Nordic Saint

Jay Rodriguez has just scored his 10th goal this season to put West Brom ahead. I'm not saying he's great but he's a hell of a lot better than any striker we've got in our squad, with the possible exception of Austin on the rare occasions he can play, and at £12m, an absolute bargain compared to the £19m we paid for Guido Carrillo. It's another example of the shambles our transfer policy has been in the last couple of years, during which our club's board has both weakened the squad and squandered money. If we could have bought Rodriguez instead of Carrillo in January, we'd have had a better chance of staying up and yes I know West Brom are getting relegated but Rodriguez has been one of the few bright spots for them this season and might well have scored 15+ goals in a better team.

Les Reed has been like a cuckoo in the nest who has got rid of anybody at the club who was doing a good job: managers, coaches, scouts, players and staff alike, and brought in inferior replacements who were more acquiescent to him. And everybody he gets rid of has negative 'leaks' about him released to the media. In Dodd's case it was that he was "lazy" when thr truth was he was doing a great job. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/may/20/luke-shaw-gutted-southampton-sack-academy-coached

Les Reed = the Arthur Daley of the football world. Paul Mitchell found the players and Old Les flogged them. Now, that Ross Wilson is only finding him duds there is nothing left for him to sell, so Old Les is moving on. It's been rumoured that he has been contacting clubs, including West Ham, letting them know he was available for months. This is the first time he has managed to get himself on a shortlist. Let's hope they are stupid enough to take him. Good riddance.

Yes, they do. They include our first season back in the Premier League. Cortese did incredibly well to build the new Academy and buy the new players yet manage to keep our loss in our first year back in the Premier League down to just £7m. I doubt that any other newly promoted team has managed its finances as well.. As an investment banker, Cortese was very shrewd with money, and Markus Liebherr's initial incvestment of . As an investment banker, Cortese was very shrewd with money, and Markus Liebherr's initial incvestment of £12m to buy the club was turned into quarter of a billion pounds for Kat: a phenomenal return. Kat must be incredibly grateful to Cortese for helping her so much money. Swiss Ramble @SwissRamble #SaintsFC made a £7m loss in their first season after promotion to the Premier League in 2012/13, but since then they have delivered £91m of profits in the last four years. Between 2005/06 and 2011/12, they reported losses (smallish) in the Championship and League One.

Les Reed's name should be ringing round Anfield tonight after all he's done for them. To think, just 2 seasons ago, we finished above Liverpool but Les kept chipping away, selling them Mane and van Dijk, to help make them the team they are today. What other DOF would be generous enough to sell so many of his best players to one rival club? He'll be wearing a smug smile tonight, thinking to himself, 'Liverpool owe it all to me." His only regret must be that we've got nobody left good enough to sell them.

Unless fans make their feelings known, loudly and clearly, there is a real danger that Les Reed and Ross Wilson will be in charge of the next transfer window and that could spell more disaster. The Gaos should be here for at least one of the remaining games and they will see our other matches on TV. We need to let them know how we feel about the way the club is being run, at the end of every defeat, with a simple chant of.... #LesReedOut

1. Selling your main goal scorers and/or getting injuries to them 2. Hiring 2 or 3 cr@p managers in quick succession 1+2 = Relegation The seeds of our current demise were sown when we sold our top scorers, Mane and Pelle, and compounded by the increasingly long injury spells for Austin. The fact we had van Dijk and Fonte at the back, however, meant that we could scrape draws and an occasional 1-0 victory. Before we hired Sturrock, Wigley and Redknapp; now it's Puel, Pellegrino and Hughes.

That 2005 squad was much better than our current squad though: Niemi, Le Saux, Lundekvam, Svensson, Phillips, Crouch, Pahars and even Beattie until January, when we sold him to Everton, with just a fcouple of weak links in defence whereas our current squad is full of weak links in both defence and attack.

Many a true word spoke in jest. He was our best player this season and featured in our best run of form, from September to December, including the victories against West Brom and Everton and the draws with Newcastle, Bighton, Bournemoth and Arsenal. We have missed him badly. Had he stayed, we'd probably have stayed up.

Spot on. The money failed, has-been managers like Hughes and Pardew get for getting clubs relegated is ridiculous.

The problem is they both have a proven recent record of failure. Why clubs keep hiring managers like Hughes and Pardew, God only knows. They are clearly the worst managers in the league. There are plenty of better up and coming managers outside the Premier League, like Paul Cook, with a recent record of success, as well as many others in top leagues around Europe, like Ralph Hasenhüttl and Javier Calleja. Look at where Sean Dyche came from. Experience shows it is best to steer clear of managers whose careers are on a downward trajectory.

They signed Arnautović for £20 million, we signed Carrillo for £19 million. It puts our owners and directors in perspective, doesn't it, and shows just how badly our club is being run.

We've left it too late for this season. Reed should have been forced to retire on his 65th birthday last year. But, it's not too late to save our club from a further relegation next season. We need to let the Gaos know that we want Reed out before he can do any further damage. Sadly, we've left it too late to get back the man who was mainly responsible for our success, our former head of recruitment, Paul Mitchell, as he has was given a job by RB Leipzig in Janaury- so we'll have to watch them, rather than us, snapping up some of the best young talented players, managers and coaches in Europe and having the most successful spell in their history. #LesReedOut

What you'll get from managers like Hughes and Pardew is depressingly predictable.

The black box left the building with Paul Mitchell. After a spell at White Hart Lane, it now resides in Leipzig. Hoedt is to defenders as Carrillo is to strikers: about as big a waste of money as you could possibly find. The millions Les wastes on cr@p mangers pales in comparison to the tens of millions he wastes on cr@p players.

They'd obviously worked on that corner in training.

Official attendance figures at all clubs nowadays are simply the number of tickets sold for the game. Many season ticket holders choose not to attend some games, especially when a team is playing badly and losing regularly, which is why we are getting more non-attending season ticket holders this season. You also get a number of non-attenders due to unforeseen circumstances such as illness.

As usual, we'll sell the ones we can get the most money for. Think of who our best quality players are and then you'll know who we'll sell this summer.

Carrillo, Hoedt, Bednarek, Clasie, Gardos, Redmond and Long.

The question is was Alderweireld ever really a Southampton player? He was only here on loan for 28 games, as an Atletico Madrid player, before following Paul Mitchell to Spurs and even then if you look back at articles written at the time, pundits and stats ranked Fonte ahead of him. Fonte was the man who led our defence and our team for all of our best seasons after our PL return and he is deservedly a European champion. I don't understand why some Saints fans underestimate how good he was at his peak. So, I'd put Fonte and van Dijk at the heart of our defence. Apart from that, I agree with the OP. This is what Terry Paine said about Fonte when he was at his peak in 2015: http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/11744526.Paine__Jose_Fonte_is_the_best_defender_in_the_Premier_League/ And this is how high he was ranked then: http://soccer.nbcsports.com/2015/05/27/2014-15-premier-league-season-review-top-ten-defenders/

It's all about opinions but as a rule of thumb, the number of full international caps for ones of the world's top football nations is a useful guideline when selecting all-time XIs for a team which has spent most of its history in a top league. Dodd doesn't have any. Fonte has 28 caps for Portugal and a European Championship winner's medal, Lallana has 34 caps for England so far and will probably go on to win more than 50 and even Lambert has 11 England caps. I remember back in the 1960s when any Saints player who had ever played for England was considered to be one of our all-time great superstars. I'm really not sure why Dodd is there. Like Benali and Kelvin Davis, he played a lot of club games for us but he was never an international class player.

As I recall, it was a multiple choice type of poll, with only 3 choices for each position, not an open one. The defensive options especially excluded some better defenders than ones that were available to vote for. This would certainly not be most fans' ultimate Saints XI if they could pick any player they wanted to. Dodd, Bridge and Lundekvam would have struggled to even get into our team in recent years, with the exception of this one.

VAR is going to benefit clubs like ours. The big clubs have got more than their fair share of dodgy refereeing decisions, including Man United against us in the EFL Cup Final. I thought the refereeing performance for the England v Italy game was one of the best I've seen for a long time and that the ref reacted to what he was told through his earpiece in the correct way. Any referee reviewing that video would have awarded a penalty and if it had been for England, there wouldn't have been any criticism of the decision on here. "From the Telegraph, a fairly patriotic newspaper: "It was the right decision too, the German referee Deniz Aytekin going to the pitch-side monitor to review a run by substitute Federico Chiesa which was ended by the Burnley defender James Tarkowski accidentally stamping on his Italian opponent’s foot. Once the referee had seen it slowed down he could hardly do anything other than give the penalty."

I finally got round to watching Brooklyn and was really impressed by Saoirse Ronan. She's only 23 and already she's been in so many great films, like The Way Back and The Grand Budapest Hotel. I'm now looking forward to seeing her in Lady Bird and On Chesil Beach.

Buffalo Springfield Again again. Stephen Stills and Neil Young really were wonderfully creative. There are some great tracks on this album, including Expecting to Fly, Broken Arrow and this....