The9

Michael Chopra, who has spent all of his career until last season employed by a club above Dickson's, seems to have managed to spend all his money purely on gambling, so...

How is he a mercenary, when his twitter pre-season suggested he wanted to go on loan but the club wouldn't let him ? Also, football wages are absolutely the fairest thing about the sport, which is a meritocracy - generally overall people find a level which reflects their usefulness to the club and the team's results also usually reflect the cost and abilities of the players they are paying. You get anomalies but they even out over time (eg Anthony Pulis) and due to the massive number of alternative options for every position on the pitch / in the squad, worldwide player wages can be almost a pure market.

I think Sharp was great for us in the Championship, but so were plenty of others who aren't what we need in the Prem. We wouldn't sign someone who offers what Sharp does at the level he does, so we shouldn't really consider bringing him back. His movement isn't as good as Rodriguez or Mayuka, and both can do the other stuff he does already. We should be looking, if anything, at buying players who give us an improvement on what Lambert's got. We also can't play both Sharp and Lambert like we did in the Championship, needs to be one up top and an attacking midfielder who can link play and get involved in play-breaking from the hole. Neither Sharp not Lambert closes down enough to do that. Guly does, Rodriguez has done, Mayuka generally doesn't as much.

You have some strange opinions, Patrick. I doubt we're planning on selling Ramirez other than at a massive profit, and he wouldn't leave for anything other than a bigger club who would have to offer that (at least in the next 3 seasons). Plus Ramirez isn't going to be next to useless to us in 2 years' time.

The pic in the Caption Competition thread makes his head look massive in comparison to his body, so I suppose so ! It wouldn't be something I'd have been saying based on his appearances in matches - but then stripes are slimming...

Which completely changes the meaning of the entire title.

Fair point that, did anyone NOT click on this expecting at the very least a link to a decent article ?

I enjoy going to football far more nowadays than I ever did in the 80s or early 90s just because it's much more sociable nowadays and there's not much difference in atmosphere, other than standing versus sitting which is nothing to do with the timeframe if you're including the all-seater early 90s. The football is much better as well with far better players across the top division, it's only the cost that is rubbish in comparison - and with away games it's normally petrol rather than match tickets than make it prohibitive.

Supply and demand. I'm not sure how that's difficult to understand. Far more people want to watch the top teams, City fans are only narky about it because they're used to being third rate and being charged lower prices, Man U fans were moaning about this 10 years ago.

QPR are the worst side I've seen this year, but they at least have some prospect of change and improvement just by virtue of changing manager. Villa weren't as poor, but nothing much has changed since we beat them - I'm still bewildered that they won at Sunderland and especially at Liverpool, but other than those games they've been terrible in the League.

Y'think ? Actually I think in SOME postcodes there are only a few, but equally in areas with teams there are loads of tweets, often all stuffed into small inner-city postcodes in tiny areas of the map. It needs some kind of heat chart to spread the figures more broadly around focal points (like the Etihad).

It's from the first weekend of the season, QPR lost 5-0 at home to Swansea and West Brom beat Liverpool, both results worth talking about. What's "coverage" got to do with anything, this is twitter ? Stoke drew at Reading, so I'm assuming there might be a lot of Saints fans at services on the M6 on the way to Manchester - though M11 at the Etihad itself itself doesn't have many Saints fans, the percentage would be dwarfed by City fans anyway.

Honestly I think we need to win it, we don't have many obviously winnable games coming up this month. Also, the last 4 are 3 draws and a defeat, only worth the same as 1 win, I'd rather have beaten Sunderland and lost the other 3.

Also, if you look at how many areas in which there are multi-team ties for position in the data, you can see that in some areas we're talking about no more than 3 tweets (central Wales being a good example).

Lots of multi-club hashtags skewing this data then... "look at all the Saints fans in Wigan", etc.

I like this, because it happened when we signed him, which was getting on for 5 years ago.

I quite like the top and bottom ones, but the "big V" is awful in all the forms I've seen so far.

...or maybe the 13/14 Arsenal away one looks like this instead (it does) :

France away and PSV away leaks confirm the Nike Man U style is a "real thing", so the Arsenal away is probably right as well...

To be fair I think I'm probably his strongest critic on here and even I don't think he's talentless, a clogger, or that he can only score headers. I do, however, think we're not maximising our use of Ramirez without a sharp (not Sharp) striker running in behind to offer a simple route to goal. At the moment we rely too much on midfielders getting past the opposition back line and Lambert's not going to get younger or faster and will have to be replaced in the next couple of seasons anyway. Though I have only seen us play once since mid-December so that might have changed in the zero matches we've won since then.

There was never a problem with the part ownership, which was sorted within days. The last 3 weeks of the faffing were purely between Saints and Bologna.

Seems extremely likely to me that our record signing who is very happy at the club would leave to go back to the country he just left where most of the clubs (and especially Milan) are in financial trouble... definitely not a wind up, at all.

It wasn't the co-ownership that took time with Ramirez, it was the fact Bologna wanted an unusual payment plan.

Oh yeah, and lets hope we're booting one of these around next season : The 2013/14 Premier League ball is the second from left.

That's the 2011/12... This is the 2013/14 AC Milan, for the adidas fans... Away kit is of a similar style to the Spain and Celta Vigo shirts already posted : Chelsea 2013/14 is leaked here too, could be a template for an away kit if we go with adidas :