The9

Despite many protestations to the contrary earlier in the season, I am now going to Everton, mainly due to the wife deciding she wants to go and the proximity to payday. Bizarrely this will mean I won't have missed any of our first 4 aways, and that never happens. As I have Everton-supporting mates I have actually seen Saints play there more times than Anfield. Due to this novel "maximum attendance" so far, I would certainly prefer it if I knew only the people with maximum loyalty points could get tickets tomorrow. Should guarantee me a shot at priority for Liverpool as well, though annoyingly as Sheff Weds is worth 20 points and I got zip for going to Stevenage, I might still miss out !

As we're on such a lovely "old kit" discussion, I'm flogging 9 of my enormous all-encompassing collection : http://www.saintsweb.co.uk/showthread.php?40025-More-Saints-Kits-For-Sale

All these shirts start at a bargain £4.99 with £2.70 P&P.... I have got just ONE charcoal grey 2009 away shirt left, as brand new, still in the packaging, ending on Sep 14th : http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261097014218?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649#ht_500wt_1203 These other Saints shirts aren't still packaged, but they're all in very good condition (apart from the last one which has a few pulls, but I don't even know what size that one is)! Southampton FC Large Away / third Saints short sleeved football shirt 2004-6 (yellow, already has a bid, ends on 14th Sep !) : http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261097023634?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649#ht_500wt_1203 Southampton FC Large Home Saints short sleeved football shirt 2005-6 (ends on 14th Sep) : http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261097032145?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649#ht_500wt_1203 Southampton FC XL Away long sleeved football shirt 2008-09 (charcoal, ends on the 14th Sep). http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261097037520?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649#ht_500wt_1203 Southampton FC XL Away long sleeved football shirt 2004-6 (light blue, ends on 16th Sep). http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261097020143?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649#ht_500wt_1203 Southampton XL Saints Score Draw retro football shirt Rank Xerox / Air Florida style (cotton, retro style no longer for sale in Saints Stores ends 16th Sep) http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261097035895?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649#ht_500wt_1203 Southampton FC Large Away short sleeved football shirt 2004-6 (light blue, ends 16th Sep) http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261097039048?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649#ht_500wt_1203 Southampton FC small / XL Boys Away Saints short sleeved football shirt 1998/99 (don't really know what size this is, missing the size label and a few pulls on it, yellow Sanderson) http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261097029574?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649#ht_500wt_1203 Buy the shirts or I'll go on a plugfest on the Main Board !

I think we need a thread just for football game nostalgia.

It was announced in the OS article when he signed that he'd already had his work permit for a week, by the previous Friday IIRC.

Because you didn't give us the chance.... ...to be honest it's pretty stupid to go to the trouble of having a points loyalty system if they're not going to use it for every match, thereby rending some aways an unnecessary free-for-all.

It's the 30 second wait every time you go to the site and it creaks around trying to load the pop-up splash that's stopping me bothering with it. And how does it take every item soooooooooooooooooo long to load in this day and age ?

Ok, so here's me... My dad got a BBC B in the early 80s but I never got to play a game on it, my uncle had a ZX80 and then a ZX81 (with AMAZING 16k memory pack), neither of which did much for my idea of computer gaming. My dad programmed some (very) BASIC maze games for the Speccy, and my grandad (RIP) bought me a Spectrum Christmas 1984, still my best ever Christmas present - with the awesome Match Point (stroppy losing stick man tennis) and the likes of Horace Goes Skiing - "Sorry No Money No Ski". That Speccy took up most of the 1980s, with personal favourites being American Football (type two letter codes from a playbook of offensive and defensive plays and watch the results - we ran an entire league with my mates and my family. Tornado Two Thousand aka TTT, which was a top pixellated jet around 3D landscape game that I always seemed to play on Boxing Day with cousins along with Daley Thompson's Decathlon, Match Day and then Match Day 2 - in which you at least couldn't run the length of the pitch with the ball on your head, and Football Manager was always a favourite despite it's stickman look on the Speccy. I used to ride my bike to my mate's house to play it on the much more impressive looking C64 version of Football Manager (never "FM"). Back in the day it took 15 minutes to load on the Commodore, and he lived about 2 miles away, so I used to phone him (on the landline) when I was leaving so he could start loading it! Pitstop 2 was also a favourite when I was round there - the tyre wear and split screen was excellent. For some reason I also liked the joystick-busting Tour De France in which you could literally play the entire Tour and had to waggle to pedal the whole way in time trials. It was insane. Anyway, once the whole "being 12 and having access to a C64" phase was over, I had my teenage years, with many hours spent hunched over in front of the tv playing with myself... on the excellent and hand-cramping magic of Nigel Mansell's Grand Prix - one touch of any other car in your 2 hour-long 80 lap race and GAME OVER, full seasons, telemetry messages about fuel and other cars' positions scrolling across the dashboard on-screen and turbo boost (the space bar) - just like in 1980s F1. Through my teenage years I had a mate with an Atari ST - and I got an Amiga. I can only remember one game on the ST, a large screen high coloured athletics game. No idea what it was called, but it looked good and played pretty badly. After a year of him telling me how great the ST was, he got an Amiga. I upgraded my 500 to 1Mb - it still has a switch on it now, like I'd ever have turned it off - and all my mates started trading hacked and pirated games. So we got into TV Sports Football, then TV Sports Basketball, and Lemmings, Kick Off, Player Manager, Kick Off 2... and then I went to University. At Uni in 1991, I was the only person in Halls to have a computer - and it wasn't for doing coursework. We roped in the entire floor to my three-division Kick Off 2 league, and it ran for a couple of terms in the evenings. Tried out the add-on packs, but settled on "pure" KO2 for the basic tournament game. My neighbour in halls quickly became well-known for abusing the virtual ref and his love of John-Pierre Papin, his striker when he played as France. A typical sentence would be "Go ON Jay-Pee-Pee my son - ohhhhhh referr-KAHNT!". We went through a joypad basically every week or so for a couple of months early on (I was using the ergonomic ones by then as opposed to the Kempston or Quickshot 2 that were more standard) but luckily for me Diamond Computers on Lodge Road were for some reason happy to replace every single one of them as faulty. I must have replaced at least 6 of them, no wonder they closed down. Also in my first year at Uni, I bought a Super Nintendo, and discovered the wonder of Super Mario World. I played the guts out of it, getting all of the stars, spending hours at a time looking for the mythical "star 97" (or whatever number it was) which The Sun's computer games page swore blind definitely existed. The peak of my computer games use, I once completed Super Mario World start to finish via Star World and secret exits in under 20 minutes. Moving out of halls, I also got myself a Mega Drive, and the Amiga fell out of use. My second year at Uni, living in Portswood behind Iceland, was a combination of NHLPA93 on the Mega Drive, which became our competitive game for my student house, then FIFA International Soccer (and later NHL94, NHL95 [which I clocked in season mode, finishing bottom of my division having won over 100 matches in a season] and FIFA95) and Super Tennis and WWF Royal Rumble on the SNES. Various upgrades and peripherals later, I had Virtua Fighter which I never played, Virtua Racer which got played a bit more, and I eventually bought a MegaCD for WWF Rage In the Cage, which was decidedly average even with the grainy CD-video on it. Graduating, I bought a PowerMac - no games for that, I used it for desktop publishing, and having failed to get a job for a year, sold my SNES with about 40 games, and my MegaDrive with about 25 games as I needed the cash. By the way, if you're still reading this, well done, and if you could reply with the word "banana" that would be excellent. The 6 months before flogging my consoles had mostly been spent playing the awesome Super Bomberman with the 4-player Multitap on SNES. Superb multi-player banter. It wasn't until 1997, some 2 years later, when I moved in with a girlfriend who had a PSX, that I got back into gaming. When we split up I discovered that I missed the games . She was massively into Tomb Raider (there was a passing resemblance in the body ) which I was cool with, and Theme Hospital, which I was not. I moved to a flat in Pontypool and started playing PSX a bit more, though the rise of the internet and my first personal Sky digital subscription reduced my gaming time a fair bit. I loved World League Soccer 98, which I first saw in Virgin on the Champs d'Elysees in Paris during the World Cup, but wasn't so keen on much else. Managed to buy FIFA99 for Playstation for about £2 without a box, and hated it, though still spent a while messing about with the kit editor. Then, on a trip to Southport to meet up with former work colleagues, I discovered International Superstar Soccer Pro Evolution during an all-night session. I bought ISSPE and then ISSPE2 for the PSX, and briefly got into hacking the hexadecimal to change the shirt colours, team names etc. Then the PS2 came out, and by the time it have served it's purpose in the early 2000s, I had a chipped Japanese PS2 and every version of PES and the Japanese version "Winning Eleven" that existed, all of them edited and kit and player stat tweaked to fill significant amounts of the early-mid 2000s (as well as crapping about with wrestler editing on the WWE Smackdown series). I absolutely loved GTA, GTA2 and GTA London on PSX, and GTA Vice City and GTA San Andreas on PS2, though as I was in my late 20s/early 30s by then I was never that bothered about completing them. By the time the Xbox 360 came out (and more importantly the PS3 DIDN'T), I was ready to take my PES geekery to a new level. Then, after the glory that was Winning Eleven 10 just prior to the 2006 World Cup, PES got crap. I gradually slid into the less-editable and still a bit-crapFIFA09, then FIFA10 to see if it was better, skipped FIFA11 altogether and picked up FIFA12, in the meantime having moved back to Southampton, bought and sold a house and then got married. We also have a Wii, but Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort are the only thing I've ever played, and they must be 2 years ago now. Somewhere in the midst of all that lot I skipped the N64 entirely, bought a GameCube in 2001, played about 3 games, decided it was gash and gave it to my ex's nephew. Then around 2005 I bought a second hand N64 just to play WWF No Mercy on, which I still have somewhere, used about twice. I also have a GBA and a PSP sitting around doing nothing for the last 6-10 years - the PSP is still running very early firmware, if you know what I mean. Before I basically stopped playing altogether, the last game I properly got into was Crackdown, which I played to death around 2007. The one thing I love about the Xbox360 is the information which tells you precisely how long it is since you last played a game. As I've mentioned numerous times before, until 2010, I'd regularly pick up a new game and just NEVER play it. I played GTAIV non-stop for a week, and haven't touched it since. Bioshock is still in the box. By now, it's probably 9 months since the Xbox360 did anything other than stream a film, and that was a New Year party with the motion sensor thing, which I can't even remember what it's called. I dumped my Xbox Live account a year ago, and just haven't missed it. Now GAME in Winchester has closed, I don't even have a nearby shop to wander around just to keep up with what's going on. So I think until I have kids old enough to nag me to play, I'm probably not going to be much into games for a while. Then again, my wife just rang and suggested a game of "something stupid" on the Wii tonight, so who knows ?

Is that the one with the board game attached ? I was weirdly attached to Gremlin's Player of the Year or whatever it was called for a month or so. Loads of faffing about getting a team and then you had a number of opportunities per match to bend the ball past the keeper, the more you scored, the better the result, and your opportunities to play for other teams improved, you got money, awards, got to play internationals etc. Actually it was pretty crappy aside from the shooting on goal screen, but the bending finishes past the keeper were cool, even if they were scored by an invisible player.

I have now got the sound of Bruce Lee's tippy-tap running burned into my mind.

I'd say Japanese players tend to run directly with the ball a lot more than Saints, but they may have changed that recently, it's not like I've been paying them much attention. Certainly seemed to be Tadanari Lee's preferred method when he first arrived.

I watched a penalty from the urinals at Merthyr's Penydarren Park by leaning around the side of the loo wall once. Wasn't "weird" until I peed on my scarf.

What this tells me is that Opta overrates "involvement" and doesn't punish key errors enough. I know for a FACT that Fox had more touches of the ball against Man City than everyone else on the Saints team, but he also (as he said on Soccer AM on Saturday) assisted Nasri for City's winner. I wouldn't put a player who'd made such a key error anywhere near the top of the rankings for quite a while, but clearly Opta's weightings indicate otherwise. It is therefore my opinion that they are a load of old gack.

Just for the lolz, I'd like to point out that if you turn our home kit inside out, it's white with red sleeves and side panels.

Yeah, but I've seen Neil McCann beat a man in a 15 minute spell. Maybe we should get him back / go bankrupt like Pompey / Lowe Out / whatever...

With you on that. The problem is that by faking these kind of opinions you're adding weight to opinion of the thickoes who genuinely DO believe it, and can now tell their mates that people on Saintsweb are saying the same thing as them. Like that bloke who always says Lambert is crap, thought Sharp would get more Prem games - can't remember his name, ends in a number - what's he on about eh ? Everyone knows Lambert is God and Master to Us All and will always be in the team and definitely as a player in his 30s won't start to get more injuries pretty soon from playing at a harder level and higher intensity against better players than he ever has, etc.

Hodgson already quoted as saying they're unlikely to get a game, but you never know.

Was "biased" a freudian slip there ?

I had assumed that as we were all mind readers with the ability to relate to the warped logic of a certain poster that everyone would be completely clear to his meaning, and that the various responses asking for clarification were from idiots. Oh no wait, I meant to type the complete opposite.

Not as uncharacteristic as you'd think. See ?

Alphabetical order of first name and more sinister, maybe because there was no squad player profile to link to. Less sinister, that's because he hasn't been involved with the U21s or U19s recently. Sterling's link goes to his junior profile, Livermore has one with the senior squad... ...as does Lallana now : http://www.thefa.com/England/All-Teams/Players/L/Adam-Lallana So the short answer is "they didn't hyperlink his name".

As I said earlier, there's no way he can be referring to MLT :

Heh, Minty made a funny. This is most unlike you.

The numerous reports of ripped and open envelopes suggest otherwise. We should upgrade to this Ticket Fairy system, I like the idea of getting a couple of quid back rather than having it taken away.

I feel a whoosh is in order, though had I not seen him talking some sense in the Arsenal Build-Up thread I'd have been there with you. See "guaranteed method of getting someone to bite" comment below.