The9

Sure I saw this rumour during the summer as well, he must be on our long list (as opposed to the Long list, which was the same list before we signed Shane Long). Not sure he'd be "cover for Pelle" at 34 and having recently been employed as a wingback in the Dutch national side.

Has no-one yet noticed that "it's only Bury", who the Skates lost to on the weekend, actually turned out to be quite crap after all, losing 5-0 to Shrewsbury last night. That makes them 8-0 worse than Shrewsbury. Yet still a goal better than Stevenage. I'm quite disappointed Saints only beat Stevenage 4-1 in the League Cup with most of the reserve team a couple of years ago now.

Cheers

The 2nd circle shows a huge empty grey space where the debt used to be...

Assuming this won't work, but try right-clicking and open it, I've been sodding about with an Infographic and can't share cos it's a free site. Gets a bit confusing around the Portpin time so tried to keep it simple. So can anyone actually see the source image by right-clicking and pasting into a new page?

If they had that much space available they'd have a new ground and training facilities envied the world over. Or they'd probably just splash the (hypothetical) investment money on players and try and buy a cup - if they were allowed.

Based on Soccerbase, starts only, all competitions. This season Matches with V Wanyama W3 D1 L2 As a %: 50-17-33 (bearing in mind two of those wins were in the League Cup) Matches without V Wanyama W3 D0 L0 As a %: 100. 2013/14: Matches withV Wanyama W9 D6 L5 As a %: 45-30-25 Matches withoutV Wanyama W10 D5 L9 As a %:42-21-38 I always thought we tended to pick him in matches where we choose to be more defensive and therefore in the matches we're more likely to lose in the first place. However... Wanyama last season (grey=did not play, bold = played). Man City H A Liverpool H A Chelsea H A Arsenal H A Spurs H A Everton H A Man U H A He played in 8 matches against the top 7 and missed 6 of them, hardly a massive factor when you consider the effect of the Lovren and Boruc injuries, for instance.

There's already a Southampton women's team, it's just got nothing to do with Saints since getting the boot along with the Radio Station when we got relegated from the Premier League last time. They don't appear to be very good at the moment, though, putting on a bit of a recovery after an administrative debacle in the late 2000s. I vaguely recall that their entire team upped sticks to play for Portsmouth at one point (or something like that). They're pretty Winchestery for a Southampton team too, I think. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southampton_Saints_Girls_%26_Ladies_F.C.

Wycombe, £17 for a terrace ticket, 23 home games a season. Women's Cup Final, £5 an adult ticket* or £10 for 2 adults and 2 children, one off event. *plus 25 FREE tickets for any Charter Standard Club and additional tickets for Adults at £3 a head. http://www.wherecanwego.com/event/834482-the-fa-wsl-continental-cup-final-at-wycombe-wanderers-adams-park-stadium/events.aspx

No-one said "pub league", "parks football" includes anything up to county level, which is an alright-ish level (with the understanding it's about the 11th tier of men's football in England). Your point about "lower levels of strength meaning a greater emphasis on passing and dribbling" is laughable. They're not competing against men, so levels of strength are only relative to other women players. The stronger players will still use their strength to their benefit, and if that's a rare quality, they'll probably be disproportionately successful until others come up to their level. No one is consciously choosing not to develop strength, and they'll just get stuffed by the first side that has strength as well as the usual levels of skill. Basically, if you have an averagely skilled side in a league where no-one has strength, and choose to develop skill as opposed to strength, you're a moron, because the marginal benefit of developing the rare skill is much greater than the benefit of incrementing the existing skills.

Legitimate point, really. Then we could have a proper argument about which sport is best without caring about the crappy minority versions that somehow end up on the tv.

I can't remember the last time I watched any athletics of either gender, but in the interests of debate - I wouldn't regard many of those competing in the Olympics as anything other than elite athletes. Even if the women are not as good as the blokes at it, they're still the best women in the world in a measurable event (where there are no grey areas like your colleague letting you down). Maybe that's easier to define as important because it's not a team sport - just like the Olympic relay team might be the fastest group of 4 100m runners from the same country, but that's nothing like as impressive as being one of the 4 fastest individuals in the world, so it gets a lower priority. Somewhere in here there's some kind of quality criteria in which I can accept all blokes who feature in this are there on merit, but that not all women are - but when I saw hypo put it like that I disagreed with the sentiment... so I'm not sure that's exactly what it is. There's also some kind of question to be had about historical importance and media values which informs the frequency and proportionality of coverage. I'm also not sure why comparing men's sport against women's is "unfair", Col, I can watch any old crap for entertainment too, I suspect the issue I have with it is the desperate need to present it as if it's on a par, when it clearly isn't. To bring it back to the main point about a Saints women's team, I guess overall I'm not bothered about it because at the end of the day, I would only care that they were better than the Skate equivalent, and THAT value is delivered by the rivalry, not the contest at all. I'd be in favour if we somehow managed to increase the club's threshold for FFP spending by spunking a load on the women's team. As Bearsy might say. But I wouldn't be keen to be "wasting" money that could somehow incrementally improve the first team even by a microscopic amount.

I think you are. There are as many who'd never change allegiance as there ever were, the ones being fickle about who they say they support are almost entirely the ones who don't actually go to matches and for whom "commitment" lasts as long as their last proclamation of support, because that's the only way you'd even know who they were supporting. They're irrelevant to a debate on ticket prices, although they occasionally pop up in a shirt - but I'd have no problem anyone charging that lot a premium for the privilege of buying a shirt anyway - and I suppose with Saints offering 10% off to ST holders that's effectively in place (albeit at the expense of genuine casual matchgoers compared to never-goers).

Don't you? Interesting. This is a remarkable piece of populist begging by Labour, presumably to counter the Conservatives' posturing on ticket prices. I have no problem with "a fan on the board" as a concept, at least in terms of fan representation over "customer" matters, eg ticket prices, community issues, practicalities of helping the club serve more people in the limited timescales around matches, merchandising, access to players, and stuff like that, but at the moment they seem to be doing alright picking up on the issues themselves, and I see no reason at all why it should be compulsory or captured in legislation. Obviously if someone wants to come along and say "you can't charge more than £35 for a shirt, you have to keep it for 2 years, plus you can't charge more than £40 for a Prem match ticket or £20 for League Two, and you have to make 10% of capacity available to local schools for free" or something, I'd have less of a problem with the concept, as the practical benefits would override it. What can I say, I'm a pragmatist, sometimes the reality is more important than the ideology.

My problem with it is the attempt to pass it off as significant or some kind of achievement, when anything where you're the "best in the world" at being a very small sub-division of a category is just empty hype. The justification for putting women's football on the BBC is presumably purely just because it is women, and they are the best women at the sport, that means that some people must be interested in it (is there any evidence that women are more interested than men are compared to the proportions of each watching Prem football?). It's pretty patronising tbh. There are literally thousands of (men's) football teams in England alone which deserve to be on television based on their athletic achievements more than any English women's football club.

I'm not even watching most Champions League group games, I'm not giving that parks-level cack the time of day no matter how many times the keeper drops a floating ball through their hands in a 5-5 draw.

Everyone knew Roberts would fail because he already had with Wigan, Blackburn and West Brom. I'd use an example like Alex Pearce at Reading, especially as some of us will have seen him for Saints - he was solid, functional and looked decent in the slower-moving, less clinical Championship, was good at clearing the ball but had no passing ability at all. Fine for the lower division, but in the Prem where decisions are more rapid, and a clearance is just turning over possession to the opposition, his style of play just invites opposition pressure. I think Jos was that kind of player - the own goals in the early Prem games were all about him being under pressure to make split-second decisions and not being able to react quickly enough.

That's because lower league football is of better quality (anywhere in the top 9 tiers of English football) AND because no-one's trying to pass a sub-standard product off as some kind of pinnacle when it comes to the likes of the Hellenic League.

I dislike Cena's stupid kiddy character, but at least he's GOT character.

Every stupid joke idea is already being done seriously somewhere... Next season's MLS numbers will look a bit like this.... Though they've also got an awful new League logo so they won't actually look like that.

This is factually incorrect, given that we'll be negotiating the deal before we know. Last year's Saints home is the style of the new 2014-16 Cyprus kit (and the old 2013/14 Armenia kit for that matter).

I won't go for less than £50.

Don't forget last year's claim that they had the cheapest shirts in the country - on a technicality, as Newport's were cheaper and some people think that's in Wales.

God I hope no-one at WWE thinks this means people want to see more of him. It would be a lot funnier if he just started doing this on the show though, preferably far away from the ring and interminable rambling scripted interviews. Stick to what you're good at, Blandy Boreton.

I *think* on closer inspection, that's it's a 2014 template (with added red line), so we'd be unlikely to end up with it.