The9

The problems I have with this assessment are: 1) Goals and assists are not of equal value 2) Assists are of equal value to key passes (which are missed chances which are no fault of the person who created the chance). Needs to compare like with like, one of them might be creating shedloads more chances but someone is missing them, which is no reflection on the creator's ability.

Absolutely, but there's no reason at all to think they won't mirror our drop off last season, they have exactly the same issues in terms of squad size and depth, and if anything an even weaker squad, though they do have a more experienced manager.

Leicester are only 11 points ahead of us and have to play Man City twice, Spurs (A), Arsenal (A), Liverpool twice and Everton away by the middle of February. We've got Spurs at home, Arsenal twice and Man U away (and Palace (a) and West Ham twice) in the same period. Every chance by the time we get to March they'll be around the same number of points as us.

They'll still be battling us to finish 7th at the end of the season.

Says the man who just responded. It's also the first post in this thread for 2 months, so it's hardly like I've been repetitively spamming threads with, say, stuff about Pelle being immobile...

In the old days there weren't a bunch of regulations allowing the topmost teams to spend a fortune more than the other teams on their players, and players didn't almost always leave the other top division clubs to sit on the bench for the topmost ones. Football has changed, not expecting anything from the cup until you're at the QF stage is pretty much standard for all non-top 6 clubs now.

Colo Colo 2016 away kit is the same style as current Spurs away too: As is the keeper shirt: In short, dunno if it's because of the time frame of the Chilean football season or because Under Armour are using kits over 2 years, but the biggest team in Chile are wearing an old Spurs style.

If you think it looks familiar, it's because the 2016/17 Colo Colo shirt is the same style as the 2015/16 Spurs shirt...

Nothing much happening kit wise apart from a load of international shirts being released, and then Under Armour 2016/17 shirts started being leaked which should give a pretty good indication of what Saints are getting. Colo Colo home 2016/17

I look at it as "had we beaten Stoke and Villa, which we probably would do more often than not, we'd be level on points with 5th". We're still pretty sound, and when it comes down to it, 6th-12th looks like it's going to be down to the odd bounce of the ball or dodgy decision this season and I don't think anyone expected us to push on to top 6 having lost Schneiderlin and Alderweireld (and Clyne), and with the distraction of various cups, did they? Apart from anything, opposing teams don't see us as a safe game for resting players any more.

He's a striker, strikers always get the most money.

We paid what we were prepared to pay for a player we obviously wanted a lot, who is fulfilling the role he probably expected to. Sold by Hull (3 years left on contract) cost £12m Sold by West Brom (1 year left on contract) cost £7m Sold by Reading (1 year left on contract) cost £6m Having 2.5 years on his contract clearly has a huge bearing on his value compared to 1 year.

Everyone is replaceable with a better player, we can't afford them - we wouldn't be able to afford probably half of the current team at their existing market value. Long is a bit of an outlier from our transfer policy of buying cheap and improving players, he obviously came up high on the black box and hit a lot of the intangibles and does a lot of unheralded stuff.

Despite thinking he's just about adequate overall, I can still see why people are questioning his appearance in the starting line-up last Saturday. Stuck out like a sore thumb to me in a side which had Clasie on the bench. I think we're going through some kind of transitional period in which we usually play sides' best teams but don't necessarily put our best team out against them. You've only got to look at Liverpool v Swansea, us and Newcastle to see what their best side is...

I'd say Tadic is definitely "better", and substitutions in attacking positions are basically a feature of modern football to keep energy high. When you consider that Pelle rarely comes off and that we have basically 4 or 5 players in attacking positions and we almost always make 3 subs, any non-Pelle attacking player has somewhere between a 60-75% chance of being subbed in any game where we don't replace a defender. It's probably slightly lower than that at the moment due to Cedric's propensity to head wounds, however, but likely to still be more than 50%. Of course anyone with a bit too much time on their hands can work out exactly how many subs we've made and how many times Tadic has been replaced compared to everyone else.

Quite, Germany basically just won the last World Cup by "offloading as soon as they get on the ball", it was a main focus of their findings after their failure in Euro 2000, that players held the ball too long and they went through extensive training to reduce the time taken to pass the ball.

I was wondering when people would start spamming him back.

I can confirm that the extent of my ambition for Saints under the existing FFP rules is to compete with the top 6 and it is almost certainly the best we can hope for. Top 4 would be an outlier and a half, as Leicester are about to find out.

It isn't 4-3-3, as it's a different system to the thing which definitely is 4-3-3. That's about as good a reason for not incorrectly using the name of something which isn't the same as I can think of. You might as well call it a hoverboard.

It shows how player values are affected by contract terms and buyer's needs. There's absolutely no reason to sell him, he's doing exactly the job he was signed to do.

I suggest you watch a lot more 1970s football and stop trying to retrofit new formations to old categories then.

Ok, I'll reword it... the amount of his pace will improve with training will be far less significant (or will require far more specialist training to get the same results) than from training to improve all of the other attributes.

Hi, my name is Matthew Hill and I'm fairly sure I'm getting banned for spamming the forum fairly soon. This is what, 4 separate dates and about 5 or 6 separate messages now?

A narrow "three man midfield" where the middle 3 are not in line is not a "3", it's a different formation. 4-3-3 has wide midfielders and out and out wingers, not 3 CMs with at least one of them playing DM, which is what Saints use.