The9

Well not really, as the consensus after we signed Lee was that it was a crap song about tossing off to sing to someone just because they happen to be Japanese. There is a tiny bit more relevance now we have TWO Japanese players as it's sort of like a gradual takeover, and one of them actually understands English, but other than that, "meh" and indeed, "guh" to the song. Besides "Big in Japan" is much better and just as irrelevant.

He actually started doing that in pre-season and even tried it once at the Etihad. On Saturday, not so much.

http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/news/article/saints-make-mayuka-move-339701.aspx Wait for it to load, click at the bottom to read the last paragraph of the article, etc.

Also, from Tuesday : 29 Reeves 34 Moore 35 Hoskins 36 Sinclair None of those were announced in the initial squad list. Amusingly, the OS report of the Stevenage match "report" button here : http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/fixtures-results/match-report/ correctly notes that Hoskins came on for Sharp, whilst the Press Association release claims it was "Cobey" Moore (34 not the person with "HOSKINS 35" on his shirt, and not called Cobey) This is also repeated on the OS on the "lineup" button - the one right next to the "report". So it's inconsistent on the OS across two tabs next to each other...

Mayuka has been given 24, it's on the OS in his "signed" article.

Agreed. But it's not like I've even looked at who's in the draw. Might give Burton consideration but probably not.

Was that really worth starting a thread ? Apart from anything it was done to death when we signed Tadanari Lee. Also, about half of the people who usually start songs will not have a clue about the tune.

"A big team" at home would be excellent, they could send their reserves and I could decide not to bother going.

If they've signed him to fulfil a completely different role then I would assume he would not be as successful. The fact Ferguson's sold him is pretty much all the red flag that anyone needs to know not to sign someone. He doesn't often get them wrong - but then I suppose the chance of a player signing for someone else who is as successful elsewhere is pretty low... Tevez maybe ? Stam ? Beckham ?

Very pleased about that, the potential communication problem was my main reservation about signing him. Even better if it helps us get the best out of Lee.

So your point here is "he was crap so they only picked him for the big games"? This somewhat differs from Ferguson's usual policy of selling crap players to ex-Man U players who are now managers.

"Write". I'm sure someone else must have picked you up on this by now though, there must be a hell of a queue...

Well done on correctly spelling one of our actual signings' names.

There were FIVE ?!!?! Blimey. FWIW I'm still waiting for Daren to relaunch Beautiful South with the article I did on the Mansfield League Cup match last summer.

You have joined the club of people who seem to think we can only maintain one transfer deal at a time. There's no reason to think this is the case and plenty of evidence to suggest that teams can be involved in multiple negotiations for players in the same position, never mind the same team, at the same time.

How much information was leaked regarding Mayuka ? Having not bothered with the HCDAJFU thread and been on my way to Stevenage for the afternoon I hadn't seen any mention of him even as a target. I saw afterwards that Nixon on Twitter might have flagged it up, but that's some pretty effective low-profile activity.

I blame Chris Benoit.

I didn't see it after September, and didn't buy it after Issue 1. There was something about the editorial style I didn't like, not sure whether it was too academic, not academic enough or just too unopinionated, but it wasn't really what I was expecting from a fanzine, and not in a good way. I think it was a little wishy-washy and too "nice". I like my fanzines to contain a bit of idiotic fury balanced by the sensible stuff, a bit of comedy (or attempted comedy) and that gets my buy-in as someone who wants to know what the contributors think. I didn't really get that with the one I read - and if that's the one they've been putting together over a long time, you know the next ones are probably going to be a worse version of that, more thrown together. Credit to them for giving it a go though, must have been a hell of an effort to just get it out there. We've also been spoiled by some excellent fanzines over time. Unless you can get one out for every home game and manage to keep the content nearly up to the week, new fanzines are going to struggle against free web content and the logistics must be a pain too.

Nothing wrong with signing experienced Prem midfielders and making sure we have enough to survive the injuries and suspensions. Just not ones who look a bit crap.

Neither are bad players, they're just playing against better players. I continue to be amazed that some people think being at the same standard as their best in the Championship is automatically going to be good enough to win matches in the Premier League. Plenty of people have said "look at the rubbish in the bottom half, they're not much better than the top Championship sides" but with a couple of exceptions they basically are. It's a meritocracy, the best teams are in the top division and the quality of players needed to compete over the course of a season needs to be higher. Add to that the wages available for the best players in the world and the attraction of being in the Prem compared to Championship and the players attracted to the League are going to be that much better. As for "are we saying we need cover"? No, mainly because we never sign cover, we always sign to improve the starting XI. It continues to bewilder me that anyone still thinks this after 3 years of signing starters and shipping the replaced players out. You don't have to be zooming up the leagues to evolve the side, but without that... well, how many current League One players from any one team would anyone expect to start in the Prem at the moment ? We still have plenty, but they're now on the fringes.

Good analogy, as they're equally as useful in the Prem. Both are borderline cases who might step up, or might not be what we need any more. Kelv saved a penalty from Silva, Lambert scored past Joe Hart. The following match Lambert didn't score and Kelv got done twice by good finishes.

You have to have 3 keepers in the 25 or you have to leave the spot vacant, and Gazzaniga is U-21 so doesn't have to be named in the 25. So as it stands, we'll have 23 players in our squad including Kelvin and only one keeper in that list, with Gazzaniga listed as part of the U-21 contingent and two empty slots for the other GKs in the 25. They should be the only empty slots though, as we're nowhere near the 17-non homegrown player limit. To give you an idea, Arsenal only had 17 players in their "25" man squad last season (not sure how many were keepers) and about 30 U21 players.

It appears there is a hole in the fabric of time and Richard Wright has just fallen through it from 2001.

FWIW Gazzaniga looked pretty solid on Tuesday, though he needs to speed up his goal kick routine and have a little more confidence in passing to the open player from our short goal-kick routines. Amusingly this was pretty much why I said strikers are easier to integrate into teams than new goalkeepers. His handling, positioning, shot-stopping and distribution otherwise looked very good. There's still the matter of getting used to what the defence will do though.

Al-Habsi didn't have a difficult save to make, even Lallana's shot off the bar wasn't going in before he touched it. Kelvin could have mopped up everything Al-Habsi dealt with. I'm not saying he's necessarily good enough, just that it was a poor example - if Al-Habsi hadn't been so committed to pushing everything wide of the goal rather than catching, which made the efforts look much better than they were, he could have walked over and picked up half of them.