Nordic Saint

I agree and if Hughes wants to play 3 central defenders then those 3: Stephens, Yoshida and Bednarek. Hoedt and Vestergaard should be sold at the earliest available opportunity and the money reinvested in a player who can cope in the Premier League.

Yet she still felt the need to charge 'her' club interest on loans. She has certainly squeezed every penny out of her father's initial £12 million investment. She owes Cortese an enormous debt of gratitude for persuading her father to buy the club and then increasing its value by so much. He has made her a fortune.

The recurring theme seems to be the lack of money. That suggests we would be plunged into debt if we did get relegated. Let's hope we don't as the aftermath would more than likely be a repeat of the last time it happened.

Whether you choose to believe the figures or not, that link came from the leading academic researcher on football finance so he would have researched those figures about as thoroughly as anyone possibly could. It's his job. https://twitter.com/KieranMaguire

Our wage bill is not only bigger than Everton's and West Ham's, it's not far behind Spurs'! There has been much talk about how well our club is run financially but the truth is huge amounts of money have been wasted in transfer fees and wages to produce a poor team which looks like getting us relegated. Those expensive failures will then have to be offloaded for far less than we paid for them and the wages of those we can't offload will probably cripple us financially.

Whether he is here or not seems to make little difference apart from reducing the wage bill. I guess it's only when we're recruiting new players and staff that we'll notice any difference. But as his appointee, Ross Wilson, appears to have stepped into his shoes, things will probably continue much as they were. I guess we all hoped that they had someone new in mind ready to replace him and that person would have chosen our next manager and overseen player recruitment in January. It's still not too late for that to happen but there doesn't appear to havebeen much long term planning going on at the club in recent times. The club has been more reactive than proactive.

That would mean we'd be singing it to ourselves then.

They have become thoroughly demoralized. But, even in our last game I could see they were still trying and most are playing to the best of their limited ability, minus the 1 or 2% you get from confidence and being surrounded by quality team mates, albeit in a shambolic, disorganised team. Since Fonte and van Dijk left, there is no real leadership on the pitch and it's clear there is very little effective leadership from Hughes and his coaching team off it. Also, the lack of match fitness from what is apparently a poor training regime at the club means that their efforts flag in the final twenty minutes of games.

That has to be a joke. You can see the impact his coaching has had on our players. I watched him trying to coach Charlie Austin how to shoot. No wonder Austin doesn't score any more.

I think Jack Stephens has a lot more potential but having Hughes and three goalkeepers as first team coaches isn't going to improve anybody.

Yes, the point is the majority of relegated clubs take a long time to recover and come back up again. West Brom are an exception. They only went down because they appointed the awful Pardew and then left it until April, far too late, to replace him with Darren Moore. Their form under Moore at the end of last season was excellent, in fact among the best in the league, with a five match unbeaten run in which they beat Man United and Spurs and drew with Liverpool, showing that they were a decent team, and so, unsurprisingly, Moore has continued to get good results from them this season. Another factor is that they have the key player you need to get promoted, a goal scorer, in Jay Rodriguez. We haven't got one. I really hope we don't get relegated because I don't think it will be a miracle cure for all the club's woes. It is more likely to be a repeat of what happened the last time we were relegated.

I don't know whether you follow European football but Pearson's team are currently in the bottom 3 of the Belgian Second Division. A Premier League club, even one in the bottom 3, should be able to attract the best manager from the Belgian top flight, Philippe Clement, rather than one of the worst ones in their 2nd tier, like Pearson. We really should be looking at managers whose careers are in the ascendant, not those in decline. It was that approach of getting a manager who was sacked from his last Premier League job because he was failing, just because he was a well-known Premier League face, that brought us Hughes. Even the most successful of managers, like Mourinho, when they've been sacked from their last Premier League job because of poor results are best avoided as Man United are currently discovering. Our whole recruitment of players and managers recently has been dull and unimaginative, which is why the usual list of suspects is being trotted out now.

We keep hearing the same few tired old names mentioned, very much in the Hughes, Pardew mould, when what we really need is an up and coming manager with a good win rate and a recent record of success, like Adi Hütter, Marco Rose, Darren Moore, Daniel Stendel or Paco López. Let's get some enthusiasm and ambition back into our club.

A comparison with where were at the same stage last season. In terms of points won, Pellegrino was twice as good as Hughes: 2017/18 Pellegrino's Saints P13 W4 D4 L5 GF13 GA15 PTS 16 2018/19 Hughes' Saints P13 W1 D5 L7 GF10 GA24 PTS 8

Rather him than Ward-Prowse. When you see the latter on the bench there is always a concern that he'll be brought on when we are a goal up and we'll let the opposition back into the game and they'll score.

It's our 13th league game, which means that if we lose, we'll be over a third of the way through the season with just 8 points. At the same stage last season, under Pellegrino, we had 16 points.

An excellent replacement is available: https://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/nathaniel-clyne-set-offered-liverpool-13625010

Very unfair on Ings. He has been one of our better players, although our training and coaching are beginning to take their toll of a player who looked really sharp when he arrived from Liverpool.

But, as results under Hughes have been worse than they were under Pellegrino, we probably would have been relegated if the change had occurred earlier in the season.

"Wilson has never played football to any significant level and graduated in social sciences at Strathclyde University.....Wilson stumbled into a career in football. A friend's father worked for the media department and needed reports on the under-18 team's games" I suppose you could argue that his record as our Head of Recruitment is his qualification as our 'football voice'. Personally, I wouldn't be too alarmed if he were sacked.

We once had arguably the best club central defensive pairing in the world. We couldn't have kept van Dijk because he was young and very much in demand but we could have kept Fonte. It was Les Reed's mistake to sell him, with the usual barrage of negative PR to turn the fans against him. Fortunately we have got rid of Reed so hopefully we won't make similar mistakes in the future.

Pied is the same at Lille as he was here: an average squad player. Fonte is the same as he ever was, an incredibly underrated player who leads defences and teams to great things, like 6th place for Saints, the European Championship title and Nations League finals for Portugal and a Champions League place for Lille. You'd probably have to go back to Alan Ball to find a Saints player like that. The Nations League finals in June will certainly have ex-Saints connections, with Fonte's Portugal and van Dijk's Netherlands team lining up against England.

Of course he was joking but this really was one of the best England games I've been to for decades. A few months ago people might have scoffed at this suggestion but we were watching a competitive game played between two of the best teams in the world and England won it. There haven't been many occasions when we could say that. This England squad and manager are really capturing the public's imagination. Apart from the Nations League finals in Portugal next summer, we also have the 2020 European Championships to look forward to and the final and semi-finals are at Wembley.

I was at the game today. It's the best atmosphere I've seen for an England game at Wembley since 2013 when we qualified for the World Cup Finals by beating Poland and beat Scotland 3-2 with that Rickie Lambert goal. It really was a great game.

Fonte is having a great season for Lille and Portugal. He played the full 90 minutes to gain his 36th cap for Portugal in their 0-0 draw with Italy and his Lille team are 2nd in the French league. How we could do with him this season.