Nordic Saint

Yes, even with the strong squad he's got at Leicester, Puel doesn't seem to be doing particularly well. It's hard to see him lasting another season there. Without the points won by Charlie Austin's goals in the early part of last season, we'd have finished 17th.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt91x0L70BQ

Austin was our top goal scorer last season and he is again this season. Without his crucial goals v West Ham, Everton, Bournemouth, Arsenal and Huddersfield this season, we'd already be down and without his goals last season, we'd have finished 17th. It's not only his goals that we miss: he lifts the performance of the whole team when he plays as they can actually see some point in attacking. Admittedly, he is physically falling apart, which is why we got him so cheaply. He's still been a bargain though and the only striker we've had over the last 2 seasons who can score goals. You're right about Long though but perhaps as others have said he might be better played as a winger as with his poor finishing he is just wasting space when played as a lone central striker.

There is a lot of lethergy and inertia in the senior management of the club, as we have seen in the last couple of transfer windows. We have an old man at the top, who should have retired last year and another who is not really interested in football. If you really believe "Reed has lined up a top promising manager for next season", I think you are going to be very disappointed. Every appointment he makes is worse than the previous one and I expect that trend to continue until Reed is forced to retire.

He has had an impact. He scored their equalizer yesterday. That's 10 goals and 10 assists for him so far this season.

That's true if you are looking to buy younger players to sell for a profit to Liverpool but if you were lookiing to make Lawrie McMenemy style signings who could bring immediate results to your team but who might not be young enough to be sold to Liverpool after one or two seasons then it's not. We could have bought plenty of goalscoring strikers for that money or less, like Kevin Gameiro, Carlos Bacca or even Albert Adomah (a Mane style winger who scores goals). Glenn Murray cost Brighton just 3 million and he already has 12 goals this season (admittedly he is too old to sell to Liverpool). Investment in goal scorers like Gameiro and Adomah in January rather than Carrillo would have seen us climbing up the table immediately, even if we couldn't have sold them to Liverpool later.

Whatever style of football we played, at Premier League level he'd still have been a pointless signing. Meanwhile if we'd had Harry Kane this season, we'd have got a lot more points. It's easy to wrap up all of your problems and bundle them all on to a single scapegoat, in this case Pellegrino, but it's totally misguided to do so. Pellegrino may be one of the problems but he's not the only one. Our lack of a goal scorer, now that Austin is almost permanently injured, is a far bigger problem. If we'd had Harry Kane instead of Long followed by Carrillo, we'd probably be 7th now, even with your scapegoat as manager.

Yes, they all must be absolutely salivating at the prospect of getting an attacking midfielder, who is slow, can't tackle and who has scored a grand total of 12 goals in 189 games, 4 of which have been against West Brom. Who would want a player like that? West Brom?

And, as I said, in JWP's case, it would be a big relief for him and his family, if he could play for another club. But, he will struggle to find another Premier League club prepared to take him. I guess his dream would be to follow in Oxlade-Chamberlain's footsteps.

I think JWP 'gets it'. When the players were on the platform at Southampton station, waiting to set off for an Arsenal game last season, he was chanting 'Play Up Pompey!" to annoy the Saints fans. His family are all Pompey season ticket holders and he is a big Pompey fan himself so I sometimes wonder how keen he is to score crucial goals for Saints. Of course, he is a professional athlete so he has to consider his own career but I think he'd be slightly more motivated if he was playing for another team.

The vast majority of players in our first team squad are not even regular starters for their national teams. I don't think you'd find a single Leicester fan who'd swap their squad for ours and I doubt even Watford or Swansea fans would either. As I said before, just the fact Les Reed spent a lot of money on players doesn't mean they are any good: Southampton 25 Squad players Alves Soares, Cedric Ricardo Austin, Charlie* Bertrand, Ryan* Boufal, Sofiane Carrillo, Guido Marcelo Davis, Steven* Forster, Fraser Gerard* Gabbiadini, Manolo Gardos, Florin Hoedt, Wesley Hojbjerg, Pierre Emile Kordt Lemina, Mario Rene Junior Long, Shane Patrick* McCarthy, Alex Simon* McQueen, Samuel James* Pied, Jeremy Redmond, Nathan Daniel Jerome* Rose, Jack Joseph* Stephens, Jack* Tadic, Dusan Taylor, Stuart James* Vidal, Oriol Romeu Ward-Prowse, James Michael Edward* Yoshida, Maya Leicester City 25 Squad players Albrighton, Marc Kevin* Amartey, Daniel Benalouane, Yohan Diabate, Fousseni Dragovic, Aleksandar Fuchs, Christian Hamer, Benjamin John* Huth, Robert* Iborra, Vicente Jakupovic, Eldin James, Matthew Lee* Maguire, Harry* Mahrez, Riyad Morgan, Westley Nathan* Okazaki, Shinji Schmeichel, Kasper Peter* Silva, Adrien Sebastien Perruchet Simpson, Daniel Peter* Vardy, Jamie* Swansea City 25 Squad players Ayew, Andre Morgan Rami Ayew, Jordan Baker-Richardson, Courtney Bartley, Kyle* Bony, Wilfried Guemiand Britton, Leon James* Carroll, Thomas James* Clucas, Samuel Raymond* Dyer, Nathan Antone Jonah* Fabianski, Lukasz Fer, Leroy Fernandez, Federico Ki, Sung Yueng King, Andrew* Mawson, Alfie Robert John* Mulder, Erwin Narsingh, Luciano Naughton, Kyle* Nordfeldt, Bo Kristoffer Olsson, Martin Tony Waikwa* Roberts, Connor Richard Jones* Routledge, Wayne Neville Anthony* Van Der Hoorn, Mike Adrianus Wilhelmus Zabret, Gregor* Zaragoza, Angel Rangel Watford 25 Squad players Bachmann, Daniel* Britos Cabrera, Miguel Angel Capoue, Etienne Carrillo Diaz, Andre Martin Cathcart, Craig George* Chalobah, Nathaniel Nyakie* Cholevas, Chose Loint Cleverley, Thomas William* Deeney, Troy Matthew* Deulofeu Lazaro, Gerard Doucoure, Abdoulaye Femenia Far, Francisco Gomes, Heurelho Da Silva Gray, Andre Anthony* Hughes, William James* Janmaat, Daryl Kabasele, Christian Kaboul, Younes Karnezis, Orestis-Spyridon Mariappa, Adrian Joseph* Ndong, Didier Ibrahim Okaka, Stefano Chuka Pereyra, Roberto Maximiliano Prodl, Sebastian Zeegelaar, Marvin Romeo Kwasie

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.