Nordic Saint

That's Old Les for you. http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/sport/saints/15377566.Van_Dijk_not_for_sale_insists_Reed/ http://www.sportsmole.co.uk/football/southampton/news/reed-southampton-have-best-midfield-in-pl_276561.html http://www.sportsmole.co.uk/football/southampton/news/reed-champions-league-realistic-for-saints_235957.html http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/sport/15005364.Reed_backs_Puel_for_Saints_success/

The days when we sold players and replaced them with better ones ended when our head of recruitment, Paul Black Box Mitchell went to Spurs. We need his 'Black Box' brain back. He is a very talented man and would be the ideal replacement for Old Les, who reaches retirement age this year. I sometimes wonder if Les is just a cuckoo in the nest who has got rid of nearly all of our talented administrators, managers, coaches, scouts, players and staff and whether it would be a happier more stable ship with somebody new at the helm.

In the first 19 games last season, in which Stephens played no part, we conceded 19 goals. In the 16 in which he started, we conceded 24. So, we went from conceding 1.0 goals per game without him, when posters on here were saying Fonte was having a poor season, to 1.5 with Stephens. A 50% increase in goals conceded! Obviously, a major cause of that was the absence of van Dijk. But, it just shows how poor our defence will be if we have to rely on Stephens and Yoshida this season.

Obviously, selling our 2 top goal scorers, Mane and Pelle, in the same summer wasn't a wise move. But this video sums up just how poor our current strikers are at converting goalscoring chances. My solution would be to sell Long ( I know this won't be popular with some posters who regards him as something of a folk hero because he runs about a lot) and replace him with a better goal scorer. www.umaxit.com/index.php/videos/by-the-numbers-where-did-southampton-go-wrong-last-season

Let's hope we don't become the best of the rest after all the Premier League teams. If we do, there will still be posters claiming we can't possibly afford to compete with them.

If we'd had a not for sale stance last summer and had kept Mane and Wanyama, that would have shown real ambition. I think they were less keen to leae than van Dijk appears to be now and we wouldn't have needed to spend anything on new players. The Club could have afforded to keep our best players then. IF van Dijk is sold, our squad is going to look a hell of a lot weaker than it did 2 years ago. That is not progreess. It isn't even standing still. It's decline.

Anything positive that happens at SFC is always down to LR: it's one of the mongboard's 10 commandments. Unfortunately he now seems to have got rid of all the staff, administrators, scouts, managers and players who really achieved those positive things.

Judging from the comments about Fraser Forster on here a lot of our fans have completely forgotten just how good Fraser Forster was before Dave Watson got to work on him. Forster used to be very good.

At Tottenham since Paul Mitchell went there.

It might work. We managed to free Melia and Grobelaar.

Even if we sold him for only £40m, the club woul 'leak' a much higher sum to the fans, as the accounts show they have consistently done in the past.

It's a scenario van Dijk, his agent an Liverpool could have almost dreamt up beween them, reducing the transfer fee by 30 million and using half of that to pay his wages.

A footbll club is the fans. Anyone who hates the fans might as well support another club although he'd probably hate their fans too. These types usally hate footballers as well. I'm not sure it's just a football thing though. Some people are just misanthropes and don't really like anyone apart from themselves.

'Dead ball specialist' is not really a correct description of Ward-Prowse. He is a corner specialist. His free-kicks in front of the oppostion penalty area usually go a yard high and wide of the goal. We really miss not having a real dead ball specialist, like Le Tissier or Lambert, who can score goals from free-kicks. I think Boufal or Gabbiadini would probably be better at taking them than Ward-Prowse.

OK, so it may be too late for you to join in but there is real life outside of this messageboard.

2 very evenly matched teams kIck of the pre-season. Half time score: Salisbury 0 Pompey 0 (Salisbury's only available striker is 51 years old)

Read your own post, you smug buffoon.

I didn't think there was anyone more stupid on here than Always, but then you turned up: a semi-literate idiot.

As usual, you are wrong. Even if St Mary's still had the same capacity as Leicester's stadium, which it doesn't, we'd still only have the 21st biggest capacity of English football clubs' stadiums. in the case of the Dell it was much worse than that. Yet, in all measurable terms of fan base on social media etc, our support is much bigger than that, usually placing us in the top 10 or 11, in spite of our lack of trophies. There are very few clubs - perhaps only 5 or 6 - who would get gates bigger than ours if they'd had our history of underachievement and disappointment, with only major 1 trophy to show for more than 130 years of competition and 14 semi-finals.

Neither did Puel, with the sale of Mane, Pelle and Wanyama.

I hope to be pleasantly surprised. I was unenthusiastic about the appointment of Pochettino. I was very enthusiastic about Koeman and very unenthusiastic about Puel and didn't expect him to last more than a year. I don't want to say I was right about Puel because I warmed to him as a man and thought he deserved another season. I feel Pellegrino would be very much a case of out of the frying pan into the fire but hope that, like Pochettino, he proves me wrong. What concerns me though is that since the departure of Paul Mitchell, the standard of our recruitment both on and off the pitch has not been very good.

And lost 0-6 at home to them. We might just as well have kept Puel. Their teams scored the same number of goals last season and both struggled to score any at home but Pellegrino's finished 9th whereas Puel's finished 8th. Puel's overall career record is much better though.

Ultimately, our set up meant that Koeman had to leave a year before he'd planned to. He probably knew little about it before he arrived as he'd never worked in the Premier League before and I doubt he'd ever heard of Les Reed. The same would apply to Pochettino.

Howe should be the England manager. As you say, the job he has done at Bournemouth is remarkable. Sadly, he's made it clear he won't come here. He has had a closer view of the managerial setup at Southampton than most.

I think when Old Les has got rid of staff, they have little desire to come back to the Club. Perhaps, if Les retires, a few of them might, hopefully starting with the return of our black box, Paul Mitchell, our Academy coaches, Dodd and Williams, as well as Sammy Lee.