The9

In case I haven't already mentioned it on here, Saints need to finish above one of Liverpool or West Ham to guarantee European football. Finishing above Man U will happen if we win and they lose, but if we're below West Ham and Liverpool even if we're above Man U (i.e. in 7th) then whoever wins the FA Cup takes the third Europa League place and we miss out either way. Makes Chelsea's lead all the more important, because if Liverpool don't win today and we win Sunday Liverpool can't catch us so we're in Europe irrespective of what Man U and West Ham do.

Nice, Liverpool now need to score twice in order to take it out of our hands again...

FWIW Liverpool are wearing their new kit tonight - I was watching for 20 minutes before I noticed, which tells you everything about how distinctive and unique it is compared to last season's. Leicester also busted out their new kit on Saturday night, we also got to see the new Premier League (Champions) badges, albeit only on Bocelli's shirt during the pre-match show, because the Leicester players all had this season's branding on their shirts. Ooh, Chelsea goal, good news for Saints.

They've been sponsoring Cruz Azul for years, I was in Mexico in early 2008 and they were sponsoring them even then.

Very kind but as I'm at the Euros that week I'll give it a miss. Plus I can't be arsed to upload a sucking up video telling the club why I deserve to go, etc. Send a teenager that's got the time. I'm not big on that kind of thing tbh, happy to see a leak or whatever, don't need to be part of the actual thing. PS yeah, the Spurs pic was leaked a couple of pages back.

So as it stands, we need to finish above either West Ham or Liverpool. Even though we can catch and finish above Man U, it doesn't do us much good, because they can leapfrog us with a Cup Final win. Worst case scenario everyone except Man U wins all their remaining games and Man U lose to Bournemouth then we'd be 7th and unable to get into Europe at all.

He's as good as a reserve keeper in the Prem needs to be.

I still think we're going to sign Stek. Contract is up, knows the club and the coaches, did pretty well for us as a backup and lots better than Gazza. We could even give him a pay rise for working fewer Saturdays.

Well, at least they didn't score in the last second. We're 2 points behind West Ham now and need to win with them not winning on Sunday to finish above them.

Staying at 3-2 is the difference between Saints finishing above West Ham and below them if we win and they draw on Sunday.

Rabble rabble rabble rabble!

Davis had a foot inside the D for the goal against Chelsea, which is by definition outside the box.

The Football League agreed to transfer the golden share on the condition of a 10 point deduction for the new owners when they came out of administration for the CVA2 failure. That, coincidentally of course, occurred after the Skates were already going down from L1 and the -10 had no impact, so the first thing they did was parrot the ways of the gun runner and Fake Sheik and managed to dodge yet another penalty by cheating the system.

Football is shed loads of luck mixed in with a load of incredible athletes trying to maintain a particular level of skill. Fixture scheduling isn't really luck though. As for Professor I have no idea what he's trying to do or say as a general rule.

I would dislike that rather a lot, far too much white. Doesn't look anything like the Xerox kit either.

The point he was making was that the Prem had changed their rules. Which the Sunderland kit pretty much proves isn't the case. Numerous teams have had different domestic and Euro shirts, it's practically an excuse to bring out a new kit nowadays. Even Hull did it.

Well, here's another UA shirt. That's two with hoopy arm bits...

Quality flow chart.

Quite - signing "top 6" backups is literally a thing we do, and with a relatively high level of success looking at Romeu and Bertrand.

Same problem we always get playing with narrow midfielders, when the opposition chooses to overlap they tend to get 2 on 1 on the full back. Cedric's had this loads this season (though more when we play 3/5 at the back). Seems fairly obvious to me that like Clasie/Romeu/Ward-Prowse, we have choices between players with opposing skillsets and have to go with one or the other. Cedric when we want the overlap, Martina when we think we need to defend.

I'm just going to say "you're wrong", and then we can all b*tch about how crappy his rating is in FM next year because someone can't do their job objectively.

Coefficient here http://m.footballseeding.com/club-ranking/a2015-2016/ Ours is 16.756 at the moment, up a little from last year, though it's barely enough to make a difference and will depend more on who else gets through. And as Steve says, it'll change depending on Liverpool's result. And I think that data still includes the 2010/11 figures which haven't been discounted, along with 2015/16 points for now.

No, we'll get a 3rd Qualifying Round place because Liverpool won't have an EL spot to lose - they can only lose an EL place for England if they have it to convert to an extra CL spot. If they finish below us, they won't have the EL spot and it stays as 3 EL qualifiers.

If we're 6th and Liverpool come 7th and win the Europa 5th gets the first EL place, Palace get the Cup Winner place and we'll get what is effectively City's League Cup place through the league because they have to at least finish in the EL places. In that situation 6th would only put us in the 3rd Qualifying Round though, bit annoying. Basically it works out that Liverpool can only cost themselves EL qualification by winning the CL, not anyone else.

Interesting-ish. Except Sunderland's new kit has a striped back, so evidently some are taking the "guidance" more literally than others. https://www.safcstore.com/cgi-bin/live/ecommerce.pl?site=safcstore&state=item&dept_id=10&sub_dept_id=10&product_id=150001008