The9

Now, now, they very much looked like challenging for the first two months. I'm hoping they come to St Mary's in the EFL Trophy tbh, I'd much rather see our U23s beat them than our fringe first teamers.

Maybe they offered him more money then!?

http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/news/article/2016-17/20160720-premier-league-2-announcement-3196929.aspx Published at 6pm, "Southampton Football Club will enter a team into the all-new Premier League 2, which replaces the existing Under-21 Premier League, following a revamp of the competition. Premier League 2 is formed of teams who can field teams of players predominantly up to the age of 23, though three ‘over-age’ outfield players and a goalkeeper over the age limit can be named in each game."

Very slightly looser, due to the different material I think - I'm L in the training tee and XL in the home shirt!

I've bought both the lime green and red training tees which I like, currently sat here in the shirt to try and get some use out of it because I have no idea if I'm actually going to wear it. Not remotely bothered by the heat-seal thing, and I've checked the DC United U23 game pics and the player shirts are definitely not embroidered.

He was rumoured to have turned us down because he didn't want to be a backup. Which is fair enough, I think.

Nope, they're all "fitted" in the club shop as well - and from one other person on Facebook with a "£90" priced shirt it looks like they've just mailed out the ones they were sent with the wrong prices on them - I'm yet to check that by removing the "club shop" price from the label on my home shirt, because they've stuck other labels over the UA price for the ones which needed to be read by the Saints store scanners. Unless yours has a non-embroidered club badge and a red panel under the armpit and down the side of the shirt, anyway.

If we'd signed Austin now people would be questioning his ability to play as many games as Pelle did last season (assuming Austin's injury record remained the same as it did with Saints for the past 6 months), so I can see why an extra striker might be something we'd need to consider. To me it seems to show a move back to the attitude at the end of 2013/14 when we gave Gallagher a run when I don't think he was really showing anything that would make people think he was a good enough striker, and that team was still good enough for 8th anyway. We might be looking at consciously leaving gaps so there are opportunities to step up.

It's very difficult to determine causality, but the way I look at it is "if Koeman had been in charge when Pochettino gave Shaw and Chambers their debuts, would they have made their debuts?". The Cuco Martina signing is the one that maybe makes me think no on that front, but it's difficult to know for sure. Pochettino for his part certainly didn't mind picking young players at Spurs either.

Thibaut Courtois seems like the obvious example, but he was already proven before they loaned him to Atletico. Kurt Zouma is in on a technicality as he was loaned back to St Etienne after a £12m transfer, but he was already 19 when that happened. They're at least as interested in hoovering up players who'd improve their rivals as they are actually developing those players. I don't think it's a stretch to say that ALL academy talents will be better off at Saints than Chelsea irrespective of their position. If they were going to bring anyone through the last 6 months of last season was the perfect opportunity for them - Bertrand Traore and Ruben Loftus-Cheek are about as close as they got, and they're by no means established, and certainly not at the level Chelsea WANT to be at, yet.

To be fair we'd just sold Shaw who played practically every match, and Chambers who played a lot at the start of the season, so the stats would be expected to reflect a drop off irrespective of Koeman's attitude to youth in the first season. Just because there are academy prospects available doesn't mean they'll be good enough irrespective of opportunities and that's something we need to be mindful of.

There have been numerous incidents of "steering" refs, or patronising hand-on should type things like that which can undermine the ref's authority and previously the only official sanction would be a red card which VERY rarely happens and in situations like that are rather excessive punishment, so this gives a separate level of punishment to cover that. Worth noting that Prutton might have got a yellow with no further action under these rules? As others have said, consistency and strict implementation are the keys to this actually working.

I think it works for Saints because they have a responsible wealthy owner who has the long term care of the club at heart, Newport have been through the "money" phase (on a different scale) and seen that it doesn't necessarily come with that long term stability. They are very much trying to do the best they can on a far smaller scale, but they are also much more susceptible to the whims of their far smaller fanbase and of football in general. The Skates failing to do significantly better than clubs who will live and die on the fluke of a sell-on clause, yet also managing to waste a load of money which should give them the advantage, through their general incompetence, and also failing to be the "transparent" organisation they claim to be despite the previous owners' secrecy, is pretty much my point here.

For some context regarding the size of club the Skates are failing to get promoted alongside for the past 3 years, here's Newport County's completely transparent end of year financial statement: http://www.newport-county.co.uk/news/article/2016-17/ncafc-end-of-year-financial-statement-3188632.aspx The club, being run by a lottery winner, had £2m of losses in 3 years and owner investment debt of £1.7m, £300k of unsustainable debt as at 30 June 2015, comprising bank overdraft (£80k), arrears of tax (£30k), arrears to major creditors (£80k) and advance commercial income for 2015/16 banked before the year end (£100k). The schedule below summarises the main cash flows in the twelve months to 30 June 2016. £000s Sources of funds Transfer fee income 700 Trust fundraising 236 Total 936 Less: Uses of funds Repayment of prior year debt, etc, as above (290) Current year operating loss (estimated) (300) Loan repayments (mainly former directors) (50) Other movements (43) Closing bank balance 253 Bear in mind the club got £700k from two player sales and raised £236k via Trust shareholder fundraising, which was literally all the money they had left - but they've got rid of the debt they were building up - rather than, say, just continuing to build up debt and then going into admin and writing a load of it off. Then they got another windfall from Conor Washington's sell-on clause when he joined QPR too, which (thankfully) isn't listed until the end of the reporting period so the club isn't showing their hand in player negotiations, but it's only as a result of that they're able to compete for players with the likes of non-Leaguers Eastleigh and Forest Green, never mind other League Two sides. I think Newport deserve a lot of credit for living within their very limited means and the transparency of the process. Compared to, say, some L2 clubs.

Guy Mowbray was the one talking about 10 v 9. It's listed on the BBC site underneath some text referring to a similar pic from Lineker above it.

The 10 yard rule was for not retreating from free kicks only, nothing to do with spreaking to the ref (although I think it was technically a card for dissent) and they got rid of that about 10 years ago "because some nations couldn't understand it". They're sticking with the spray foam to deal with that now, which seems to be working pretty well tbh.

Same bog standard site as most EFL clubs, it's a bit of a mess like all the others, and some of the multiple clicking and duplication is pointless.

"Starting this season, red cards will be issued to players who confront match officials and use offensive language or make gestures towards them." Or alternatively, starting when red cards were introduced... in theory. "Offences which could earn players a yellow card Visibly disrespectful behaviour to any match official; An aggressive response to decisions; Confronting an official face to face; Running towards an official to contest a decision; Offensive, insulting or abusive language and/or gestures towards match officials; Physical contact with any match official in a non-aggressive manner; A yellow card for at least one player when two or more from a team surround a match official. New red card offences If a player confronts match officials and uses offensive, insulting or abusive language and/or gestures towards them; Physical contact with match officials in an aggressive or confrontational manner." It should be good for us, we don't generally get in the faces of officials - our high red card tally last year was pretty much down to Wanyama's efforts. Not sure why they're using the word "could" there, they either are or aren't.

Worth noting that from looking at the shorts in adults sizes they seem to be huge as well, I'm usually a large in shorts but the medium still looked big when holding them up. So if you're buying shorts (I didn't), try them on if you can. The overlap in Youth and Small sizes has always been weird - probably a VAT workaround.

Women's shirt has a smaller Virgin Media logo though other than that the labelling is exactly the same - but given that we were actually trying to find them in the megastore for about 10 minutes, it's unlikely you'll have accidentally picked one up. The women's stuff is in with the Youth sizes at the back right of the store, and you'd have to walk past all of the Men's ones to get to them. Not many aways on show compared to homes either...

Also, I REALLY don't like the fit, especially the panel, which weirdly goes under the armpits.

The badge is embroidered on the home and away replica shirt, and a sort of rubbery plastic heat-meld effect on everything else. Apparently the badge on the players' shirts is actually the heat-transfer version, so the embroidery is obviously either a sop to the "it won't last" fannies, or it's necessary because the player shirts don't get as much use as the replicas. Could have sworn I'd already posted this at least once.

Nothing wrong with it for me, on 3 different devices in 3 different locations around Hampshire...

Only the home shirt comes in a woman's fit, and they had hardly any of those in store, maybe about 10 of each size - not to say that's all they've got, but there were probably 15 times that many men's shirts on display.

Fair Play rules are basically out of the window with all the additional income every club has from this season, everyone's got the best part of £100m to burn through before they hit that ceiling and it's all a legitimate income source so it can all be spent on wages. That's not to say either that Katharina should spend all her money on players or that there's anything that would necessarily improve the club's fortunes from her doing that. Even with the spending, we'd still need to be massively successful to attract players, winning stuff every season including competing in Europe AND then be spending a fortune on wages... just to get to the level of the clubs we're already competing with (except Leicester).