Nordic Saint

Although he'd been OK for Liverpool, he never kept a single clean sheet for us until the bribery scandal finally hit the headlines on the back pages of the tabloids. Then the very next game, at home v Arsenal in November, with Saints fans holding up 'Bruce is Innocent' banners and cheering him like he was a hero, he 'miraculously' kept his first Saints clean sheet and then kept another one in the following game at Palace. It was about the only time he deigned to show his Liverpool form for us. As for that FA Cup collapse v Spurs, it's a hard one to forget and ranks along with the nightmare at Tranmere as one of the worst memories for us Saints fans who were there. Another one I wish I hadn't been at was the 7-2 loss at White Hart Lane in 2000. The 6-1 defeat there in 1968, didn't seem so bad, as at the end of it we scored the final goal of the game and all sang, 'We're only warming up.' The 5-3 defeat there the season before was even better, as 10,000 of us completely took over the Park Lane End and sang ourselves hoarse for 90 minutes so took some pride from the fact that off the pitch we had taken over at White Hart Lane

He seems to be going through a similar transformation to Raheem Sterling, from being a player with obvious skill but little end product to becoming a really dangerous forward and a game winner.

You do wonder where we might have finished if Ralph had been our manager from the start of the season. There is still an FA Cup up for grabs.

Two great wins. Now let's win the next two as well. Redmond for England.

Those stats certainly indicate that Austin contributes a hell of a lot more. He is ahead in every category apart from passing the ball backwards. Anyway, rumours abound that the decision has already been made and that Gabbiadini is going to be sold. I have total faith in our manager to make the right decision and to use the money wisely to strengthen the squad.

Objects getting thrown at players is not good but one problem with this particular incident is that the plastic bottle hit Alli on the back of his head. He then put his hand to a spot on the left side of his head, which was untouched, and continued to rub that spot as if it was painful so it was reminiscent of the cheating players do when they feign injury to try to get another player sent off. A bottle being thrown at a player is bad enough in itself so an honest reaction would have been better.

He also scored the goal which got them a draw in the league this season at Fratton Park. If that is what ultimately stops Pompey getting promoted, that's another feather in his cap.

Not world class but he is certainly an underrated manager, who is particularly good at motivating underdogs in cup matches. He's done a fantastic job in his 14 years at Burton Albion, taking them up from the Northern Premier League all the way to a League Cup semi-final. Remember when he knocked us out of the League Cup to take Sheffield United through to the semi-finals? And he also took them through to the FA Cup semi-finals. Good luck to Burton in the semi-final. It would be great to see them reach the final.

It seems that everybody associated with the club is upping their game. Hesketh is a skilful player, whose progress stalled a bit over the last couple of years under the old regime but it would be great to see him back here, playing for our new manager.

The chorus of this song has to be one of the best in years for a football anthem. Our Ralph! Our Ralph! Hasenhüttl He's the best manager in the land

Sheer class today. I'd never really considered him to be a top class Premier League forward but it looks like he is finally maturing into just that. He is still only 24 and has the potential to get even better. Let's hope the injury is not too serious.

He is a top class goal scorer. Ings and Redmond really caused problems for Arsenal today. Redmond obviously had to go off injured but I was surprised Ings was subbed because, although he took a knock too, he still looked full of running. But, Ralph knew what he was doing as Long and Austin came on and conjured up the winner. Every player just looked so much better than they've looked all season. Ings was good when he first arrived but today he looked even better than Arsenal's £60 million striker, Aubameyang.

Simply brilliant: our best performance for years. What a miracle Hasenhüttl has worked already! St Mary's hasn't felt that good since May 2016, and the indications are Hasenhüttl could be even better than Koeman.

I can't see him lasting the season. He's never going to be a popular manager and, in spite of the good players they've got, they are beginning to look like they might just get dragged into the relegation battle.

Not forgetting Charlie George. Once you hear the words 'knee problems' associated with a player, it never ends well. On balance, though, perhaps it is better to have them here scoring goals for a few games than some waste of space, who never scores, playing every week. The alternative is to have a scouting and recruitment team and/or manager good enough to spot up and coming players from lower leagues both here and abroad, like Lambert and Mane.

Yes, he is the best goal scorer we've got, even if he is going to miss a lot of games through injury. The reason we got our only proven goal scorers, Austin and Ings, was because they were injury-prone. If they hadn't been, we couldn't have afforded them and other clubs would have wanted them so they wouldn't have come here anyway. It means in both cases though, as we are already discovering with Austin, that their careers are not going to last as long as those of less injury-prone players

The problem is the few good players left have to work with the dross around them. They still try but football is a team game. Unfortunately our fans tend to turn against the wrong players, the best ones, and accuse them of sulking and not trying. This negativity got further fuelled by PR 'leaks' from the club about the players they wanted to sell. It happened to Mane, Wanyama, van Dijk, Fonte and Tadic and now it's happening to Bertrand.

The club's intention was always to cash in on van Dijk, the same as all of our saleable commodities, and he knew it. The only reason the sale was delayed was because Gao wouldn't pay Kat the money for the club if she sold any more players before he took over. Meanwhile the fans were fed the usual Les Reed PR spin on it all, about how we were standing up to Liverpool and didn't want to sell him and many seemed to fall for it.

We have won 1 game out of 16. We have only won 1 home game in the last year. We have 22 games left. So, on current form, you'd expect 1 or 2 more wins. A big improvement might give us 4 or 5. It would be a massive turnaround if we managed to win 8. Under Puel, when we finished 8th, we won 7 of or last 22 games. We all believe we have the right manager for the task but the question is do we have the right players? Winning the first of those games on Sunday would show that we do.

Well, at least he's improving. He didn't score any last season. If he keeps improving at this rate, he could eventually become as prolific a goal scorer as Shane Long.

Well, that's good. The players and referee would notice you shouting and singing a lot more if you were in the middle of the Northam end, where there is currently just an empty block used for fan segregation, and the away fans would be heard less if they and the empty block were shifted over to the Itchen/Northam corner. The acoustics in the corners are the worst in the ground as the sound get directed inwards, not outwards, and is muffled.

The problem is that the home fans in the Northam/Kingsland corner won't move because they think that by being there they are having 'bantz' with the away fans in the Northam, even though there is an empty block and sometimes even two next to them and 90% of the away fans don't even notice they are there. As you say, they'd get noticed a lot more if they were in the designated home end, the Chapel, and the away fans could actually see them and hear them but because of inertia they won't move there. That is why the players have taken the initiative and asked if the away fans could be moved as they would like our most home vocal fans to be behind the goal in the Northam, where they and the referee could see them and hear them more. Anyway, it would support the players' initiative if we had a poll on here which showed that the majority of our fans are in agreement with them. So, based on the club's remit, a simple poll with 2 choices, move the away fans into a corner or leave them where they are, would be the best way to canvas opinion and very helpful for our club. Is it at all possible for anyone on here to organise that? At this stage, we really don’t need to worry about the minutiae of moving a partition in the concourse, how many yards away fans have to walk to their coaches or who sits in particular corporate boxes. The club will obviously deal with that later and anyway, in terms of obstacles to progress, they don’t seem to be particularly insuperable ones.

They'd have even easier access to Britannia Road if they were shifted a couple of blocks across. The only argument given against that has been having to move a concourse partition and having away fans below a few corporate boxes at the end of the Itchen North. That should in fact be seen as an opportunity. How many of the corporate boxes are sold out over the season? Let the few that would be above away fans be reserved for neutrals and visiting fans and perhaps we would sell out a few more and improve crowd control as about the only disorder we've had inside St Mary's in recent years has been caused by away fans and home fans sharing the same corporate boxes. Football fans have known for decades that you get the best atmosphere by having a large number of noisy home fans directly behind one of the goals. You only have to look at any top 10 best atmospheres at football grounds lists, both in this country and abroad, and they nearly all have that in common.

And that is the easiest and cheapest solution and would enable us to have home fans, rather than an empty block or away fans, behind the goal at the Northam end for all of our games.

Also, as large numbers of both home and away fans arrive and leave via the footbridge, where there is usually little or no police presence, there is already as much if not more mingling of fans than you would get around the megastore. Plenty of clubs around the country have moved the location of their away section in recent years including some like Leeds with far more troublesome fans than ours. In fact, the current setup at St Mary's is more likely to cause flashpoints between the most volatile fans of both teams than just about any alternative, although crowds are so peaceful nowadays that the police probably get more criminal activity from Saturday afternoon shoppers. The point made earlier that our singers being split into two groups in the corners of the Northam, who can't hear each other and usually sing different songs, means they are easily outsung by a large, united bank of away fans, is a valid one. I also return to the fact that the players themselves are unhappy with the current setup and want a proper home end supporting them. This isn't just because it lifts the team but also because it has an influence on refereeing decisions. Any 50/50 decision at the Northam end tends to go the way of the away team because of the loud howls of protest from their fans, whereas at the Chapel end our fans rarely do more than murmur. Any minor obstacles to moving the away fans, like a dividing wall in a concourse, are not going to cost a fortune to remove so let's back the club's initiative on this.