The9

"Bipolar" in the sense of wanting a side to win one week and lose the next. I'm not too worried about the coefficient, I think Leicester are going to stack it completely in Europe next season anyway.

Plenty of shouts for that at the time too, especially from Wanyama.

I just had "careless, reckless or dangerous" going on in my head whilst the ref pointed for the throw. It was at least two of them and should have been at least a yellow (possibly a red for DOGSO if Long got to the ball first) and was definitely a foul, whether he got the ball or not.

Our supporting in L1 was basically the same as it is now, with fewer of the kind of background people who fill empty seats but don't do much else. On the bright side, the backgrounders put physical barriers between me and the fighty helmets who thought they were entitled to do what they wanted in the lower leagues, of which there seemed to be more, but there were actually just a larger proportion. It's still basically the same number of people singing as in L1, there's just more chance of other people joining in than when they weren't there at all. Unless they're in Kingsland centre, in which case there's still no chance.

Actually on 14th February when we were 6th, everyone had played 26 matches. http://www.statto.com/football/stats/england/premier-league/2015-2016/table/2016-02-14

And repeated for then Bolton keeper Adam Bogdan in the Championship.

1997/8, I remember it well, because I know who I celebrated it with (and how). Although in hindsight she was a Liverpool fan... Just looked it up - 2nd Nov 1997.

We were 6th as recently as 14th February, so I'm not sure how what happened in December guaranteed us 8th.

In the second tier. Where they were for the 14 years from 1988. Can't imagine why Le Tiss didn't want to...

I don't usually do predictions but I'll go for WWDLW which gives us 10/15 from the remaining games. It is fairly contingent on us playing Man City when they're still in Europe though - and of course getting robbed blind by Spurs. Oh, and breaking whatever hoodoo we have at Goodison, where we usually lose no matter how bad they are. At least we should have a defence and defensive midfield against them unlike at St Mary's. I did also say we'd finish 8th a month or two ago (I think it was when we'd just gone all those games without conceding), so something's probably got to give as we're unlikely to get 10 points and finish 8th.

Can safely say I didn't hear even one of those songs from the other side of the away fans. There was hardly anything from the Northam either, very subdued.

Nah, that was just us sodding around at a League 2 match because... it's League 2.

I suspect it was because Long landed on his head/neck in the collision with Darlow in the first half and we didn't want to risk him when tired and with the game safe at 3-0 up, but at 2-0 we didn't want to risk losing his workrate. Agree Romeu could have come on instead to lock it down. Wasn't particularly bothered by our second half performance given that we scored the third BEFORE we switched off when I was only concerned that we'd switch off when only 2 ahead. As far as Townsend goes, when he's comfortably your best player you know you're bad. Funnily enough I thought Jaanmat looked like the only one who was bothered before his injury after slipping following Mane(?)'s awful through ball which ended up costing them the second goal. They could have scored with every 30 yard Townsend attempt they had and we'd have still found more goals than them - their full backs were both midfielders after 40 minutes and it showed.

I can see the first bit but not the second. Getting out of the Europa League would of course vastly improve their chance of getting into the Europa League. Dortmund (H) Bournemouth (A) Everton (H) Newcastle (H) Possible Europa Semi L1 Swansea (A) Possible Europa Semi L2 Watford (H) Chelsea (H) West Brom (A) Possible Europa Final

True. But by the time they play it on May 10th we will know which result (if any) we want from that. I'll take going into a home game with Palace needing to win for top 6. Although I can't see Man U not beating Bournemouth on the last day. West Ham are at Stoke.

Spurs win was great news for Saints - only 3 points off Man U in 5th. I am choosing to ignore that Man U have a game in hand on us, as do West Ham who are a point behind them and 2 points ahead of us, and that Liverpool are 2 points behind us and have 2 games in hand. Can't see us catching Man City in 4th either. The bipolar supporting opponents thing we have going on at the moment sees me wanting Man City to beat PSG so they make the CL Semis, which apparently are either side of our game against them, and then losing that so they don't win the CL whilst finishing outside 4th and potentially move the Europa places up if Liverpool win the EL. It also wants Liverpool to do really well in the EL without winning it.

Yeah, they were 35% off in the store for the concourse sale, they're half price now as of last Thursday, but they're probably still going to have some left to flog at £10 in a few weeks - albeit mostly in 2XL and larger or youth sizes like they usually do... but there are often one or two M/L/XLs in there early on. FWIW Cortese's legacy was on full show at the last concourse sale...

Good good. Also interesting to see Spurs are flogging off their current kit at 50% off, so we might see more concourse sales like the recent one in the future too (there may be another this summer to shift the 2015/16 adidas stuff as there wasn't any in the one last week).

Meniscus tidy-up wouldn't take long anyway, even if they do the op he might only miss one match, though it would probably be two - and it's not like we'd need to rush him back at the moment.

With Spurs' next couple of games and Leicester's its probably going to be over well before then. Just like we're going to miss out on relegating Villa by at least a week.

Using your stats, and not including this season, the actual figure for teams who made the playoffs or better within 2 seasons of being relegated is 16 out of 30. "Nearly all" that is not. Plus of those only 8 of the 30 relegated sides were re-promoted within 2 seasons. Not sure what this says about Burley, but it's an interesting bunch of stats - I'd like to know how many were relegated into League One within 5 years as well... I make it 8 of them also (2005 Saints, Norwich, 2007 Sheff U and Charlton, 2010 Portsmouth, 2011 Blackpool, 2012 Wolves, 2013 Wigan). So it appears that you're as likely to go back up within 2 years as you are to end up in League One within 5. You can add Bolton and maybe Fulham to the down list and maybe Hull and/or Cardiff and probably Burnley to the up/playoffs one this season.

I didn't mention that he got Ipswich into Europe because he also got them relegated the season after - I'd love to see what Ipswich's injury and suspension rate was like in 2001, they could have been the template for Leicester this season. I thought he was fine at the time for a while - probably an unwillingness to accept that Alpine might be right about something! As you mentioned, his early tenure was a general improvement on the awful first season in the Championship when for 4 months it was only Walcott that made Saints worth seeing. It was only when I realised how much money we'd thrown at failing to go up when it became obvious that we had no financial Plan B, could never have afforded what was needed for Plan A unless it was a success, and how low Burley seemed to be setting expectations, that I had a problem with his understatement.

Oh and incidentally, I'm fairly sure the 6th screengrab from Essruu is a triangulation glitch as opposed to a route diversion. I get that kind of weirdness any time there's a weak GPS signal when I stalk my past movements on Google.

He literally just told you where he's been in his description of Uber journeys.

Because we'd been a mostly poor Premier League side and then a Redknapp-managed Championship side. Hardly an achievement. This season is the exception, but for the best part of 20 years now, most money = most success. Until this season there's been an enormously strong correlation between wages and success in the Premier League - lower down where all of the players have more evident weaknesses it should be even easier to win things just by having more money and spending it relatively well because the players you can afford should make fewer basic mistakes. We somehow managed to avoid this inbuilt success despite also having Bale. No he wasn't, or we wouldn't have been able to appoint him as a mid-table Championship side. He left Ipswich in 2002 with a relatively good reputation despite getting them relegated. Went to Derby and did almost exactly what he ended up doing at Saints, taking a rebuilding Championship team from mid/bottom half to play-off failures. He was then Hearts manager for a bit and due to chairman Romanov's quirks got sacked when top of the league after 8 matches having not played either Celtic nor Rangers. He was by no means still a much-sought after manager by 2006, he was one who'd had a good season 5 years ago and might have been about to have a good season 6 months previously (and btw Hearts still came second without him). Critics would say he made a pile of weird substitutions, ignored glaring deficiencies in the starting line-up, had his favourites who weren't the best players, didn't react quickly enough to teams doubling up on Bale, spent all season underplaying our chances of success and meeting those projections, and with the hindsight of what Adkins did, most Saints fans must still be wondering how we failed to get in the top 2. He had the entire team sold in the January when he first arrived which he definitely would have known about. We then dropped to just above the relegation zone and recovered into mid-table just in time. His second season was the playoff tilt, and the most successful one due to buying players we couldn't afford, and he didn't stick around when it became obvious that we weren't planning on paying them to play for us any more in his third season. At a time when we'd spent most of that time in the bottom half of a better division. Going on about win ratios, yet weirdly you don't seem as keen to ascribe that as one of the reasons you liked his tenure? Strange. I thought the football was an improvement, but only because we were dire other than Walcott in the first half of the first Championship season, it wasn't difficult to improve from there. Incidentally, Burley's Saints win ratio ended up below (Adkins, Pardew and Koeman who followed, as well as) Hoddle and McMenemy. He was 3% better than Sturrock, and ahead of every other manager we had in the Premier League though - to no surprise. Clough's drinking ruined him. Can't argue about Redknapp or Branfoot.