwise draining of antipodean sinks is something of a myth, he also knew he couldn't risk the seeds of doubt and confusion the sight of such a phenomenon would sow in the sensitive minds of men like Phil Vickery." It worked, and the rest, as they say, is a guest spot on A Question of Sport any time your agent demands one. Woodward is seen as an innovator, but when it came to drainage he was very much following the example of his illustrious predecessor among World Cup-winning England coaches, Sir Alf Ramsey. After success on home soil, Sir Alf approached the World Cup in Mexico with understandable concern about Central America's waterworks arrangements. Worried about the effects a combination of food containing a suspicious amount of what continentals refer to as "flavour", and foreign plumbing, might have on Bobby Charlton, Sir Alf insisted that the England team travel with their own toilets. "We realised this would cause diplomatic problems with our hosts," the FA secretary, Denis Follows, would later reveal. "But the Ramsey was adamant. 'No thank you,' he said, 'I don't want no foreign conveniences.'" A dozen British lavatories (in those days players were still expected to share toilets, a practice many believed helped team bonding) were shipped to Mexico. As expected, however, the Mexican authorities were incensed by the implied criticism of their sewage-management capabilities. The lavatories were impounded by customs officials and sat on the quayside in Veracruz for the entire tournament. Sir Alf attempted to compensatefor the toilet fiasco, by turning the atmosphere in the team hotel into as authentic a reproduction of the traditional English seaside boarding house as was possible in tropical temperatures – making the players pay extra for using the salt and pepper, insisting that baths had to be "booked 48 hours in advance" and that the upstairs WCs were "not to be used for solids". With trainer Harold Shepherdson dressed in a pinny, hair net and curlers, waking the squad up at seven every morning by vacuuming the passageways; the team doctor, Neil Phillips, tasked with producing officious handwritten signs to stick above light switches; and fresh supplies of doilies flown in every few days, such was the level of familiar discomfort that homesickness among the England players was kept to an absolute minimum. However, the lavatory issue had already raised its ugly head when an acclimatisation trip to South America culminated in the infamous Bogotá bidet incident in which England's captain, Bobby Moore, was accused of leaving something unseemly in the "footbath" at the Hotel Tequendama. And now, with England about to face West Germany in the quarter-finals, it would do so again, the goalkeeper Gordon Banks forced to withdraw with an upset stomach that Ramsey would always believe had been exacerbated by the custodian's lack of confidence in push-handle flushes. "We had arguably the strongest squad at that World Cup," Francis Lee would later recall wistfully, "and I still believe we were just a couple of good old-fashioned British, chain-pulled, overhead-cisterns away from genuine greatness." The Manchester City striker's other career in the toilet-tissue industry was clearly more than coincidental, and while some may wonder if any amount of bathroom fitments would have made the difference against Pelé's Brazil, you can rest assured the FA will do their utmost to ensure it is not a subject of "if onlys" 46 years on from next summer. www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/nov/10/england-squad-hotels-tournaments-toilets
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Post by waterbuffalo on Nov 11, 2011 16:12:42 GMT
Hahahahahaha!! Wow that toilet would be a perfect place for a punk video. Great article from The Guardian
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Post by sharky on Nov 12, 2011 15:36:07 GMT
If your team won the toilets makeover, would that mean you would no longer be in the sh*t!!?
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Post by Macmoish on Nov 30, 2011 10:28:55 GMT
Oldham Official Site - LATICS FLUSHED WITH SUCCESS?Posted on: Wed 30 Nov 2011 Latics are looking for your votes as they bid for a £100,000 washroom windfall… in The Best Loo-sers competition. Inspired by Plumb Center, the UK's leading plumbing and heating supplier, the online competition will provide critical investment for clubs, which simply don't have the funds for the hygienic, energy-efficient loos that families expect. More than 8,500 votes have been recorded for Aldershot Town, Barnsley, Barrow Town, Bradford City, Ebbsfleet United, Exeter City, Oldham Athletic, Plymouth Argyle, Sc**thorpe United, Sheffield United and Tranmere Rovers, in the first two weeks of the competition. Article continues Advertisement So far Conference teams Ebbsfleet and Barrow are well out in front but voting doesn't close until January 2012, so it's anyone's title. Whichever club emerges victorious will also get £1,000 to award to a grass roots team of their choice. Plumb Center, which has over 490 branches nationwide, has secured the backing of leading companies: Cistermiser, Cubicle Systems, Twyford Bathrooms and Franke Sissons. These companies have a lot of experience in delivering stadia fit for the 21 century; including Twickenham, the Aviva Stadium in Dublin and the b2net stadium in Chesterfield. Visit www.bestloosers.co.uk and back your favourite team. Visit www.worldtoilet.org/WTD for more details about World Toilet Day www.oldhamathletic.co.uk/page/NewsUpdate/0,,10337~2520010,00.html
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Post by Hogan on Nov 30, 2011 10:58:31 GMT
Makes me proud of our club. We won a BAFTA in the 90's. Does anyone else remember this?
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Post by FloridaR on Nov 30, 2011 11:42:17 GMT
Thats some toilet - Are you serious !
Someone needs to fire the janitor.
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Post by blueeyedcptcook on Nov 30, 2011 13:25:23 GMT
Many years ago I was lucky to find on a table of reduced in price books at Westfield Miranda Fair in Sydney, A Football Fan,s Guide, written by Janet Williams & Mark Johnson, published in 1995.
Its a good book, it lists every club, details of how to get to the grounds and full details of the clubs facilities.
A few facts about QPR.
Visitors Toilets Male: The age of hygiene has reached West London! Hot and Cold water, soap and hot-air hand dryers. Whatever will they think of next.?
Female Toilets: A prize-winner in the Longest Queue of the Season competion! The good news- hot water . The bad news- it,s so scalding it wasn,t possible to use , as there was no plugs in the sinks.
Rivals: Arsenal and Chelsea [the latter known as Loogans " because they,re losers and hooligans."
Supporting QPR can be a frustrating business . Crowds are generally not big enough for the club to compete for major honors and players have to be sold each year to cover costs. As the fanzine " A Kick Up the R,s " wrote " A pessimist sees a cup as half empty. An optimist sees a cup as half full, We,re still looking for the cup.!
Don,t forget that this was written in 1995.
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Post by Hogan on Nov 30, 2011 19:47:30 GMT
Many years ago I was lucky to find on a table of reduced in price books at Westfield Miranda Fair in Sydney, A Football Fan,s Guide, written by Janet Williams & Mark Johnson, published in 1995. Its a good book, it lists every club, details of how to get to the grounds and full details of the clubs facilities. A few facts about QPR. Visitors Toilets Male: The age of hygiene has reached West London! Hot and Cold water, soap and hot-air hand dryers. Whatever will they think of next.? Female Toilets: A prize-winner in the Longest Queue of the Season competion! The good news- hot water . The bad news- it,s so scalding it wasn,t possible to use , as there was no plugs in the sinks. Rivals: Arsenal and Chelsea [the latter known as Loogans " because they,re losers and hooligans." Supporting QPR can be a frustrating business . Crowds are generally not big enough for the club to compete for major honors and players have to be sold each year to cover costs. As the fanzine " A Kick Up the R,s " wrote " A pessimist sees a cup as half empty. An optimist sees a cup as half full, We,re still looking for the cup.! Don,t forget that this was written in 1995. I think that was around the time as this BAFTA (Best Away Fans Toilets), published in the Daily Mirror at the time. In fact money was spent putting a lick of paint on all the toilets. It was from the proceeds of the Sir Les transfer.
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