The9

Probably for the same reason Reebok did that with Bolton for the best part of 10 years, main sponsor as well as kit supplier AND holding the naming rights for the stadium. They also did the same with Macron after Reebok stopped sponsoring them. So dor whatever those reasons were.

Based on previous timings, it'll be 1615 if there are 3 matches on Sky that day.

You might be referring to the tweet from his hairdresser in Southampton wishing him something akin to "all the best and goodbye" in May 2014, well before there were inklings he might leave Saints that summer. After what I can imagine was a tense but brief conversation, she updated it to say "I mean until next season", which was even more clunky and made it obvious something was going on, and from a position of no-one expecting him to go he then buggered off not long after.

Once in a lifetime chance to have someone try to muller me in the first minute, get my name wrong on the video and... well, score in the first 2 minutes at St Mary's past someone who appears to have emigrated as a result.

If anything I think we're more likely to keep players now that I thought we were at the start of the season. Can't see anyone in for Cedric, I doubt Van Dijk would Lovren us, Wanyama and Mane have underachieved compared to last season and are slightly less certain to leave, Pelle going was always a possibility, Bertrand, Tadic and Forster aren't really up there in the "being talked about" stakes either. Could be relatively settled, maybe only 3 first team starters going this year and 2 of them have been pretty much guaranteed for nearly a year. Then again there's loads more money in the pot so maybe they get much bigger deals and don't go either.

I'm still waiting for any hint of that Seattle Sounders/Paul Allen link up that was mooted last year when the green kit was leaked...

Funnily enough since this was announced I've booked 4 nights in a hotel in Scotland for early July for our anniversary as opposed to going on a US Tour. I'm guessing they can't trumpet it as a US Tour in case we make Europe, but even so, it doesn't look like it'll be against any kind of opposition. Maybe this year will be about putting the foundations for the coaching scheme with a trip to Baltimore (which I can't say appeals much anyway) and next year will be about playing some of Europe's top sides in the Big House in Michigan... or something.

In the sense that every kit's for one season nowadays, I'd be very surprised if we didn't get rid of the green away kit.

Except Spurs are joining Nike in 2017/18.

The best thing about the Spurs game is there's every possibility Leicester will have just won the league when we play Spurs. Going with the most likely results, Leicester will win the title beating Everton on the day before we play Spurs. It'll be glorious if we walk into that wake, and I can't imagine the pious "Saints fans singing about Leicester winning the league" response will rear its head as much then... . My idea of "most likely results", home team first: Leicester draw with West Ham; Stoke lose to Spurs (Spurs gain 2 points) Leicester beat Swansea; Spurs beat West Brom Man U beat Leicester; Chelsea draw with Spurs. (Spurs gain 1 more point, having gained 3 on Leicester in total) Leicester beat Everton in SNF at 1715, Spurs play Saints at 1330 on the Sunday - Leicester 7 clear (one game left) with Spurs only having 2 to play. Of course if Spurs gain more than 1 point on Leicester in the interim despite Leicester having played one more game, they'll need to beat us to take it to the last game.

We don't have the third best form - West Ham and Chelsea have played a match less than us and would be above us if they won it. Also, if we do the last 15 matches, we won our most recent one so we'd be 3 point worse off, and Liverpool have only got 14 games in that table and could also be above us with an equal number of games. So potentially over the last 15 matches (which removes the imbalance of games played since Xmas) we might only actually be the 6th best. Or you could make it over 16 matches, in which case we're at worst 6th.

Hmmm, so if it's a 7 year deal not 5, is it still £40m, and if so, is it actually less valuable per year than first thought? Also, when's this getting merged with the Kit Thread?

I'm MOST disappointed that they haven't yet buggered up the "logo on the programme spine" thing by accidentally duplicating a week, I'd have had them down as certainties for that.

To be fair most of them wanted Moyes out at various points too. They're all as knee-jerk as everyone else, but with the club tending towards longer-term appointments it just gets to the point where everyone's moaning about something. Don't get me wrong, I think Martinez is doing a good job... for Saints. Not so much for Everton.

Awaiting the inevitable flurry of activity on here when the Under Armour announcement comes about, guessing it'll be in the next hour and ten minutes seeing as people have all said "this morning"...

Carlisle too. Unsurprisingly they've jumped in with two of the main stops on the West Coast line they fairly recently took over for clubs in the lower leagues, given that you can get to Carlisle in under 3 hours from London, and Preston is one of the first stops. If Wigan hadn't been in the Premier League so recently they'd probably have them on board as well. They really missed a trick with the Virgin Trains logo not matching the two stripe design on the shirts. Someone obviously had a great idea which wasn't checked closely enough.

Was "nearly sold out" 2 days ago when I got mine. It's absolutely barmy, there are piles of people waiting on releasing lower tier but it'll take a bunch of people jumping to get the crappy Upper Tier seats before they'll make them available. We've bought Upper just in case those people never commit.

In line with the Spurs shirts of the past couple of seasons. I'm interested to know if the shirts will finally be on sale everywhere or if they'll stick to the recent expansion into "a few JD Sports sites in the south". Aside from the club shops and the one place on the IoW a while back the only place I've seen Saints kit in a retailer was SportsDirect.com flogging off some 125th Anniversary shorts when we were still in the Championship.

"Egregious cant" indeed.

Can't see Davis being fit, he's meant to be out for 2-3 weeks with that ankle injury and it's not even a week yet.

Fair enough. I doubt he's done 8 that haven't since then.

We'd already seen both this year's actual kits for a month this time last year thanks to a very convincing leak. Expecting it just to be an announcement of Under Armour rather than a kit launch though because the other deal will probably run til May 31st. The original adidas announcement was May 29th (2013) but it took a while - June 28th for the actual (horrific) kit to get announced, again probably for contractual reasons. Hopefully it'll be a bit earlier this year, I can see us wearing Under Armour in the early July US Tour that absolutely no-one has confirmed and I may have made up, due to the possibility of getting into Europe again.

FWIW, my current stat on Pelle's backheel flicks is that he's on a streak of 8 in a row which have found opposition players - though I can only count matches I'm at, so that doesn't include Stoke away (or Swansea away, in the event that this streak has been going on since before 2nd Feb). Equally, I might have missed one that came off, but I don't think I have. He's still hitting a solid 8/10 in terms of performance and effectiveness over the whole season though.

The vagaries of 8th aren't clear at the moment, see this thread for discussion: http://www.saintsweb.co.uk/showthread.php?56310-Europa-League-qualification#.VwzlMzArLIU