The9

Actually it's fairly amazing what you can make happen with that predictor at your disposal: # Team M. W. D. L. Goals Dif. Pt. 1 Leicester City 38 22 11 5 61:37 24 77 2 Tottenham H 38 20 12 6 63:29 34 72 3 Arsenal FC 38 18 10 10 53:40 13 64 4 Manchester C 38 18 9 11 60:38 22 63 5 Liverpool FC 38 17 9 12 52:47 5 60 6 Manchester U 38 16 11 11 43:35 8 59 7 West Ham U 38 13 15 10 51:44 7 54 8 Everton FC 38 12 11 15 58:53 5 47 9 Chelsea FC 38 11 14 13 49:49 0 47 10 Watford FC 38 13 8 17 37:40 -3 47 11 Crystal Palace 38 13 8 17 42:48 -6 47 12 Sunderland AFC 38 13 8 17 51:58 -7 47 13 Newcastle U 38 13 8 17 48:57 -9 47 14 Swansea City 38 12 11 15 37:46 -9 47 15 Stoke City 38 13 8 17 35:44 -9 47 16 West Brom 38 12 11 15 34:43 -9 47 17 Norwich City 38 13 8 17 50:60 -10 47 18 AFC B'mouth 38 12 11 15 45:55 -10 47 19 Saints 38 13 8 17 41:51 -10 47 20 Aston Villa 38 6 9 23 28:64 -36 27 Once you get beyond that point, there aren't enough non-critical fixtures left to leave West Ham on 47 points as well without sodding up everyone else's points scores so I left well enough alone. And if anyone wants to "typical Saints" it, one consolation goal at home to Palace on the last day would keep us up, despite still losing 2-1. Or any two of Chelsea, Bournemouth, Stoke, Swansea or West Brom conceding one more goal on the last day. Also, scoring two more goals on the last day would put us 8th.

Not if he's looked at some of the results which are required for that to happen...

Ok, so I did work it out. Basic methodology - add in 1-0 wins for Norwich, Newcastle, Sunderland and 1-0 losses for Saints in all possible matches, then look to see how many points or goals were needed. Tweak it until those three (not even just 2 of those three) were above Saints - which meant upping their wins to 2-0 and 3-0, and Saints losses to 2-0 and 3-0, and where they played each other making the games higher scoring so they'd win out on against Saints on goals scored if it was a factor. Then look at the table again, see who had the fewest games left below Saints and get them above us by giving them wins against the sides already above Saints. Ignore Villa, who can't catch us and will finish at least 10 points behind us even now. Then check the table again, see who is now nearest the bottom or has fewest games left. Give them some wins too. Repeat until everyone except Villa is above us. http://www.worldfootball.net/table_calculator/eng-premier-league/ It's definitely possible, I had us coming 19th on 47 points, with Norwich, Newcastle and Sunderland all on 47 with better goal differences (which admittedly required them to win some unlikely matches by 2 or 3 goals and Saints lose all of ours by at least 2). But there are PLENTY of points to go around in mid-table to have teams finish on more than 47, to the point where I was just padding non-key games with 1-1s with about 5 weeks of the season left. # Team M. W. D. L. Goals Dif. Pt. 1 Leicester City 38 21 12 5 61:38 +23 75 2 Tottenham 38 18 12 8 61:31 +30 66 3 Manchester C 38 16 10 12 59:40 +19 58 4 Arsenal FC 38 16 10 12 51:43 +8 58 5 Manchester U 38 15 12 11 43:36 +7 57 6 West Ham U 38 13 16 9 52:45 +7 55 7 West Brom 38 14 12 12 37:42 -5 54 8 AFC B'mouth 38 14 11 13 45:53 -8 53 9 Watford FC 38 15 7 16 40:38 +2 52 10 Crystal Palace 38 15 6 17 45:46 -1 51 11 Liverpool FC 38 14 9 15 48:51 -3 51 12 Stoke City 38 14 9 15 37:45 -8 51 13 Chelsea FC 38 12 14 12 50:48 +2 50 14 Swansea City 38 13 11 14 39:44 -5 50 15 Everton FC 38 12 13 13 60:51 +9 49 16 Sunderland AFC 38 13 8 17 53:58 -5 47 17 Newcastle 38 13 8 17 48:57 -9 47 18 Norwich City 38 13 8 17 50:60 -10 47 19 Saints 38 13 8 17 41:51 -10 47 20 Aston Villa 38 4 8 26 25:68 -43 20 It's not worth me uploading all the scores, no-one will read them anyway. Key results, Norwich 2-2 Newcastle, Palace 2-4 Norwich, Saints 0-3 Newcastle, Norwich 3-2 Sunderland, Villa 2-0 Saints, Liverpool 0-3 Newcastle, Norwich 3-0 Watford, Sunderland 3-0 Arsenal, Newcastle 2-0 Palace, Stoke 0-2 Sunderland, Arsenal 0-2 Norwich, Saints 0-3 Man C, Villa 0-3 Newcastle, Norwich 2-0 Man U, Sunderland 2-0 Chelsea, Spurs 3-0 Saints, Everton 0-2 Norwich, Newcastle 2-0 Spurs, Watford 0-2 Sunderland. I didn't say it was LIKELY, just possible.

As I did an audio capture of Saints songs to upload into EA's FIFA game on PS3 about 5 years ago, I can confirm that we had, at the time, around 80 unique songs (not necessarily unique to us, of course), of which about 1/4 mentioned Portsmouth. It's surprising how many there are when you actually catalogue them. I wouldn't expect it to have changed much, most of the player-specific songs are just replaced by other player-specific songs the longer the season goes on. The thread's probably still in the archive in the Computer Games forum if anyone wants to dig it out.

Can't say I'd noticed it was any different to normal, other than there just being fewer songs than usual full stop.

That's been increased since the start of the season, which makes it even more difficult to work out for the lazy-ass who actually put this together because it splits the figures across (at least) two capacities. They couldn't even be sodded to check if some of the figures were actually the capacity (as I mentioned, Rodney Parade holds 4,000 fewer for football than rugby due to the safety certificate), so no point expecting miracles...

We were getting over 20,000 in League One and the lowest was about 18,000 in the Championship relegation/admin/"Lowe Boycott " season, still well over 50%.

To save MLG the trouble, in that situation the teams who pulled out of the competition would be relegated (possibly more than 3 if they couldn't play next season either). So it's only an issue if Saints get the plague, and surely in that situation they'd just field a bunch of kids to finish the season knowing that 47 points is almost certainly enough to stay up already.

I'm looking forward to someone working it out. It'll probably be me... For instance, as well as the Newcastle/Sunderland/Norwich thing, which requires a specific set of results, you'd then have to have Palace still able to get 14 points from their 8 games despite losing to whichever of those 3 had to play them, and so on.

There's a whole page of Sunderland ones here: http://rokerreport.sbnation.com/2011/8/1/2290840/safc-lookalikes-or-at-least-we-think-so-anyway These are my favourites:

That's Liverpool reject Albert Riera and Quagmire, right? And Luke Chadwick and Cletus, in no particular order? I also think fat John O'Shea looks like Peter Kay, but others think he's more Paddy McGuinness: If someone can get the pic of Mark Hughes and Shaun-Wright-Phillips and their car out of the way early, that'll be great.

It isn't poor at all, it merely reflects segregation and often the away section not being filled. Saints sometimes only have a week or two to shift Block 43 or 44 when teams decide not to take full away allocations, and sometimes this is after the home capacity is already a sell out - Newcastle being a recent example. It's much more difficult to sell tickets when casual purchasers have already been told there aren't any left once. Also, as I said, the figures aren't accurate. That's not even the capacity any more (it was 32505 in the Prem handbook last season) so the percentage should be higher. The record attendance is also lower than the theoretical capacity, being 32363 for the last match of the Championship promotion season.

Fair shout also.

Would have been interesting to see whether Pardew could have arrested the slide in Saints' results at the start of the 2010/11 season the way he's since failed to do so at Newcastle and Palace. Always interesting to see how "easy" it was for Adkins, who inherited a side full of future internationals... with a win, a draw and 3 defeats in the League (plus one cup win and two cup defeats), and took them to 30 wins 7 draws and 7 defeats (inc one against Man U).

There's definitely a "location in St Mary's" thing going on here about how loud people thought it was. People should probably give an approximate location for clarity, because compared to my experience in lower Northam 41 it sounds like the Chapel sang for once and a lot of people are getting excited about it. Nowhere near the Norwich game in the relegation season where the crescendo also lasted far longer than just the last 10 minutes, not even close to the best atmosphere this season with the Arnhem game and sticking 4 on Arsenal. We've been consistently louder than that for entire matches on a few occasions this season, and personally I thought the roar for Mane's Villa hat-trick jsut at the end of last season was twice as loud and the atmosphere lasted for much longer then too.

The figures are cobblers anyway, some of them are just wrong. Newport's capacity for football is 7850, not 11676 which moves them up about 7 places and puts them at about 33%.

Nobody gave a toss that he was on the pitch until Lovren went off and a backup boo victim was needed. Didn't hear anything of songs about who his kid's father was from Block 41, assuming that was a "back of 42" thing?

As far as Lambert goes, I'm fairly sure he went to West Brom to either get more matches than Liverpool would give him, or guarantee an extra year or so on a Prem contract, I can't see him moving anywhere else now as Championship sides won't pay him the same kind of money. To be honest he's worked hard enough in the rest of his career to have earned that.

Completely agree. Reading was a weird move, there were a few better jobs likely to come along without the guaranteed relegation he inherited at Reading at the time.

Me and my gob... http://www.chichester.co.uk/sport/pompey-latest/ten-facts-about-new-pompey-signing-conor-wilkinson-1-7293073 They've just signed the bloke on loan who failed to score an open goal for Newport against them in Newport's 3-0 win at Fratton (because presumably Bolton wanted a larger loan fee?). Well, at least they've seen him play for half an hour, even if he was only on County's bench.

You'll also find other inventive ways around copyright (I assume Arsenal have copyrighted their name or someone's tried to prosecute for indecency or whatever, due to the "Arse" bit)... And some United and City logo dodging here - City's old badge (which is also about to be their new badge more or less) and the middle bit from United's badge... Here's a [FOREVER] UNITED v LIVERPOOL scarf without the words Premier League or either official badge. Etc.