Chris Larkin

Anyone know if we can collect away tickets on the day at Villa Park? Cheers in advance.

I suppose he could mouth off at some children, as he did against Eastleigh in the preseason a few years ago, and have Gillingham send him back for that. Hope not though.

Fantastic! Very pleased that deals are getting done now after weeks of disappointment on the transfer front. Forecast is (finally) out of contract next summer, so we'll never have to see him at Saints again. Brilliant!

I realise it's only a highlight video and they can players look far better than they are, but I really like how Lens tries to stay on his feet when surrounded by defenders. Would be really encouraging if we could sign him.

Alan Bennett looked like he'd never played football before in his life during his debut (Opening Day of 07/08, Jamie Scowcroft got a hat-trick as Palace beat us 4-2 at SMS), but he was pretty solid after that. Also loved Jhon Viáfara, both for his style of play and for the time that he shot from the edge of the area at the Chapel End and managed to hit the screen hanging from the roof.

As the second picture was loading it looked as if it was going to say 'SEX' written in blood. Jesus. Second one is clearly better though.

It's by the sea though so it can't be Sheffield, or Nottingham as I've seen suggested elsewhere. I always assumed that it was never meant to be set in one particular real place. As the title says, 'This Is England', and so the town in the film is representative of all the parts of country that had a particularly hard time economically in the early Eighties, i.e. everywhere except the South. The fact that it was filmed in several different places, and that the characters have a range of Midlands and Northern accents seems to support this. But that's only my theory. I'm happy to be proven wrong but I don't think Shane Meadows has ever definitively said where it's set.

John got one when we beat Hull City 4-0 at home in December 2007. A quick search on Google seems to think that Rasiak never had one for us. Kenwyne Jones never got one competitively, although he scored three in a preseason game against Anderlecht before 06/07. This is two years before I followed the club properly, but Dexter Blackstock got a Carling Cup hat trick against Colchester in October 2004 as well. Brett Ormerod apparently also got one in the (then) Worthington Cup in October 2002 against Tranmere. Those are the only hat tricks not yet mentioned I've been able to dig up from the last ten years from players we've owned in the post-Prem era.

He made an excellent save from Leon Clarke in the last ten minutes, and his handling and shot stopping in the rest of the game was mostly decent. Also made two good punches to clear the ball from a corner and cross in. Seemed okay in his control of the defence but didn't have a lot to do as Swindon were really quite poor. I've not seen a replay of the goal; at the time I thought he might have gotten closer to it, although it was well struck. Kicking was weak tonight, for some reason. Almost every goal kick was played short, and the back four insisted on messing about and playing it back to Bart frequently. Maybe it was an Adkins idea to try to keep the ball down all the time? We would have been better just sending it long sometimes. His under pressure distribution was poor at times, with at least one ball going out of bounds when it really didn't need to. The County Ground looked like a small pitch but none of Bart's long kicks went that far up it or hung up in the air very long. I was wondering if he was playing with some sort of leg injury, but I don't see why they'd risk playing him if he had been. For me, Bart tonight was not as good as Kelvin's been in the games I've seen this season. I still think he's a fine keeper though. We've been lucky to have the two of them for so long.

Goodness me, watching that game was such a lot of effort in the second half. I thought Cork was the best player for us, Holmes and Schneiderlin were also good. None of the other players were especially fantastic. Harding in particular made loads of mistakes, but he was at least on the ball a lot and trying to make things happen. You could see just what Lambert brings to the table when he came on, winning long balls and linking up so well with Lallana. Before that there was hardly any bite or creativity up front. Martin and Seaborne don't make a great defensive pairing for a team committed to passing along the ground - you really need someone with the ability of Fonte to bring the ball forward and give it to one of the midfielders rather than just going back and forth across the back four ad infinitum. Has Bart always been that poor at kicking? I'm sure I remember him having been far better in the past. His refusal to send goal kicks long for the first 70 minutes was bizarre. Nice to see Sam Hoskins get his debut, he looked lively in the minute or so two was on at the end. Hopefully one for the future. Overall well done to Saints, not a vintage performance but we easily did enough. I'm actually looking forward to seeing how far we can go in this competition.

Stay classy, Saints. You can still be respectful to someone as they leave even if you think they've treated you poorly. BUT, that's only a minor gripe. I'm not nearly as unhappy about seeing Oxo go as I was about Bale, and if we've actually got £15million out of this, you have to be absolutely chuffed with that. Well done to the club.

Andrew Davies for £s + Anthony Pulis I know the club denied that the two deals were linked, but I don't honestly believe that we would have bought a player as godawful as Pulis unless we were forced to as part of the deal where Davies went Stoke.

Corrected. I'm a fool sometimes.

Looks good, just the kind of player that we should be signing. I'd completely forgotten about the existence of Jan-Paul Saeijs mind. He played 20 games for us in 07/08! I think that maybe I've just repressed the memories of that awful season.

http://www.wba.co.uk/page/FriendlyGuide/0,,10366,00.html West Brom's website suggests we aren't playing an XI side, but then apparently they're also playing first team games against Rochdale the day before and Bristol City three days after. Hmm. If I had to guess, I reckon that they'll probably send a mix of first teamers and reserves against us. Ticket prices are quite reasonable, will be going to this one if I can.