The9

I'll be in Milan watching Inter v Torino for the wife's 30th (though strangely my birthday also happens to be whilst we're away), so missing this one. I'd expect us to put the usual cup team out, a couple of rotations and a strong core. Forster; Clyne, Fonte, Gardos, Targett; Cork, Reed; Ward-Prowse, Long, Elia; Pelle. Subs: K Davis, McCarthy, Bertrand, S Davis, Tadic, Isgrove, Seager (or Gallagher, depending on rumours).

Wrong.

Lambert, Steven Davis, Fonte, in that order. Three absolute bargains.

That's nice, we've had nothing but problems with them just not working and have now stopped even bothering to try to use them.

Nobody's calling for a recreation of any retro shirt. Originals or gtfo.

The adidas thing is definitely ripe for discussion in the Pointless Kit Thread...

Surely not! Me, you, davefizzy14 and Redslo so far. Plus Katarina, Katerina and Katrina from others.

It's the same colour as the yellow on the shorts and socks they've already worn numerous times this season. Daft thing is that you can buy the socks, because they're the GK socks. The yellow shorts are very similar to the keeper's shorts but with a different coloured Saints badge, the navy shorts they're wearing are obviously the normal away shorts. They must have had special dispensation from the Premier League because the yellow shirts aren't listed in the PL handbook (though the yellow alternative shorts and socks are).

Yes, having been there for their French Day a couple of seasons ago, when Schneiderlin amusingly scored the opener.

https://pbs.twimg.com/tweet_video/B7dWR_UCEAEZq7v.mp4 Add this to the list of "not been sold" Saints kit. You can get the shorts and socks though.

Saints and Newcastle both played in their home kits at St Mary's. Anyway, do we really need multiple threads on this? There's already a kit thread (a 2014/15 one and a 2015/16 one for that matter).

So ill-informed. Sunderland themselves have already worn all white against Palace this season that you can't buy. Sheffield Wednesday wore 4 different kits in one season circa 1997, they weren't selling them all. We also played the whole of the 2005/6 season wearing a yellow away shirt you couldn't buy, plus a bunch of other kit that hasn't been on sale (that I've listed on here at least twice before). Finally, never mind Sunderland playing in red, Saints v Newcastle at St Mary's saw both teams in their home kits.

I'm not sure that year's stock problem wasn't that they ordered too much, it have been the case that the navy/fluorescent stuff wasn't released until after Xmas, which would have had a massive impact on sales. They ran out of the white/black stuff pretty quickly.

It's exactly the same design as the navy away with the colours reversed, not sure why you think it looks like a training shirt? I thought we'd have broken this out for Palace, but there you go. And they're not selling it, so anyone want to get me one? :/

Last home game of 2002/3 (FA Cup Final) season was a 0-0 draw with Bolton on 3rd May 2003: The last match we wore the striped sleeve (FA Cup Semi-Final) shirt at St Mary's was the 3-2 win against Leeds on 19 April 2003. I'd completely forgotten that, but you're absolutely right. We did also wear the striped sleeve shirt it replaced in the last League match at The Dell though, prior to wearing it for all of 2001/2 and 2002/3 (except the last match).

Every adidas shirt for years has had a break in the stripes and a plain patch on the sleeve for the addition of Premier League (or other competition) patches, there's no way that's accurate.

We'll need a solid back panel for the numbers to sit on, most shirts don't even have stripes on the back on the top half now anyway, and I think we've moved on from the fury of 2004. Something with a solid top half and stripes underneath for Euro games, with a fully striped version for Premier League would be fine.

I'm expecting us to win all the home matches against the bottom half, 75% of the aways against the bottom half, and 50% of the games against the top half. That would be... ...about 34 more points on top of our 39 so far. 73 points then.

They might have got Pelle and Tadic on dirt cheap wages for all we knew, and then sold all the players to repay outstanding loans and remove funds from the club. For instance. On July 26th I could see why people thought it was an asset strip - the confusing bit was why if the club was being sold we'd bother to sell the assets first - apparently that was down to the "buyer" wanting to pay less for the core club without the high player contracts or something. It was worrying, and there were grounds for concern AT THAT POINT. Fire sale, however, was always nonsense, just because of the good values we got for the departing players.

Tadic and Long both faffed in the box when they should have shot, other than that, everything was difficult with the wind shifting the ball randomly.

Disappointing display? We were bloody superb! Scored early and strangled them to death without looking remotely troubled. Pitch looked bad but it actually didn't bobble very much and in the second half the wind was more of a factor. As it was for the drive back from Portman Road, along with the torrential rain and lorries displacing spray all over everything. Thankfully I got to the car by 10pm (£1 car park next to the ground!) and we were home in Hedge End by 1am. Can't understand people saying it was boring, it was an excellent performance and Ipswich's failure to create anything was due to our superb defensive work, they had no ideas and no hope. When we went forward we looked threatening and Steven Davis again proved why he is so important to us by keeping the tempo high when we went forward. Real shame about Wanyama's injury, hopefully Cork's comeback will be complete this weekend and without midweek games and thanks to the FA Cup 4th Round, maybe Wanyama, Alderweireld and Schneiderlin might only miss a couple of League matches.

That overlooks the fact that if we go a goal up we can shut the game down by keeping possession without needing to throw numbers forward too. Ipswich last night never looked remotely like scoring, the offside decision was comfortable (and the flag was up well before the shot) and other than that we strangled them and with Championship level players they couldn't even get touches near our box.

That was the last time we did it, true. EDIT: Not true, see below

There's a Prem rule allowing teams to wear the next season's kit for their last home or away game of the season. I think we're missing a trick not releasing a shirt in May, they do tend to leave it a bit late and I'd rather the cost was spread across the summer with the other shirt released just before the season starts. With two kits and a (couple of) season tickets to fork out for the more widely spread over the close season, the better. Essruu may be on a wind up, like Turkish, but at least there's an outside chance one of the players might have actually said something. Can't see us de-striping myself, too unpopular. No idea if we have reverted to adidas, quite surprised we haven't had some kind of announcement, given that due to the "no-branding" we probably don't have any kind of contract stopping us doing that.

Cheers Katharina - I hope the stuff I keep hearing from various places about us always being a selling club is garbage, and we can keep the core of the squad this time and build on it, without having to rebuild all the time. Sustainable growth is great, but I hope we can step up the investment in line with the additional prize money if we make CL group stages. Actually, there's a dilemma around that - coming 4th (which would be nice) would give us a qualifier and no guarantee of CL dosh, but we'd need to consider how we'd cope if we DID make the CL groups and leaving it until after the qualifiers to get players in would be pushing it a bit. Still, cross that bridge when we come to it...