Nordic Saint

You should have learned by now never to trust any numbers provided by Pompey fans. These are the real totals: Seasons in top flight, not including next season: Saints 45 Pompey 33 This site is fairly reliable as they can't tamper with it: England historical attendance and performance (european-football-statistics.co.uk)

Here's something else to cheer you up. We are now going into our 46th season in the top flight.

Does he have anyone on his coaching staff who's worth listening to? Kelvin Davis? Dave Watson?

We don't have anyone who's any good at heading the ball, either in defence or attack, and opposition managers have begun to capitalize on it. Meanwhile our manager and coaches still don't seem to have realized and we keep lobbng high crosses, throw-ins and corners into the opposition penalty area. Because we don't win anything in the air, the pathetic excuse has even be offered that we deliberately direct long throws to opposition players' heads so that they will head the ball to one of our players, which of course they don't. They head it to one of their own players instead and start an attack against us. I believe there are stats which show we are the worst team for conceding goals from corners and crosses and for failing to score from them at the other end. Until we buy a defender and striker or two who are good at heading, we are going to continue struggling.

I don't suppose there's any chance of getting Giovanni van Bronckhorst? He might fancy managing in the Premier League, although he'd probably choose a bigger club than Saints.

Nowhere near as good as Romeu.

Please not another 9-0.

The combination of Kent and Tavernier has been devastating in Europe this year. What a final it's set to be. Eintracht took 30,000 fans to Madrid. They'll have more than that turning up in Seville and so will Rangers. Pity the stadium doesn't have a bigger capacity.

To be fair about the only time, the Chapel, our supposed home end, made any noise was for the Europa League game v Inter Milan. I'm resigned to the fact that we're never going to have a proper home end at St Mary's though. The will simply isn't there.

Frankfurt - proper home end. No hiding in little groups in the corners of the away end there.

Arsenal away looks tough but Chelsea and Brighton at home and Brentford away are all winnable. I can see them surviving with a win on the final day of the season. As for being in freefall, Leeds have won three and drawn two of their last 6 games. The only one they lost was v Man City.

If Everton start winning, it could take more than that to stay up this season.

I've been watching Saints since the 1960s and Jose Fonte is the best captain I've seen. He's also proved to be Lille's best ever captain.

It is permissible to eat and drink between dawn and dusk when you are travelling but you are supposed to do make up days later to compensate. Certainly, for away games at least, players don't have to observe the fast but, of course they realize they are being watched by millions of people on TV. The vast majority of muslims - I'd say >90% - try to observe the fast throughout the month of Ramadan, to varying degrees. In some places you can be arrested by the religious police if you are seen eating or drinking in public. Ironically, some muslims gain weight during Ramadan because of all the extra food, especially unhealthy sweets, eaten during the hours of darkness.

That and the fact we don't score from corners, crosses and long throws is because we don't have anybody who can head the ball, either in defence or in attack, which is a serious deficiency at any level of football, let alone the Premier League, especially as our main mode of attack is high crosses and corners from our wing-backs. Let's hope we can buck the trend today and scrape a draw with a ball accidentally bouncing off the back of one of our strikers heads into the Brighton net.

The tension leading up to the Brighton game is palpable.

Juanmi has now scored 18 goals and has capped a fine season by winning the Copa del Rey with Real Betis: only the 4th trophy in the club's history.

Sideways passes in front of your own goal. It doesn't matter how good your goalkeeper is, it doesn't work. Even a good midfielder stopping and playing short passes is going to give the ball away at least once every game but it's not in a danger area. But a goalkeeper doing it a few yards in front of his own goal is stupid, and the manager is even more stupid for telling him to do it. So many goals are being given away that way.

Even at just 5' 10", Danny Ings was a better header both in attack and defence than any of our current players. We've had many central defenders who were good headers: van Dijk and Fonte, for example. Of course, to be a good header you need bravery and perhaps that's a quality some of our current players lack.

The lack of good headers in defence, midfield and attack is a glaring weakness in our squad and it has cost us many points this season. Brian Clough used to say that he would never recruit a player if he wasn't a good header. It's ridiculous that we have excellent wing-backs who win us so many corners and a player who's reckoned to be one of the best set-piece specialists in the league to take them yet nobody who can get on the end of them and head the ball in the net. I've seen some people try to ridicule Newcastle's January recruitment but they bought good headers and you can see how much that has helped improve their results. I wondered how many goalscoring opportunities we had missed this season and how many goals we'd conceded because of this deficiency. Well nta786, you've partly answered that question: more than any other team in the league. How we could do with a central defender like Dan Burn instead of any of our current centre backs.

Probably because he was our best player AGAIN.

Small northern mill towns with a population half the size of Eastleigh's, whose football team has massively overachieved by winning the league twice? By rights, you'd expect a team in a town that small to be in League Two, at best. Having been to watch Saints play at Burnley, I can't say I was feeling the similarities but as you say, the folk there are friendly enough. View of Burnley (looking remarkably like Southampton) from the Singing Ringing Tree:

Your memory is correct although I wouldn't say he was 'darting'. He was slowly ambling across several blocks of empty seats for ages and then one of our lot started walking towards him. The Pompey fan got slower and slower as he saw he was getting near the Saints fans and fell into the arms of 2 stewards when he was about halfway across the empty stand. Then the Saints fan, who'd gone out to meet him, spat on him as he was being led away, which was a bit unnecessary. But it certainly couldn't be described as a 'punch up'. That FA Youth Cup game was the second time I saw a Saints team beat a Pompey team 7-0. The first time was when our first teams met in the John Milkins Testimonial at Fratton Park and poor John Milkins was in goal for Pompey. There certainly won't be any hooliganism at a women's football match but there is a chance the result might be another 7-0. (58) GOALS: Southampton 7-0 Portsmouth (FA Youth Cup Third Round) - YouTube

This thread is certainly going to be interesting to revisit if we do. The chances of a club with our budget replacing him with a better goalkeeper are slim. It may take years of trial and error. We still haven't replaced Fonte.

You'd think he'd at least remember last year's winners, Leicester, as they beat us in the semi-final.