Nordic Saint

Top 3 Mitchells 1. The Mitchellin Man 2. Mitchell Ma Belle 3. Mitchells & Butlers (There's probably one of their pubs near you now, Turkish. You can't escape from them that easily)

If our players lose their Premier League status next season, their transfer value is going to fall even more. Any good players we have left in the summer would then have to be sold off cheaply. Relegation would be devastating for a club like ours with owners who aren't prepared to invest and Gao would be looking even more desperately for a way to pay back the loan he took out to pay Kat.

I think he's being ironic. They've taken Leipzig from the 5th tier of German football to the Champions League and their scouting and recruitment are the envy of the football world. Their average crowds have grown from 2,000 to 40,000 and they are now expanding their stadium capacity to 54,000. They are currently 2nd in the Bundesliga, ahead of Bayern Munich, who they aim to overtake as Germany's top club. Salzburg have won 10 Austrian Bundesliga titles since they took over and been regulars in the Champions League, whereas before Red Bull took over, the league had been dominated by the 2 big Vienna clubs: Rapid & Austria Vienna. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RB_Leipzig

That's a fair summary although the owners will still be hoping to make a few bob from player sales.

That really belongs in this thread: https://www.saintsweb.co.uk/showthread.php?61468-New-Skates-Rivalry-Documentry-Coming-Out#.XdfwEa_grIU

That would be great. They have been fantastic owners at both Leipzig and Salzburg but, apart from the Mitchell connection, I can't see why they would choose us and we don't know what terms Mitchell left the club on. He may be another one Les Reed has burnt our bridges with.

If, as the Independent suggests, Gao has been open to offers for the club for the past 6 months, protests aren't going to help him sell it. Gao wants out but no new owner is going to want in at a relegation-threatened club in turmoil with the fans up in arms.

He is the new Carlos Kaiser.

The stats are on our side. We've never won a Premier League game at Arsenal. Surely, we are due a win now?

As for the dock strike story, it's all here if you ever need to straighten out a Pompey fan about it: https://www.fansnetwork.co.uk/football/watford/forum/165954/2223138/scummers/fb_pl.php

After reading the glowing reviews on here, I decided to watch it to the end and we weren't. It was nearly all about how hard the film makers think Pompey fans. A Saints fan said, 'Pompey fans think they are hard' and the interviewer soon shut him up by replying, 'They are'. Quite frankly, apart from the fact we beat Pompey 4-0, which was almost edited completely out of the video, it was embarrassing. They condensed the match down to a few seconds because we won it, which didn't suit their agenda, and even then only focussed on women and old men amongst the Saints fans.

I stopped watching after the first ten minutes, which was all footage of Pompey fans talking about how tough and working class they were. I didn't know there was some balance later, with Saints fans doing the same thing. As for sports where people want middle class credentials, there are many: rowing, badminton, show jumping, tennis etc.

I don't think we've got 72m worth of players left to sell (even though we paid much more than that for them) so there goes the 'war chest'.

The transfer window is, as always nowadays, going to be about selling first, if we can persuade another club to buy any of our players and we'll only be able to do that if we have any player left who is good enough to interest another club. Then, if we can, it will be about using part of that fee to buy anyone at the last minute, no matter how mediocre he is. And so, the downgrade will continue.

It's a portsmyth thing. In the opening 10 minutes I heard that they were a 'northern city on the south coast' but then I also heard they were the 'East End of London on the south coast'. They seem desperate to have some sort of 'working class' credentials even though they are a tourist town which usually votes Tory, doesn't have much industry, apart from tourism, and has fewer socially deprived areas than their neighbours, Southampton. Most of their fans come from affluent areas in the suburbs and countryside anyway, including Jon Petersfield Westwood. Every Pompey fan seems desperate to appear 'hard' and 'working class' even though they aren't. Perhaps the fact they've lost nearly every fight they've ever been in explains their insecurity.

I stopped watching it after ten minutes of listening to Pompey fans telling us how tough and working class Portsmouth is and that it's The City of War because they were bombed in the Second World War and the English army left for the Agincourt from there (in fact they left from Southampton, which, like many other cities, was also bombed in the Second World War). We also heard that 'mush' was unique Pompey slang and then had the sight of the interviewer drooling over the sight of some old chap's knuckles, which had actually hit peoples' teeth! He was so excited by this that he just went on and on asking questions about his knuckles. I won't bother to watch any more of it, as I'm sure we'll then get the interviewer drooling over more portsmyths about scum, dock strikes, how hard the 6.57 were etc etc. If a so-called documentary gives credence to lies and falsehoods like that, it's really not worth giving it the time of day.

Vestergaard is more of a liabilty than Bednarek but, let's face it, all of our central defenders are nowadays. I guess, because we have seen so little of Danso so far, we still hope he will be better than the rest.

Yes, and with the tiny transfer fees we are prepared to pay, we'd probably only get one equally bad, if not worse.

Ex-Saints in Europe Tadić scores a pen for Serbia. Perhaps, we should have him as our ex-Saints penalty taker, instead of Davis. Fonte starts for his 42nd cap for Portugal. Could he win his third major trophy with Portugal? They certainly have a great spine: Rui Patricio - Fonte - C. Ronaldo

$6m. The sort of transfer fees being bandied about would indicate that we are not going to be able to afford Premier League class players.

But we are top of the best sellers list! There can be no other club of our size that's sold so many players who've gone on to star in European competitions for both club and country. We had a few more out there tonight, who we'd sold, playing in winning teams in the European Championship: Tadic, Fonte & Oxlade-Chamberlain.

Ex-Saints in Europe A couple of ex-Saints involved in big European Championship wins tonight: Oxlade-Chamberlain, with his 33rd cap, in a 7-0 win for England and José Fonte, with his 41st cap, in a 6-0 win for Portugal.

You get the impression that a few young Business Studies graduates have been recruited instead. Hence all the new PR initiatives, which are p!ssing off fans. Somebody in the club must have had the idea that this was the way to both save and make more money.

Agreed. You should be selecting our team! The danger now is tht Ralph is going to keep picking JWP & Vestergaard & mess about with the full back positions until it's too late. Managers often get hoodwinked by how players perform in training, when the pace and pressure is not so intense. Presumably, that's where JWP and Vestergaard look good.

Yes, it is, in fact, the most one-sided derby in the country but I doubt the documentary will mention that. The only stat the TV commentators mentioned before we beat them 4-0 was how many years it had been since we'd beaten then as if it was something that had almost never happened whereas usually before derby games they refer at least once to how many games each team has won. Anyway it's updated now: 20-9 https://www.soccerbase.com/teams/head_to_head.sd?team_id=2049&team2_id=2471