The9

Decent though he was in L1, he didn't even get in the 2010-11 League 1 team of the season, "genius" is massively overstating his general "fair bit better than averageness". Pos. Player Club GK England Kelvin Davis * Southampton DF Spain Iñigo Calderón Brighton & Hove Albion DF Scotland Gordon Greer Brighton & Hove Albion DF Portugal José Fonte Southampton DF England Dan Harding Southampton MF Ireland Anthony Pilkington Huddersfield Town MF England Adam Lallana Southampton MF England Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain Southampton MF England Elliott Bennett Brighton & Hove Albion FW Scotland Craig Mackail-Smith Peterborough United FW England Bradley Wright-Phillips Charlton Athletic

Surely just another player getting their availability for transfer out there and an agent claiming we're in to get them the move they really want a la Rojo?

I certainly wasn't in favour of the car parking policy of charging fans for parking for over fifteen minutes when anything over an hour would have stopped people parking there all day, which was the supposed point of it. Shockingly, the "free" parking in the industrial estate was then taken up with people who could no longer park in the club car park. All you have to do to work out if it was a good policy or not by Cortese is look to see if Katharina's regime has changed it, and they have, to everyone's satisfaction.

Yeah, it's weird. There is no "unfair situation", the clubs have agreed the regulations to make them as workable as possible WITHOUT prejudice. What would be unfair would be basing away allocations on home attendances, so Man U would have 7500 at St Mary's. THEN there's a problem, whether fans actually have any impact on match outcomes or not. Fortunately that's not the situation.

Given Man U's weaknesses at the back and strength going forward I can't see us NOT playing with 2 wide men if they're going to play 3-5-2, it's the de facto tactical trump card to sit wingers in behind their wing backs and pull their CBs wide. We'd be 4-2-3-1 then (much as I'd like to field 12 as above...). A side with a good defence and decent attack will usually beat a side with a poor defence and great attack, though much could depend on whether Herrera and Carrick play as they give them some semblance of solidity. That will be especially effective if one of them is Elia on his debut, which is think is a possibility ahead of Long. They won't have a clue what to expect. We need to attack them, as their defence is toilet and ours isn't. Our defence is sound as long as it's Forster; Clyne, Fonte, Alderweireld, Bertrand plus Schneiderlin, Wanyama shielding.

3000 or 10%, whichever is fewer. This would be 10%.

Your logic is flawed all over the place. I would think that (unless the ticket allocation process is flawed) the first 5% who get away tickets are the people who really want to be there, the next 5% less so, thus adding less value, and so on to the people who may as well not be there, for all the support they actually provide the team. In addition, you're assuming that there is any tangible, empirically proven value to having fans at a match to begin with, when such results like the 5-2 defeat at Watford in the League Cup in 2004(ish) saw half the Saints fans ironically singing for Watford at 4-0 down, resulting in a 2-1 scoreline in Saints' favour for the last 15 minutes. Or the fantastic atmosphere at Blackburn in 2005 to watch the team utterly keel over. On the flipside, Anfield sees what seem to be 30,000 tourists sit on their hands for 95 minutes nowadays in between the two renditions of YNWA, giving no tangible benefit to the team whatsoever. It is also tangibly ridiculous to suggest that Saints' better away performances this season compared to, say, 2004/5 are due to the number of fans, and not the quality of players. All the stats for home record against away record can be just as easily attributable to familiarity with surroundings, the pitch, the changing facilities, less time spent travelling, and more importantly than all that, the quality of the team. I'm glad you've recalled the purpose of this thread, but I fail to see how any of the stuff around away allocations it is unfair, especially when, in Saints' case, we've only been shortchanged on those allowed to attend compared to those who actually wanted to, on maybe 2 or 3 occasions this season. Anyway, overall, yes, I'm pretty sure that compared to a bunch of other factors actually affecting what happens on the pitch, the crowd doesn't really do much at all. Players will always make out that it does, but good teams win away all over the place irrespective of their following.

You'll be waiting a long time for everyone to respond. I personally fail to see what unfair advantage is being gained from the allocation rules, when 1) we're not even filling our allocation 2) the home team already have loads more fans in the ground which is the only unfair part of it, and even that makes perfect sense. The point about Palace being unfairly treated because they get proportionately fewer fans at other London grounds is a nice effort at trying to make out that someone's being unfairly treated, but literally no-one at Palace has ever complained about this. So... 1) Not sure what the basis for the "unfair" complaint is in the first place... 2) If it's down to the number of fans in attendance, the home team will always have more anyway, inherently "unfair", or actually just fine due to logistics and geography depending on how you look at it. 3) If it's because they have bigger grounds and the percentage of away fans is lower in big grounds, that's only actually a problem for fans when clubs are vastly oversubscribed to away ends (which actually only really affects the big clubs when they travel away anyway). Other than that, it's just a ridiculous figure which is tantamount to an acknowledgement of the right of men to have children which gestate in a box. 4) The alternative for genuine fairness and proportionality is 50/50, not some other arbitrary figure 5) A fixed 10% figure will lead to sides with big grounds having to leave seats empty for a number of away fans who are never going to turn up, unless of course they can work out some system of finding thousands of away fans who didn't really want to go but are made to. 6) The real problem is actually about clubs not co-operating to provide an optimum number of seats at competitive prices, leading to the sale/return situation which means clubs take a smaller allocation when they might actually fill 3000. But that's a long way from finding 7500 people to go to Old Trafford on a Sunday afternoon rather than just ambling into their lounge to see it. 7) This thread is about improving the atmosphere at St Mary's, nothing else.

Nice little video, not really that much in terms of content, tells a nice story whilst cutting out most of the crappy stuff that people have to deal with (included the missed coach bit though) but it does beg the question about the club's position on selfie sticks as there seemed to be one in use, and seeing as we're sponsored by a company that makes mobile video equipment it would be pushing it to also have a policy reducing their use at matches. Not that I'm really bothered though, as long as it's not in my line of sight. Thought the hat waving was fairly entertaining if a little lame, and I'm glad we don't all have the boring wannabe hoolie attitude of some to our support.

Where's the advantage? Also, re the 7000/7500, I'm pretty sure we can always find at least 500 no matter what, hence "7000 empty seats".

Obvious.

Except Senegal are perfectly within their rights to prevent him playing for Saints in the timeframe of their participation in the AFCON, and FIFA enforce suspensions in club v country issues of this nature, so it's very much our problem.

It was an absolute non-event, and the stories of Inter wanting rid of him as a result are either an uber-dramatic over-reaction as well, or a tactical move now they've realised Podolski is a safer bet - though they've played both of them. Either way he's got no way back into Saints, and nor should he have. I'm quite hopeful he'll still be there in a couple of weeks when I'm off to see Inter v Torino.

There is no "unfair advantage", there's not even any concrete proof that having more fans makes for better results. Never mind it being unfair that Man U would, under your tangibly bonkers proposals, have to set aside 7,000 empty seats per match on the off-chance that a load of Saints fans want to decamp to an away game despite there being absolutely no suggestion that likely to be the case. Just to be clear, what is the only scenario that is actually "fair" with your argument, is actually that the ground is 50-50 home and away fans, so we should give Man U 16,000 seats, and they should give us about 42,000. Which is the bit you're actually saying is unfair anyway.

It's a bloody good job they don't do allocations based on global fanbase, then. Because I'm not sure our allocation at Old Trafford would be much compared to Man U's 37,600,000 estimated worldwide fans (2008 figures: http://www.iese.edu/en/files/S.Kuper_tcm4-40591.pdf). I'm still not sure what you think is unfair about clubs letting lots more home fans in, when most of the away sections are about right and we're not even selling out the section we have been offered.

Considering that Morocco refused to host the tournament at all due to their ebola worries, it's at least a vaguely valid concern. Though admittedly Africa is a bloody big place and it's not like they've moved it anywhere with an outbreak or got any teams playing from countries which have the problem, as they were suspended at the qualifying stage.

Fair point, I was going from memory. That does still leave 3/4 of the Prem sides playing on the Sunday/Monday/Tuesday though, which is pretty significant. They obviously weren't the Prem sides the BBC were interested in.

I'd be VERY surprised if Saints were allowed to pick him for the duration of the AFCON without Senegal at the very least being satisfied he's genuinely injured, there are previous instances of nations preventing clubs picking players until after the international break is over - if Senegal think we've pulled a fast one, FIFA's regulations allow the suspension of a player from club duty. There's also the risk that they might play him if he is half-fit, a la Agustin Delgado.

He signed on the 3rd, which was still after the deadline. The "some crappy rules" are listed above, and I'm not sure why anyone would want the draw at a time when few people could actually watch it. I'm also pretty sure the reason the matches were pushed into the week was the Christmas holiday fixture list and the lack of midweek matches.

Because he wasn't eligible for the first match, he was signed at 00:01 on 3rd Jan and the FA Cup deadline was 12:00 on 2nd Jan.

We've pretty much only stopped doing that altogether in the past 5 years, the accelerated P-T-O-N was always a bit weird, but probably necessary.

This hasn't been a problem for about 3 years. And one of the ONLY things Liverpool fans do now is sing YNWA, before sitting on their hands for 90 minutes and then singing it again just before the end. I would hate our atmosphere to be that bad. Can't use the side stands unless the club drops the price, which they won't, and no-one wants to go to the Chapel because it's not near the away fans. It's not really about banter, it's about trying to drown them out by volume.

Fairly sure sticks are already banned from all grounds as part of the ground regulations, they ruined flags by insisting on removing the stick for long enough.

Yeah, but Lovren's been getting less (i.e. no) game time because they've gone to a back 3 - which features Can, Skrtel and Sakho - and at the same time they're using Gerrard far less as a DM where he'd been utterly hopeless but seemingly undroppable. Comes to something when Lovren can't even make the 18 for AFC Wimbledon away.

DMs are always undervalued relative to their value to the team, but yeah, probably about £20-25m. And I was saying I wanted £35m for Lallana... Hopefully we'll run the price up ridiculously if we finish top 4 and he still wants to go, though.