The9

We shifted out 17 in the January after Redknapp left and Burley came in, which was the season after Prem relegation, so it's not unprecedented to have a high turnover when you change divisions - though you'll never see a contract with a promotion release clause. It's also well known that we have a pile of players still being paid who aren't of Prem standard, and some who aren't even necessarily Championship standard, so I'd be surprised if we didn't shift on at least 10 of those currently under contract in the summer. It will of course depend on which contracts are up, because you can guarantee the likes of Dickson and Forte aren't getting paid what we're currently giving them by anyone else any time soon. That's assuming we stay up. If we go down who knows who'd be off ? According to Transfermarkt.com Puncheon, Boruc, Richardson and Chaplow, Dickson, Forecast, Seaborne, Reeves, Hoskins are up, and from the U21s there are THIRTEEN with "2013" as their contract expiry including Butterfield, Isgrove, Chambers etc. have, all of whom have at least one appearance this season, plus there are others like Jake Sinclair, Andy Robinson, Corby Moore who have been with us for a while but haven't broken through who might also be leaving. Including them, plus a few players who other teams might be able to match wages for (Sharp, Lee, De Ridder), 15 leaving could well be possible.

He looks like a hamster.

To add the weight of pedantry to this worthy thread, I'd be surprised if any fully grown adult's mum would spell "hee hee" using only the one "e". The Beano was the standard for this kind of colloquialism back in the day, and they were very much "double e"-ers. Single e "hes" are a recent phenomenon, incorrectly inspired by Peter Griffin from Family Guy's "he he", which in itself is supposed to resemble the "heh heh" of Beavis and Butthead. In short, people nowadays can't spell, and some of them are really stupid.

If Forren's not "a real person", then there was a hell of an impressionist warming up on the pitch with the squad before the Man City match.

The Mirror, to my knowledge, his posted more Saints stories than anyone recently, and almost all of them have been wrong so far. Plus they were miles off with all the January transfer speculation.

Just for the record, Forecast's record on loan to Gillingham this season is : 1 match in the JPT, 1 match in the FA Cup, and 20 minutes as sub keeper when the real goalie got sent off. On the bright side, his days of pretending to be a goalkeeper will surely be over within a few months. He's had a hell of a run.

I was specifically pointing out that was my rationale for not being as impressed as everyone else with Lambert, though it does come with the rider that EVERYONE was saying we needed to improve the GK and defence, and our midfield is pretty decent, whilst that particular person has some obvious flaws.

Yep. So what's your problem with it ?

I think my favourite current stat is that we've only lost 4 of our last 17 matches. Chelsea FA Cup, Liverpool and Man U Away and bloody Sunderland. Puncheon was shooting a lot at QPR but has mostly reverted to taking the extra touch again - but I also think one of the reasons our shooting percentage to goals is so high is because we work the ball into positions very close to goal and only shoot when the likelihood is a goal rather than taking random pot-shots.

I take solace in the fact I only have to think about them when other people sing about them at St Mary's, or when they're nearly going bankrupt again.

If you can disprove it I'd be interested to see the argument.

Beat you to it, good link though. They have his nationality wrong though. Unless he's fussy about it, like me.

Not if you go to matches, you haven't.

He's done nothing to me. To clarify, I think we'd be a better team with someone better playing there, and think us building our entire gameplan around him in order to get the best out of him is short-sighted and risky if he is unavailable. Ooh, here's something I learned from SaintsWeb : Being top scoring English player in the Premier League is apparently a big deal, even though numerous other non-English players (including a welshman who was born nearer to Southampton) have scored more goals, and there are no tangible point or prize money benefits to the club to having an Englishman scoring the team's goals.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone suggest that. Also, if he HAD stayed we'd have probably gone up in the Play-offs season anyway.

I'm fine with it as it is, to be honest. There are some daft rules but they seem to work well enough, and if I'm going to get trollied I'm not generally going to do it when I have something else to concentrate on, i.e. football.

They'll be lucky to be that high up. I don't know of any re-formed club that's started above tier 4 of non-League, which in their case would be Southern League Div 1 or Isthmian (Ryman) League Div 1 South. AFC Wimbledon took 9 years and 5 promotions to get back and they had similar crowds to Portsmouth in the Prem before their respective relegations.

Just checked ...Alan Bennett signed for bottom of the league AFC Wimbledon on deadline day.

He was utter shart for us for about 2 months (I started a Facebook cartoon on some app detailing a variety of hilarious ways he could be miles apart from Chris Makin) then bizarrely got quite good (relatively) just before his loan ended and had people actually keen to keep him. Was at Cheltenham last I heard.

Our insistence on fielding the entire youth team for chunks of 2008 almost certainly ruined some of them - but without a statistical breakdown of every youth team in the last (say) 15 years and what level they peaked at / most appearances at there's no real way of categorising. Some kind of points system for major leagues and cups per player... a multiplier for academy appearances, then totalled up to rate the youth teams to find out which were the most and least successful. Not that I'm going to do it, but there's the methodology.

Aka "Alan fecking Bennett and Chris Makin"...

Recent update : Tadanari Lee will be wearing this adidas striped template : But then Japanese styles very rarely get used in the west. Still no word on who's going to be making next season's kit yet - I see Blackburn have signed up with Nike next season and Umbro are still making shirts for their existing clients (mostly in South America and Ireland) though. There will be a reveal of all the 2013 MLS shirts in the next week or so, some of which are striped, so that will probably tie up all of the adidas options for 2013/14 if we end up with them.

Certainly convenient.

He came on as sub at home to Arsenal for his debut, and got utterly done by Thierry Henry, who scored his first goal for Arsenal that day after weeks of not looking like he was any good. I vividly recall Arsenal's bench warming up at half time being rather good (Luzhny aside) and Ray Parlour nearly taking Pat From Poole's head off with a shot that deflected off the bar into the Archers bike shed.

Shayne Bradley as I previously mentioned got a start up at Everton, he was like a broader, slower James Beattie before he got good.