The9

The infrastructure and lack of overall vision and leadership can't help, you still get teams getting shot at and players killed or left in a wheelchair because they're taking a bus to matches thousands of miles away, you get the impression the administrators aren't exactly interested in improvement of the squad and where else do you hear about players disappearing for days either side of international breaks or teams going on strike due to not getting paid (or indeed disputes about contract terms like the one discussed on Eurosport about Sunzu's contract) ? Interesting point about the fractured nature of South African football as well. I don't think the player talent itself is lacking, just the glue to hold it all together and things like the guidance of external sources to bring things on that extra step. There are plenty of African players winning trophies in Europe.

Bit of a Mayuka chat on Eurosport commentary, they didn't say much other than "sub at Southampton" though.

If anyone's still paying attention, Sunzu is the guy linked with Reading (funnily enough pre-Pochettino I thought he might be an option for us). Plays for TP Mazembe, the DR Congo side that got to the World Club Championship Final a couple of years ago. And as I type this they reel all of that off on commentary.

I guess with Chile and Uruguay it's about having to adapt to playing Brazil and Argentina regularly and they have a League qualification system plus the Copa America, which African nations get to play top World sides that often ?

I've seen a few African countries at the World Cup, saw Morocco v Scotland and Nigeria v Denmark in '98, and Cameroon v Russia, Sweden and Brazil in '94. They were all pants except Morocco, who were only stuffing Scotland anyway.

Oh yeah, and there are also half as many Africa nations at the World Cup as European teams to begin with which statistically reduces their chances... and the South Americans who have the same representation (more or less) always have at least 2 previous World Cup winners amongst their representation. Plus Pele said there would be an African WC winner before 2000 so that's screwed them for probably another 40 years, just like it killed El-Hadji Diouf's career when he bigged him up as part of the FIFA top 125. One other thing - even the top African nations do mental things like letting Mikel take a penalty which makes precisely no sense at all.

Thoughts are that African nations generally don't play that many non-African nations away from World Cups and therefore lack that experience as a team at the very highest level of international football, whereas both European and South American countries play a fair few intercontinental matches (albeit friendlies). Ghana are getting there though. I'm trying very hard to avoid stereotyping here, but there's still that nagging doubt about discipline - even Drogba with all his experience went mental basically every time Chelsea got knocked out of the Champions' League...

I believe SA v Cape Verde was announced as a 66,000 sell out, but thousands of people stayed away due to the rain. Going to this tournament is on the bucket list - which now contains one thing. I'm sat here with Eurosport HD on, listening to it, haven't looked up twice yet.

Playing Lambert for 90 minutes in every match is the best way I know to get him injured - especially if he plays all of them with the effort to impress the new manager that he put in in the first half on Monday, I've never seen him run for a through ball before and he did it at least 3 times.

Bloody awful pitch, and I see Mayuka's got some new Nike boots (the same as Guly and Gaston's)...

ONE statue is League One mentality. We need six gold ones, all built by people who can't speak English, but can really.

Also, what hasn't been improved by the addition of a mechanical rodeo bull ?

Can I have one of those nice wooden bowls full of pot-pourri ? And maybe do the back of one of the stands in some flock patterned wallpaper as a "feature" ?

Tahar got a lot of grief in the media for that one, hence my Fantasy League team "Tahar Shot JR" the next season.

As Lambert said in his post-match interview on Sky, "obviously a footballer's place is on the pitch, once you're on there you forget about everything else."

Owen's "dive" was arguably in both 1998 and 2002.

Fixed.

Meanwhile, 30 photographers gathered next to the tunnel on the pitch to get a photo of Pochettino emerging for his first match, apparently not a problem.

The Sky talking heads were done on the pavement in front of the stadium. I dare say if they had drifted onto a paver there would have been a sniper on standby.

Bloke responsible for giving someone millions of pounds not slagged off by said person unshocker. Must be a genuine verbatim quote though, why else would you leave in an horrendous grammatical error like "I haven’t actually spoke to him myself" in otherwise, apart from Seaborne being unable to conjugate the verb "to speak" in the past tense, which is fairly typical for a thicko footballer ?

I find it difficult to believe Nige will take any job outside the Prem when he must know full well he'll be first on the list of any bottom half Prem team who don't currently have an English manager and plan on sacking theirs. Why would he gamble the reputation he's built by dropping into the Championship and face having to repeat his success, which can only make him look potentially worse if he fails and prove nothing if he succeeds ? Having said that I'd laugh a lot if Brighton sacked Poyet and appointed him...

Thin end of the wedge, if you tolerate this then your children will be next, etc.

Even if it was true, Sky Sports managed to get a bunch of talking heads for Monday Night Football so they clearly weren't very good at enforcing it, and any reporter worth his salt would have just pitched up in the nearest pub if they wanted some rentaquotes about the situation. So in short, Saints crap at PR and not good at allowing free speech, ban ineffective and pointless.

I'm pro his signing lots of good players and paying all the costs with Markus' money, and anti pretty much everything else he's done.

Yes there was, and it's basically a load of guff. If you take the number of teams who wear red compared to other colours and work out their level of success, it's actually lower than wearing other colours. Even though there are lots of successful red teams, there are also lots of unsuccessful ones. I'm not linking the bleeding document again, even though it's in my favourites.