qwertyell

Where have they gone now he's available for peanuts?

I think this is a bit of a myth. QPR fans liked him enough to vote him young player of the season, but I'm not sure they had many other young players to choose from. On the pitch, their defensive record was worse with him in the team than without him. In a Saints shirt he's looked slow, weak, and poor in the air - and is justifiably 5th choice CB in a squad of appalling CBs. If we're serious about improving (it's a big if), he's not going to be an upgrade. So it makes sense to take the money and move on. If he goes on to be Bobby Moore, good luck to him. But he's not even nearly Jack Stephens at this stage, so fuck that.

Young player of the year at QPR - inheriting the title from Sinclair Armstrong, a striker who scored 3 goals in 61 games for them all told. Which is to say, perhaps the accolade isn't a huge indicator of quality. Could Edwards have featured more for us? Sure. But he's the slowest CB we have - even slower than Stephens - and the weakest in the air, which is not a great combination, and certainly not attributes an already slow and aerially weak defence are crying out for. "Touted as a future England international" means little when you consider "clowns" Stephens and Wood have played for England u21s too - and somehow Harwood-Bellis has a senior cap.

After his first game (Spurs away, I think), I said a couple of their goals were troubling - they'd gone in the middle third of the net, and he hadn't gotten anywhere near them. His weight distribution was also all wrong, always on his heels and falling backwards rather than diving across. Alarm bells were ringing. It didn't look right. He didn't look like a keeper. Anyway, here we are. Where do I collect my prize?

This season is our best chance of going up for a while, IMHO. It's not a strong Championship at all. Next season looks like Wolves, West Ham, Burnley will be in it, along with a Leicester who will presumably have served their points penalty and be back on fairly even financial ground. Making such a balls up of this campaign probably consigns us to the Championship for a number of years.

Is it that, or is it just a byproduct of teams being absolutely knackered at the back end (there's still two more rounds of PL games to cram in before the FA cup starts) of an over stuffed fixture schedule? Fast and dynamic football is the first thing to go when you can be neither fast nor dynamic. I managed to watch three games yesterday, and they were all 0-0. Great start to the year for me. But I didn't think anyone was afraid to attack, they were just all incredibly flat. That being said, Saints still managed to miss two injury time sitters to walk away with a forgettable 3 points. (For what it's worth, average goals per game in the PL this season so far is 2.77. Which, over the previous five completed seasons, is only better than 2020/21 (2.69), but not drastically below the average for the period of 2.91 goals per game.)

Alysson Edward joins Aston Villa. We were linked with him in the summer. I forget what the forum consensus was - presumably that we'd be fine with the players we already have, who are world beaters at this level. Interesting to see how he goes.

Yes. Tired of hearing about our amazing players (for this division) while simultaneously seeing no on-field evidence to back that up. Can't always be the manager's fault (although he's not exactly helping). Our squad have found their level. And it's utterly mediocre. Happy new year, everyone. It's going to be crap.

It's a stupid situation. We can't "permanently" address the goalkeeping issue, seemingly, because our best keeper is out on loan as no-one wanted to buy him, and he doesn't want to play in the Championship. So we're just going to, seemingly, tread water until the end of the season, when he'll return as our best keeper - who'll immediately want to leave again because we're still going to be a Championship club. And if, again, no-one wants to buy him, he'll be loaned out again. And the cycle restarts.

He's already played for two clubs this season. So, no.

Absolute banger of a year, 2025. Started it bottom of the Premier League, ended it 13th in the Championship. What joys will SR bring in 2026?

If you were remaking Brewster's Millions, who would you spunk £15m on without ending up with any assets?

Might have been. Fucking useless. Archer's half assed effort at tracking back should've been a stackable offence.

This is ridiculously poor. How did we spend so much to end up with so little?

No-one's mentioned whoever the fuck it was that joined us on loan in January last year, made about one sub appearance, and that was that. Can't even remember his name. Not worth bothering to look it up.

Agreed, there's no single magic bullet solution. We signed a better (although wildly overrated) goalkeeper than Bazunu and McCarthy last season - and then conceded a risible 86. Our worst ever was 92 in 1966, but from 42 games - we would've conceded around 95 last season with 4 more games. It's the entire defence. Not one of them is worth a damn. In any division. They don't work as unit, they don't compliment each other's strengths (whatever they might be) or cover their weaknesses. And individually, it's a pile of crap - mostly slow, weak in the air, physically indifferent, and positionally all over the shop. And prone to total panic. Wood and Quarshie have physical attributes that could work, but their lack of actual football ability is something of a drawback. The rest, you can fire them into the sun for all I care.

Vague idea we have an option to extend for a year if he does anything worthwhile to suggest he might have a market value.

Last four seasons we've shipped 67, 73, 63, and 86. We're on course to concede 65 this season. It's been years since we've been competent defensively - and the wait goes on. If we want to be successful in any way, this is obviously not sustainable. We have some crap individuals, but we also don't seem to be defensively well balanced as a team. Lightweight, small, slow. Not sure what the answer is other than raiding the transfer market again. We've tried multiple configurations, across multiple seasons, under multiple different managers, and the results are the same: we give up an inordinate amount of shots on our goal. That's not ideal when you've got a keeper who doesn't save much.

Wins breed confidence. We're already night and day from the naval gazing lumps of 7 or so games ago. Whether we've looked dodgy at times getting those wins is a moot point, really. I still think we're treading water until January - and I'm not confident we'll bring in the necessary reinforcements that defensively and offensively we're crying out for. But let's ride whatever this momentum is for as long as we can and try and muscle into the play off places before then. Things might look a lot brighter come the new year. Or worse. It'll probably look worse, won't it? That's the Saints way.

Dad driving the kids to the footie only to find they're a player short and can he fit into a mismatched pair of size 9 boots they found in the kit bag.

Frustratingly, at one stage today we were just 3 points off 2nd. Which, if you're looking for silver linings, tells us we've forced ourselves back into the promotion picture after a terrible start - with plenty of points left to play for. Irrelevant, though, if we're as poor as today and still can't defend properly no matter the combinations back there. A hard earned point wouldn't have been the worst outcome, but we really didn't deserve anything more. Back to the training ground for Tonda to give the lads a damn good staring at.

The toilet?

There's a little bit of academy depth to the midfield now. Bragg did well, Williams didn't look out of place, and I think Sesay is maybe a better prospect than both of them. Nice to see. One of the few benefits of being in the lower leagues should be greater opportunities for the youth to get some first team exposure, as opposed to being thrown into the deep end in the Premier League.

Additional context: his starting GK (Samba), CBs (Khusanov and Danso), and Striker (Wahi) were sold.

He ditched us twice before the age of 20. Who gives a shit if he's having a lovely time or not? Let it go, chaps.