The9

Losing a half decent manager, losing a lot of matches and selling all your half decent players will also help with this.

I can't wait for Adkins to do this so you realise the use of tactics boards is quite widespread in football...

Most of the players who didn't make the 25s were known a while in advance so teams were lining up to get them on loan. Bellamy and Woodgate didn't make it at Man City and Spurs respectively, although the latter was still injured.

Saturday December 3rd from today then... but there isn't another league match for Saints until Sep 10th, so a player signed on Sep 9th would leave a gap of only 20 days in mid/late December (albeit a busy period and for us a time in which we visit Fratton) during which they weren't available to us before we could re-sign them on Jan 1st 2012. Not really a concern.

11 shots on target and 9 off, first page of that thread.

Hypo posted "F*ck you Adkins you pathetic waste of space with your uninspiring cr*ppy interviews and sh*t style of play with the players you have. F*ck you overpaid players who last gave a cr*p against Man United and never take their chances. F*ck you sh*tty saints forum which crashes despite receiving a load of money. F*ck you Solent which forces me to listen to Skates winning and possibly making the playoffs. F*ck you." Do you think he's still got it in for the Forum ?

"It is crystal clear that, on the strength of this result and the post-Oldham era, there are either some serious f**king attitude problems in the squad, or the manager is utterly incapable of lifting the players to the right state of mind for the games." Cue Saints losing one match in 4 months.

Errr, that would be why I didn't think they've changed my opinion much. I haven't seen Fox kick a ball for us yet, nor obviously Hooiveld, and De Ridder has looked amazing half the times I've seen him and a little out of position up front the others, but enough to make a judgement on him as an attacking player - if not defensively. He looks potentially excellent. Also, the whole point of this thread is to make predictions, so I'm not quite sure why the specific criticism of me.

"Top Flight" does not mean "the League above the Championship", so based on that you can write off Hooiveld and de Ridder's experience, leaving 11 games for Cork and 29 for Fox, both in relegated teams. As it happens, I think Cork's a great signing, Fox could be good, de Ridder I'm expecting to be excellent, and I'm not passing opinion on Hooiveld until I actually see him play - I'm merely saying your response to a question about players being "good enough to compete in the League above" is by no means the best way to illustrate it.

It is fcking preposterous in this day and age that a digitally transmitted copy of a signature is legally acceptable to the FA, but a digitally encrypted signature from a secure email address or secure website isn't. Especially when you consider that the FA-end copy could have a faked-up signature glued to the original anyway and you wouldn't be able to tell once it's been through the fax.

Around 5th place, which is what I said when we signed De Ridder. Can't say Fox or Hooiveld have changed my opinion much, though some of our performances revised it upwards for a little while...

I think that was implied.

You mean donkey Heskey who's still starting regularly for a well-established Prem side and scored on the weekend, as opposed to scraping occasional appearances for a one-season flash in the pan Prem team that got relegated and then getting released by an SPL team ?

You didn't read the OP then ? It didn't ask for your questions. It asked what the format was and how likely he would be to get to ask the questions he already has.

At least one of those attempted deals (Jemal) happened before we sold Chamberlain. This is assuming that it was one of the three, you could argue that Gorkss, Fontaine, Rodriguez, Maynard and Jemal is more than three, but compared to the others there's little evidence of any dealing with Maynard or Rodriguez. EDIT: I see the original quote mentions "three centre backs" - Jemal was still prior to the Chamberlain transfer. Anyway, next question, who's been left out of the Prem 25s who we can get hold of?

I'm thinking you like to generalise. I could drive a truck through most of those arguments, but will leave it at pointing out that Dyer has played no more than 3 matches in the Prem to date, so judging whether he's done well or not is rather like Celtic fans slating Hooiveld - could be a bit premature.

Or Jonathon Woodgate at Stoke.

Mine's been fine too.

So NOT Andy Johnson - might be worth updating the thread heading to indicate that...

As in ex-Palace and Fulham Andrew Johnson ? At least we'll have a song ready made for him, having nicked the da-da-da-da song we use for everyone from Palace in the first place.

There's a story with that title on the Echo site...

The full list of our LATEST signings of each transfer window since August 2002 (if anywhere near the deadline, so not all necessarily on the last day) - there were a couple of extensions due to bank holidays : Jonathan Forte Sc'nthorpe Signed 31 Jan, 2011 Richard Chaplow Preston (though already here on loan) Signed 31 Jan, 2011 Jason Puncheon Plymouth Signed 01 Feb, 2010 Radhi Jaidi Birmingham Free 03 Sep, 2009 Anthony Pulis Stoke Free 29 Aug, 2008 Jason Euell Middlesbro Free 31 Aug, 2007 Stern John Sunderland Signed 31 Aug, 2007 Inigo Idiakez Derby £250,000 31 Aug, 2006 Alexander Ostlund Feyenoord Signed 30 Jan, 2006 Olivier Bernard Newcastle £400,000 31 Jan, 2005 Andreas Jakobsson Brondby £1,000,000 31 Aug, 2004 Paul Smith Brentford £500,000 28 Jan, 2004 Danny Higginbotham Derby £1,500,000 31 Jan, 2003 David Prutton Nottm Forest £2,500,000 31 Jan, 2003 Marcus Hall Nottm Forest Free 30 Aug, 2002 Andrei Kanchelskis Rangers Free 30 Aug, 2002 Quiiiiiiiiiiiiiite a few clangers in there... say "thank you soccerbase"...

I thought we'd lose more games this season too. £45 (and to be fair it may well be £35-£40 depending on the opposition) x 19 = £855 vs £26 x 23 = £598. That's not the end of the world.

He often didn't do himself any favours with his occasionally time-delayed reactions to through balls and closing defenders down, but equally, the post I was responding to initially claimed he "never" won the fans over, when he certainly did.

Not sure how this works ? "Alright love, hop on and away we go..." "Oh, er, is that it?" "Yeah, but Saints have broken their transfer record" "Ooooooooh... aaaaahhhh..." etc