The9

Decided to stay in Amsterdam until Saturday evening's flight back and pretend it's a Citybreak for the wife.

They will be wearing adidas kit by then, and unless adidas have a sneaky 3rd shirt up their sleeves we won't be wearing yellow next season.

I thought we got over the excitement of websites updating the team lists for the forthcoming season when we stopped getting promoted.

My FB profile pic is currently me in Bucharest in October 2003 for some reason...

If there's flooding due to rising tides, how exactly does a causeway open linking Pennsylvania to the European mainland? Or is this one of those "Israel is in UEFA" things?

There's a big difference between the possible of how a player might acclimatise to the set up and fit into the side and the reality - no amount of stat matching will give us the level of information we get from Elia having actually played matches. As with Long, I think his defensive work is massively underrated despite being essential to the team.

I think we can come happy 7th after a season in midtable, as opposed to miserable 7th after a season in the top 6. Europa League might cost us about 10 points over the season, it just puts us in Everton's position last season really. Oh, and the difference between Saturday football and Sunday football for me is the need to be sober for Monday.

Which season did our involvement in Europe cause our relegation then? 2004/5 we weren't in Europe, and any relegation prior to that would have been when the european competitions were straight knockouts and you only had to play 10 extra matches to win it.

Whatever happened to Stevo anyway? Always amused me when people used to call him Steve, which wasn't his name.

I'm shocked that this hasn't captivated the masses. Anyway, in other "not news", Saints playing at Feyenoord on July 23rd means we'll need an away kit (or Feyenoord will launch an away kit by then and they'll play in it at home)... I'm also hoping to see Valencia's mental red/yellow/blue thing close up in Salzburg.

And I'm sure they're always the matches against Stoke and Leicester, rather than Arsenal, Man U etc.

I'm absolutely fine with anyone who only wants to see Cat A games getting charged a premium, it's completely fair - anyone who only wants to see Saints will find plenty of matches they can buy tickets for without a membership.

Sounds completely fair to me. If you're only planning on going to one game in a season and it has to be a Cat A one I hope it costs a fortune.

I'd assumed one of the other reasons for the membership scheme would be that it might lead to the club taking bigger allocations, knowing that people had paid for priority and would be more likely to use it, though that's a pretty tenuous link when they already must know exactly what proportion of ST holders to non-ST holders are buying for away matches.

My new question for discussion is - assuming the green/navy kit is revealed as the away shirt, what are they going to do with the sponsor? Assuming it's going to be either veho, muvi or one of their other brands, the away shirt has a navy diagonal sash over a green shirt, but just slapping a sponsor over a diagonal looks a bit weird - they're unlikely to break the sash because that generally looks awful, so I wonder if there's the possibility of either a diagonal sponsor running within the sash, or maybe the "Saints Foundation" style small sponsor in the space under the branding logo like we had in the match where we wore the sash kit and plugged the Foundation in 2010/11. So, three questions really: 1) which veho sponsor? 2) what colour text (white, green, navy?) 3) where on the front of the shirt?

Just about, it's become the norm and no-one's showing any great signs of reversing the trend even though (for instance) NFL teams go years on end without changing their shirts. Saints went to the "every year" model when they signed up with Umbro 7 years ago, and only going into administration caused us to have not changed the home shirt every year since the great escape season in the Championship.

Pretty sure we can register whatever we like as a European kit, there are no regulations which say it has to be like our domestic colours.

Another factor this season will be if we make the Europa League group stages, which will shift a load of our matches between September and December to Sunday which is bound to hit demand.

Ah but what it will do is ensure the two adults who only want to see Chelsea, Man U, Man City, Arsenal and Liverpool are now paying the club £25 for the privilege of having the remotest chance of getting those tickets, and this is to be applauded. The ones who just want to see Saints will still get the chance to buy tickets for the likes of Sunderland, Stoke and West Brom, which will usually get to general sale whether there's a membership system or not. It's only really an issue if you can only get to a few matches and they happen to be the ones you wouldn't usually be able to get tickets for, getting membership or not has always been a bit of a gamble on that front. The other question is how will this affect ST holders trying to buy an additional ticket for a mate? I guess they need membership too.

Logically red and white stripes. The blue and white stripes argument would only be the case if he'd tried to make us look like Portsmouth, which he didn't.

To be fair, you are likely to have a lot more insight into this than any Saints fans - I only have the foggiest clue what you're on about because I'm reading the book at the moment... Your thoughts about Beene and Boston are confirmed in here: http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2011/oct/12/liverpool-boston-red-sox-henry - a fair way in. They were at least in theory attempting to use some of the tenets of sabermetrics to deliver their success. As an aside, one of the problems of the A's model is obviously that if everyone else starts doing what you're doing then the advantage you have disappears and you're back to square one, still less money than the others but now with them all using your methods to recruit the same players you wanted at fees you can no longer afford to pay. FWIW in hindsight I think the A's success was also due to the very specific rules around baseball - like the draft and the protected period you get on signing players before they are allowed to leave and negotiate much bigger contracts. Saints for one would have been delirious if it was the case in football, as we'd be keeping all our Academy players for a fixed number of years and no-one could take them - in reality we lost half the team due to our successes and that might keep happening. There's obviously scope for a different type of analysis of football, just as there was for baseball, but when Man City (start of last season) say they are happy to share their performance data in the hope that someone will develop something beneficial to football analysis, you have to assume there's nothing out there for football yet which makes links between key activities and results in the way OPS (that's on-base and slugging percentage, geeks) correlates to wins in baseball. Which is not to say there's not a load of data, but it's WAY easier to see the relationship between pitch/hit/location runs/wins (and to compute stats which produce a "cost of losing a player from a position") than it is the infinite possibilities of non-set play football. To do that kind of analysis in football you have to look at all kinds of variables, all of which make the underlying cause more difficult to ascertain. Prozone may tell you how many passes, and where, and goals from crosses etc. and you hear rumours of Germany analysis time in possession per player per action and getting their success from working out that players need to hold the ball for a maximum of x seconds because after that time the opportunity has gone, and you hear that Aguero's title winning goal came from taking one more step nearer goal to increase his goalscoring chance from 50% to 70%, but there are still SO many different permutations that it must be incredibly difficult to coach or more importantly work out which players have the skillset to be coachable or already deliver the kind of play you want to focus on. Aaaanyway, Liverpool are hilarious, moving on.

Depends if you think the last 16 of the CL is "a long way" - they've got that far in 2006/7 (lost to Barcelona), and 2012/13 (beat and lost to Barcelona in the group, lost to Juventus 5-0 on aggregate in an absolute cake-walk in the knockout round). Given that I think we're comfortably better than current "no-one to compete with domestically" Celtic, I'd be happy enough if we could beat their performance last season of getting to the last 32 of the Europa League before losing by one goal to the worst Inter Milan side in 60 years. As an aside, it is bizarre that now they have to go through the CL qualifiers and usually drop into the EL they get to play nearly as many European games losing in the last 32 as they did losing in the UEFA Cup final in 2003, or winning the European Cup in '67.

Logically you'd expect that one membership = one priority ticket, or they'd only sell one membership to a really popular guy.

When you compare our membership scheme to the unfathomable mass of additional costs the likes of Arsenal put on being able to buy a ticket if you're not a season ticket holder, I think it's pretty reasonable to charge (approximately) 65p a league match for the privilege of getting priority on tickets. It does also make it much easier to sort out priority for the bound-to-be-massively-oversubscribed Europa League 3rd Round Qualifying match considering they'd only have ST holders and then "everyone else" in the database at the start of the season - they must be hoping we play someone like Sunderland or West Brom really early in the season to link the Europa League game against. Though £25 is quite a jump from the £10 it was about 10 years ago when we last had it.

Ridiculous how everyone got taken in by a stunt so obviously designed to prevent a backlash against Emirates sponsoring the thing in the first place.