The9

The funny bit is that at least half of that list wouldn't consider managing them under the current circumstances in a million years.

Newport County in League Two is £18 for a seat, with a £2 ticket tax on the day. Standing is about £15/£17 I think. Exeter City last Saturday charged £21 for a seat (though Newport thought the tickets were £23 and gave out some refunds, don't ask) Accrington tickets are £15, I think they may even be £13 in advance. Bury are also £15. They're my next 2 League 2 grounds next weekend - one is going to be for Accrington v Dagenham and Redbridge and it's costing more for the hotel on the Friday night than both matches combined.

Fair comment, so are we talking about the Liebherr Era (Pardew onwards), just Adkins' time, Adkins & Pochettino, or maybe the Les Reed regime being responsible for the "good influence" policy ?

He showed a previously unseen ability to suck up to our glorious leader, certainly. Forecast had a load of "do you know who I am"s and a reported punching of a woman in the face. Seaborne definitely broke his skull getting chucked out of a nightclub, Barnard wore a bandage on his hand for months due to his incident, and I'd actually forgotten about Guly's incident - weren't we already in the Prem by then ? As for "not thought any less of by his teammates", footballers don't generally give a toss about that stuff in the professional environment, none of it matters on the pitch unless there's a direct impact. Hell, even my Saturday side kept picking a guy when he was on trial for rape (my strike partner for the best part of 2 years as it happens, I never saw him away from matches) until it became obvious that his acquittal was on a technicality in some very dubious circumstances and THEN they told him not to come back - not that he was staying in the area anyway...

Um, no-one gives a toss about the FA Cup until the quarter-finals either nowadays. The prestige is practically non-existent as well. The 5:15pm final kick off time and integration within the league calendar on the same weekend as matches haven't helped.

My ST is always with me. I can't even say that of my boots nowadays.

Puncheon, Barnard, Seaborne, Forecast. All far from upstanding citizens during our rise from L1. The treatment of Puncheon actually underlines the firm line taken, however, he's undoubtedly a bottom end Prem player yet we happily shipped him out for the whole Championship campaign. Seems fairly obvious our recruitment policy has changed with the signing of Osvaldo, but he hasn't punched anyone, erected an arty composition in the centre circle or boarded any ships and asked anyone to walk the plank yet, so he can have the benefit of the doubt for now.

I've been saying we're going to sell him since we got promoted from the Championship, I'll probably be right eventually, though we do have a bit of a habit of paying people not to play under the current regime...

Which reaction ?

Thankfully. Unfortunately there will still be some spuds who boo him because they had no idea why anyone else was doing so in the first place.

No they don't. Many call their rivals "the scum" (eg Leeds with Man U), but "scummers" was unique to our fishy friends until fairly recently, until it became a derivative of "scum" for some other teams too, no doubt led by some kind of online laziness or misunderstanding on a forum.

Assuming you're not planning on selling tons of merchandise to unique visitors of course. Plastics are more likely to buy stuff on any one particular visit, partially due to the novelty, and a bit, I guess, as they've got more disposable income from not spending £500+ on attending other matches.

I think those in attendance still have an overall perspective on the game you just can't get from watching on tv - you can't see off the ball movement or where players have come from or go to outside the widescreen, and you also can't choose to focus on one thing all match if you want (like, say, Ramirez's workrate, Wanyama's passing and the full range of passing options available to him at each point, etc. Full live tv coverage is still only highlights that focus on what's happening in the immediate vicinity of the ball, though as you say, still better than the edited highlights - which is one of the reasons I haven't had much to say about why we were so much better against Liverpool than in other matches - it was very difficult to tell even from Sky's Match Choice extended highlights, because a lot of what we do with pressing initiates off-screen, and many of Saints' extended spells of ball-controlling possession just get cut if they don't lead to anything. We did seem to be high-pressing more than I've seen live, but I'd have to speak to someone who was there to check that... preferably someone who was sober.

Most professional attacking players - he did hit it with an exceptional amount of power, but plenty of others could have put it in from that position by other means with the space he had. It was an excellent finish though.

Pretty sure my ST averaged about £26 a match in the Championship that season, averages £33.50 a match this season, so stick a few quid on those prices for match by match, plus Cortese's ticket taxes, and you can see why £40 a match isn't selling out stadiums. In addition, there's now a plethora of pubs showing live matches at 3pm (or showing Saints matches live whenever) which will impact on attendances, people don't need to be in the ground OR have a Sky subscription to see every league match live without being in attendance any more, you can follow from "afar" from the pub down the road from the ground and still have the near-full match day socialising and communal match-watching.

Can we turn this into an early mathematical safety points total probability thread ? Brilliant !

Based on OTHER results so far Sunderland, Norwich and West Brom all seem to have got worse compared to last season overall, Liverpool are doing a little better - but were a lot worse against Saints - and West Ham are pretty much at the same level. So looking at that, you'd have to question if it's Saints progressing or the other sides regressing. Either way, I wouldn't mind us getting into Europe by default...

There was a ton of space out there last night. Harrison Reed came on and made two thirty yard runs with the ball unchallenged, as an illustration. Albeit late on when City had tired a bit, but Davis did similar things as well. Gaston didn't.

Not based on last night's non-performance. One hammered shot and a couple of speculative through balls in a game where there was a ton of space and time in midfield and willing forward runners with Guly and Lee to pick out. Disappointing throughout, aside from the goal, which most players would have buried, albeit not with as much power.

It seems fairly obvious from our selections that both Ramirez and Yoshida are being rested in the early part of the season in order to give them the break they didn't get due to the Confederations Cup (and the year before due to the Olympics) - I wouldn't be surprised if neither of them have had a proper pre-season and it takes a long time to get back to that level if you don't have that base. One thing last night did show me, was that Tadanari Lee is in no way a Prem player at the moment. His touch was poor when he had one at al, his reactions and sharpness were far behind those of players who have been playing even sporadically, and he just didn't look good enough. It's no wonder that he's been asked to do extra fitness.

Pretty much spot on. I've given up thinking he's on a different plane to others and decided he's just sloppy too often. He's still young but doesn't seem to have progressed at all in the past 12 months. I also think you're being a little generous to him regarding workrate, he was by no means busting a gut or showing for everything, though at times he was more defensively positioned than Davis and seemed to be operating alongside Cork. The fact he got picked for a League Cup game featuring a significant "reserve" presence is pretty telling in its own right.

We'd have sold more striped adidas shirts than plain red ones, no matter what. I don't understand the logic where people have said "we're moving from stripes to improve sales", when we are obviously reducing sales by doing so. If sales go back up if we go back to stripes all that does is show the seasons without stripes cost the club money in relative terms. No-one's going to buy a striped kit that wasn't already going to buy a striped kit but just didn't get the chance in the previous seasons. People who are weary of buying "another striped kit" aren't going to buy a red one just because it's not striped, they're just much more likely to buy an away kit instead, the colours of which have less significance for club identity. There won't be any "stripes" factor any more than there's usually a "new kit" factor - what there won't be is an "I'm not buying that, Saints play in stripes" factor.

Or maybe it's just completely different.

Logical that the loan delay would happen, if it's a season long loan it can only be terminated in Transfer Windows - but as it hasn't happened in a Transfer Window it's classed as an emergency loan which have a 3 month limit (as mentioned above). We've had a few of these kind of weird delays before when making/providing loans in order to maximise the number of games from the loan period (mostly in Championship pre-takeover), though no names immediately spring to mind.

Jouls' age is known to no man. He's the Kanu of IFC football.