This is the second Raging Comment of Rage Online, written to coincide neatly with our second week online.

The past week has seen the arrivals of South African goalie Andre Arendse and Icelandic striker Stefan Thodorsson (or something) on trial. Rarely can two players from so close to opposite poles have been involved in the same United squad.

The introduction of the squad numbers innovation will certainly add some interest to the forthcoming season. Who will get to wear the coveted 666 jersey? If Fear is four will Stefan be seven? Should Murphy be 6X? etc. etc.

One of the more interesting pieces of last week’s news got slightly overlooked with all the excitement of the various other announcements. The postponement of the creditors meeting from Thursday 15th due to a cock-up by the solicitors, who failed to give fourteen days clear notice, was worthy of the Cox regime at its most typical. We were kind of hoping for better things since Keith’s departure, but I guess that lawyers are lawyers and they’re hardly likely to forego their fee as a result, are they? Hopefully this delay will turn out to be nothing more than a minor irritation and it won’t seriously interfere with Kassam’s attempts to turn the club’s finances around.

Rather more worrying is the imminent parliamentary recess, which means that the section 14 holding order might be extended for several more weeks before we learn whether or not John Prescott is going to call in the multiplex application. Hopefully the powers that be will decide beforehand, but if not one trusts that Kassam will have the patience to wait, rather than jacking it all in. With the two million that he has already pledged to the club (of which ?900,000 is to be used to pay off the creditors under the terms of the CVA) it is to be assumed that Kassam will consider it an unwise decision to pull out before realising a return.