Nordic Saint

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....

Well, it is the case, and the club isn't paying it back. Football club owners, like race horse owners, do it for fun and always have done. They don't do it to make money. "Though Bloom has ploughed more than £200million into Brighton his wealth is unknown. Some estimate it at a billion pounds, based on his expenditure at the club." http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-4783574/Brighton-s-Tony-Bloom-gambling-Premier-League-survival.html

Owners usually put money into football clubs. Thy don't take it back out again. Tony Bloom, Brighton's owner has spent about £150m of his own money on buying Brighton a new stadium and players. It would be almost unheard of for him to take a penny back out again. Kat is special.

We were heavily linked with Trippier as one of our main transfer targets just before Paul Mitchell went to Spurs and then Trippier followed Alderweireld and Wanyama there.

You say 'he' but surely it's 'she' Kat Liebherr the club is paying the 210 million to, albeit, via Lander. In fact, she already has the money. The club just has to pay it plus interest back to the bank from whence it came.

From today's Echo: "The accounts state that Lander Sports (UK) International Co Ltd acquired the entire share capital of St Mary’s Football Group Limited – essentially the club. However, there is a Hong Kong based Lander company above that, of which Katharina Liebherr has become a minority stakeholder, which explains how she remains involved." http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/sport/saints/news/16100297.IN_DEPTH__A_detailed_look_at_the_Saints_accounts/

It will be increased because it doesn't take into account the van Dijk money either. But, a lot of money we get from selling our best players does seem to get frittered away on players like Bednarek, Hoedt and Carrrillo. Whilst the priority of the board and owners is clearly to make money, the performance of the team continues to decline and in the long term that will turn those profits into losses as we'll be relegated and left with a lot of expensive players on high wages who aren't really good enough for the Premier League and who nobody else wants.

The main reason the team has been toothless is that we have't had a goal scorer up front. When Austin replaces Carrillo, we'll have one.

FT Blackburn 1 Saints 0

At €8.8 million he wasn't much of a punt for a club as rich as Monaco. Like Chelsea, they can afford to buy loads of young players in the hope that one will come good. The season they bought him, they also bought Fares Bahlouli, Thomas Lemar, Corentin Jean, Gil Dias, Allan Saint-Maximin, Gabriel Boschilia, Jemerson, Rony Lopes, Ivan Cavaleiro and Adama Traore, most of whom are now worth less than they paid for them.

Whilst I agree that the performances of our U23 team over the last couple of seasons have been appallling, it's too soon to write them all off. Will Smallbone, Alfie Jones and a couple of others show the potential to one day be first team players. We'll see.

We certainly do not want a repeat of Strachan's two games against Arsenal at the end of the 2002/03 season, when he played a weakened team in the first one, so we got thrashed, and were then demoralised for the second one. We should field our strongest team for both games..

Should we wait at least 100 games before saying anything about him? Pretend he's not there? It got a bit like that with Clasie. We needed a goal scorer last summer and we were crying out for one at the beginning of January. If Carrillo was the best that Ross Wilson and Les Reed could come up with, after all the research they supposedly put in, then they are incompetent and that is a big concern with an important summer transfer window coming up.

There is a much more significant difference than that. Cuco scored a goal for us.

#blackbox was at Tottenham when Liverpool signed Salah, and they already had Harry Kane. He's at RB Leipzig now so it will be interesting to see what players and managers they sign in future.