The9

The realities of it being that their matchday revenue will drop from about 50% of their revenue to about 10% of it because of tv income. They don't HAVE to raise ST prices, but at the same time, price of living and size of the ground means that's the sensible thing to do even though they don't really need the extra money.

Isn't the reason that he does that because we don't have many attacking options outside the U21s? Speaking of which, have the club announced tonight's team yet? Just noticed there's a live stream on YouTube (though I'm going unless it chucks it down).

But with City only needing a point, unless Arsenal stick about 10 on Sunderland (which admittedly isn't impossible).

Interestingly that's exactly what happened at St Mary's.

High Bump for you

Since 2000 according to this: http://www.soccerbase.com/players/player.sd?player_id=16120 though as he's only played one match for Torquay I don't think we should be holding our breath. Boruc is out of contract on July 1st, can we please not revisit that one? There is next to no chance of him ever playing for Saints again after his refusal to sit on the bench this season. And "half season loans" don't exist, but "season long loans with the ability to recall in the transfer window" covers that option nicely.

I don't even remember the League Cup goals, so that rules those two out... Long's was technically very nice but I've scored a few of those myself so can't say it's massively difficult with that kind of time and space (and I was already yelling for him to hit it early so it's not like it was the kind of quick-thinking only the very top players can achieve); Wanyama's was decent too, needed to happen exactly as it did to have gone in and he made that happen - I think it was probably a better goal even though it wasn't as pretty. But Pelle's was excellent, he teed himself up and just to get his mass into the air to hit the ball, never mind bury it, puts it top of my list. The Schneiderlin one against Newcastle was great too, but has to be watched in its entirety to be fully appreciated, and ain't nobody got time for that. Last goal against Villa was nice too, especially Djuricic's flick, but mostly it's just a cross and sidefoot in against a terrible defence at 5-1 up.

There's a 1:1 correlation with his appearances, that's the one I'm looking at. Yoshida's goals against column also comes in a lot fewer matches - which is also why the team has scored fewer. Helpfully the chart also includes "per 90 minutes" which levels out everything in relation to how often they've played. So, Yoshida has the highest "goals against per 90 minutes" of the entire list, and only Mane and Yoshida have been on the pitch for over 1 goal conceded per 90 minutes. Schneiderlin is top with only 2/3rds of a goal per game, and he's on the pitch for us scoring 1.61 goals per game. Tadic and Forster are the next best at not conceding. In short, Morgan's presence is worth nearly a goal a game to Saints (actually 0.95 of a goal).

I see there's a new article showing the players' +/- scores (goals scored/conceded when they're on the pitch), which shows Long top of that list. Yoshida is bottom*, which should be completely bloody obvious to anyone who's seen him play (we've conceded as many as we've scored with him on the pitch), but with Mane just ahead of him (+5) the waters around overall effectiveness seem to be muddied quite a lot. Interesting stats, but difficult to assess cause and effect. http://stmarysmusings.sbnation.com/2015/5/18/8621257/saints-stats-shane-longs-intangibles *only includes those who've played 900 minutes, i.e. 10 or more matches.

High bump? Have you missed the entire point of the joke?

Mmm, I started the season defending the shirt quality, but my long sleeved shirt has a gazillion pulls on it, mostly the arms but some on the main body, plus the "pebble" on the front disappeared before our form did, somehow taking all of the stitching in that corner of the shirt with it. Worse, the club didn't have any long-sleeved shirts left in stock to replace it with, so I was stuck with it. The new adidas shirt isn't even going to be available in long-sleeved versions, which is a bit cack, will need to dig out something with red sleeves to go underneath for the winter matches. On the bright side, I won a signed short sleeved shirt AND an away shirt this year (one for some Sky online contest and one for using my bpay two weeks after they were introduced, when evidently no-one else was), so that was nice.

Yeah, "accidentally" managed to provide forward momentum for a pass to a teammate with his standing foot, definitely not by swinging his right leg as a distraction and pivoting on his left heel. It was an awesome little no look pass, took much more skill than his 35-40 yarder into the empty net on Saturday, anyone can do that.

He sure as hell meant it, too.

Which, had they not also have said they were signing someone, would have led me to think Gazzaniga was going to be that person. He might have changed their mind - he might not.

Marshall is decent-ish but still a little unproven. McGregor I'm not really sure about, whilst Sorenson is gash and has been for about 4 years - you may as well have said Simonsen.

It's inoffensive to the largest number people, nothing negative about that. Excellent analogy, if someone tried to make me wear a £50 meal at St Mary's I'd be really annoyed.

Already done the training kit thing a couple of pages ago in this thread.

Actually, I think they might have been in stock (kids sizes only) a year ago?

Pretty sure they're just placeholders for people who are desperate to buy something with a Saints badge and adidas logo on, they're not proper training kit and the logos being reversed suggests they've just slapped a Saints logo on some generic adidas products which you can also buy without it (as opposed to the actual training kit the team wears, which of course you can also buy with no logo and lots of other clubs' logos, but I hope people get what I mean...).

Ah but Chelsea will still be the champions at home in their last game, sticking 10 goals on Sunderland and holding up a banner saying "Boring?".

Difficult one that. He's started to show flashes that suggest he's used to the Prem pace now even coming on as a sub, which isn't a bad thing. I'd say £9m is a lot, but it's really about whether we can sign other Europa League standard players for similar amounts who could bring us more, and whether we just write off the investment in his development we've already made. I'd keep Elia for those reasons, I've suddenly got reasons to keep Djuricic as well. The only question for me is whether we can attract MUCH better players in on loan to buy deals next year with the knowledge that they can prove themselves (hopefully in Europa League) in 2015/16 and get themselves higher wage incentivised New TV Money deals the year after. Hopefully we can skip the recall buyout clause bit this year?

No man is an island.

So far, two games where basically everyone was bad... As for Long's first touch, he occasionally knocks it too far when he's running flat out into space - in fact he did it for Mane's third on Saturday, but Vlaar/Hutton whoever was the nearest defender didn't go for it when they were comfortably closer, and instead Long picked out Mane and he scored. He also did this early on against someone when he was played in in the first minute and didn't even get a shot off (Burnley?), but other than that, which is not his first touch, I've not seen a problem.

Not sure how you can say that when it was obvious Gerrard was going to get 90 minutes.