The9

1. Fox's fee was undisclosed, though guesswork has it somewhere between £1.5m-2m as his previous transfers were to Celtic (£1.5m) and Burnley (£1.8m) 18 months previously. He cost about the same as Billy Sharp, but Sharp was £1.8m for 6 months' worth and 3 years' wages. This all paled into comparison with the £6m for Rodriguez the following summer of course. I also don't remember anyone complaining about the fee for Fox at any point, it was pretty standard for a Championship player. 2. They seemed much of a muchness to me, with different skillsets but Fox's attacking play and set piece delivery was vital to our promotion and his defending wasn't usually detrimental to it. 3. He did seem slow to react and break cover from the box to close down wide men preparing to cross, but that was about it. He wasn't a slow runner, but he was usually 10 yards behind the ball being played into the space behind him which is the kind of distance few would make up. Shaw had the same problem and was worth about 20 times more. 4. Can't remember it, to be honest. Fairly sure today is the first time I've ever seen Fox blamed for us not winning the Championship title. Especially given that Lambert equalised and we were drawing 1-1 at the 70 minute mark, and also lost at Middlesbrough a week later which was far more damaging given that Reading drew and lost their final two games and beat us by a point.

Actually the table does lie, luck doesn't even out over a small sample size like 38 matches, and key decisions in key matches (Liverpool at home being the obvious example) can have a huge bearing overall just from the timing of that luck. I doubt Sunderland (Poyet aside) care about the lack of a penalty when Fletcher got poleaxed and we beat them 8-0, but a weaker challenge in the return fixture provided a penalty worth an additional 2 points to them. There's a pile of luck in everything, and it's the main determinant of results, with the skill element less important - and football is also proven to have the widest range of chance of all "major" sports, with favourites winning less often than any other. It may not be purely representative, but that's how we expect it to be, it's accepted as such and it is of course the only representation of the season that matters.

WhoScored.com has them. I'm certainly bored with proving my point repeatedly and having to deflect irrelevant asides, yes. The stats to November were obviously relevant, as they were part of the reason we were so successful and the basis for many of the clean sheets.

No, clean sheets are disproportionately valuable because they guarantee a minimum of a point, whist one goal gets you not that much in comparison. As Saints showed last season, if you keep the back door bolted, you can usually find a way to fabricate a goal to cash in on that. Luck is the primary factor in football, but of the elements we can control, having an organised defence is more effective, and cheaper, than splashing money on creative players. There's nothing fanciful about not conceding against Stoke, Sunderland or at home to Spurs... 8 teams managed it against Stoke last season out of the 19 they played. It happened 14 times for teams against Sunderland (including twice for QPR), and 10 teams did against Spurs. With Saints having one of the best defensive records in the league when we had the first team on the pitch, it wouldn't have been too difficult to recreate those kind of performances against 2 lesser opponents and one rival but at home. I fail to understand how you can continue to write utter nonsense about our defence "coping well" in matches where they conceded twice in 83% of their last 6 matches, compared to the Prem-best defending performances seen with the preferred starting side the rest of the time. Davis/Gazzaniga may have had a lower save percentage than Forster, but firstly the sample size was negligible and no serious comparisons can be made, and secondly (albeit subject to the same sampling problem) they were both facing more shots per match than Forster so more likely to concede to begin with. As for "coping without Alderweireld", we won 4, lost 4 and drew 1 in his January to March absence. Unfortunately his performance stats are skewed by the ineffective midfield performances in those end of season defeats. Also, who said anything about splurging £27m on a Schneiderlin replacement? We've just bought one for £8m, and we could buy 2 good Europa League standard centre backs with that kind of money. I get it, you, like loads of others, think spunking money on strikers scores goals, and goals win games. That's great, because that's precisely the market inefficiency Saints are exploiting, and it means we don't have to spend as much on the defenders and defensive midfielders who are stopping the opposition creating chances in the first place and giving the team the opportunity to make the goals we do score actually worth something.

Forster's injury made a lot less difference than the lack of defending in front of him. I've already posted up a pile of stats showing how he faced the 2nd fewest shots against when we were into November, and a bunch of other stuff that is empirically proven but people still want to argue about.

You mean to let us know where other people got their useful information from, and then accuse them of trying to pass it off as something no-one else knew about, when no-one else knew about it? It doesn't help me with sleeping, as you can tell from my posting time.

We conceded 2 goals per match in 5 of those 6 games having managed 18 clean sheets in matches where we hadn't fielded that combination of players in those positions, OF COURSE IT WAS A PROBLEM. I'd also point out that I provided 6 successive matches, whilst you have cherry picked 4 matches from across half a season, and also supported my assertions by underlining that we would also have needed to provide clean sheets for those goals to have more than 1 point in value.

That one didn't count towards the assist stats - but it was a good illustration of how absolutely knackered he was by then. No-one's every questioned Shaw's fitness, have they?

He was out of position because our tactics called for him to be out of position more often than not. He wasn't slow, but he didn't have the kind of pace that would catch up a 15 yard head start on players with 40 yards of space to knock the ball into. Shaw's assist stats were exactly the same as Fox's in the Premier League - they both had 1 assist, Fox in 2012/13 and Shaw in 2013/14. Shaw was caught up the pitch plenty of times too, it was a feature of Pochettino's sides how often we had full backs in the opposing half and how many times we got caught by long balls which we couldn't defend with only 2 centre backs in our own half. Shaw obviously had a bigger upside, so he took over, but he made plenty of Fox-like positional "errors".

So did everyone else at the time, but Ferguson was even saying it was a football decision at the time: http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/ferguson-sons-role-in-stam-transfer-9276429.html And since then there has been this story about Ferguson reading the tackling data, since repeated in The Numbers Game. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/9471db52-97bb-11e0-9c37-00144feab49a.html "But the broader breakthrough came in 1996, after the Opta Index company began collecting “match data” from the English Premier League, explains the German author Christoph Biermann in Die Fussball-Matrix, the pioneering book on football and data. For the first time, clubs knew how many kilometres each player ran per match, and how many tackles and passes he made. Other data companies entered the market. Some football managers began to look at the stats. In August 2001 Manchester United’s manager Alex Ferguson suddenly sold his defender Jaap Stam to Lazio Roma. The move surprised everyone. Some thought Ferguson was punishing the Dutchman for a silly autobiography he had just published. In truth, although Ferguson didn’t say this publicly, the sale was prompted partly by match data. Studying the numbers, Ferguson had spotted that Stam was tackling less often than before. He presumed the defender, then 29, was declining. So he sold him. As Ferguson later admitted, this was a mistake. Like many football men in the early days of match data, the manager had studied the wrong numbers. Stam wasn’t in decline at all: he would go on to have several excellent years in Italy. Still, the sale was a milestone in football history: a transfer driven largely by stats."

Deep, deep into this article, which also has loads about Prozone, Saints, Redknapp and Woodward... http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2014/01/features/the-winning-formula

What I'm suggesting is unfeasible, just as I confirmed in the original post - it's a hypothesis not based on our real situation - but then so is forking out for a player who needs to score nearly 3 goals per match to get more points per game than cheaper defensive players who guarantee you an average of 2.5 points for any match in which they keep a clean sheet. *It was actually 2.7 for Saints last season, but 2.5 for the Prem over the 10 years prior to us getting back to the division. To bring the discussion back to realistic terms and figures we might have been able to afford, one key DM so we could keep Alderweireld and Fonte together and have someone as good alongside whichever of Wanyama or Schneiderlin would have given us a much better chance of getting those 10 points. We paid £8m for Clasie - could that have been the difference? Selling Cork MIGHT have been the difference too, though it's more difficult to claim he's at that higher level - but clearly nor is Reed, yet, and nor was Alderweireld the DM solution. So £8m for Clasie, and proven defensive statistics showing where and how we were actually getting our points. Does no-one else now realise why we didn't bother buying a Pelle replacement? It's because Long and Mane covered that position if needed, and goals weren't our focus, not conceding was, and those players are also cheaper to buy.

What's "unlikely"? We failed to finish in the top 4 because we were unable to field key players in most of the matches after the draw at Chelsea and conceded 2 goals in 5 out of our last 6 league matches having only let in 2 or more in 4 of the other 32 matches combined. Stoke saw Wanyama missing and Alderweireld out of the back line to play in midfield. 2 goals conceded. Spurs was the same, 2 goals conceded again. Sunderland saw Wanyama back but Schneiderlin missing, Alderweireld again in midfield. 2 goals conceded. Leicester saw Schneiderlin missing again and Reed start with Wanyama in the middle. 2 goals conceded. (Schneiderlin was also missing against Villa, but so was Villa's defence, so it didn't matter - and even then we let one in). Man City saw us concede 2, again with Schneiderlin missing. If we had the kind of backups Chelsea have, we'd have been able to replace those 3 key players without disrupting the entire squad or having to risk Yoshida or Reed to try and get results. Realistically City away was a tough ask even with the first team on the pitch, but clean sheets at Stoke, Sunderland, and even only conceding one against Spurs, would have given us an extra 9 points. A clean sheet at Leicester would have got us 1 more. The point is that we didn't even need to score any more goals in three of those matches, just maintain the level we'd been at all season and we'd have had 9 more points. We finished 10 behind Man U - and I've written off getting points at Leicester and Man City altogether. So we were one point off the top 4 spot without needing to score ANY more goals provided the key defensive players were available.

Golf? Back waxing.

MLG's desperate bid to be the only person able to share information in the entire world is going well, isn't it?

Koeman's way of defending a one goal lead last season was usually to continue defending with at least 7 players and not to concede, teams often get out of shape over-committing chasing an equaliser.

Pretty sure no-one else came to those conclusions. Weak? Not at all, he was holding players off all the time, a lot stronger than Mane for instance. It also takes some weird perspective to see that celebration as a negative thing.

We would have made the top 4 with 2 more defenders of the ability of Alderweireld and Fonte, and another DM of the ability of Schneiderlin, which would have left us not being in the position of having to put out understrength sides in most of the last 2 months of the season, but we can't afford those kind of quality back ups so it's a moot point really.

Except Elia rarely played anywhere other than out wide and almost always on the left, and Ramirez's best position is in the middle and only plays out wide when he's in the process of being dropped for not being good enough to play CAM. They play completely different positions. The only consideration on whether one might affect the other's position in the squad would be wages.

I was interested to note my "buy a 2015/16 ST" letter a month or two back said we had 19,000 ST holders last season.

Thanks, that's new info!

As mentioned about 2 pages ago, there are numerous buses running to the stadium from the station, they're free to Vitesse ST holders, or pay for day ticket holders (and therefore away fans). The bus routes are on google maps (it even shows more frequent buses in the hour before kick off, though that doesn't include the extra buses, only the 6/7/331). To get back afterwards it's gathering point A outside the ground. You guys really need to read back through the thread.

The Premier League, Lge Cup matches and FA Cup matches are basically a constant, they have the same variety as any other season (in fact we have the possibility of one fewer League Cup match than usual as we start a round later). Within the parameters of knowing that success means we might do slightly better than before, and with that basically offset by the likelihood of fielding a weaker team, that means they can be ignored, only the EL fixtures could be considered as "additional". So I'm fairly sure they will be planning for playing some EL matches before the season even starts instead of some friendlies. The 3rd Qualifying Round 1st Leg coming before the start of the season, the second leg being offset by not having to play a 2nd Round League Cup fixture, and the Play-off Round coming whilst the transfer window is still open all means that there is basically only 2 additional games to think about before September, and with the PO Round concluding on August 27th they will know whether they have 6 additional EL matches BEFORE the end of the transfer window, which will allow them to complete or walk away from deals based on qualification or not. If we get to the knockout stages, I'd have no problem at all with the club doing some short term loan business in January which could cover off additional areas (and also potentially attract targets for the following season). In short, I bet they have it completely in hand.

"2015/16 Season Ticket holders have their usual seats reserved for the Vitesse clash until general sale begins at 9am on Thursday. However, for the Espanyol game, no seats will be held back due to the Kingsland Stand being closed. Read more at http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/news/article/20150720-vitesse-espanyol-tickets-on-sale-now-2557437.aspx#uir0UgZRqK8QXoS5.99" It doesn't say ST holders HAVE to buy their own seats for Vitesse, but the only ones they will be able to buy prior to Thursday are the ones which aren't other ST holders' seats. For Espanyol it's unreserved.

Why, when they play completely different positions?