Nordic Saint

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Do our first team players look well coached?

All this talk of him buying real estate around the stadium is bizarre as he's probably struggling to even make his loan repayments. Where do people think he's going to magic this money up from?

That table shows that you generally get what you pay for so the clubs currently filling the bottom 2 places in the Premier League come as no surprise.

Why can we never get rid of them properly? A "12-month secondment" means he'll be coming back again. When does his contract end?

Maybe the thread should be renamed that.

Man of the Match: https://www.dailystar.co.uk/sport/football/celtic-player-ratings-fraser-forster-20835904

And Fraser Forster is back to his best. #Escaped from Dave Watson

What a turkey this one turned out to be! https://www.footballtransfertavern.com/premier-league/southampton-fans-laugh-at-mario-lemina-after-dismal-showing-against-real-madrid/

It's a bit of a lifeline. Another heavy defeat would have seen heads go down at the club. But, apart from the scoreline, which of course is what counts most of all, the stats against us were as one sided as in the Leicester game: Possession: 76% - 24% Shots: 25 - 3 Corners: 17 - 0 The key differences were that McCarthy is a better goalkeeper than Gunn, and kept us in the game and, of course, this time we were playing with 11 men. Still, only losing 2-1 means we can go into the Everton game with more confidence than if we'd been thrashed again.

Another first team coach then. After failing as our goalkeeping coach, that's how Dave Watson was moved while Kelvin got moved there from his role in hospitality, where, presumably, he wasn't doing very well either.

No, nobody has in the last few years, which is exactly what I said. Why are people so desperate to argue on here when basically, as Saints fans, we agree?

They were only trying to protect the fans from the sight of seeing another Saints team thrashed at home and they didn't even succeed at that. We still got to see them thrashed 1-4 by Brighton.

Our record against Man City until 2017 was: Total won 31 drew 25 lost 29 Simple as that.

Good idea. But, Hong Kong flags would be even more effective right now and most effective of all would be the burning of a Chinese flag. Of course, it would mean we'd never be able to attract wealthy Chinese owners like the ones at Wolves and Man City. "CFG turned to China in the latter half of 2015, first offering themselves as a host location for high-level business talks between the government leadership of the United Kingdom and the People's Republic of China before agreeing a £265m sale of shares to a consortium of Chinese state-backed investment firms China Media Capital and CITIC Capital. The deal made the two companies a combined 13% part-owner of CFG and therefore of Manchester City, giving in exchange a significant partnership allowing both City and CFG to expand into the Chinese market in a variety of directions."

Is that just agent talk though? It's easy to say any club is tracking any player because it's probably true. Most clubs nowadays have their own version of the 'black box'. It doesn't mean they have any intention of buying that player. Ozdemir has been playing on loan to Hacettepe Spor Kulübü from Gençlerbirliği. If he was any good, surely one of the big Turkish clubs would have taken him?

Until 2017, we had a winning record against Man City. They were a team we expected to beat at least once every season and we beat them 4-2 in 2016. Since then, however, they have won 6 consecutive games against us. The fact we now expect to lose to them by around 6 goals and a defeat by fewer than 4 goals would be considered a good result does, indeed, show how much we have declined since 2016. https://www.soccerbase.com/teams/head_to_head.sd?team_id=2471&team2_id=1718

A song for JWP:

That's stretching things a bit far But, maybe he could move back to Cork City for his 33rd birthday present in January. We'd still have to pay 90% of his wages though.

McCarthy, Cedric, Danso, Bednarek, Yoshida Romeu, Hojbjerg, Stephens, Boufal/Djenepo (if available) Ings, Redmond As we are going to lose this one anyway, I'd like to see Yoshida tried as left wingback and Stephens as an attacking midfielder.

"Southampton's starting XI at Brighton had an average age of 24 years and 128 days, the youngest team in the Premier League this season." Obviously, they may have to put 1 or 2 older players in now to try to avoid relegation, which apart from selling players for profit, is the club's other main aim.

On a positive note, next season they could save us from relegation.

As long as it's not more than 16 teams, I don't care.

Stephens deserved that. He's been our best forward in this half.

And Ralph then subs Boufal instead of JWP. Maybe he didn't realize JWP was still on the pitch.

I'm struggling to think of 2 consecutive Saints games when we made so little effort to try to win. The concern is that this is going to be the game plan against top teams for the remainder of the season: just trying to keep the score down. But, when we play our relegation rivals will it be possible for the team to switch back to game winning mode again?