The9

Bloody hell, I was about to volunteer as well.

FWIW I think about half that list are better than Mayuka (though probably none of the strikers other than maybe Pekhart, who's a Czech international now).

In an injury crisis affecting an entire midfield's worth of players, where you're missing anyone who has played AM because you have to use them at DM to cover injury, yes Ramirez would play. But the one area of the squad we we DID have a reasonable amount of depth was midfield, and under normal circumstances he'd have had barely any match time. He'd be about 7th choice midfielder.

I'd say we were exactly our normal selves against Leicester, teams can hold on for a lot longer nowadays by just defending and we did well to break them down. We had a load of energy and missed a load of chances. Basically if we don't score early, we usually don't score. If people can't look at the starting line-ups and say "oh, right", then they're missing the point. First fatigue from relying on the same core, then injuries and suspensions to that core caused by being asked to play too frequently (and against better opposition), and now maybe a lack of confidence from losing a couple of matches to teams we'd beat with a rested fully fit first XI. It's only going to get worse in the next couple of weeks, so enjoy Christmas and New Year and we'll see where we are in mid-January. We'll also see what we can manage in the transfer market too.

Mane's an excellent footballer in patches, Mayuka, well, he's my benchmark for squad depth. If he's on the bench we don't have any. As for the overall "wheels fallen off", it's hardly surprising with the injuries and lack of depth in the squad. As I may have mentioned in October, when most of your covering options involve players playing in different positions to those they're used to, it's impossible not to impact on the team overall. We have an EXCELLENT team, and a fairly ropy bench. We can give anyone a game with a fully fit, rested side, and we haven't had that since before the Villa game. Still, it's not like we've got to play Chelsea, Man U or Arsenal in the next fortnight. What? Oh. Plus Everton after their first midweek break in ages and Palace away? Ah. Well, at least we're not losing the AFCON players for two additional games in January, and when Sheff U draw Chelsea we can give a sigh of relief.

It'll be about getting an early goal and making them chase the game and picking them off whilst retaining our shape and playing within ourselves. Should be possible. Worst case scenario for all concerned is we go all the way to pens and lose.

Some ART-level mentalism in that lot.

I have to say that since I've retired from playing (last new boots I had were in December 2010), I've become more and more bewildered at who in the hell would want to be seen in the ever-more ridiculous boots which are being produced. It's practically an in-joke at the expense of the entire football industry by the top boot brands - who can produce the ugliest, stupidest, most pointless design? Now they're releasing different colourways of their various silos practically every week, and charging double what they used to for elite boots which are better than the super-premiums, and anything else they can think of to extract money. Glow in the dark boots? You play football in the dark then? Then again I never wore a single pair of coloured boots between 1981 and 2014 to begin with. I appreciated the design features and got on board with Predators and blades and suchlike, but the coloured boot stuff was always ridiculous to me.

I don't think you understand the blue line thing. It doesn't mean "ignore it", it means "we've taken it on board and don't need to keep harping on about it".

My thoughts are that we've moved on and there's no reason to take a punt on a manager who has proven the ability to stay in the division, when we have one who's proven the ability to get us into the top 6 for half a season. Times and personnel change, and Koeman's better suited to the current lot.

As I said at the time (becoming a theme recently, don't worry, I'll be back to predicting stuff like Sharp to be better than Lambert in the Prem soon), I didn't understand why Adkins took the Reading job and put himself in a situation of either having to miraculously keep them up or then get them back up, when he'd already proven he could get out of the Championship AND stay in the Prem with Saints. If he'd waited a few months longer he might have been in contention for Stoke, Sunderland or Crystal Palace and the chance to build a side with a bit more Prem experience. His choice meant he needed to prove himself again at the same level he'd already achieved, and short of taking Reading to the Prem top half, he could only damage his reputation from that point. Nevertheless, he was superb for Saints, and anyone saying otherwise is a total idiot.

Half way means nothing. The schedules aren't mirrored, the opponents are not even equally split across the two halves of the 18 fixtures. We don't play Chelsea in the first half of the season and play them twice in the second half. Lucky for Saints, who can hard sell the half-season ticket on all the category A home games we have left (though one of them is Villa!). Equally, previous performance is no guarantee of future success.

A false position is a position which is better or worse than you'd have if you played an even spread of teams from across the whole division. The easiest way to work it out retrospectively is to fit individual results against the final league table to see where teams over or underperformed compared to the result you'd expect them to get.

They're not in a false position, they've actually played a few of the top sides - us a month ago, that was a "false position", you're always going to look better playing the worse teams (unless you're very good, very bad or very weird).

I have nothing to speculate, but here are some pics: The pink/red inside colour can be seen on the away kit pic. Morgan's been wearing the turquoise colour ones most of the season though. Wanyama was wearing the yellow Magistas earlier in the season: and he's now wearing the turquoise ones blacked out.

He moves the ball on quickly precisely in a way to develop attacks that slower or less aware players aren't able to do, which allows us to exploit un-set defences and score goals from the next couple of passes. Lallana did something similar last season, lots of important possession stuff high up the pitch, not that many direct assists or goals, but we had someone who could hold the ball in difficult positions and enable others to get involved in support. Davis' role is to shift the ball from non-threatening positions into threatening ones, but notsomuch by providing a killer forward pass. I'm thinking of stuff like picking out Bernard's overlapping run or quickly spotting someone in space who can deliver a through ball. A decent stat would be to compare how many goals we've scored where Davis is and isn't involved in the 5 passes before the goal.

I understood your response. But he's been demoted irrespective of his relationship to Cropper, he's behind one more goalkeeper than he was this time last year when they're all fit (ignoring Boruc as Koeman is too).

Good God, what an appallingly poorly thought out law.

But last season Gazzaniga was second choice, and played a few times when Boruc was out. So he's definitely been demoted from there.

Interesting questions which tangibly have butkus to do with football, but definitely worth answering. Good job I didn't decide to be a Newport fan at the start, that would be even more confusing than my national identity already.

Usual dig at the questionnaire here - the options for "how often do you go" are Three or more times a month Once a month Several times a year (then less frequent options) 19 home games a season, a couple of cup matches, maybe about 5-10 aways in a season, that works out around twice a month. So, um... a massive number of people will want to choose somewhere between "once a month" and "three times a month" (anyone who goes more than 12 times and less than 36 times a year in fact) and there's nothing for them to choose. "Several times a year" is listed after "once a month" and the other options are of decreasing frequency, and as a result "several" will be perceived as less than once a month and isn't appropriate either. Shoddy design.

My mistake, we were 2 points off 2nd at the start of Dec 1st, after 12 matches. http://www.statto.com/football/teams/southampton/2013-2014/table/2013-11-30

Given that he was excellent against Spurs we could do worse than flog him to them at double the fee.

Didn't work on Saturday.

Um, Mane was excellent against Spurs and went past the full back (Naughton before Dier) over and over again. Until he missed a "sitter" he couldn't even see until it was on his boot.