The9

Being picked for a low-risk competitive match to prevent Wales from using him.

It's certainly a relevant consideration if the percentage of unforced errors is high. I'm assuming you didn't play in Villa v West Brom for the sake of argument.

Surprised Villa are so low given the presence of Bent, how they played against us and Paul Lambert's preference for big target men (eg Morison and Holt at Norwich), but then they haven't had much of the ball to be passing with. Completely unsurprised Newcastle are top of the list given their tendency to whack it up to Cisse or Ba, or Everton aiming for Fellaini's chest - which they didn't really need to do against us as they just ran through the holes in the middle instead and then killed the game off playing safe passes. Wigan didn't look that direct against us, and the bottom 5 is exactly as I'd expect. Stoke are quite low, but then they've always had more of a tendency to play it to wingers and cross as they have the set piece threat from corners and throw-ins, than play direct and long at Crouch in the middle of the park where the ball is less likely to go out of play. Though obviously the %ages above indicate they're not exactly averse to long balls either, some of those could be crosses.

Don't forget the bit where delldays comes along and makes out he knows exactly what will happen though... oh, you didn't.

I thought Gazzaniga's positioning was awful for the second and third goals - (he also dived out of the way of the first one but wouldn't have saved it anyway). For the second Jelavic was very wide and Gazzaniga should have been a step or two nearer the ball and less wide of the near post - Jelavic's shot went in nearly 2 yards inside the post and he had far too much of the far post to aim at. As for the 3rd one, he didn't get across quickly enough and ended up with a starting position behind the line, that's not going to help his chances of keeping the ball out - though it was a powerful header from Jelavic. But we knew he wasn't going to be perfect immediately, his handling and distribution is still good and the positioning is easier than something like learning to kick accurately. The bigger problem overall was discussed by Jonathan Wilson earlier this week in an article I read, which is the idea that "possession football is replacing the defensive midfielder". The idea being that rather than having someone dedicated to winning the ball back, you use that position to have someone additional in the midfield to keep the ball away from the opposition to begin with. He uses Swansea as his example (high pass completion rate and possession stats), but Saints are the perfect example of this - we have an offensively-minded team, and the number of times we've been caught out with 5 midfielders the wrong side of the ball when we've turned the ball over is shocking. For examples, look at the first goal against Arsenal - lost the ball in the middle, Podolski immediately in 10 yards of space, picks a pass, cross, goal. The same thing happened (albeit with slightly less space) for Everton's first. Top players can pick a pass under pressure and with space and time you'll get killed over and over. It's not so much the defence as the lack of shield in front of them when we lose the ball, even at Sunday parks level if there's no-one protecting the back 4 when the other team have the ball in midfield you're in trouble, it just shouldn't be happening in the Prem.

Nice to see all of that, the strange thing is thinking about how many of those images we just will not see as part as an official club broadcast now.

I think just for the hell of it, a white shirts, blue shorts and red socks combination should get an airing this season. Never going to happen though, they make a point of not mixing the yellow kit with anything else.

Teams don't HAVE to change shorts, but sometimes it helps the overall colour effect to do so, and sometimes teams just want to "match" the kit style. The only real pointers are that the overall colours should not be similar enough to confuse, and that refs tend to like socks to be different colours because you get a lot of deflections, fouls etc where you need to know whose leg that was and it's not immediately obvious which player it is attached to, which is not really an issue with shorts. The new FIFA rule about "kit coloured tape" is also to aid identification, players were taping up half their socks with white tape, which obviously doesn't aid identification if the opposition wears white socks. And while we're on about white socks, don't even get me started on Burnley v Saints last season, when both sides inexplicably played in all white socks - before we had the sense to introduce the alternate blue socks for the next away match against a team in white socks.

Yes, a max of 8 (as I mentioned above, it used to be a minimum but there's no Prem documents from the last time we were up to support that). It's up to the Premier League panel who sorts it out (clubs have to advise 7 days before if there are any concerns), but it comes down to the ref on the day anyway. They don't care about shorts clashes in the Prem and haven't for some time - remember we changed shorts to white with the home kit for the 2003 FA Cup semi-final (because the cup rules are different), and changed shorts at Leicester in the Championship a couple of times, but we never wore the home kit with change shorts in the Prem. There's another issue of course, Prem clubs are much more likely to have "alternate" shorts for their kits rather than using the away or 3rd kits anyway. Similarly Saints currently have 4 sets of (outfielder) socks on the go, including two pairs of white ones. Man Utd actually have two pairs of black shorts at the moment (and often do), they have a pair of alternate home shorts in the same style as their white home shorts, and they often have black shorts with their white (or black) away kit too. This season the alternate black home has a red stripe down the side, whilst the black away short is designed to have the same horrible gingham pattern as the home shirt except in all black - but still they don't use it with the home kit (and sometimes not with the away kit either) ! If you want to be utterly anal about it there's an entire article on True Colours about it and loads of comments : http://www.truecoloursfootballkits.com/truecolours/clash-of-the-shorts Aside to this, I dunno how many of you noticed Gazzaniga made his league debut for Saints against Villa in last season's grey away goalkeeper's shirt because the ref decided the black one clashed with the officials (and presumably so did the dark purple one, and last season's home keeper kit was the same colour as Villa's away shirt), but he did. Played in black at Everton though.

This is rule F22 from the 2011/12 Handbook : http://www.premierleague.com/content/dam/premierleague/site-content/News/publications/handbooks/premier-league-handbook-2011-12.pdf Players of the Visiting Club may wear its away Strip or third Strip when playing in League Matches provided that they shall not do so on more than 8 occasions in any Season, including those occasions, if any, when required to do so by virtue of the foregoing provisions of Rule F.21. For the avoidance of doubt, nothing in this Rule shall limit the number of occasions a Club may be required to change its Strip pursuant to Rule F.21. Clubs last season had to use a kit on NO MORE than 8 occasions - though back in 2005-ish when we were last up I vaguely recall the rule was that you had to use it at least 6(?) times. Don't think I can prove that though... http://www.premierleague.com/content/dam/premierleague/site-content/News/publications/handbooks/premier-league-handbook-2012-2013.pdf The 2012/13 Handbook has reworked the rules, and has an index down the side of where old and new rules have been implemented, there's no current rule that links back to F22 from last season, so basically they've dumped the "you must wear it 8 times" rule. Not surprising then that you get the likes of Fulham releasing limited edition 4th kits for one match. I'd also like to point out to the Kraken that I drafted the "where can we wear the white shirt" list twice already then deleted it because I knew no-one could care less. Liverpool away is the only time there is both a need AND the option to wear the white kit - various other games will give us the possibility to wear white shirts with other coloured shorts/socks, but Chelsea aside, pretty much everyone is at best a shorts clash, or wearing white is just pointless, like at Norwich.

It was me, I won't be doing it again - but if you take your phone to matches and you're in the Northam you can do it yourself.

No, but he's in the Bologna one. Yoshida's in Japan, Mayuka is number 20 in Zambia with a PES name, and Clyne is nowhere to be found (same goes for Gazzaniga or Chambers)! We do still have Sharp, Forecast, Hammond and Harding though, so there's editing potential there.

Short answer... nope. In fact I bought a PES3 and PES2013 to waste time on that instead ! Haven't people still got the chants from before ?

Are you the taxi driver who told my mate in London he'd sent his FIFA12 Chelsea formation to Roberto di Matteo yesterday ?

We were never either of those. We are now "SOTON". Beats being "Berkshire Blues" or "North West London" anyway. Plus the wonder of PES is if you don't like the look of people, you can just edit them all until you do.

That makes no sense. Saints have been in FIFA regularly for the whole time we've been outside the Prem, it's PES which has reintroduced Saints (or SOTON actually), as well as decent gameplay, finally, this season.

That's as maybe, but when you coach zonal marking, you coach (basically) a 9 zone square, and every player moves towards the set-piece into their zone. If we're all standing still, as we were against Van Persie's header, it's because they're knackered and not doing what they're supposed to, not because of the system.

I would be nice if people weren't able to forget how to spell "Markus" as well.

I'm sure the Football Unsupporters Federation table will show this appropriately. Worth noting that as there's no particular reason for listing teams by division, we're also joint bottom of the overall Prem/Championship league behind everyone in the Championship except Ipswich as well.

All of this is correct (I also have no idea if the club was ever fined). The Fans' Charter was put on the website from about Jan 2010, as it mentioned the right to pay via instalments (which of course couldn't have been referring to summer 2009 as the charter didn't exist until after that ST period). In summer 2010, the first ST sales after the Charter, there was no instalment plan. This coincided with the conclusion to Nick Illingsworth's case about refusing him an ST, and the club then didn't bother updating the charter from the 2010 version which was already out of date and at odds with their existing policy, and it disappeared altogether with the website redesign(s) that followed.

Frankly we should be on negative points after the Illingsworth thing.

I turned down a ticket for £10 around 5pm, I just did not care whatsoever whether we won or not. If we get to the Final, yeah, great, it'll have been a part in that, but it's not until the last 16 it's worth considering putting out anything other than the developmental squad with a smattering of regular starters*. But the hassle of getting there, parking, getting soaked and spending over 3 hours in order to watch something I just wasn't interested in just wasn't worth it. I might possibly have gone for a fiver, not sure, I had plans for the evening doing not much... *for the pendants

Indeed.

*Cough*

The important fact here is that people were EXPECTING it to be a reserve team, whether it was or not is irrelevant. FWIW I think it was mostly a reserve team with a few fringe first teamers like Cork/Gazzaniga/JWP/Rodriguez and one from Yoshida/Hooiveld.