The9

Well don't think about it then. I usually buy the full kit, though not usually all at the same time, and generally wear the shirts to matches and the rest to training. Last season I got the whole lot in one go, and then bought additional identical home socks from JJB for £3. The white Umbro home shirts from last season are excellently designed, really comfortable and good quality with the lining, though the black away shorts (which have the stripe down the side rather than around the bottom) seem to pull down at the back all of the time, which is something the white/red England away shorts which are the exact same design also do. I've got the last 5 sets of home shorts, only the St Mary's kits though - but to be fair I've also played for the Saints-kit wearing IFC team for most of that time. And what a startling revelation that the home shorts are black, as they have been for every season except last year since 1950.

Yep, I've been playing the "type possible jpeg titles into the web page" game about once a week for a few minutes at a time since the pre-order started, but no luck yet.

Sales begin Thursday, "launch" is Wednesday, not that it means anything other than getting to see the design.

I've just noticed that GK shirt has the weird "inner collar" that's on the Man City home shirt as well. Strange, and possibly irritating as hell on the neck. That's all...

That's not even what we're discussing. "Cortese Tax" itself is the match day additional fee. However, as the person who originally coined the term, I can confirm it may be extended to include all other forms of additional revenue streams exploited by the club at any point since August 2009, e.g. car parking charge, phone booking fee, online booking fee, even the £2 more the kit costs this season - whether they're VAT-based or not. Incidentally it'll be interesting to see if the club does pass off the price rise as being due to the VAT rise, and if they also charge more for VAT-free children's sizes. They haven't mentioned it much - you can pretty much only tell from going to the online site that there's even been a price hike, and I don't know how much kids' kits were last year.

I knew this place wouldn't let me down. Not THAT unlikely then really ? He actually pitched up in the queue just before I left, so it was more of a 5 minute overlap during a 28 minute 23 second wait (I timed it for car parking rant purposes, as I like a stat to back up my arguments, and it's still on my phone) - but of course if there hadn't been a queue I wouldn't have seen him...

I'm assuming about 11:40pm tonight... or something It doesn't actually say here: http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/page/NewsDetail/0,,10280~2376925,00.html but I'm not sure there's a public "launch" like there was last year as there's been nothing to say "come to the launch" and the kit isn't on sale until Thursday.

The goalie shirt will definitely be this bog standard template - though most of the Umbro GK shirts this season have the black on the sleeves not the body of the shirt. Only Man City and England have got unique keeper kits, it's been the same for at least 3 years. Not sure about the go-go-gadget feature.

LOL, I suppose I may have misread

Ah the power of logical thinking. Glad I couldn't get to sleep last night now ! Oh yeah and FWIW I think £16 is pretty reasonable, though I think the weird format is putting people off.

Proof we didn't have it in March 2007 : http://web.archive.org/web/20070204064711/http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/tickets/?page_id=3 Proof we didn't have it in Feb 2009 : http://web.archive.org/web/20090207201042/http://saintsfc.co.uk/tickets/?page_id=3 Here's June 2009, with an administrator's statement, only a few weeks before the takeover, after the season had finished, and absolutely no mention of any match day additional ticket fees whatsoever : http://web.archive.org/web/20090608030116/http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/page/TicketNews/0,,10280~1635574,00.html There's only one update on the wayback machine after that, and it's Jan 2010 - but it's not loading at the moment. Even so, unless the policy was implemented between June 2009 and the takeover, I think you may have to accept that you're wrong and the matchday charge is indeed a Cortese initiative.

You appear to be implying that the pay on the day charge was introduced due to huge queues at the TO at a time when we were in the process of getting relegated from the Championship and having some of our lowest crowds at St Mary's - now why doesn't that make any sense ? There may have been one or two instances for friendly matches or early round cup games prior to 2010, but it wasn't a policy for all matches until last summer. My recollection is that we didn't even have it during 2009/10 under Cortese, and the £2 match day charge was introduced along with the online booking charge and phone booking fee. I quite like the term it captures the degree of brazen short-termist fan exploitation that embodies that banker spirit. I'm off to investigate...

Which is hardly difficult, he comes across as remarkably thick even for an 80s footballer.

Two things. Firstly, no it wasn't, and secondly, *I* invented the term thank you very much.

As a weird aside, the bloke in the seat immediately behind me was renewing at the exact same time as me. What are the chances ? No, seriously, I want figures. Say I'd recognise maybe 5 people who are in the row directly behind me (but 2 of them are his kids so won't be pitching up to renew anyway)... there are 13000 ST renewals out there, and the time period I was there was 30 minutes of a renewal period which was 9am-5pm for 10 working days. Someone out there has got to be this bored.

If he is, he's not being very good at sarcasm. I haven't bought tickets yet, 50/50 whether I'll be there or packing our flat into boxes (which I'll be doing for the rest of the weekend). What I CAN guarantee is that if I don't have any tickets by Friday I won't be pitching up on the day to pay Cortese Tax.

Gecko gave a bit of a run down on the kit process to me on Facebook as well as a few questions on here, and he said Umbro could turn around a kit from China in 3-5 weeks, which would mean an incredibly late start if there was any delay. Shortages with Umbro are not unheard of, we ran out of home shirts for 2 months last season from mid September to mid November, but that was an unexpectedly high selling shirt. We also ran out of kit in 2009 but that was due to admin, and West Ham ran out of away shirts when XL were their sponsors before going bankrupt. But not to have any at the launch? That only happens for the minikits and stuff like that...

That's precisely what I'm expecting, more or less. The Ugly is going with the "UEFA cup" style shirt but as I'm expecting it's utter guesswork based on the thin-ish stripes on the advert I'm not thinking there's any ITK involved. And as for "kit is late", I call massive load of balls. Sibley's tweet was indeed the week before the aap3 deal was done. I have heard the odd rumour that Cortese's been very hands on, and that the original schedule was May and July, which could feasibly feed into the delay and/or kit design changing scenario. If I have a spare hour or two tomorrow I MIGHT gather all the ITK comments into one place to see who's legit and who's full of it, but time might be a bit tight so I may not get the chance. I do wonder if we'll get two kits launched, we could wear the away v Bilbao's red and white, the home v Bremen's green and they could wear their away kits (green for Bilbao and orange for Werder) against each other. Or we might just wear the home kit against both with Bilbao playing in green v us and their stripes v Bremen. Not that it matters...

I think *I'll* decide on how much I charge people for standing in a queue behind me, thanks. .

Umbro are by far the best of the major manufacturers at keeping their kits secret prior to release, you very rarely see a leak of an Umbro shirt more than a day in advance on any of the kit websites, if at all - though that may be because Man City are their highest profile client - and their home kit WAS all over the place a good month before release. But mostly, compare that to Nike and Adidas, whose kits of well-known and more obscure teams are popping up all over the place from about February onwards. The new Man Utd away blue/black hooped kit was out there about 4 months ago - I even saw a kid wearing one last week and it didn't come out until a couple of days ago. If Nike take nothing else from Umbro it should be how to control their kit secrecy, seeing as every leak reduces the impact of the new product and therefore the sales.

1986 European Cup Final, our chums Steaua did the same to Barcelona, won 2-0 on pens.

A particularly stupid US Immigration officer had the front to tell me my nationality was "UK" (a nation) as opposed to "British" (a nationality). I bit my tongue on the subject, but God knows how many other people had to go through that particular piece of un-education...

Anyone wanting to mention that this will give the club yet another opportunity to cash in on the car park charges can form an orderly queue behind me. Though I should point out that if you're waiting for more than 15 minutes it'll cost you a quid .

Having not seen anything else on here to describe it, is it the same format as last season ? Printed slip in the front, match-by-match tickets with a bus voucher (or two) inside in book format ? I'm assuming if it was an NFC-based smart card for magical new turnstile operating that someone would have started a thread about it by now. And also that we'd have new external turnstiles surrounding the ground as I can't imagine they'd be able to fit the technology AND the staff to sort out problems into the existing areas.

Seems like a pretty effective way to debunk a dubious rumour to me.