The9

Don't hold your breath. I still think there's a vacancy for a "has actually scored goals in Premier League recently" in there somewhere too.

Probably more likely to be the phone monkey's knowledge than the club policy though.

New Man City shirt is quite bland, their last season with Umbro too :

That seems perfectly in line with last season's "make it as awkward as possible" policy - though I seem to recall they've settled on sending tickets out this year haven't they, so at least not EVERYONE has to go down there ? Makes me laugh the number of times we instigate a rubbish policy for one season then backtrack on it and do what everyone else does. So far that's been the case for not having instalment plans, not sending out STs in the post, having a ridiculously short purchase period for tickets, pre-sale for kits people haven't seen yet... etc. I await the removal of the ticket taxes and car parking fees with bated breath, they're already well overdue.

Do you not think it's justifiable criticism ? At best the club's missed out on the chance to sell more tickets by marketing the "Final Ten" as a way to get an ST renewal.

I wouldn't bet against it, but Adkins did show faith with Harding for a few games before starting Fox, and Sharp and Lee were in and out when they first arrived, so he doesn't always throw them straight in. You'd expect a full pre-season would mean we'd go with Rodriguez, but there might be some desire to see what Lambert can do in that company as well. To some extent it will depend on the opposition, I think.

I'm now positive it's just mischief-making.

I only put Cork in because he was signed more recently, and therefore you'd assume as part of the plan to play in the Prem (though the same goes for Lee, Sharp and Fox - not so convinced by Hooiveld's role as he was clearly not first choice at the time). I personally think we need two new CMs, with possible Guthrie only being a borderline starter slightly ahead of Cork. Trying not to mention Sigurdsson here, I think he's going to end up at Liverpool now Rodgers has. I'm pretty sure the Guly post is just mischief-making. We don't sign back-ups and squad bolsterers, it's a very Rupert Lowe trait. We will however end up with loads of "useful at the time" players on contracts as a legacy of the rapid rise up the Leagues. Will be interesting to see if there are any automatic contract extensions on July 1st, we seemed to have a few unexpected ones last year thanks presumably to promotion clauses.

Typical Cortese era PR nightmare - don't tell the "Final Ten" holders they have priority so miss out on the good publicity (and possible additional sales) from that, but manage to annoy existing ST holders and potentially charge them more for the privilege. FWIW, shouldn't you just renew in your current seat after June 20th then apply to move as soon as you can ? Contrasts so poorly with Reading's runaway Championship campaign when they told everyone in December that if they bought a half ST they'd definitely get one for the following season (likely to be in the Prem). As a result they shifted loads of half STs in the Championship and sold out of STs for the first Prem season in a matter of days as well. Horrible plastic club, but that's how to sell a load of tickets.

The team will depend on the opposition. As far as ridiculous speculation goes, here's my team, with appropriate gaps. GK RB Hooiveld CB Fox RM Cork CM Lallana Lambert Sharp Davis, Rodriguez, Fonte, Richardson, Schneiderlin, Lee, Guly on the bench. Cork or Schneiderlin pretty much even tbh. I'd put Lambert on the bench but certain people would throw a massive hissy fit and say I had it in for him, plus I genuinely think Adkins wants to show that our "4" strikers will be interchangeable and all of last season's regular starters will feature (except Hammond, who will be Jaidi/Barnard 2013). Then again we might have signed another club record striker by then and it could be him and Rodriguez. Realistically despite my 5 gaps I can't see us signing more than 4 more starters by August (but I suppose we HAVE to sign at least one keeper and what's the point of him being worse than the one we have ?). We might add a couple more in September if things start badly.

The Sweden home kit has some socks which are mainly plain and massively thin stripey around the middle, we might get those. I'd be surprised if the shorts were anything other than plain black... or plain red... or plain white. Or all three over both kits. Umbro aren't doing much in the way of faffy shorts at the moment, though last season's shorts were plain black, so they might go for a different colour.

Kleber Chala is now a country off the coast of South America.

Hands up, which one of you lot was it ? I won't take the Premiership thing personally, but it DOES completely undermine the authenticity of the source.

I thought it was weird too, but with the exception of the promoted clubs they're all relative to their finishing position in 2011/12. Stoke are alphabetically where they finished last season. Oh, and the reason the BBC's site is slow to update is because they pull their score data from the "live text" pages now, so it feeds that page first, then refreshes the score onto the divisional score update page, then (apparently manually) onto the Football Index page where you can sort by division. It has absolutely nothing to do with which team is playing, only how regularly the match live text is updated. It's pretty inconsistent though, as their score updates for all leagues on the right of the page update at a completely different frequency to those within the "League" page. e.g. if you're in the Championship live scores page, the scores on the left are up to date (within the relative slowness of the live text updates), but the scores on the right of the Championship Index page are really behind.

Thanks.

I like to give people the benefit of the doubt usually, but you appear to have completely lost the plot. There is no "innuendo", a number of people have outright said "that's basically the kit", and it is pretty obvious that people won't like it, as it's not conventional stripes. I am assuming from your comments that you've only read page 16 onwards and haven't actually seen the numerous images, all very alike, of what the shirt is expected to look like.

I think this is probably more an indictment of your imagination than mine.

Not sure where you got that idea from. I don't even think it's a bad design, I just don't think it suits Saints. Also not sure how me saying "it's weird that Umbro haven't gone for a classic design" would make anyone more or less likely to buy the kit. In fact I'm at a loss to know why anyone would take someone else's opinion of it over their own, when they have the chance to see it and judge for themselves on June 30th and couldn't buy it even if they wanted to until after that.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was a none-too-subtle message to fans, agents and the media - which of course they will completely ignore. Seems to fit Cortese's general model of being prepared to pay a bit more to get exactly what he wants.

A+ for that.

Erm, maybe you shouldn't be so suggestible then ?

That's because Huddersfield basically have a teamwear deal. They get their Umbro kits from a local sports goods supplier rather than Umbro direct. We get ours from Umbro directly. Having said that, when ours gets launched people will probably be pining for bland and striped.

Well he hasn't got any better since leaving... and who knows whether he'll wish he was with us as World Club Champions in 5 years' time ?

No, they'd probably advise him to get a new agent.

Every Umbro kit we've had under this contract (except the home one when we were in admin) has been one year, as announced 5 years ago. Seeing as it's the last year of the deal, there's every chance it may also be our last Umbro kit for a while. Which is a weird way to go out, brands usually go for something classic in their final year because they don't usually have to beat it the next season.