Nordic Saint

I second that. Sub-zero temperatures, a blanket of snow on the pitch, ice on the terraces and a blizzard blowing. Even in those days, it seemed incredible that the match went ahead and wasn't abandoned after it started. After the 1970s, a match certainly wouldn't have gone ahead in those conditions. For those of us who made the trip it was worth it though. An unlikely scoreless draw away to the Arsenal team that did the double that season was some achievement and still remains one of my most memorable away games. It was probably the most one-sided draw ever. Arsenal seemed to have about 30 shots at our goal, hit the wooodwork, had a goal disallowed and Eric Martin played the game of his life, while I can hardly recall Saints crossing the halfway line: it was real backs-to-the wall stuff. The fighting spirit and true grit we had in those days made the 1970/71 team one of my all-time favourite Saints teams. That was the team Bill Shankley labelled 'Alehouse'. Everybody hated playing against us, especially Arsenal that day.

One Saints fan was especially good at beating them back down with the big wooden poles in his banner. In those days, teams were allocated the upper tiers at each end while the lower tiers were for neutrals. Those neutrals usually supported the team that had that end but in 1976 about a million Man United fans wanted to be at Wembley so just about every neutral ticket in the stadium found its way into their hands, while we just had our allocation, which I think was about 26,000 in the upper tier and at the side. For that reason, I preferred the atmosphere at the semi-final at Stamford Bridge, where Saints fans had all of the Shed end, and, of course, the '79 League Cup Final, when we had the whole of one end as well as part of the lower tier of the Forest end.

The biggest name and arguably the best player Hampshire have signed since Shane Warne. I was at The Oval when he scored his recordbreaking 311 not out v England. I look forward to seeing him help Hampshire win the County Championship.

The 1976 Charity Shield game at Wembley is probably the drunkest I've seen Saints fans en masse. There were about 40,000 of us there, many with bottles and cans inside the ground, which got lobbed at the Liverpool players as they left the pitch. Whereas a few months earlier Wembley had been taken over by marauding United fans, at the Charity Shield it was Saints' fans who caused most of the trouble. The 1979 League Cup Final probably had the best atmosphere of the lot though, as the majority of the crowd, including part of the Forest end, were Saints fans. The club managed to get extra allocations of tickets because a lot of the neutral sections hadn't been sold.

How can any player respect Pardew??? I know Pelelgrino is hated by many on here but I'm sure our players have a lot more respect fror him than West Brom players have for Pardew. The influence of managers is overrated. A lot of the 'old school' managers like Redknapp, Pardew and Allardyce, mainly had influence through who they bought in the transfer market, and then just told the players to get on with it out on the pitch. Redknapp spent most training sessions standing on the sideline talking into his phone and occasionally yelling expletives at the players but still managed to be the most successful manager of the modern era for Portsmouth and took them to two cup finals just through his activity in the transfer market. I doubt Pardew and Allardyce do much more and, to be fair, we are grateful to Pardew for buying Lambert and Fonte. Even a 'modern' manager like Klopp, is mainly successful because he has bought players of the calibre of Salah, Mane and van Dijk.

Do you mean the 2012/13 squad, with Boruc, Clyne, Shaw, Fonte, Schneiderlin, Cork, Lallana, Rodriguez, Lambert, Sharp etc or the 2013/14 squad with Lovren and Wanyama added to it? I'd take either of them (at the ages the players were then) over our current squad. The one glaring weakness in 2012 was Hooiveld but on current form Hoedt looks just as dodgy.

The Reedites seem to think the fact that Reed spent a lot of money on players, like Hoedt, Clasie, Redmond, Boufal, Gabbiadini, Tadic, Long, Hojbjerg and Carrillo, many with exotic sounding names, automatically means they must be better than cheaper players at rival clubs in the bottom 6, when the truth is most of that money has been wasted, resulting in an overall downgrade of our squad from a top 6 one 2 years ago to a bottom 6 one now. Lemina is about the only player we've bought in the last 2 years who looks worth what Les paid for him. Right now, Glenn Murray, who cost Brighton 3 million, is scoring more goals than Long, Redmond, Carrillo and Gabbiadini, who cost Saints 60 million, combined. I'd also argue that just about every team in the bottom half of the table has better central defensive options than ours, even if they cost much less than the 30 million we paid for Hoedt, Bednarek and Gardos. I understand that the club's main priority is selling players for profit but when that profit is then wasted on buying inferior players, the law of diminishing returns is going to result in us ending up penniless at the bottom. We're near the bottom now because Reed has sold our best players, frittered away the money, and left our squad weakest in the key positions, the ones which win or lose you points, strikers and central defenders whereas, when we had Lambert, Pelle, Mane, Fonte, Alderweireld, van Dijk etc, they used to be our strengths. The best move the club could have made this January would have been to sack Reed and bring back the man who found us better players, our former head of recruitment, Paul 'black box' Mitchell, so we could build a strong squad again.

I went by train so I didn't see any of that stuff in the coach park. But, yes, in the 70s, United and Chelsea had massive hooligan armies, which attracted followers from all over the country, including the Millwall Reds, who followed both Millwall and United, wherever there was the most trouble.

The first thing is we were heavily outnumbered. Un those days, the two teams were alloacated the upper tiers qt both ends while the lower tiers were for neutrals. Traditionally those neutral allocations usually found their way into the hands of fans of the the team in the upper tier at the same end. In 76 they didn't. There were avout 70,000 Man United fans at Wembley that day. I remember Saints fans at the front of the ipper tier battering United fans in the lower tier with wooden posts, which were allowed in to hold banners made out of bed sheets. Around Wembley there were a few skirmishes but nothing serious. There was hooliganism in the mid-60s. I remember a few hundred of us taking the central section of Fratton End in 1966 and Pompey fans who'd been shoved up into the corner of their end, throwing bottles at us.

Our central defenders are slow to react. Hoedt especially is often caught napping. How we miss all those last ditch clearances Fonte used to make, the assured defensive partnerships he had with Lovren, Alderweireld and van Dijk and the way our central defenders used to dominate in the air, as they had to because Forster never came off his line for crosses and corners. Stephens is a very promising footballer but he is not a Premier League central defender yet and I'm not sure that Hoedt will ever have the speed of thought and foot to be one. Of course, we also miss the protection that Wanyama used to offer in front of the back four. As with our lack of goals, these defensive problems are symptomatic of the way the squad has been downgraded over the last two years yet there are still those on here who go on about what a strong squad we have. We don't, and it is especially weak in the most important positions of strikers and central defenders.

Winning the FA Cup and finishing mid-table - how do we prepare as fans? Some on here will be disappointed, others upset and angry. It's going to be very hard for many to accept. The bitter disappointment of not losing away to the 7th team in the Premier League is perhaps a foretaste of things to come.

I predict Carrillo will score 4 goals a season at this level. He is what he is. I also predict that when he scores his first goal, the Reedites on here will hail him as a cross between Ronaldo and Messi. He is never going to be a prolific goal scorer, no matter how many other forwards he has supporting him. If he scores the goal that keeps us up, I will be happy. If he emulates Bobby Stokes and scores the winning goal in the cup final then he'll have been a brilliant signing even if he never scores again.

27 caps for Portugal and a European Championship winner's medal make him one of the most successful players on the international stage in the club's history. He came back, after many years' loyal service to the club, expecting a hero's welcome, and perhaps a final pay increase, only to find the Club completely ignoring him and that Les had already decided to cash in on him. He was not desperate to leave. But, the club was keen to cash in on the last chance to get a transfer fee for a player in his 30s, the same as they did for Lambert. Perhaps in the hardheaded world of football business, they were right to do so as he was coming towards the end of his career but he was not sold because of his "knpbheadedness". The "Billy big boll_ks" quote, which was bandied about sounded like it came staright out of Les Reed's mouth, and Les knows some of our fans fall for those PR 'leaks' about players about to be sold, hook, line and sinker, every time.

More importantly, I wish our owners and directors weren't just about chasing money for themselves. The owners and directors at most of our rivals are more interested in their football team doing well.

And didn't the BBC commentator keep on about it. He mentioned Southampton so many times, it made me think he must be from here too. When he said, "The whole of Southampton must be watching" I thought, probably not at this time. I doubt many people had even heard of Billy Morgan before today. But, it was a remarkable achievement in an event which requires incredible bravery, for a man who learned on the dry slope in Southampton.

Thanks for that link. The first picture that came up was a rug identical to one I bought in Esfahan for £100 many years ago. It's now valued in England at £3,700, and it's not even my best Persian rug. I'm not really a business-oriented person but if you want to make money, it's clealry worth going to Iran and buying rugs.

Carlos Bacca would have been great. But, of the strikers we were linked with this January window, this is the one I was hoping we'd sign: http://readsouthampton.com/2018/01/16/southampton-reportedly-asked-kevin-gameiro/

Another one I'd like to have squeezed in was Rob Renesenbrink. When he played for Anderlecht against us in 1977, he showed the most sublime ball skills and technical mastery that I'd ever seen at the Dell. Up until then, I'd thought Channon was the master of dribbling but Rensenbrink was at another level. He was, however, just a forerunner of things to come because, since the 70s, football skills have advanced a lot. If you could send players like Cristiano Ronaldo, Messi and Aguero back in time, they'd have been viewed as superior to even Best and Pele. But, it's not fair to compare different eras.

How many of those players you see live? It's more fun, more challenging and more interesting if you can only pick a best XI from players you've been to games to see. I might have named Yashin, Pelé, Cruyff, Maradona and Messi but I have only seen them on TV. So, of the players I've seen live, mine would be: Goedon Banks Tarcisio Burgnich John Charles Bobby Moore Paolo Maldini Luis Figo Zinedine Zidane Bobby Charlton George Best Cristiano Ronaldo Mario Kempes Subs: P. Schmeichel, Dani Alves, Sammer, Džajić, De Bruyne, Cantona, Aguero

The main reason is lack of pace. He is nowhere near as fast as Austin. He also lacks the physical and mental toughness - that bit of aggression Austin has- which you need to intimidate Premier League defenders. His ball acontrol and passing ability are not awful, but nothing special. I hope that helps you, Duckhunter.

Romeu said MP "is not the main problem at the club." I wonder who is? Personally, I think it's Reed and if the 3 more years with the same board tweet is correct, it sounds like we're now going to be stuck with him until he's 69 years old at least, which will mean further decline.

He's the same now as he's been his whole career, except he's now playing in a much harder league. A leopard doesn't change its spots. He was never more than a mediocre striker in either the Argentine and French leagues, which is why he was not a regular first teamer, a prolific goal scorer or ever considered good enough for an international cap at any level. When we signed him, we all knew that. He'll do his best but he won't score many goals. He's never going to be a regular goal scorer like Austin, Pelle or Lambert. I predict he will average 4 goals per season at this level, and hopefully a couple of them before the end of this season. The glass half full fans will praise him every time he touches the ball and the glass half empty fans will criticise him for all the times he doesn't, a bit like Clasie when he was here. All those saying the manager's tactics are responsible for him not scoring goals, seem to forget that Charlie Austin had no problem scoring for the same manager with the same tactics in the same team.

Yes, he was out for a long time with a hip injury but he's played in a few Premier League and Champions League games recently including the full 90 minutes in their Champions League game this week.

Smales like teen spirit.

Yes, we'd have sold him as soon as we got an offer for him from another Premier League club, as we would have done if we'd had Vardy or any other goal scorer. The business is the board and owners' sole priority now, not the team. Players are simply viewed as commodities to be sold and the team is only used as a shop window to attract buyers for them. But, that short-term greed and consequent neglect of the team is going to cost the owners money in the long term, as you need a successful team to attract buyers and keep the Premier League money pouring in, not that Kat will be particulary bothered as she is already laughing all the way to the bank, having made quarter of a billion out of us, which is more than just about any owner in history has ever made out of a football club.