Nordic Saint

The first years back in the PL: Fonte Lallana Lambert The players who helped take us to 'the next level' Mane Wanyama van Dijk Fonte is incredibly underrated by Saints fans. He was very influential in our rise. He was our leader on the pitch. He helped lead us to our three top 8 finishes, Portugal to the European Championship and, currently, his Lille team to 2nd place in the French League.

I agree with you, Micky. There were at least 30,000 there. In fact, I've seen plenty of 30,000 gates at St Mary's with more empty seats than there were for the Chelsea game.

Pity it didn't happen then. It's going to take so much longer to repair the damage he's done. He has now got rid of just about everyone who was doing a good job.

You aren't very bright, are you?

The same people who laugh at the idea of a successful, young, up and coming manager like Darren Moore, are the usual suspects who were against the idea of Eddie Howe. They prefer the old, experienced failures like Pardew, Bruce, Moyes and Hughes and they are, of course, wrong. The chance to get Eddie Howe has passed. Darren Moore would be a great choice right now.

Well, they're not: they're a level above us nowadays.

We haven't won any of our last 4 games against Burnley so it's not much to imagine,is it?

As things currently stand, Bournemouth are 5th in the Premier League with 5 wins from 8 games. It's taken us 30 games more than that to get that many wins.

Anyway, getting back on track, what exactly makes Ross Wilson any more qualified than the average fan on here to be our head of recruitment? Was it that he never played football, had a degree in Social Sciences from Strathclyde University or the fact that Les Reed had lunch with him and took a shine to him? If Les Reed hadn't liked him, would he have got away with wasting 100 million pounds on dud players no other club wants and still kept his job? In any other job that would be considered an awful lot of money to waste. He's certainly a very lucky boy that Old Les has his ass covered.

I'm hoping that, like Ward-Prowse, he will one day get at least a few minutes on the pitch for England because I love ramming this down Pompey fans' throats, when they start going on about their 'history' and being a 'big club': England internationals Southampton David Armstrong James Beattie Ryan Bertrand Wayne Bridge Arthur Chadwick Mick Channon Nathaniel Clyne Peter Crouch Bill Ellerington Tim Flowers Fraser Forster C B Fry Kelly Houlker Kevin Keegan Adam Lallana Rickie Lambert Bert Lee Matt Le Tissier George Molyneux Terry Paine Tom Parker Alf Ramsey Bill Rawlings Nathan Redmond Jack Robinson Jay Rodriguez Luke Shaw Alan Shearer Peter Shilton Fred Titmuss Arthur Turner Danny Wallace James Ward-Prowse Dave Watson Steve Williams Mark Wright 36 Portsmouth Jim Allen Sol Campbell Peter Crouch Dan Cunliffe Jermain Defoe Jimmy Dickinson Jack Froggatt Peter Harris Mark Hateley Kelly Houlker David James Glen Johnson Arthur Knight Len Phillips Jack Smith Fred Worrall 16

Poor Turkish's obsession with me is bizarre because I'm really nothing special. He's followed me around on football messageboards like a pet dog for nearly ten years. But, with his boasting about what designer labels he has in his wardrobe and how he looks in the gym, I can't help thinking he'd be better off posting on Mumsnet.

I think if you took an average of the managers and players posters on here think we should have signed over the last two years and compared it to who the 'professionals' at our club actually signed, we'd come out ahead of them. Since Paul Mitchell left, our recruitment all seems to be just smoke and mirrors, Vestergaard 'a big bloke' at centre half who isn't very good at football, being a classic example. Would any of us have chosen him? I think not. We all knew he was too slow. It was no secret.

Javier Calleja was my long-term choice when we sacked Pellegrino, a young up and coming manager. Paul Cook was my short-term fix: a motivator to keep us up. Who knows how they'd have turned out? Choosing the right manager is certainly not an easy task but I think that our previous head of recruitment, Paul Mitchell, had it as close to an exact science as you could get and that he probably deserves more credit for the Pochettino appointment than Cortese who went along with him to see an Espanyol game, where he claims he noticed him, gets. The one thing most of us agree on, however, is that appointing the usual suspects, Pardew, Hughes, Bruce and Allardyce, reeks of setting your stall out to finish 17th.

Gazzaniga suffered from the coaching of Dave Watson. I always thought he would do better if he could get away from him. Forster's career has been wrecked by Watson. It will be interesting to see what he does to McCarthy and Gunn, who, at the moment, seem OK. The best scenario would be that Watson has learned from his mistakes and doesn't repeat them.

He's better than anyone else we've got and our results when he plays are better than when he doesn't. Of course, he's not as good as Fonte and van Dijk but those days are gone. If Hughes sticks with Yoshida and Bednarek v Chelsea, we could get a draw; if he plays Vestergaard and Hoedt, we'll lose easily.

Let's hope Hughes doesn't bring Ward-Prowse on as sub and hand the game to Everton.

He's slow and unathletic. He'll never make the grade in the Premier League. Thank God he's not playing tonight. Yoshida and Bednarek are much better than Vestergaard and Hoedt.

He doesn't have the quickness of feet you need for the Premier League. No amount of coaching from our brilliant first team coaches is going to change that. Another 20 million + wasted because, like Carrillo, he is simply too slow for the PL. That was known before we bought him, which is a shocking indictment of our current recruitment team.

Fonte's Lille team beat Marseille 3-0 to go 2nd in Ligue 1.

If the inane drivel you post on here is anything to go by, that would have been a good result for you when you were at school.

Darren Moore as manager with Paul Mitchell as DOF would be good. But, until Les Reed can be persuaded to retire, it's very unlikely we'll get anyone good. Also as West Brom and RB Leipzig are flying high and it's rumoured Man Utd want Mitchell, they probably wouldn't want to come here now anyway. Lethargy and laziness seem to have permeated our club from top to bottom. We really need someone dynamic and ambitious at the helm to inject some energy and enthusiasm into it.

If we'd played Yoshida and Bednarek instead of Vestergaard and Hoedt, we just might have got a point today. If we persist with our current centre back pairing, we will be relegated. Unfortunately, it's going to take Hughes a long time to figure that out by himself. Let's hope when he finally does, it's not too late to save us from the drop.

We've turned into the new Stoke: no fighting spirit, shambolic defence with 2 big, useless lumps in the middle of it, with our ambition largely limited to trying scrape home draws and keep the score down to less than 4 in away games.

It hasn't. They have a better manager and players than we've got and have done well in the transfer market, bringing in Fabianski, Felipe Anderson and Yarmolenko in the summer. We have nobody as good as Arnautovic, who cost about the same as we paid for Carrillo.

"expect them to troop off the pitch reasonably satisfied with a 2-0 or 3-1 defeat" Pundits seem to think that we have incredibly low expectations nowadays.