Nordic Saint

So far thi season, Murray has scored 10 and Abraham has scored 7 so, yes, they are better than our strikers, with the exception of Charlie Austin when he's fit. What is your point, by the way?

I misread it and thought that it was £5 to buy the whole football club. Terry Venables only paid £1 for it in 1997.

Lukasz Fabianski, Lewis Dunk, Xherdan Shaqiri, Glenn Murray, Tammy Abraham, Jordan Ayew, Jamaal Lascelles, Alfie Mawson, Ben Mee, Abdoulaye Doucouré, Aaron Mooy, Matt Ritchie, Pascal Groß, Wilfired Zaha etc. With the exception of Charlie Austin when he's fit, I don't think any rival club or even some Championship clubs would want to swap their central defensive and striking options for ours.

Any league is good when you are going well in it and bad when you are doing badly. At the end of the 2015/16 season, every Saints fan was very happy to be in the Premier League and looking forward to the next season. When we were struggling at the bottom of the Championship in 2009 we were miserable. We have spent 41 of the last 50 years in the top flight and it's where you'd expect a club with a fan base as big as ours - among the 12 biggest in the country - to be. There is nothing great about underachieving alongside smaller clubs in a lower league. Ask Sunderland and Hull fans about it. Wishing for it is just defeatism.

The owners of other clubs spend their own money plus the Premier League prize money on their teams. Brighton's owner, Tony Bloom, has spent around £150 million out of his own pocket. on top of the club's own income, on Brighton's new stadium and players. You'll find that's fairly typical of Premier League club owners. Football clubs have always been, like racehorses, a rich man's palyhting. Traditionally, wealthy local businessmen used to spend money on their local football club as a way of putting something back into their local community. Jack Walker at Blackburn was a classic example. Nowadays, international billionaires compete against each other to see who can build the most successful team but there are still local businessmen like Mike Garlick at Burnley. They wouldn't dream of trying to make even one penny out of their beloved football clubs. Meanwhile, we are reduced to only being able to spend part of the money we get from selling players on their replacements. Coventry is one of the few other clubs where the owners have seen the club entirely as an opportunity to make money. Kat not only pocketed the £210 million she got from Gao but the the club had to pay her back a loan plus interest before the sale took place. She must have made more money out of this club than just about any owner in the history of world football. We got lucky with Markus Liebherr when he bought our club for £12 million but unlucky with his daughter.

Kelvin Davis and Dave Watson as caretaker managers would be the cheapest option and would almost certainly see us relegated. i feel now, the same way as I did when nearly everyone was calling for Puel to be sacked: our current manager is not very good but I think it's highly likely that if he's sacked, the next one will be even worse, simply because I have no faith in Les and Ralph's judgement. I also think that whilst Puel was left without an effective attack after the sale of Mane and Pelle, poor Pellegrino has been left without an effective defence and attack after the sale of Fonte and van Dijk. Koeman had Wanyama, Pelle, Mane, Fonte and van Dijk! I wonder how well Koeman would fare with our current squad and how well Pellegrino would have fared if he'd had the strong squad that Koeman had. The man I hold almost entirely responsible for the club's decline over the last 2 years is Les Reed but now all of the Reedites on here seem to be trying to deflect 100% of the blame onto Pellegrino. In terms of points won, the decline form Koeman to Puel was greater than the one from Puel to Pellegrino but most of that can be explained by the sale of our best players and the poor replacements being brought in. The squad is so much weaker now than it was 2 years ago. Again I expect the Reedites on here to try to deny that.

They cut themselves hopelessly adrift the moment they appointed Pardew. He was certain to take them down.

There is no point sacking him unless Les Reed is sacked first because you know he will find an even worse one. It will simply be a case of out of the frying pan into the fire again. We thought it would be great to get rid of Eric Black, who was a terrible first team coach, but then Reed found an even worse one in Kelvin Davis, one of the worst goalkeepers in Premier League history, with no previous coaching experience. The poll we need again is the Les Reed Out one.

It would be great if the meeting in China was to discuss Les Reed's replacement. Unfortunatley, the ideal replacement, Paul Mitchell has already been taken by Leipzig. I doubt that he or any other former Saints' employee would come back here while Les Reed is still here anyway.

Reed should have retired last year but who is going to sack him now? As long as there are still a few playing assets left to be sold off and the money keeps flowing into Kat's handbag, I guess he can keep on taking his cut. But, one day the Gaos are going to ask why Reed is wasting so much of their money on players like Carrillo and Hoedt.

Kat: "Look at Lemina and Bertrand, Mr Gao. See, I told you there were still players left to sell."

No, they've got the worst manager of any of the bottom teams. Pardew will see them relegated.

He has scored a goal every 2 games for most of his career, including his spell with Saints. http://www.skysports.com/football/news/11683/11244027/watch-sheffield-uniteds-billy-sharp-hits-200-in-style

It is not good to use the 'we can't hope to compete with the top six' excuse for a club's lack of ambition. For a start, the top six is different every year. We were in it a couple of years ago and Leicester were top of it while clubs currently in the top six, like Chelsea, have struggled in the recent past. The Premier League is probably the most competitive top flight league in Europe. Four different clubs have won it in the last 5 years. Most other top leagues are dominated by just 1 or 2 clubs and in the 1980s the old First Division used to be much worse, with Liverpool dominating it virtually unchallenged. Krueger's 'small club' mentality is not acceptable. Our average home gate this cenntury is among the 12 biggest in the country and social media figures indicate our fanbase is one of the ten biggest. What we always have been for a club of our size, however, is an underachieving club. Historically, despite the fact our gates have been limited by small stadium capacities, our all-time average home gate is bigger than Nottingham Forest's, for example, and much bigger than Pompey's, yet look how many trophies we have won in comparision. It's about time we had some really significant overachievment for a change and just finishing in the top 8 is really not very significant for a club as big as ours. Most other clubs with gates as big as ours have won 4 or 5 major trophies at least. Nottingham Forest, a club with fewer fans than Saints, have won 9 major trophies.

Rickie Lambert interview: http://www.liverpoolfc.com/news/first-team/290357-rickie-lambert-lfc-southampton-adam-lallana

Much as I agree with you, I think you'd have to shut up most of the traps on here to achieve that, as nearly every player we sell gets slagged off nowadays, and the Club does seem to encourage it.

I assume Bednarek will folllow him out after an appropriate interval. In spite of some of the big profits we get, selling players to Liverpool, we do seem to fritter away a lot of it on fringe squad players who never look likely to make the grade.

Fair enough. It's probably as simple as that. Old Les just doesn't seem very good at negotiating with footballers and managers. I guess, as our head of recruitment, Paul Mitchell used to handle most of that before. Pity Lepzig got him. Seems to be a good fit for both of them. Leipzig are a very ambitious club, currently 3rd in the Bundesligs and looking to build their squad for the Champions League, and they have now got one of the most talented chief scouts in the business.

In retrospect, it seemed a pretty half-hearted attempt to buy him. Being linked with big name players in the transfer window, even if you don't actually buy them, always goes down well with the fans. There were certainly a lot of PR updates/'leaks' from the club about it to keep the fans excited, right up to the end. You just have to look at the number of posts about it on here to see how well it worked. Certainly since Paul Mitchell left and even before, our club seems to do its transfer business incredibly publicly. We get told about every player we are interested in and we also get told all of the negative things the players and managers who ae going to be sold are supposedly doing, in the weeks leading up to their sale. A lot of it does seem to be PR bullsh!t to appease the fans.

I'd like to see Sam McQueen playing as an attacking midfielder for the 1st team, as he is a goal scorer, and that is exactly what we need.

Bring back Pellè!

You must have been incredibly close to him to witness all that. What people forget are the circumstances which led up to Lallana's sale. At the very beginning of the summer transfer window, before the World Cup finals, Les Reed announced very publicly that Rickie Lambert had been rewarded for his 5 years service to the club with a 'dream move' to Liverpool. So, Lallana thought, after 8 years service to this club, that sounds great, I'll get a 'dream move' too. But, he found out that was not the exact moment when Reed planned to sell him to Liverpool. And, yes, then Lallana got stroppy and Reed made sure that the fans got to hear about it. It was all very unsavoury but unfortunately that is the way our club does its business nowadays, washing its dirty linen as publicly as possible. You could argue that they 'both threw a strop", which seems to happen far too often when Reed is involved in negotiations with our players and managers, and that if Les Reed had been wanted by Liverpool he'd have been off like a flash and wouldn't have let anyone stop him.

They were good for us and I believe that a few of them who would have happily stayed a year or two longer, like Wanyama, Mane, Fonte and Koeman, were sold far too soon, because that was what Les Reed and Kat Liebherr wanted to do. Of course, they nearly all get tainted by the negative PR 'leaks' to the media and internet, which many fans choose to believe. I'm not saying that most players aren't happy to go along with being sold to a big club but the club has been very happy to cash in on them too. There was a 'leak' from West Ham not long ago that a certain DOF had been letting other clubs know he was available but it seems none of them wanted him. That 'leak' probably has as much validity as the 'leaks' about our players and managers.

I think the key word there is 'perceived'. I doubt that they left in any way differently to how players and managers have always left the club, including fans' heroes like Mick Channon, Kevin Keegan, Alan Shearer and Lawrie McMenemy. The diffference now, is that what should be private discussions between the players & managers and the DOF are 'leaked' to manipulate fans perceptions of the club's transfer deals. We really would have no other way of knowing who said or did what if these PR 'leaks' about what happened behind closed doors didn't occur and it would be better for the long-term image of the club if they didn't. Before the board were mostly 'gentlemen' who would have considered such underhand tactics beneath them, even if they were unhappy that a player or manager wanted to leave. In most cases our DOF and the owners are happy to sell players and managers to the highest bidder when it suits them but would prefer it if the fans didn't think of it that way.

Assuming Austin will play in most of them, we should get 15 points from those 12 games; without him maybe 10.