Nordic Saint

Our 'black box' was Paul Mitchell. Maybe if we could get rid of Old Les we could get him back.

I wonder how much his transfer value has dropped since the summer? It's certainly unlikely we'll get 70 million for him now. Maybe we have saved Liverpool 25 million. I don't blame anyone for this as it was probably a condition of the club's sale that Kat and Les couldn't sell him until Mr Gao had taken over. Otherwise they would have sold him in the summer as they'd originally planned.

So those of you who want to keep Old Les, how much longer should we keep him for? 70, 80 or until he dies? He's already past retirement age.

They have temporarily at least sated Kat's desire for cash by paying quarter of a billion euros into her Swiss bank account. That's a hell of a lot more than most of us have paid her with our season ticket money.

There is no more point in sacking Pellegrino than there was in sacking Puel if Old Les is still here to choose the next manager, control all transfers in and out and keep his favourites, Eric Black and Dave Watson in control of first team coaching, never mind the harm he is doing to the academy. Until Reed, Black & Watson are gone no new manager is going to be able to improve things.

And what exactly do you think Old Les will do? Whatever it is, it's unlikely to be any good for Saints unless he agrees to retire.

So, what is Old Les's plan then? To keep taking the club's money until he's 70 or 80 and just using his pension to pay to have his Bentley serviced? He seems to have got rid of all the people who really brought us success while trying to claim all of the credit for their work and wasting millions on bringing in increasingly mediocre, overpriced managers, coaches and players. When he made those other hangers on, Eric Black and Dave Watson, his favourites, it was already obvious he was doing bloody awful job. If we want to stay up, we need to replace all 3 of them now. The alternative to Old Les is to bring back the man who was largely responsible for our success, Paul 'the Black Box' Mitchell.

I'll grant you one thing: at times it can seem as though we have more arrogant cyber fans who think they are entitled to insult the normal fans who actually go to games regularly than most other clubs. But I expect every club has a similar little group of misanthropes and sociopaths.

I'm not just talking about the transfer fees. Leicestershire owner has kept players like Mahrez and Vardy whereas under similar circumstances Kat and Les would have cashed in on them at the earliest available opportunity. Probably the only reason they didn't sell van Dijk in the summer as they'd planned was that Mr Gao wouldn't let them sell any more players when he was in the final stages of paying Kat 210 million. Mind you Les has wasted fortune on some pretty mediocre new players so it' s not just about the sums of money spent but also about spending it wisely, which Leicester have done on Maguire, for example.

Hopefully, he won't still be here to get anything more wrong or waste any more of the club's money. We want our 'black box', Paul Mitchell back before we choose any more managers or players.

I think you'll find the entitled one who sacked Puel and weakened our squad whilst waiting millions was Les Reed, not any fans.

Pity Old Les sacked him. But, to be fair, Leicester have got a much stronger squad than ours. You can't really compare the likes of Shane Long, Steven Davis, James Ward-Prowse and Fraser Forster to Jamie Vardy, Riyad Mahrez, Demarai Gray and Kaspar Schmeichel. We simply haven't got a rich owner prepared to pay for players of that calibre.

If it's Old Les, I wonder how many other clubs he's asked for a job, without any success? As for the 'there's one very good one' bit, don't all of the other clubs above us, like Man City, Liverpool, Spurs, Burnley, Watford and Leicester, have directors of football? If they do, even though they are more successful. I wouldn't know as none of them do as much self-publicising as Old Les

Looks like it's going to be a perfect storm tomorrow: gale force winds, torrential rain and sleet, trains cancelled, road traffic affected by the terrble conditions... A lot of Arsenal fans with tickets are not going to be able to make it. All this should work in our favour and help us get a good result, although a lot may depend on winning the toss as playing into the 45mph winds in the first half, which are expcted to moderate significantly after 1pm, is going to be a hell of a disadvantage for one of the teams.

There were quite a few, like Terry Paine, born in places like Winchester, Basingstoke and Petersfield. This is a list of players who won England international caps in their time as Saints and Pompey players. If you look them all up on Wikipedia, you can find out which ones were born in Hampshire. Of course, there were also many England internationals born in Hampshire who won their caps as players of other clubs. CB Fry is debatable as some say he was a Corinthians player at the time. Southampton David Armstrong James Beattie Ryan Bertrand Wayne Bridge Arthur Chadwick Mick Channon Nathaniel Clyne Peter Crouch Bill Ellerington Tim Fowers Fraser Forster C B Fry Kelly Houlker Kevin Keegan Adam Lallana Rickie Lambert Bert Lee Matt Le Tissier George Molyneux Terry Paine Tom Parker Alf Ramsey Bill Rawlings Nathan Redmond Jack Robinson Jay Rodriguez Luke Shaw Alan Shearer Peter Shilton Fred Titmuss Arthur Turner Danny Wallace James Ward-Prowse Dave Watson Steve Williams Mark Wright 36 Portsmouth Jim Allen Sol Campbell Peter Crouch Dan Cunliffe Jermain Defoe Jimmy Dickinson Jack Froggatt Peter Harris Mark Hateley Kelly Houlker David James Glen Johnson Arthur Knight Len Phillips Jack Smith Fred Worrall 16

Peter Sillett, Bill Ellerington, Bert Lee.... and probably a few more from the 1890s and 1900s

Martin Chivers

Is 'the headmaster' nudge, nudge, wink, wink, you know what I mean, Old Les? His insistence on his 'teachers' playing Academy products in the team, regardless of whether they were the best options was a major cause of the dispute betweeen Old Les and Koeman.

All strikers who score regularly at Premier League level have to be very fast over 5 to 10m or they wouldn't ever beat defenders to the ball. It's certainly not beyond the ralms of possibility that Austin is faster than Long over a short distance like that, even if he's not so fast over longer distances. He also accelerates when approaching the goal whereas Long tends to decelerate once he's reached the penalty area and starts looking around.

Yes, 50,000 was the planned capacity. There was a photo on the front page of the Echo, so there should be a copy in their archives. The major stumbling block was that John Deacon, the chairman of Portsmouth FC, who'd been turned down for a place on the Southampton FC board, was the head of Southampton City Council at the time and saw to it that planning permission was denied.

I think Charlie Austin would get into my list of 20 all-time greatest Saints strikers, based on their whole careers, not just with Saints. In no particular order (just as they came to mind): Alan Shearer Kevin Keegan Mick Channon Ron Davies Matt Le Tissier Martin Chivers Rickie Lambert Ted Drake Peter Osgood Marians Pahars James Beattie Graziano Pelle Ted MacDougall Charlie Austin Steve Moran Rod Wallace Phil Boyer Sadio Mané Gareth Bale Terry Paine

I was there too. We had great away support in those days, often bigger than the home team's as it was at Fulham that day. We took 13,000 to Forest the season before.

"More than 34,000". For a club which has always had smaller average gates than ours, that shows ambition.

Give van Dijk a break. IMHO, he played much better than Hoedt today. A lot of this cr@p about players giving less than 100% is simply in the imagination of fans who are prejudiced against certain players. I remember hearing the same bullsh!t about Mane and Wanyama. As long as he's with us, he desrves our full support and I'm sure he's giving his full effort to every game. You should see how happy he is when we score a goal.

I really like Charlie Austin. He's not only a great goal scorer, fixated on scoring goals and winning games but he's also a hard man who roughs up and unsettles opposition defenders: the exact opposite, if you will, of James Ward-Prowse.