The9

Yeah but I'm desperately trying to keep that on topic... and also I'm not deluded enough to think the kit design details and general content of that has broad appeal in the way the team itself does ! Plus I'll expect it to disappear when the thing is actually launched. Or maybe even Thursday. The squad stuff is never-ending.

Yeah, but they're not exactly essential purchases nevertheless.

It's a shame you're posting it on a Forum which widely condemned last season at half-time of a match in the first week of April with 9 games to play !

I dunno about anyone else, but I frankly cannot be ar5ed to go into these mega-threads and would much rather a thread for each individual player. Same deal with the Pompey Takeover debacle, I haven't read that since they dodged the bullet, and I'm not likely to pick it up again 200 pages later even if I am interested in the subject - it's just too much like hard work to trawl through all the guff, when you can usually tell the reality of the situation from the OP.

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I hate all retro kits except the England World Cup 90 Umbro one with "19" on the back because that's pretty much authentic. It's the crappy efforts at recreating the original which offends my sensibilities... though as crappy rip-offs go the polyester Air Florida one is reasonably decent. FWIW I don't like the Blackburn kit much, but the collar's alright. Different without being horrible and/or pointless.

Quite. You'd expect the new club sponsor to want the shirts out asap as well, very strange.

Looking at that Blackburn away kit a little more closely, it's got a separate shoulder panel - given the problems with lining up the stripes in two directions, I wonder if we might have another "red shoulder piece" kit (or maybe a white shoulder piece) like the last Umbro striped shirt ? Though as the seams seem to be square, I suppose it wouldn't be too hard to just continue the stripes all the way up - the last striped Saints kit had weird curved seams over the top of the arms / shoulder which was probably a problem for matching the striped pattern.

Here's the Blackburn kit. You can see similarities with the Cosmos collar, and this is the first photo of any other Umbro kit which has been released this close season showing that collar. So from what we heard long ago in this thread, I'd be inclined to say that's the collar Saints will have on the home kit. Although you can see they're not exactly the same, there's definitely a similarity.

I think you misunderstood. What people were saying was that it was ridiculous to be worried about us not signing anyone prior to the contract breakpoint of July 1st, not that it was suddenly fine to start getting massively het up over it from July 1st. July 1st is the first date when people might reasonably expect us to start announcing signings - anything before that would be a bonus. The other thing is that there are plenty of people on here who think we've got a solid top half squad already, and there might not be any players we've identified who will improve us prepared to move yet - this would especially be the case if we planned on signing some lower Prem players, who may or may not be available depending on the transfer targets of their clubs. Under the assumption that we're not competing with Man City yet, there's a pecking order and we may just have to wait and see what happens in the Prem first. I have to say that the signing of a few clearly superior players would assuage any doubts about funding, but that's not really the basis for sound squad-building.

I'd agree with that word for word. Even without adding anyone the squad is nearer top half than bottom.

As did the "Stars in Stripes?" graphic for the new kit. It's got more black because they've reversed the colours to try and make it look different to last year's ball despite having the same basic pattern, nothing more to it than that.

Interesting to note Blackburn's new yellow Umbro away kit is a completely different design to the other Umbro shirts we've seen so far - collar is new and looks vaguely like the Cosmos one too - can't link at the moment as I'm on mobile, but it's on http://www.football-shirts.co.uk

Oh, and having once played up front with a bloke who stood trial for rape (not convicted, disappeared from the area immediately after the trial and from the team the week before the story hit the papers) you could say that kind of thing affects team morale a little, which could possibly have explained the drop in form. That or having to play Rangers and Celtic a few more times with the title not even a remote possibility. As opposed to mafia scoundrels, you'd think.

I would suspect they are trying to deflect attention from one of their players being added to the sex offenders register for "tapping up" a 12 and 14 year old online, as it were. Rambling on about mafia crime groups manipulating the media because 3 of their players have been caught up in things like this kind of overlooks that at least one of the crimes happened in Scotland, not known for its Eastern European crime mafia media links. I think mentioning paedophiles and that "The task of the club is to tear these kids out of hands of criminals" in the statement MIGHT have been a slight misjudgement, given that they haven't even sacked the bloke. And the reason Cortese hasn't issued any of these kind of statements has got quite a lot to do with him not being utterly insane, as well as Saints players not actually doing any of these things (yet, to my knowledge, etc.).

Just a little "heads up" to those saying "red sleeves are unlucky". Here's River Plate getting relegated for the first time in 110 years, wearing their usual colours, which might look a little familar...

I'd be inclined to think that spacing out the launch maximises sales because people who can only afford to buy one that month don't have to choose between them when the kits are most likely to sell. Sales tail off significantly after launch and the shirt becomes less and less value for money until the price drops.

I don't think that's a reasonable comparison to be fair. Who knows what Pearson could have done with the "£7m" (actually nearer £5m btw, Rasiak was already signed as a loan to buy under Lowe the previous Christmas) that Burley had - and Burley had left us safely clear of the bottom 3 when he took the Scotland job, for all his weird substitutions by then.

Well, we don't actually know that, chairmen have a habit of making funds available when it looks like the alternative is going to cost even more - but that's speculation either way - but neither of those were available to bring in when Burley was in charge.

Heh, nice edit. I suspect that he had his hopes pinned on signing Wayne Thomas long before he actually did, which was indeed "too late". Actually, I'm surprised we were still signing anyone at that point, with hindsight.

Yeah, but who had we sold to fund that at a fraction of the cost?

I agree with you to a point, but the original quote (above) is what we were discussing, and I wouldn't say that was the case - we only have fan expectation to go on regarding where we "should" have finished, and they're obviously going to be skewed, and as we often see on here, biased towards Saints being more successful than they are. I'm not going to argue about Euell though, that's a lot of money for a bloke who runs like a frog.

Do you not think with hindsight that this was the first sign that we were absolutely skint and wouldn't be buying anyone decent because we'd gambled on the previous season with relatively big names and wages, and were therefore stuffed from then on due to the losses we'd incur ? Burley was a sitting duck from that point.

Not true, in fact we weren't even in the top 4 spenders. Sunderland and Derby both outspent us significantly for a start (and went straight up). Roy Keane signed about 15 players. As well as that, West Brom lost very few of their Prem squad from the previous season so didn't need to sign anyone, and yet lost in the Play-Off Final.

That's not exactly accurate either. We only lost one league match well into October under Redknapp. Though admittedly we drew shedloads. It was only when we caved against Leeds that people really let themselves go and stopped giving the bloke the benefit of the doubt entirely. We should have got shot when he was wavering in the summer - though I was saying this on whatever Forum we were using in 2005 from May onwards. It was hardly like he'd shown signs of turning the club around in the previous 6 months and he had a history of hitting the eject button. That 6 months and then losing all the Prem bailers at Xmas not in the summer cost us 18 months and our best chance of getting back up.