The9

Tomorrow? I booked Thursday and Friday for every possible date for 3QR, PO round, and all 6 Group games back in May, knowing that I'm getting at least 10 of them back, and that only 4 more days are needed before my leave year runs out in April for the knockout matches. Oh, plus last Friday/Monday for Salzburg, and the Thursday/Friday of Rotterdam - which annoyingly coincides with the 2QR results and could have an impact on ability to book stuff... ... and the draw date, booked that too.

Yeah, 10 not 14, amended.

Friday, though most likely we still won't know who we're playing til a week Thursday. We will have a better idea who we're playing on Friday morning as they will put teams into 5 Pots and we will be guaranteed to draw one of the unseeded teams in our pot. I'm guessing as there are 58 teams and UEFA have said 5 pots (with one having a different number of teams) that will mean 4 pots of 12 teams and 1 pot of 10. As there are even numbers of seeds and non seeds, on the morning of the draw we'll know which 6 (or if we're in the bigger group which 5) unseeded opponents we might face. Well, which 6 or 5 "either/ors". Then we have to wait a few hours for the actual draw. Rest assured geek fans, I've taken the day off to follow this crap, so I'll be a-posting about it (once I've done my travel research and cued up some flight info just in case).

I'll leave it to someone with better recall than me to explain how the voting structure was biased and complicated in favour of the board being able to block any takeover attempts but I have vague recollection of people who knew saying it was unnecessarily complex to preserve the incumbents' status - this before Lowe started asking for silly money for his shares.

Summary: making it up as he goes along and doesn't understand analytics.

At the moment Delph is about the equivalent of Rodriguez, but without the injury. I'm 90% sure he'll be gone next summer no matter what Villa do (I'm not comparing him to Schneiderlin), but for now, he's probably got a new deal and the kind of whopping pay rise we can't afford - which is another salient point here. Baines's fleeting success correlates almost exactly with Everton's which meant that he always had a challenge where he was, he's also known for being a bit atypical in his outlook and it's not a surprise that even if he'd had an offer he might not have wanted to move.

I'm fairly sure everyone in football knows that the top 6 clubs can outbid anyone else in England if they want to attract players. We're just very good at identifying players we can make a profit on. Seeing as it's part of our business model, I'm not sure we should be bothered by it until we have become a place that doesn't have any players we can make a profit on.

If Rodney had an experienced French antique dealer mate with him at the time telling him it could be worth millions.

I'm not quite sure which bit of your "MLT was duped" argument disagrees with anything FF has posted here, and you're well out of order (or just a bit thick) for calling him names based on a completely realistic assessment of precisely what was happening. You seem to have assumed that this is some kind of attack on Le Tiss - it isn't - no-one is saying MLT had anything but the best intentions for the club, he just happened to be backing the wrong side and it is absolutely a fact that without his support Pinnacle might have been unraveled more quickly. However, however it happened, it has turned out about as well as we could have expected for the club (Markus aside). Katharina is clearly over it, Matt Le Tiss is, why aren't you?

Lowe could and would never have raised the capital or supported the level of investment in the squad that was needed, nor built the infrastructure to the exceptional levels of today. He was happy being in charge and preventing being overthrown, and Saints existing on their new stadium revenues and Staplewood as it was. In fact his own shareholder structure was the thing that for so long prevented anyone else being able to invest in the club.

My usual argument over the last 5 years is that we need to add 6 players to the squad irrespective of those leaving, but over time, as the squad improves and FFP becomes a consideration along with our ability to attract better players, I have come to accept this also means counting fringe U21s to plug the squad gaps cheaply as "new" and this will allow us to free up wages for the sort of players who generate points (last season that was mostly Alderweireld). So... Worst case scenario (ignoring any further transfers), players who are not available to us who played last season: [Forster, Bertrand injuries], Clyne, Schneiderlin, Alderweireld, Djuricic, Elia. Players who are available who did not play for Saints last season: Stekelenburg, Martina, Cedric, (Clasie?), Juanmi, Ramirez, Rodriguez. That's pretty much a 1:1 replacement ratio, assuming Clasie in DM - but with a gaping hole in CB and probably a weakness in DM as Clasie takes time to learn team-mates' ways and the system he's playing. A pile of kids getting opportunities will pick up the slack once the obvious deficiencies are addressed. Having read Anderson/Sally's brilliant statistical analysis of causes and effects of what really happens in football this weekend, it's absolutely bloody obvious that Saints are following the model outlined in the book in strategy and outlook, just as it's obvious we absolutely need a top quality centre back and defensive midfielder. The fan often wants to buy an awesome striker to create loads of chances, but the analytics for beginners nerd knows that if we have the chance to buy a £15m striker or a £15m centre back, chances are the £15m spent on the centre back will get us a whole heap more points. The reason Saints are focusing on solid defending is because keeping a clean sheet nets you, on average, 2.5 points per match, (based on analysis of Prem games between 2000-2011). Scoring a goal is actually only worth about 1 point. This is presumably because scoring 1 guarantees nothing, whilst a clean sheet confirms at LEAST one point in every situation. Reading the game through good positioning, intercepting, stopping passes, and not making poor passes and minimising turnovers when you have the ball, are all more valuable in stopping teams scoring against us, than the creative side of the game is in making goals. Basically it's easier to organise and stop goals than it is to create them, and if you're stopping them you usually only have to score once to win. The perfect example is Saints towards the end of last season - sudden loss of key players meant we conceded 2 a game for a run of matches - how much does it cost to get the kind of world class player who guarantees you three goals, compared to how much we paid for the two or three players who were missing defensively who had been preventing us conceding two all season? I suspect there's deeper analysis to be done on whether actively playing uber-defensively reduces the value of the points you can get (do you create fewer chances? are those chances less likely to result in goals?), but to counter the single sample statistical outlier examples I expect to see in response, I'll offer Mourinho's Inter and Di Matteo's Chelsea winning the Champions League . Also, football is proven to be an "o-ring" model (named for the frozen rubber part which caused the Space Shuttle to explode), in which you are only as good as your weakest link. It kinda explains why we signed Bertrand rather than gamble with Targett last season - and why we should focus our efforts on improving the defence. That's the risk for Saints - that bringing through the kids might introduce a weak point to be exploited, which is far worse than the upside likely from them being successfully introduced. That (along with the cost of signing players already in the Premier League) could well be why we have bought cheaper from abroad rather than promoted from within in the past year. A lot of this stuff is already "known" about football, but some of it is proven and still counter-intuitive to what people believe. Anyway, this all just proves the obvious, we need to replace Schneiderlin and Alderweireld (as we've already replaced Forster in the short terms). Beyond that, we're looking at throwing mega-money at someone who guarantees us more goals than they stopped. Slight concern at Martina as the single point of failure at the moment, but that's why we have coaches.

Also, every clean sheet wins you on average 2.5 points, every goal scored is worth less than half that. Why would we become less defensive when it was being defensive that was the core to our points-taking last season?

When Schneiderlin was on the pitch we scored 0.93 goals more than we conceded. When Yoshida was, we scored the same number as we conceded (in a team with a massive positive goal difference). He will be a MASSIVE loss (as will Alderweireld) and we've got our work cut out to come close to replacing him.

I see no reason for us to drop prices at all, I reckon we'd get at least 25k at £30 irrespective of the opposition for a first European match in 12 years. About the only thing likely to dent the crowd would be getting thrashed in the first leg if we're home in the 2nd, and even then with the times we'd have shifted loads of tickets already. As for Espanyol, I had no intention of going (ridiculous really when I've just spent about £600 going to Salzburg), but the "extra fiver" double purchase deal has swung it for me. Also, West Ham tickets were £20 on the night (or would have been, had they not sold out beforehand).

I don't think I'm helping much when mentioning that I had the pleasure of seeing Cuco in Salzburg from behind the goal we were defending and he looked completely lost - Stephens didn't help much, they were slow to react between them, Mané didn't get back enough and he was left exposed time after time. Even so, his reactions to positional mistakes were slow and I can't remember him doing anything much with the ball either. Fonte was doing the running and organising for 4 of them in that match. Hopefully it's a blip and he'll get what's expected of him sorted soon, and Targett's return may at least give him some examples, but it was not a promising start.

I got as far as point 2, which is totally wrong, and stopped reading.

I'm glad you've moved on from being a moron about tickets to being a moron about other things you know nothing about. Well done.

Posting this from Munich Airport (in work tomorrow...), not particularly bothered that two half strength sides with our best two ex-players missing lost, I'll only be bothered if those two gaps aren't filled. Stekelenburg and Cedric already look good buys. I'm actually more annoyed by the white numbers on the green kit, what an awful choice.

Not as silly as it sounds, the one side of the ground was basically a load of portakabins with a single tier, the rest was two tiers, there's some validity to the idea that him being further from the majority of fans would quieten the crowd. It wasn't that many making the noise either, the ones near us in the hardcore home singing section were pretty quiet about him, booing and whistling was all from the side opposite the "portakabins".

Makes sense, given that the programmes were laid out on the seats so he wouldn't have had his other job to do...

He will if our stats say a cross to the far post is more likely to result in a goal than a shot.

Red Bull fans (with a few Saints fans near them singing the "real words"). For some reason the Tony Christie song is popular in Germanic countries, Bayern fans sang it during the Champions League Final against Chelsea too.

Neither Martina nor Yoshida should be near the team as right back (based on Martina's single awful left back outing, which I readily accept he may significantly improve on, hopefully and Yoshida's general poorness there the few times he's tried it). Didn't we decide to use Hooiveld at CB and Fonte right back one time in 2013/14 rather than move Yoshida to FB? Hopeful we've got an excellent CB lined up, the Bertrand thing is unfortunate, Alderweireld I'm not quite over yet, no much how they lay it at his door.

I seriously doubt we'd switch the home or away game (Saints have already confirmed a Thursday on the Newcastle moved fixture page) and we'd also only have from 23rd until 30th to arrange things anyway, unless we drew one of the few unseeded teams going directly to 3rd Qualifying Round. It MIGHT be possible if Saints contacted both possible opponents and confirmed preferred days and home/away order before their 2nd Qualifying Round games, but then we'd probably know about that before the 23rd as well. The important bit is that they keep us as informed as possible, and they were absolutely crap at telling us what was going on for the Salzburg friendly tournament (I'm currently in Munich). I had to tweet them twice over a week to get them to confirm what Red Bull Salzburg were saying months ago, and they didn't put anything official out until the Thursday before the Saturday tournament. That's just not good enough when fans will be potentially spending hundreds of pounds to watch the matches. On the bright side, not going to get to sit next to the opposing team's drummer and chanting brigade many times in my life, and our tickets were €16 not the ripoff €32 most Saints fans paid for their top tier perch.

They'd spend literally the whole time digging holes in the pitches and trying to find places to hide the thousands of unsold £5 Sondico shirts they've got left to place curses.