The9

To put that into perspective, there wouldn't have been a person that paid to get in that day who is now under retirement age. England had never lost a home football match, the backpass law was 37 years from being implemented, Saints have two current players who wouldn't even be born for 43 years afterwards, and the Queen had her Coronation that year.

We're not a proper modern Prem club until we've signed one of the following : A Ba / Baba / Diagne / Dialla / Diouf / Diop / Diarra / Diawara / M'Bai / M'Baye / Camara / Kamara / Mo / Mohamed / Cheick / Abdoulaye / Amdy / Abou / Souleymane / Cisse / Pape / Papa / Papis Not sure whether Henri Camara on loan still counts as that was last time around.

Nope. Everything to do with the way people with lots of money decide to spend lots of money. Nothing to do with football ability at all, given that he was almost certainly on similar money to many of them. The comment about losing 3/4 of his salary does show the kind of wage cut players who don't see out their contracts might be being asked to take.

I roll this out every so often. ALL of the starters still under the age of 33 are still contracted professional footballers apart from Baird, who has played in a Europa League Final since leaving, and Folly. The majority of the others have had Championship-level careers. No-one has crashed and burned directly as a result of this, but it's very difficult to make a case that chucking them all in at the same time with a few borderline first team pros was GOOD for them. P Smith - at Southend in L1 after playing mostly Championship with Forest M Cranie - at Barnsley (Championship) after bouncing around Championship and L1 D Kenton - now 34, retired in 2009 after joining Leicester, Leeds and Cheltenham - tangibly wasn't goo enough anyway. M Mills - career in the Championship with Doncaster, Reading, Leicester and now Bolton. C Baird - 31, played for Saints in Championship then Fulham in Prem for 6 years, now 31 and unsigned N McCann - 38 and retired having gone back to Scotland and played for 5 more years R Delap - managed another 6 years of mostly Prem football at Stoke, currently with Burton aged 37 Y Folly - now 28, played L1/L2 with Plymouth and Sheff Wed under Sturrock before moving to Aberdeen, released in 2012 T Walcott - Prem, Arsenal. N Dyer - now Prem with Swansea after leaving Saints and a few Championship seasons K Jones - Prem with Stoke, usually on the bench but sold for a big old profit D Blackstock - Championship career mainly QPR and Forest D McGoldrick - Forest bought him for a million and after a season or two in Championship mainly loaned him to L1 sides, now Championship again with Ipswich. S Gillett - Championship level with Doncaster and Forest M Tejera - who knows ? A McNeil - went to Hibs (30 appearances), Montrose, Raith and now at Livingston. If anything, the evidence is that almost all those players were good enough, but they all needed to be brought through gradually, supported by a body of experienced pros. For evidence of a side of "not good enough" youth teamers all chucked in at the same time, look to the Championship side of early 2008/9 (and overlook the 3-ish players on both lists) - or maybe they just didn't have enough experience to guide them.

Probably the most well-balanced and reasonable threads on here. I assume you've never read it ?

Same thing happens with me when I see people who haven't bothered to learn English before writing it.

Also gives a new meaning to the "Norwich Build Up" thread.

How did people who didn't find this funny somehow happen upon it anyway ? Apart from Googling "Delia Smith c-unt" as stated in the comments, of course ? I did well to get past that apostrophe in "Managers" in the first sentence. It was ok, too much sexy time though, literally becoming a one-trick pony ?

Thanks for saving me the trouble of clicking the link.

Given that one of our main tactics is for the full back to overlap into the space created by the wide right attacker pulling inside, it makes no sense for us to play the defensively minded Chambers (who wouldn't overlap, and hasn't overlapped) with the "not-attacking midfielder the rest of the time" Clyne ahead of him. So I'd say the answer is "no", unless we play Clyne at left back - and even then Chambers would have to get forward a lot more. Noticed last night during the Spanish SuperCopa that Henk Ten Cate pointed out that Barca are no longer playing such a high pressing game due to the rigours of adopting such a system and the difficulties in motivating players of a certain standing to do so... and they're not as good as a result. All his opinion of course but makes you think...

I'm not remotely bothered where Saints' players come from to be honest, only that they are good enough. The fact we've got a model which seems to produce cheap talent is impressive, the fact the players meet the home grown rule (which itself doesn't discriminate on nationality if a player has been with a club long enough) is the main benefit apart from cost.

What, no "burst into tears" option ?

I think last night's white socks are the "Milano" : Shorts are the Campeon (like the shirt), though Saints' had the badge on them :

That's the site I'm going to be buying my various bits of stuff from, just for training purposes (not that I do much of that any more).

Or the tedious "who cares, it's only a football draw" ?

I'd like us to play the nearest team to St Mary's whose ground I haven't already been to, not sure why any Saints fan would want anything else. I couldn't give a toss about us possibly winning it until we get to the QFs, and this year it's pretty clear everyone's had the same idea, so last season's Final will probably be replaced by a Manchester/London top 6 Prem team clash.

I like the black away shirt anyway, I like the black shorts a lot too. Was actually buying a Saints-logoless pair anyway as it happens.

There's no rule about keeper shorts having to be a different colour to outfield players that I know of - but seeing as the only reason we wore black shorts yesterday was because the League Cup (and FA Cup) rules insist on teams changing shorts if they clash (viz Saints' white shorts v Watford in 2003 FA Cup Semi), it's unlikely we'll see them again. There are both black and coloured versions of the shorts for all of the adidas keeper kits anyway, as modelled by the various adidas Prem keepers already (inc Vorm wearing Swansea's white socks). As for the white socks, completely inexplicable as the usual black socks didn't clash, unless the officials had black shorts and socks and thought that was too similar for no apparent reason. On the bright side, they weren't even "three-stripe" socks so you can get them for about £6 online with just the logo on the front. Can't think of any situation where we'd wear the black shorts with the home kit, as the home shorts are red, and the white away shorts are the second choice - the black shorts were used over red shorts to avoid a clash with the rest of Barnsley's kit, but I can't imagine there's a rule insisting no colour can appear in any of the other team's kit. There's also a tendency not to mix and match the different kits nowadays (we had 2 different pairs of white socks for the away/3rd kit last season as well as alternate blue 3rd socks) so we may never wear any of the red kit with any of the black/white one. I'm more interested to see what happens if we draw Bournemouth in something, we have a red kit and a black kit, they wear red and black. We could break out white away shorts and last night's white alternate away socks, but we probably couldn't wear either home kit (though the red would be better against their predominant black).

Yes, but he scored, and he's an English striker who offers something different to the usual suspects, so he's probably in contention. I'm still surprised Crouch didn't get Lambert's spot in the last squad given some of the thinking.

I wouldn't be surprised if we're keeping some of them specifically so we have some Championship-level experience for tonight as opposed to using the kids, I should think we're probably pretty keen on having a go at the Capital One Cup this season and obviously we'll need to get past Barnsley to do so. Last season we used Sharp, Lee, Richardson, Butterfield and Seaborne in the Stevenage away game and they barely got a kick between them for us for the rest of the season. Shaw made his debut too, as did Isgrove and Chambers - but our focus wasn't on that Cup at the time with staying in the Prem a big challenge.

I'm hopeful he's involved, Defoe doesn't deserve to be anywhere near it at the moment. Just to note that Darren Bent scored on the weekend...

Can't really argue with that - they had a golden opportunity to prioritise the "hard core" with away attendance in L1, but changing the system from a crap one to a different crap one meant they lost a lot of detail in the data cleansing. Having said that, the system we have is FAR preferable to the systems the top sides use, all of which involve forking out more money to buy priority, which is admirable as far as capitalism goes, but pretty cack for recognising supporter loyalty. I suspect, unfortunately, that we'll be back to levels of membership as soon as we buy another new IT system which supports it.

Because the rules of developing players say we get more. And the other reason we would have got more is because (originally) we had an agreement with Spurs which said we'd get more. It's not difficult, we would have got more because Spurs said we would as part of the deal. We then changed the deal. I completely disagree with you re: "unrecognisable" as well. He's changed physically, has experience at a higher level, has changed his free kick style, and is playing in a more involved position. That's about it, he was running past players for fun in the Championship from left back and scored an awesome free-kick in first few games. This has been done to death though.

We've had this discussion loads of times, and pretty much everyone agrees that ST holders with previous attendance should get priority. It's not even a particularly high threshold, only 1/3 of last season's aways. Your argument that ST holders who don't go to many away games should get priority over non-ST holders who regularly go doesn't have much weight either, because lots of Saints fans live away from Southampton and you can make the same argument for them as you do for home fans going to away games : "Not everyone [living away] can go to home games, due to financial restrictions, geography, family commitments etc". You're already going to 23 matches, why shouldn't people who are near to aways and regularly go to them already get the chance to go ? If you live in the north west and go to a lot of aways it's ridiculous that someone who never goes to away games should get priority over you just because they get discount on your home games.

Ha, you wacky idealists with your nutty "working system" craziness.