The9

I'd have Lovren back for a cut-price £5m in a second. Already proven link with Fonte and a lot less likely to go wandering off to Liverpool the second time around. Better than Yoshida and Gardos.

Elia and Djuricic both contributed a bit, difficult to claim they weren't worth having.

Not that strange, he's probably got minor tears and damage in both and would benefit from some surgery to tidy it up, but Saints wanted to make sure they had a signing lined up before letting him go ahead. The other possibility is he has wear and tear damage that already needs surgery for pain relief in one knee and they may as well tidy up the other one at the same time to prevent it getting worse or him having to miss another 6 weeks to have that fixed.

Gaston's new mohawk needs to be seen to be believed...

Quite. Everything Spurs and Atletico are doing is contingent on Atletico being able to completely ignore a pre-existing contractual agreement. But no harm in looking around for decent CBs. Who did the top 4 in the (non-English) top 5 leagues in Europe have sat on the bench last season who we can get in on loan?

Better off getting one made for Sam McQueen.

...as Bevis Mugabe is also injured. The fact it's only a 2 year deal tells you all you need to know about how confident we are this will work out in the long term. Stop-gap signing to stop us looking completely exposed at the back with Forster, Clyne, Alderweireld and Bertrand currently out from last season's first choice starting back 5 - three of them have now been replaced.

Lisa Simpson would absolutely kick Blackmore's ass. I imply, you infer.

And he probably will, provided the money's better than Saints were prepared to pay. He's already said pretty much that he's easy where he ends up, wants to play and knows his best chance of getting away from Atletico's bench is to go along with what they want to do to get the most money, with the proviso that it's not obviously going to be detrimental to his career.

Could be anything though, even if it's directly related to that situation (and there's no guarantee it was, though the timing is interesting), it could be that the text was poorly worded and unfavourable for Saints, that there was ambiguity, that the contract didn't represent the agreement management had decided on, or any number of other things.

Can't argue with the other bits, but I don't think you've done much to address the "glass ceiling" question, when you've spent quite a while previously pointing out how there was no next level and how we can't get there anyway - so is your point that the ceiling isn't glass so we're never getting above where we are, or that there's no ceiling and we can finish in the top 6/4/whatever the criteria for a glass ceiling is?

I have no idea, but I'm guessing it was somewhere around 8th, seeing as seemed like we spent practically the entire season in 8th that season. Not sure what your point is? If it's about us improving since, we have, but each position above where we are is incrementally that much more difficult to achieve due to the scale of expenditure and probability of the teams with the biggest wage bills not messing up over the course of 38 matches. We all saw what we could achieve on a level playing field, and with our first choice team on the pitch, but we can't do that every week, that's one of the challenges.

They do, but, under all the usual crap, is the legitimate question "can we continue to do it?". Bolton were bloody marvellous at exploiting short-term deals for once-stellar players in the twilight of their careers to augment the slightly more run of the mill Prem journeymen they slotted into the gaps, and Wigan were excellent at bringing in cheap overseas players to enable them to compete at the top level for nearly 7 years - but BOTH of those teams fell out of the Prem when their model stopped working, or they lost a key element of their success and couldn't replace it. And they were merely existing in the top division, we're actually trying to hang around in the top 6. Structures and systems are one thing, but the evolution needs to be continuous and sometimes decisions won't work out - we can't afford to make too many of those.

I actually thought it was a genuine and open-ended question for once, until the completely fvvcuking preposterous attempt at a sentence in bold above there. Have you even for one second considered that the reason we sold less under Cortese was that for the first 4 years of his tenure no-one wanted to buy any of our League One and Championship players, and even if they did they couldn't match our wage offers at that level? The reason we didn't sell anyone in the 18 months he lasted as CEO in the Premier League was because we were utter gash for the first 6 months, in the bottom half for the second 6 months, and that he sodded off 6 months late in mid-season knowing that all the players who had become good were all about to jump ship due to failing to reach the Champions League in 2013/14 as a result of having an upper-midtable squad with no depth but a lot of empty promises? Almost all of last summer's instability was Cortese's fault, for promising the players things he was in no position to deliver, that they decided they'd go and get for themselves.

I'm amazed anyone's clicked on it at all, three weeks before the previous season's away kit is even launched.

That was Turkish that just replied to you, assume it came with the level of sarcasm attached to his posts about how wonderful the Cult of Cortese was.

Just because this thread is still twitching, and this is a 2015/16 adidas shirt, here's the new Man U shirt finally leaked properly: I like the old-school style adidas Man U collar from the 80s, clever design. They've undone it all with the hideous jagged trefoil thing going on with their black change kit though.

I can confirm 2. I wouldn't worry for that long, they're only sending you a pre-ticket thingy to exchange for the actual ticket at the ground anyway IIRC.

Only mentioned that in the first sentence, FFS.

The king is dead, long live the king! : http://www.saintsweb.co.uk/showthread.php?54570-The-Rather-Previous-2016-17-Saints-Kit-Thread#.VZqe5vlViko

You may as well have said "first!".

I promised not to open it until there were 2016/17 leaks to discuss, seeing as aside from 2 people on last year's thread saying they'd heard we'd be wearing Under Armour, and the knowledge that both the adidas deal and the Veho deals run out in 2016, there has been literally no 2016/17 kit news at all. Until now. So, according to THIS site and @LaCasacaBlog on twitter, next season's (national team) adidas kits, will have the three stripes down the side of the shirt as well as the sleeve. As the original site is in Spanish, I've cut and pasted the translation: They also have Sweden, Colombia and Mexico, but you get the gist. Here's the Argentina mock-up for illustration - you'll note they're created by the site, not adidas - hence the boots looking rather Nike-ish: Don't forget, at this stage Saints could wear any brand at all in 2016/17... rumours are going to be a bit thin for the next 6 months, hell we haven't even started selling the lime green away kit for 2015/16 and don't know what's happening with the need for a panel on the back of the striped shirt for the Europa League 3rd Qualifying Round yet - but there you go, 2016/17 rumours have started. One thing I will say - I'm pretty sure the Premier League kit rules prevent clubs from displaying branding logos or motifs anywhere on the shirt other than a band down the sleeve and an area on the chest, so these adidas designs with the 3 stripes in the shirt-side area could actually be against the regulations. Oh, and that Germany away is VILE.

£14.50 plus a £2 booking fee as I couldn't be bothered to collect at the ground. £31 for two of us, and 50,000 in the stadium. Audi Cup in Salzburg on tv too, can't wait to see how bad our defence is this weekend... when I get to the ground.

There's obviously some re-checking of legal documents going on all around at this point.