The9

They're not good enough to keep us in the Prem, are you happy shuffling around in Championship mid-table ? Raises quite a lot of questions about morality to be fair.

He got "Coventried" at Espanyol, like WGS - had all his decent players sold from under him and eventually you're going to run out of talent to replace them with. I'd expect Cortese to also want to make some big signings to support his decision and distract the fans.

Unbelievable, can't wait for him to come back to St Mary's with whoever he takes to the Champions' League in the next 5 years. Let's hope it won't have to be a Cup match. Thanks Nigel, you've been fantastic.

I'm not sure "the club" is to blame... and let's hope the protesting about the Chairman being a megalomaniac doesn't get turned into some stupid anti-Argentinian agenda by the morons.

Lambert IS a bloody false 9, FFS. He plays in attacking midfield with Puncheon pushing on ahead of him most of the time !

Taking the lead at Man City. Was unexpected even 10 minutes before it happened.

And did the same to Fonte at the same time...

Man City v Chelsea live on Sky at 1:30pm on that day, was announced about a month ago. We're not on the tv. http://www.skysports.com/story/0,19528,12942,00.html

Yes, which is why deterioration in defensive performance is the key factor, because everyone's scoring some.

Dunno if I've posted on this thread before but there were two differences - 1) Retaining players with Prem ability enabled them to get off to a good start, 2) they didn't have to play all the top sides in their first couple of months - though in hindsight that's worked in our favour as it meant we could get experience whilst not losing too many vital games (Wigan home aside). Now West Ham have played everyone once like we have, and have injuries (especially Maiga), there's not much in it, and we might even finish above them.

They're beneath Crawley, Stevenage, Shrewsbury, Bury and Walsall as well as Bournemouth, so why not? It's what we're used to anyway.

Didn't they sing "que sera sera... we're going to St Mary's" in that clip then ?

I'd be very surprised if they're playing either of us next season, it would need either us going down and them coming up, or the frankly hilariously unlikely prospect of Portsmouth not getting relegated. I think what he's trying to say is being rivals with Yeovil and/or Swindon isn't very interesting.

Yup, Rodriguez would benefit from it as well - though I think we're a lot less predictable than last season when we basically played ball to Lambert, ball to right wing, faff about to get the ball to Richardson as Lambert ambles to the far post, cross. On almost every attack. As you've said, when we plugged Lee and Sharp into it they made loads of direct runs whilst we passed it around midfield ignoring them until we could get it out the the wing. We also used long diagonals from Fox to Lambert on the opposite flank a lot too. It certainly helps having a superbly talented player like Ramirez in there with a variety of options, he can run with it and beat players, hold off pressure, pass accurately short and long, or shoot - so many options. Underlines how completely different we are this season and how much has been rebuilt, but then we saw that from pre-season. You can also see from that why West Ham struggled a bit with the Championship but got off to a good start when they came back up this season having retained a core of Prem players.

I know it's not entirely the done thing nowadays (Liverpool in purple at Norwich springs to mind, and our FA Cup "home" kit debacle), but why on earth would we wear anything else ? The home kit doesn't clash in any way, the away kit socks clash, and the third kit shorts and socks are the same colour as the home team's kit.

Anyone know if Paul Williams has Scottish parentage ?

Let's play a game of "spot the teams without pacy, mobile strikers" shall we ? Le Fondre doesn't start for Reading and Kenwyne's effectiveness despite having pace, agility and mobility is limited by his slow reactions and a tendency to sloppiness. Top teams move the ball quickly in the final third and use pace and quickness of thought to do things before the opposition has time to react. Lower ranked teams generally can only attack in limited ways, making them predictable and easier to defend, or just can't do things quickly enough. Having said all that, I'm still naively hopeful that due to the overall terrible quality of defending in the Prem this season, mainly caused by the use of an additional ball player in midfield instead of a recognised defensive midfielder, the teams we face in the second half of the season won't have just watched a ton of video and worked us out, but that tends to be what happens. At least we have other options to mix things up should we show signs of becoming "uncreative", and it'll probably be defensively that decide if we'll stay up or not. You'll notice I haven't taken this opportunity to mention Lambert specifically, can't be bothered to try and discuss him on merit any more because some people... just can't.

Here's 2011/12's tv deal payment, the range for tv deal to prize money is £39m for last, to £61m for Man City. Our matchday income will remain at approx £15-20m. Next season the overall pot is expected to be nearly three times that amount : http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2012/nov/12/premier-league-tv-rights-5-bn "The existing TV deals, which run to the end of this season, themselves marked a huge increase in overseas income from £650m for the previous three years to around £1.4bn for 2010 to 2013. In total the current deals are worth around £3.5bn"

Historically it's been much more important that it is at the moment if you're a Prem side. Wigan for one are surviving off tv money and an imaginative transfer policy and wouldn't have a hope in hell of competing in the top league if it was attendance money and merchandising only. Would be useful to know exactly what the percentage of match revenue from overall revenue generated is for various Prem clubs are to have this discussion any further, but you'd have to think the ground-extending (Arsenal and Wolves being the most obvious recent example) implies it's worth doing in the longer term. There's been a negative correlation between attendances and on-field success in both those cases, which assuming clubs are still bothered about filling grounds, is also a factor in pricing. I did have some figures from 2005-2008ish but it's getting out of date as the tv money/parachute payment situation has already changed once since 2005 : West Ham received £40 million for finishing bottom of the Premier League last season compared to Southampton’s £19 million in 2005. Similarly, while Southampton’s relegation was cushioned by £13 million of parachute payments, West Ham will receive £48 million (£16 million in each of the first two years, and £8 million in each of years three and four). So stick another £21m on our tv money for 2005 to get an estimate for this year, and then factor in that the winners this year get less than the bottom club next...

Even that won't make any difference unless the clubs (or Premier League) decide empty stadiums are bad for their image and it begins to impact on the money they can make from tv, they could avoid that "image" problem by letting loads of kids in for nothing. Bigger picture is that due to tv money, match day attendance, even now, is under 50% of turnover for all Prem teams. Next season it'll be a much smaller proportion. Why would the clubs even care about attendances when they can sell Official Merchandise to people who don't go to matches ? As long as the tv money props them up the attendance money is almost incidental. The clubs could just as easily perform the PR exercise of capping match costs, but unless they also start subsidising the price of petrol it's not going to make much difference to a lot of people.

I think we'll get 9, and that's with 2 more than you thought at Villa in the bag.

There's a bit that worries me in this soccerbythenumbers link is the sentence "the relegated clubs defended poorly early in the season, improved to levels roughly equal to the rest of the league about a third of the way through the season, but then saw a massive and steady deterioration in performance as the year wore on to the tune to about a goal per match by the end of the year" "Finally, if we look carefully at the data for clubs relegated in the 2010/11 season, we see that the deterioration in offensive performance was much less than their deterioration in defensive performance" suggests that losing Shaw and Fonte could have more impact than losing Lambert.

Just to wade into this feeble debate with the facts... http://www.sportsclubstats.com/England/Premier.html Weighted figures to reflect the strength of the previous and remaining opponents : Chances of Man Utd winning the Premier League : 73% Chances of West Ham winning it : 0.00151% Chances of Man Utd being relegated : None, it is in fact mathematically impossible without points deductions Chances of West Ham being relegated : 0.632% Chances of Saints being relegated : 14.6% ...Sunderland : 1.5% ...Newcastle : 15.5% ...Wigan 41% ...Reading 62.2% ...Villa 71.7% ...QPR 88.5% Even using 50/50 results from this point it's still West Ham 3.9%, Saints 19%, Wigan 41%, Villa 44, Reading 63, QPR 76 So using this particular model of probability West Ham are 632 times more likely to get relegated than win the Premier League this season.

Had a similar problem for a while there, with less local gangster involvement, allegedly. Hang on, I can withdraw the allegedly, Chopra can't afford to sue anyway.

I bet he is. Needs to work on getting more involved in matches and being more than just someone who runs with the ball up front, I think.