Nordic Saint

As has been pointed out many times, we can't compete financially with other Premier League clubs even the likes of Crystal Palace and Stoke, so if another PL club is intereted in a player too we might as well forget him. That means any signing we make will be leftfield. If that results in us getting another Mane then no problem. But I wonder if now that Paul 'Black Box' Mitchell has moved to Spurs, we are capable of unearthing another gem like that. i guess we'll soon find out. Fingers crossed.

We need a very good striker to replace both Pelle and Mane and their goals. We already had Rodriguez and Austin in the squad last season so I certainly don't consider them to be replacements and Nathan Redmond is a midfielder, not a striker. Sadly, the odds look stacked against Rodrguez ever again being the player he was before his injury and Austin's injury problems last season soon explained his cheap transfer fee and why no other club wanted him. They could both well be players whose best years are over because of injuries. I also don't see any defensive midfielder in the squad now as good as Wanyama. I was very disapointed by what I saw of our youngsters last season in U21 and Youth Cup games and their first team appearances. I don't know why we've kept Gallagher. About the only one who seemed to make progress last season was Alfie Jones. All of the others, including Reed, Targett and our once most exciting prospect, Sims, seemed to regress. Since Dodd and Williams left, the Academy production line has stalled badly. If Puel is forced to play youth, our results will suffer and for what reason? So youngsters can be put in the shop window?. To sum up, Redmond looks like a good replacement for Juanmi and Hojbjerg should be an improvement on Clasie, who I hope will follow Steckelenburg to Everton, but we still we need to buy very good replacements for Pelle, Mane and Wanyama. None of the youngsters look good enough to do that. On the positive side, we still have most of the players left from the team which finished 6th last season. But, really we needed to keep all of them and then add a few more in order to have a squad strong enough to do well in both the Premier and Europa Leagues: a bit like Spurs have done this summer.

May 2014: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/may/20/luke-shaw-gutted-southampton-sack-academy-coached

We may have great facilities but they don’t count for much without the right coaching staff, and the turnover of coaches in our Academy seems to be very high. Players in the upper age groups don’t seem to have progressed much since Dodd and Williams were sacked. I notice the club is now advertising for a new assistant coach for the U18s. Does that mean another one has been sacked? From what I saw of the academy games last season, and I saw quite a few, the most promising players, like Sims, Gape, Gallagher and Reed, all seem to have gone backwards. We don’t appear to have a single player in the current England U19s squad, which is doing so well in Europe. Luke Shaw gives a lot of the credit for his development to Dodd. Would it be possible to get him back again?

If you have players who aren't good enough to be wanted by clubs prepared to offer them bigger salaries, like Francis Benali and Kelvin Davis, they will stay with you forever. If you have outstanding players of the calibre that usually get paid bigger salaries than you are prepared to pay them, like Shearer and Bale, then they won't stay. There are, of course, exceptions to every rule, and Le Tissier was a gem of an exception. I doubt there is anybody working at the club, from cleaning ladies, through admin staff, to Les Reed and Ralph Krueger who wouldn't move to another club if they were offered a lot more money to do so. Clearly, they have't been, which is why they are still here.

The point of the thread is that it means, by that argument, most of our best players 'clearly aren't committed' every year. The truth is that becoming a big club costs money. The clubs that had the biggest ambitions and invested the most early in football history became the biggest. It didn't just happen by chance and it takes time. The first step is to build a big stadium. That is the common factor nearly all big clubs have. Increasing the capacity at St Mary's to 40,000 would be a big step in the right direction. It will be interesting to see if Leicester do that because until they do, they still look small in the eyes of players, fans and the media, in spite of just having won the Premier League. Big clubs usually became big because they had wealthy owners who poured money into them, as has happened at Man City recently. Getting one of those is, to a certain extent, down to luck. All employed people who work for money and change their job for a better salary could be called 'mercenaries'. I understand that ordinary people are jealous of the ridiculous amounts of money top footballers earn but the same could be said of film stars and other famous people at the top in sports and entertainment. They needed an exceptional work ethic and great talent to get to the top of the pile. If you want the best, you pay the best salaries. That's true of most professions.

No, you're not wrong. Saints really did sell Luke Shaw and Calum Chambers.

So far, I'd say that Spurs, with their signings of Janssen and Wanyama for what are by today's standards very reasonable prices, have done best. They will certainly be challenging for honours again. Vincent Janssen looked Holland's best player when they played at Wembley and is similar in style to Vardy. Leicester, with Mendy and Musa as well as a couple of decent squad players, have done well so far too. There are rumours that West Brom are lining up Borja Baston as a replacement for Berahino. If so, it will be interesting to see how he does, as he was one of the top scorers in the Spanish league last season.

On reflection, you are probably right about him nowadays, Turkish. He probably isn't used by the club any more. I got the impression he was hired in the Cortese era and still posting on his behalf and several other people suggested that, as he was very active around the time Cortese left. However, the policy of planting posters strategically on the internet to argue the club's case when it comes under critcism, especially in times of crisis, appears to me to be continuing. The cascade of 'ITK leaks' about Koeman which suddenly came cascading out of the club, about him being lazy, unpopular with staff, not interested in the Academy, having undermined Targett's confidence, players now wanting to stay because he had left etc seemed to be orchestrated. You don't suddenly get that many leaks without the club sanctioning them. Some of the stuff about his contract negotiations could only have come from someone very high up in the club. I'm sure many people will tell me I'm totally mistaken. Maybe there is just a group of people with connections to the club who chose to post their ITK info at the same time. By and large, as we all support the club, it doesn't do much harm and in the case of transfer activity is of interest. But, I do wonder about the veracity of some of the things said about players and managers who've left.

It appears the club uses a few so-called 'ITK posters' for PR purposes. i assume they are sub-contracted and paid to do that job. The information would therefore be, as you say sanctioned by the club so the posts about transfer targets in particular are reliable, even if we don't eventually manage to sign the target. Those that appear to be working in this PR operation include areasix on the Uglyinside, and Rooflas and Armchair champ in the Daily Echo Saints news comments. I guess that Jack Schitt is part of the operation and presumably 1 or 2 posters on here but I don't know which ones. I guess a couple of PR writers could cover most Saints-related internet forums by using multiple usernames. The information about transfer targets is probably fairly objective but some of the other stuff relating to players and managers who leave may not be. The stuff about Mane wanting to stay because Koeman had left, for example. just seemed to be part of a general smear campaign. One of the people who used to do the PR on the Uglyinside had the username Clickinsect and it turned out he worked for a small PR company which did football-related promotion work mainlky on YouTube. I should imagine he uses another usrname now, as he took a lot of flak.

Kelvin Davis, like Benali, stayed with us for a long time but he was never, by any stretch of the imagination, a great player. In fact, he even made it into the all-time worst Sunderland XI. Irish interntaional, Tommy Traynor, with 434 first team appearances over 14 years for Saints would be far more deserving if we were doing it on the basis of longevity of service. There are no appearance stats for CB Fry on Wiki but I doubt it would have been more than 100.

1st team appearances for Saints (according to Wiki): Paine 713 Channon 510 Le Tissier 443 (Branfoot cost him quite a few more) Fonte 243 (will probably go on to more than 300) Davies 240 Lambert 207 Bates 202 (none in top flight) Shilton 188 Keegan 68 Ted Bates was a fairly average footballer and he was not, as many people think, from this area. He initially signed for his local team, Norwich, but never broke into their first team. His statue is more to mark his achievements as a manager and director and the fact that his career here, in 3 different roles, spanned so many years.

As the majority of teams in the competition will be fielding their first teams, it will definitely go into the record books as a first team fixture.There would certainly be a capacity crowd at Fratton Park for a night game which our academy players would not find easy. It's the best posssible derby game as far as Pompey are concerned as they will be facing a weak Saints team. It would, of course, be great if we won it but, I'd much rather we got them in the FA Cup when we would almost certainly beat them and get revenge for our recent winless run against them.

A whole season of 'you're not fit to wear the bra' chants and it's going to be worse for whichever player gets picked out for the 'looks like a woman and he wears a bra' song. Let's face it, although we can laugh it off, the club didn't really need to heap this embarrassment on the players and fans.

Our players and fans are certainly going to get a lot of stick from oppostion fans for wearing a bra this season. I guess we'll just have to get used to it like Brighton fans have had to with the boyfriend songs. Four Four Two's take on the bra shirt: "giving the wearer the impression that they’ve donned a brassiere over their shirt" http://www.fourfourtwo.com/features/whos-got-best-and-worst-kits-premier-league-season-you-decide

Not if they beat us, and our U21s certainly aren't guaranteed a win against them. You can just imagine the gloating if they win and presumably it would go into the record books as a first team fixture.

+ another 1. There's plenty of space to Rickie's right.

Can his picture be added to the banner at the top of the page now, please? He certainly desrves to be there alongside Rickie Lambert.

He's a truly great player, up there with Paine, Channon and Le Tissier in the pantheon of all-time great Saints, in a less glanmorous position, but achieving more than all of them. It's good to still have football heroes, especially one so modest and unassuming.

And some classic examples of the latter quickly followed.

"People like you". Exactly my point. We used to all be Saints fans together. I have never known us so bitterly divided.

It seems that anyone who doesn't follow Sir Les like a sheep is going to get called a melt or a bedwetter by the sheep. To be honest, the extent to which he has bitterly divided the fanbase and got us turning against each other is a cause for concern.

You are right. It was England's 2nd game he played in: a 2-0 win v Mexico.

No, Fonte and Cédric are the first. Terry Paine played in England’s opening game of the 1966 World Cup Finals v Mexico but then was replaced by Alan Ball, who, of course, later played for Saints. If there had been a World Cup in the early 1900s, however, Saints might well have been good enough to win it, as they thrashed the national teams of Argentina, Uruguay, Hungary and France on tour. I think that Fonte, although playing in the less glamorous position of centre back, has now earned the right to be considered one of the all-time great Saints, up there with the likes of Paine, Channon and Le Tissier.

We could do with buying another couple of players from that Portugal team. I expect José will have a word with them. He appears to be the leader of that team, constantly organising them and nearly all of their attacks build from the back, starting from him. Cédric really has electric pace. If he converted from wing-back to winger, he'd be a brilliant replacment for Mane. The only question mark would be against his finishing.