The9

Hold on, Pardew's last match was a 4-1 win, and much of the damage occurred from the useless performances in the matches immediately AFTER Pardew left.

Er, those of us not stupid enough to believe the generic football manager sha66ing rumour have also already been told this one. It's hardly a revelation, unless you're also one of those people that thinks Markus was just a lovely bloke rather than just a very successful businessman. Also, why would "had some run ins with the Chairman" reduce your opinion of Pardew, especially if your initial impression was that he'd been fired for humping a player's missus ?

Nilsson WAS fcking useless, an absolute sh1111!thouse of a player. I'm by no means a blood-and-thunder kind of guy, but I've never seen a player so gutlessly wince out of a 50/50 as he did at Carrow Road that season. He wasn't crap because we "didn't know what to do with him", he was crap wherever we played him (full back or wide midfield) because he couldn't give a toss and didn't put any effort in. For all the slating of Davenport, Bernard and Jakobsson, it was Nilsson who was our worst player that season - in fact one of the most useless I've seen for any Saints side - made all the worse for his vaguely competent career either side of it. Anders, in comparison, worked his guts out, could see a pass, had a great touch, was a decent dribbler, and had a pretty decent career at Saints, even if he did set a world record for being tackled from behind in one season.

Anyone looking for a methodology, get the list on 92 clubs, then delete everyone you've never seen away, then delete everyone you've definitely seen at The Dell or St Mary's, then start looking into it a bit more, maybe checking seasons you had an ST, etc against Soccerbase. You may be surprised at some of the home matches you've been to that you've completely forgotten about. I think it's only 2 : Manchester City (been to Eastlands to see Saints win under Sturrock, but I think due to their lower league stint coinciding with my most regular Dell attendance in 1998-2000 that I've missed them in Southampton - they were still in the second tier when St Mary's opened and I got my first ST when living in South Wales, and we haven't been in the same league whilst I've had my ST since 2005). Before '98 I was playing much more often and would have only seen Saints sporadically, reducing the likelihood significantly. Hereford United (may have seen them at Somerton Park against Newport County in the 1970s or 1980s though, probably in the Welsh Cup or Div 4). everyone else I'm likely to have only seen away is non-League, like Bromsgrove Rovers, Evesham United, Forest Green Rovers, VS Rugby, Weston-super-Mare, Yate Town, Swindon Supermarine and Gloucester City - and even some of them may have pitched up against Newport in forgettable matches.

Bolton have got you unless you specify new Wembley, FA Cup winners 4 times at old Wembley, even 2nd tier Play-Off winners in 1995 at (old) Wembley and in 2001 at Cardiff (another for your "same competition" list), League Cup Final losers in 2004 in Cardiff.

Old grounds I've been to : Arsenal (Highbury) Fulham (at Loftus Rd) Swansea City (Vetch Field) Brighton & Hove Albion (Withdean) Cardiff City (Ninian Park) Coventry City (Highfield Road) Reading (Elm Park) Southampton (The Dell) AFC Bournemouth (Dean Court which they claim is a different ground since rotated) Charlton Athletic (at Selhurst Park) Walsall (Fellows Park) AFC Wimbledon (Wimbledon at Selhurst Park) Oxford United (Manor Ground) in addition, some non-league pearlers [to tier 6 only] Newport County (Somerton Park and Meadow Park Gloucester) Gloucester City (Meadow Park) VS Rugby (no longer in existence) Forest Green Rovers (The Lawn) Weston-super-Mare (Woodspring Park) Somehow I've missed out on absoutely loads of old grounds in the top few divisions due to basically only going to lower League grounds until 1988. How I've never been to Twerton Park in 28 years of football watching I'll never know, I've seen 2 different teams who have played at home there playing at home somewhere else (Bristol Rovers and Gloucester) and have never seen Bath City for some reason. I think what's stranger is the number of new (post 1987) grounds I've been to for teams where I haven't been to their old ground : Bolton Wanderers Manchester City Stoke City Derby County Leicester City Middlesbrough Colchester United Huddersfield Town MK Dons Wycombe Wanderers Yeovil Town Bristol Rovers Northampton Town That shows just how many grounds have sprung up in the last 25 years, I've been to as many "new but not the old" as I have "old".

You've missed out Bolton for a start, 2001 Div 1 PlayOff Final, League Cup final (?) and 2010/11 FA Cup Semi Final hammering. And I'd be shocked if none of Carlisle JPT Finals or Play-Off appearances were in Cardiff too.

If we'd signed Antonio we either wouldn't have got £12m for Chamberlain or would have just wasted a sum of money on a bench-warming Antonio. Which we pretty much did on Forte anyway.

Fine logic, the near 30 year old with no top level experience in 10 years of football and no resale value is clearly worth more than one of the country's brightest young stars who has already scored in the Champions League in one of his few appearances at that level and has a ton of untapped potential.

Worth mentioning that we occasionally played with Guly theoretically on the right but in practice leaving a huge hole down the right wing as he played so narrow. Rochdale and Leyton Orient away spring to mind. We did also play with Hammond and Schneiderlin as holding midfielders on occasion in a 4-2-3-1 with Guly in the hole, and 4-3-3 at Brighton. But I'd say a straight 4-4-2 with Lallana and Chamberlain wide would have been our preference if the new Gooner hadn't been injured for months on end.

Let's get on with it... using the team we built for promotion last season, and added a couple of improvements to. Dunno where you got the idea Coventry have been building from, SISU have done a lot, but giving that impression isn't one of them. It's equally as false to claim that some teams aren't gradually built as it is to claim that they're just thrown together and successful. Very few teams which aren't divisional "all-stars" get chucked together and are immediately successful, and the understanding of others' games isn't often there where there are wholesale changes. Norwich last season added 5 or 6 over two transfer windows to the nucleus of a winning team. Swansea added a couple of Prem and Italian loanees to their consistent squad of the previous season to put themselves over the top, Reading lost in the playoffs with a core of players from the season before. Leeds challenged with the previous season's core from League One but fell away and are having to rebuild - with their season start an indication of the perils of just chucking a team together - both Leicester and Leeds started slowly with new players and are now starting to put results together. I think to be honest you can get success either way, but it's more likely if you're building on successes not making wholesale changes, so there's something to be said for the advantage of "building", as long as you're "improving" not just "changing".

Plus you get stuck up and down St Mary's Street with the Northam traffic, whereas parking alongside Hoglands Park means if the dual carriageway looks busy you can get out via Millbrook or miss the queues up to the Jury's Inn - again if you shift it at the final whistle. As I used to have the reverse of last week's trip to Cardiff after every midweek game, I used to hang around near the exit in injury time and leg it all the way to the car, saves sitting in traffic for half an hour for no good reason.

I'm finding it weird that David has apparently only just discovered the Liebherrs are worth £3bn. There was a bloke in the pub at Swindon under Pardew when we got booed off and were still on minus points in League One with "£2.5 Billion" on the back of his shirt. Also, whoever made the point about only the Champions League qualifiers winning anything in the past 17 years (except Leicester, Brum and Cheats FC) seems to have forgotten Middlesbrough's League Cup and UEFA Cup Final, Bolton's European runs, as well as Fulham's Europa League final - and including pre-2004 Chelsea as some kind of big club is highly misleading, yet they, Spurs and even Newcastle have all had relative European success without megabucks since 1994. "Winning things" is not the only measure of success in football anyway.

I have to say I genuinely could not give a flying monkey's about how many times the media reports on Saints, and I find it significantly less irritating than people who complain about bizarre media conspiracies against the club, when the reality is that the majority of people don't give a crunchy frog about any club other than their own, and the media generally only cater to the clubs with the most fans. When we've won the Champions' League 3 years in a row and we don't get a mention in Match or our own FIFA16 cover, then there's a problem.

Yes, you're right, that IS the second thread on this. This one was up about 3 hours before the other one.

I always used to park on the road between The Plume and where the Eagle used to be - free after 6 and you get a jump on the traffic too if you get there quickly enough.

I suspect worse players have dragged out top level freeloading for far longer. At 29 with his experience he should be signing at worst a League One deal for about 3 years - tells you all you need to know about how overrated he was when Redknapp signed him and his attitude and application to the "job" that he's down the pan already.

Errr... http://www.saintsweb.co.uk/showthread.php?33037-The-World-s-Smallest-Violin...

I ponce around with the pointless stuff and only play Be A Pro. Then after about a week I get bored and never play it again. This time around I may fart about creating the development squad just to see if any of them get a game like Isgrove and Hopkins seem to be for Saints in my first season. Last year I created my Sunday team and used them about twice - nevertheless annoyed that Creation Centre keeps crashing on my PCs. My gamertag stats are damning. Last 4 games played are FIFA 12 - this week F1 2010 - for the 2 days after I bought it cheap in about April FIFA11 - for the corresponding week last year (it came out a week earlier I think) and FIFA World Cup 2010 - which I played in June 2010 and completely stopped playing before the World Cup had even finished. I also played GTAIV for about a week when it came out. I think I've killed one pigeon and won about two games of pool. They are the MOST recent games, FFS. As I have mentioned numerous times, I still have Bioshock and Bioshock2 in the shrinkwrap. Red Dead Redemption and the zombie content are likely to be my next Christmas gifts I never play, a mere 18 months after release. "Casual" gamer probably just doesn't cover it.

It's not entirely surprising, you're a lot less likely to concede fouls for tackling the opposition when you've got the ball most of the time.

He's actually about 6' 2" Rickie, Rickie... ...There's no apostrophe in "gets", he's not that tall so er, cool your jets, Rickie Lambert, still a bit slow, for me...

...is playing for Vincent Pericard. http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/15214371.stm

What if you actually edit the players' long/short sleeve options and re-save ?

Dunno, mainly because "British Modern" (aka St Mary's with the scoreboard moved) is a stadium in which you can only play day and night dry matches, and I haven't played enough games to know. I am mildly annoyed that there's nothing between British Modern 20k capacity and Europa 50k capacity that looks like it could be St Mary's, and 20k is far too small, more like the Keepmoat than St Mary's. Century Park is close but has a two-tier side stand with a load of boxes in the middle, Stade Neder is even smaller, the Municipal also has a two-tier side stand, and nothing else really fits. Both Fratton and the Riverside are difficult to match to the stadia on offer as well, and it really pains me to give the Skates a bigger ground !

For those of you who want their Saints to wear exactly what the real players wear, here's a little resource of what the players wore in their last outings (and the relevant boots in game). Will take a little time to get this fully completed. Might also add tape, socks, sleeves, gloves details at a later date, feel free to point out any changes. 1 Kelvin Davis - Circa 2008 black Nike Total 90s with gold trim - just use EA Black 2 Frazer Richardson - adidas Predator white/blue 3 Dan Harding - 4 Morgan Schneiderlin - adidas Predator white/blue 6 Jose Fonte - Charcoal/Dark Red Nike Superfly III - he did used to wear the grey/orange ones which are in game though. 7 Rickie Lambert - Nike CTR360 Maestri - charcoal front / white heel, or white front yellow heel away - use the white / navy as they're in-game. 8 Jack Cork - White / black Puma kings - there are white / black Powercats or black/white Kings in game 9 Lee Barnard - when last seen was still wearing 2010 adidas F50s in yellow/black 10 Guly Do Prado - adidas Predator white/blue at Burnley, has worn Nike Tiempo (R10 Ronaldinho?) in burgundy since. 12 Danny Butterfield - adidas F50 Prime black/electricity (v Exeter for the Dev squad) - use the updated black/electricity F50s in-game 13 Daniel Fox - switches between blue/electricity and white/blue adidas Predators, both in-game 14 Dean Hammond - switches between white/blue and black/red/white adidas Predators, both in-game 15 Radhi Jaidi - 16 Aaron Martin - adidas Predator - black/red/white (v Cardiff for Dev squad) 17 Jonathan Forte - Nike Vapor Superfly III Purple/Yellow 18 Richard Chaplow - adidas Predator blue/electricity 20 Adam Lallana - Nike CTR360 Maestri - switches between charcoal front / white heel and white front / grey heel / light blue swoosh. Use the white / navy as they're in-game 21 Bartosz Bialkowski - Nike CTR360 Maestri - charcoal front / white heel; wears short sleeve GK shirt with undershirt! 22 David Connolly - Nike CTR360 - Black front/red heel. 23 Ryan Dickson - adidas Predator - black/red/white (v Exeter for Dev squad) and adidas F50 Prime black / electricity (v Cardiff Dev). 24 Lee Holmes adidas F50 Chameleon 25 Daniel Seaborne 26 Jos Hooiveld - switches between white/blue and black/red/white adidas Predators, both in-game 28 Ben Reeves 29 Ryan Doble 30 James Ward-Prowse - player not in game 31 Tommy Forecast Who cares ? 32 Jack Stephens - player not in game, but adidas adiPure black/white/blue sole 33 Steve De Ridder - switches between blue/electricity and white/blue adidas Predators, both in-game 34 Luke Shaw - player not in game 39 Harlee Dean - player not in game, adidas adiPure black/white/blue sole (v Cardiff Dev) and white/blue Nike Tiempo (v Watford Dev - white/gold ones are in game) 40 Sam Hoskins - 51 Lloyd Isgrove - 55 Alberto Seidi - Nike Blue/Orange Vapor Superfly III - not in game, but other boot colourways are. xx Jason Puncheon - meh. Thought I'd throw in a few U21s/Dev squad for you too, mostly from the last match v Exeter. Jack Dovey Aarran Racine - Nike Tiempo legend in black/white with yellow - there's a black/orange in game Sam McQueen - Purple/orange/yellow adidas F50 Corby Moore - Graeme Murty - Nike Tiempo legend in black/white with orange - use the black/orange in game James Ward-Prowse - Nike CTR360 Maestri in Charcoal/white v Watford and adidas Predator Black/white/red v Cardiff Jake Sinclair -