The9

Used to be Cardiff City and Portsmouth for me, in varying order (2008 FA Cup Final saw me supporting my birth enemy, and they decided to lose). I almost feel sorry for them both at the moment though, Cardiff for the ridiculous demands of their owner and the fact that all but about 8000 of them are utter plastics who used to support Man U or Liverpool and the Skates for being hilariously poor and deluded. Brighton's cheating ways had them pretty high on the list, but Poyet's humiliating departure and them hilariously losing to Newport County last night have all but killed that off, so... at the moment there is quite the vacuum to be filled with bile, I'm sure football has something planned for me this season though. Oh, and MK Dons, how someone on here could claim they "have no rivals" when they have 91 of them immediately springing to mind is beyond me.

Didn't seem to be the case when we were getting promoted, or at the end of last season though. All those delusional people saying we were safe on 39 points who were completely right... all the realists who saw us going down after playing 9 of the top 10 in our first 12 matches...

As you (and that Batman fella) have always so far managed to walk the tightrope on the right side of being a massive pointless WUM, tending more towards either simple contrary stupidity (him) or sanctimonious balloon-prodding (you) you've not yet made the list. I am more than happy to discuss any valid opinions about football with anyone who goes to the trouble of actually debating the responses and doesn't appear solely interested in posting things for the maximum negative impact. However, this thread is teeming with absolute unjustifable nonsense from people purely interested in WUMming who never bother to attempt to debate their position, and thanks to the wonder of "ignore" I no longer have to waste my time and energy bothering to read their nonsense. Any wonder alpine gets furious about it ? He knows that if everyone just ignores the trolls, they'll just go away, and then what would they do for attention? The irony of him accusing someone else of attention-seeking is the main reason he's on ignore in the first place. I'm not even sure where you're getting the happy-clappy stuff from, we've made two signings which appear to be good on the face of it, and spent the 6th most in the division. I'll wait and see how the results go before I start judging us on success or failure, but it seems reasonable to think our young team will continue to improve. I'm hugely bloody self-righteous though, you got that right.

Fair point, that.

Just to further confuse matters, the Premier League rules state that squad lists basically have to consist of consecutive numbers. Last season we had more than 25 senior pros so they didn't all get named. We only have 24 players currently declared as having numbers - and that list contains 5 U-21s in Ward-Prowse, Chambers, Shaw, Gazzaniga and Isgrove so we only have 19 senior pros with numbers. The list however does not contain the numbers 11, 14, (15), 17 or 19, or the names of Sharp, Hammond, (Forren - fair enough, we only just sold him), Forte or Lee - which "coincidentally" also happen to be the players who were allocated those numbers last season. So if we now name all of our senior pros we have 19+4=23. There's still room for two more before Sharp and co WON'T be listed on the squad list - unless we sell them by Sep 2nd they will have to be named whether they're in the plans or not.

You're confusing "having a number" with "being named in the squad". Dickson was named in the squad (because as you've correctly said, we had to name 25 senior pros if we had them) but was never allocated a shirt number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%9313_Southampton_F.C._season, because he was never going to play. Same for Lee Barnard. However, Sharp was not named in the squad list and DID have a squad number because he'd been on the bench for the first two games, played in the League Cup, and was sent on season-long loan before the squad list was submitted at the closure of the transfer window, which is a few weeks after the start of the season. http://www.premierleague.com/content/dam/premierleague/site-content/News/publications/squad-lists/Squad-Lists-September-2012.pdf

Oh I think you've got me all wrong - like everything else.

That's as maybe, but they were as successful at not losing 4-1 as Portsmouth were on Saturday, I happened to be there. I wish him well, and hope they take the second promotion spot behind Newport.

They got to you too ?

"We'll meet again". You probably won't if you drop out of the Football League, or if the opposition gets one of the 4 promotion places - so is this Skate being optimistic in thinking they're staying up, or pessimistic compared to the rest of them who think they're bolted on for promotion ? Just think, if they didn't have such sooper support, other teams' players wouldn't be getting so up for playing them. Or it could be that their team is just cack and will lose to anyone ? I'm sure most L2 fans are looking forward to the trip to Fratton, purely because they were in the Prem 4 years ago and in theory that looks like an impressive scalp for their poky L2 teams, plus the way they've been playing for the last 2 seasons and the general chaos, it should be an easy 3 points. They surely can't stay this bad for long though, even with all the restrictions and the bills to pay they SHOULD have a massive advantage over all these tiddlers, right ? They're a mid-table Championship side at heart.

I'd say that was probably "when", not "if", based on the matches I've seen so far. Accrington were fairly solid on Saturday and certainly didn't have any centre-backs doing that "run around the stick 10 times then try and head the ball" game in the penalty area, they just got outplayed by a team very high on confidence that has had year on year of success recently and is used to winning - and if there's one thing Portsmouth FC is not at the moment, it's that. If Newport had any sense they'd be trying to shift the Skate match (Dec 14th) forward a few months, because they usually hit a run of form just before losing all of their players in every transfer window, though I guess someone has to want them for that to happen...

I think in this case they were referring to the train approaching Southampton. The fact all of them chose to stay on it and they were then haring away from Southampton having done nothing whatsoever was probably the fault of the FA, or the Fit and Proper Person Test, or HMRC, or Chainrai, or the Net High Worth Owners (they're next) or Terry Venables, or Tal Ben Haim or Tesco, or Dave Kitson or possibly that woman in the mobility scooter, or those Scammah Kants, but it definitely wasn't anything that they "done".

The wife has a ST in the seat next to me. I also took a Skate I was seeing to St Mary's to watch a celeb game once, and five other exes have attended matches with me at the Dell, Liberty Stadium, St Mary's, Anfield and Highfield Road over the years, some of them more successfully than others. None of them have been particularly embarrassing, though one of them definitely did not enjoy herself.

Strange the correlation between this list and my ignore list, literally 1:1 with those you named. Anyone would think there was a reason for this. FWIW there's also a strong correlation between "threads started by the above" and "enormous number of comments I can't read on a thread" too. Ignore list is 90% of the future, the other 10% is banning the quote feature so I never, EVER, have to see their comments.

I'm quite enjoying having someone else as my mouthpiece on certain subjects, but you may as well give up, people just do not understand that there is a concept such as "better than them" when it comes to certain players and will insist they are picked despite growing evidence to the contrary. Andy Durman's "is that what you want, cos that's what'll 'appen" is a perfect illustration of this. There can't possibly be a better way of playing or getting more success than the way we've done things to get from L1 to the bottom half of the Prem...

I enjoyed his team's useless efforts on Saturday a LOT more, but I'll be back on his side this weekend.

I like the fact that they think Accrington winning will make them complacent, when BOTH sides got dicked 4-1 last Saturday. Oh that Skate logic...

I suspect MK Dons have more rivals than they are prepared to admit to themselves. At least 91 of them off the top of my head, and one in particular.

FWIW I have absolutely no problem with Bournemouth whatsoever, and very much enjoyed their inferiority complexes the last time we played them. Wandering around that park next to the ground singing "you're our second favourite club" at their wannabe-hoolies was quite amusing and really seemed to wind them up. I actually hope the Skates beat them (their reserves hopefully), but only because I desperately want us to have the chance to absolutely demolish them in the second round with our reserve team.

We have no rivals until we antagonise some random southern Premier League side with some Don-based antics. My money's on a vicious media war with Fulham for 10th place involving Cortese defecating on Michael Jackson after Cortese moves into the actual cottage and refuses to pay rent until they sell us Brede Hangeland. He'll also not cut the grass on the pitch, causing £1.5m worth of damages (assessed by Franny Benali's accountant).

So basically just like the original then ? It was a bit of a shock to go into the shop after all the atmospheric black and silver pics on launch, to see it's actually plain old black and white ! I have now purchased the black away shirt (and a pair of the home socks, as they are in line with tradition and I got 10% off making them the same price as the identical ones sold by Stoke and Boro). I have to say the away shirt looks very nice - but who the hell thought selling the FORMOTION shirts - skintight - was a good idea ? I felt like Chris Hoy in the large, and even the XL is not exactly capacious. Turkish would have been delighted to see us selling them in 3XL as well... one lardo bought one when I was there. Home shirt - horrible design, horrible colours, nice fit because it's not FORMOTION, it's just ClimaCool (not that I've tried one on) Away shirt - nice design, nice colours which actually go, fit is unflattering on porkers (and we have a few). Training kit ? Still no sign of it.

I'm amazed at how easily people bite on utter cobblers on this site.

I think it might be nice to have a little perspective, we've got 8 or 9 more experienced Premier League starters in the starting 11 than we had this time last season, for a start. I think Swansea and Hull have signed well, but one of them has to run a Europa League campaign in parallel and were only 10 points off a relegation place last year, and the other had little, if any, Prem experience in their squad last season.

I blame Cortese as well, if he hadn't made those two signings early on we wouldn't have people flapping that we haven't signed anyone for ages. We've got a pretty decent squad with a couple of obvious areas for improvement, with equally obvious reasons why they haven't been improved. I'm fine with it.

We pretty much already do this on occasions.