The9

It's not ignored in football - it's just not practical to call every single incident. You might want to talk to the NHL officials about "legal" fighting, or to "non-contact" basketball officials ?

As I've said, it's not actually a cost issue anyway. Just as having replays for every team in every park is as much a logistics and practicality issue as a cost one.

The reason parks teams don't have 6 officials is nothing to do with money, it's because the number of officials are declining because of the behaviour of players and people don't want to do it. The issue is to educate players to accept decisions are made in good faith, not to put decision making in the hands of a bunch of the money obsessed - and saying "actually you're right, they ARE crap at it, let's get some cameras in" is not supporting that cause. I will say I'm being a massive hypocrite having only ever been booked or sent off for dissent... but that's by the by.

I don't think it's in any way essential that every decision is correct, only that the arbiters are making their decisions genuinely and as fairly as possible. I don't care in any way that there are bad decisions, the problem is a lack of respect for the officials irrespective of their decision making ability, and the refusal to accept that human error can in fact impact on multi-million pound companies, not the fact that they occasionally get things wrong. Actually, I see the existence of the humanity of refereeing decisions as a kind of weak link in the money making machine as a good thing.

I'm also against that, though firstly there are 6 officials, and secondly there's no significant cost actually stopping parks games from having 6 officials.

Because it's not needed, and creates an artificial break between the top level of football and everyone else. Let the referees and assistants adjudicate. As I've said before, failing that, you may as well sit them in a tv room the whole time and convey the decisions via video screen. Actually about the only thing yesterday's match proved was that if they want tv replays for goal-line technology they'd better ban white socks as well.

Only 9 days late... http://www.saintsweb.co.uk/showthread.php?37736-New-Kit&p=1385657#post1385657

As suggested above, Peter Crouch for England v Colombia in the USA in May 2005, he last played for Saints getting sent off at Palace in our penultimate Prem match, signed for Liverpool on July 20th 2005. International Tu 31May 2005 N Colombia 2 - 3 England

It doesn't match the bit of collar I've seen. It's a plain single colour v at the front, no contrast colour. Only Lille have released a plain v that looks like it could be the same so far, and their home kit has the same collar as Man City's last season. See here : http://www.saintsweb.co.uk/showthread.php?37736-New-Kit&p=1387041#post1387041

The new Blackburn Umbro shirt shows the tape effect we'll probably have on the back of the shirt, and the Umbro socks mentioned previously in the same style that Sweden have, so they're clearly one of the options available to English sides :

Seems fairly obvious that Dickson's under contract to Saints and wants a season-long loan somewhere but there aren't any clubs that will want him who can cover the cost of his wages, and it's not in our interests to let him play for someone else on the cheap. If (Lge 1) teams can't cover enough of his wages then they can't have him, fairly simple. His options are therefore to get a permanent transfer (and renegotiate his wages downwards in line with the league he'll be playing in and team he's playing for) or sit there and lump it with Saints on more money than last season. He's not getting to see any Premiership football either way. FWIW the 25 man squad thing isn't as restrictive as people think, because none of our under 21s count towards the total. He's third choice left back though (assuming we don't sign another), how often do we expect he'd play? Unless Fox/Harding are injured he won't make the 7 man bench.

But trending doesn't mean a lot of people are talking about, only that a lot more people are talking about it than were not long before. You can be trending without that many people actually referring to you.

I know it's not strictly accurate as if they're liquidated there won't be any chance of them fulfilling their fixtures in League One (and they're not so integral to the balance of the entire nation's football that they could be parachuted back in like Rangers), but can we start referring to them as "Club 24" please ?

Wasn't there a lengthy discussion about whether we'd rather be regularly winning in the Championship or occasionally winning in the Premier League on this forum even before we got promoted. I'm pretty sure there are teams in last season's Prem top half who don't genuinely believe they can compete with Man City in a one-off game.

Erm, do you think Cortese didn't already know who the other 19 Prem teams were before today ?

Typical of the Saints that used to be in the Prem, maybe.

If Hammond plays more than 5 times in the Premier League he'll be playing a lot more than I'm speculating.

No you weren't, you chose to start it by deciding to be the person who took it upon themselves to reply to a throwaway comment asking who would be the first to start an "Is Adkins up to it?" thread on seeing the fixtures. Don't try and make out there was any kind of personal element to it, you chose to be that person.

More likely "Lambert sold to Liverpool for £6m" than that.

Wait for the tv date... wait... wait...

Don't feed the troll.

Right, well I'm going to use this available space to mention to Matthew Le God that he knows stuff all about fixture scheduling, and that we've been paired with Reading on the same dates as the Manchester derbies and therefore could not, as I said, play them in the opening or closing matches. Also, my recall of probability isn't what it was, but I was trying to keep it simple...

Well would you look at that, we're scheduled to play Reading on the same dates as the Manchester derbies.

It's difficult to judge how good we are at defending against pressure when we're not under pressure. We did keep 20 Clean Sheets, though as you say it's easy when the other team doesn't have the ball. We didn't concede at home to West Ham or away to Leeds (or away to Barnsley with 10 men) and there was plenty of pressure in all three of those. Prem's a different level though, obviously. But then we haven't signed our new centre back(s) yet and we've lost Martin and Jaidi so you know we've got something planned.

Probably because it's bloody difficult to run a side in the Prem and the bloated Europa League at the same time. Not so tricky for the teams who build up the squad for year on year Champions League competition as they already have the depth, but when the difference between 18th and 8th is about 5 wins over the course of the Prem season, the likes of Bolton and Stoke could easily have been dragged into a relegation battle had they gone all out in the Europa rather than saving their "starters" for the Premier League. Having said that, both Manchester teams bombed out rapidly - but given Ferguson's derogatory comments (and Bilbao's focus on the Europa League) it wasn't so surprising United didn't apply themselves though.