The9

Except that it's not possible to buy a standing ticket for the Prem in 2012 so the whole thing is a barrel of chickens.

I thought Poyet's comments were fairly reasonable, for a chimp-headed c()ck.

Only whilst running sideways trying to get the ball onto his good foot though. I bet he's not Jonno Quick either.

I haven't, yet. Although I am considering doing this more often from now on. Can't wait to see A Lal in the P Lea, and hope we can tempt G Sig away from S Cit now B Rod has gone to L Foo.

Apparently he has pace. Nice to know, I think that might be a useful trait in the Premier League.

Sprinting ?

My favourite thing about this is that they post MLS salaries in the public domain, the likes of Tim Ream (now Bolton) were on about $30,000 A SEASON last year, and Poolis isn't even at THAT level, he's playing in the league below. So whilst he's still making money for being a footballer, he's probably not even getting the equivalent of the UK's average wage a year any more. As for "trial when 14", were you a very tall teenager ?

Yes, but on the bright side we only have to field one goalkeeper, and we don't have a match for over 2 months.

I suspect they just wouldn't let them in, what with a lot of arab nations refusing to recognise the existence of the state. But given FIFA's stance on legal issues during World Cups (i.e. they basically want to run the country), I'm sure FIFA would rule some fudge that claimed Qatar wasn't an arab state for the duration of the Israeli team's stay, or rename the Israeli team to something inoffensive and give them all diplomat status, or something equally as spurious.

I have not seen the new Saints home kit in person, no.

The mock up above looks much more like the 2011/12 Arsenal than the 2012/13. AFAIK we won't have white sleeves though.

Going by the rumours it's a 2012/13 Saints shirt. More or less.

Didn't say I had or hadn't before, did I ? I know the collar's a red v-neck, and it's similar to the Sweden kit.

I mentioned this on the Jay Rodriguez thread. If Sigurdsson's not signed a contract yet, get back in an wave some money at him, Swansea's manager is going, there's no guarantee they'll play the same style or be as "successful" as they were last season, and as long as Rodgers doesn't whilsk him away to Liverpool there's still a chance. I have this mild obsession with Sigurdsson, it's true, but he does meet our criteria perfectly and has 6 months' experience playing in a side who do things on the pitch in a similar way to us, and have shown what we should aspire to as Prem-joining n00bs (at least for now).

Must... resist... temptation... Obvious... wind up...

My interpretation of your posts. I'm sure I'm not alone.

Premiership Schmemiership.

I'll be surprised if anyone's watched a Premiership football match since 2007, never mind this season. The point is that overall football is a meritocracy, the better players play for the teams higher up the leagues. We are stepping up a league, and need to be confident that we are able to compete. I'm saying nothing about "outwitting", I'm talking about the practicalities of moving the ball more quickly and having strikers in goalscoring positions as well as linking play, and of maximising opportunities to score. If you have a player who can create his own openings and is fast enough to set up play and get to a loose ball in the box a matter of seconds later, you have a bigger threat than someone who can only do one or two of those things. It's perfectly possible that what we have is good enough, and I'd like to think that our existing players are capable of improving themselves further, but given the massive strides they had to make from League One to challenge for the Championship, are the ones who we had in League One going to be able to find that bit more again to threaten in the Prem ? And I assure you I haven't once spoken about the "Premiership" in this thread other than to point out that it doesn't exist.

I've suggested Lambert could play as a false nine already on this thread. I'd rather our link man was also able to get into the box (see the Rooney discussion), but yes, it's perfectly feasible that we could do that. We'd need to sign some pacy wide players though...

I don't get why we haven't milked it either. Posted a couple of recent Umbro designs similar to it on the previous page. Afraid that anyone wanting anything other than red with white stripes will be disappointed. Unless of course there's a striped kit hiding somewhere and the red one is the away ? This thought has only just occurred to me.

One of life's great mysteries, the number of goals he probably cost us from cutting back ! Though he'd have probably fitted into the current possession ethos better than he did with Strachan's side.

I'm clearly not wrong. Your scale is "within the Prem" where there will be a particular scale, but that scale is overall going to be at a higher level than the Championship. So a "mediocre" Prem player will be, on average across the entire league, a faster player than a mediocre Championship player. You can also pretty much guarantee that a slow Prem player will be significantly better than a fast Championship player at a lot of other things. The football pyramid is a meritocracy, that's how these things pan out. To say "fast players are an exception" is complete garbage, ESPECIALLY when we're comparing them against equivalent players from the League below. There will always be exceptions, and pace is not the be all and end all, but if you don't have pace you'd better be bloody good at some of the other stuff to compensate - and they ARE exceptions.

Not at all, what I'm saying is that the windows of opportunity in the Prem are significantly fewer and shorter in the Prem and we need to be able to take advantage of them as much as possible. If we knock it out wide, lay it back to the right back and whip a cross in against decent Prem sides they'll eat it up all day long with a lot fewer problems than Championship teams have with it. The window of opportunity is in shifting the ball quickly, turning defenders and attacking the space in the area, not in hanging about while your playmaking target man gets himself in position. Admittedly this was only one of our approaches (a very successful one until December), but it's one that won't work as well against better defences unless we can do it with more speed than we've been used to.

But my point is that without having that ability to link and score soon after we may well be better off using a different option in the Prem, hence thinking Sharp could get more games. There's a significant difference in the speed with which teams need to attack in the Prem compared to the Championship (and of course League One). Course, we might find that Lambert dropping off and Sharp on the shoulder of the last defender is the best option - or Rodriguez and Sharp mixing it up, or Lambert and Rodriguez, or Lee up top on his own, who knows ? I'm just trying to sustain a discussion on the relative merits of the type of strikers we have (focusing on Sharp and Lambert as that's the statement I made). It might turn out that we sign another 3 strikers and they both become Lee Barnard 2011.