The9

Not true, one bloke on here is claiming to have tickets off one.

A mate of mine mentioned it during the match when Davis was impeded for the second or third time (he's a ref, I wouldn't be entirely sure of him as a source but it seems too specific a thing to misunderstand or misinterpret. As for the ballboys, we saw them disappear, it was blatant. About four moved to behind the Brighton goal to control and delay the return for their goal kicks at that end (not sure Kelv had any his end so he'd have had to run to get the ball himself) and ALL the ones along the sides who had been killing time delaying Saints restarts AND Brighton ones to timewaste from kick off suddenly all gathered under a floodlight near where the players come out. One of the things I both like and hate about Saints is our refusal to adopt this kind of "any edge" gamesmanship. I wonder how many other opposing fans have come away from Withdean this season complaining about the short amount of time the ball was actually in play? It does explain their huge run of narrow single goal wins though. On the bright side, 2-1.

No wonder they think changing the colour of the away end and putting up pictures of famous visiting teams' players will improve their new ground, they have no idea what football is about. Playing "Making Plans For Nigel" over the PA (followed by an utterly boll0cks excuse about some bloke called Nigel being ill to attempt to justify it) and "Catch Us If You Can" were feeble - I just found it amazing they had devoted so much effort to running Saints down, especially Adkins for some throwaway stuff from 6 months ago,when they had basically spent no time at all actually celebrating what they had achieved other than a few songs. And it wasn't just the fans, it was their club - the programme was full of digs and snipes at Saints as well - even the front page had "Keep Up" on it. What made me laugh is that I don't think any of us could even remember what he'd said two days later, back in the autumn, but my God they were clinging onto it for all they could wring from it today. Still, 2-1 eh ? You cheat but you still don't win.

Actually I think they'll be finishing in the nPC bottom 6 next season, though 18th or 19th would still be their highest finish for 20 years !

That's a lot more polite than I was going to be.

There were at least a hundred of them lined up to hurl abuse (and objects) at Adkins at the start of the second half - and just look at this lame banner... Not a lot of humble pie when he was beaming his way off the pitch at the end, and guess who had the egg on their face ?

This - and if we get get Ankegren banned (after the Huddersfield match of course) for his v-sign at the Saints fans all the better. It was just wonderful to absolutely stuff their pathetic anti-football play-acting, time-wasting and diving back down their throats. Interesting to hear the Adkins had already written to the league about Brighton's use of obstruction to prevent the keeper releasing the ball quickly (a yellow card offence, which they repeated endlessly) and their cheating use of ballboys - who ignored all ball requests by Saints players until about 10 seconds afterwards, and were then entirely withdrawn from the surrounding areas and stationed either behind the Brighton goal or (for most of them) in a group near a floodlight miles from the pitch, at around the 80th minute. So very delighted we beat the bitter, whining, cheating losers, as much for their attitudes as for the vital 3 points.

They are not going to lay down in their last match at Withdean. It just will not happen. They already lost at Huddersfield and won't want to have failed to beat either of their nearest challengers, plus they also have 2 away matches against teams who basically aren't playing for anything in which to rotate a few players.

Actually we outplayed them far more at Withdean (they barely had anything you could describe as a spell of pressure all match, and their goal was a gift) than St Mary's, where we outplayed them first half and the second half was pretty even.

They timewasted from kick off today as well - at home, in a match they've since been trying to claim they weren't really up for. He even did the old Mourinho "send the player to be substituted to the furthest away part of the pitch" thing, never mind the half hour all of their players took to respond to treatment. Of course, that just meant when we finally got the breakthroughs they had no chance of getting back into it.

We absolutely slaughtered them in terms of having possession when the ball was in play - looking at the full time stats I can only assume that the possession figures include giving possession to the team taking the restarts, because Brighton taking 5 minutes to take all their goal kicks until the 89th minute can be the only reason why we didn't have at least 60% of possession. Funnily enough Dag and Red also did against them last week.

I'd forgotten how old you were. "All weather pitch"... LOLz, the word you're looking for is "Astropitch", the all weather things were brown and made of gravel, and they WILL carve up your knees - unlike the rubber crumb 3G 5-a-side stuff at Fleming, which you can probably manage a slide tackle on without much damage. Don't try it on the sand-based full-sized FP astro though...

I couldn't care less what happens on here during home games and I should think about 90% of the other subscribers don't either.

I have to say personally, having started off in flappy collar late-70s kits with nipple-grating material, moved on into v-neck and round neck polyester sheen shirts in the early 80s, then pinstriped v-necks in the late 80s, on to the hideous collared jacquard woven shiny patterned things of the early 90s, hideously loud screen prints in the mid 90s, the pointless quirky design features like laced and button down collars of the late 90s, and on into the bland multi-club regimented templates of the 2000s, I'm not bothered whether kits have collars or not as long as they don't sit on your throat or break your nose when you pull them on.

You think that was accidental in a response about how infrequent Guards of Honour between two clubs are at football ?

In that case can you spare us all the daily updates on how wrong it is ? All of us can do crap predictions, and as you had Saints screwing up anyway...

Well I won't be there, so that's a bit of an oversight.

But is that on your own or were you part of a bigger group ?

I'm still sodding around with overlaying the original shirt template (for which I have hundreds of Umbro templates rather than about 15) on those short and sock templates... problem being the shadow effect around the whole kit, which needs to be removed from the bottom of the shirt. I really like the yellow/blue stripes, don't like the split-sash navy/yellow version, just because it's impossible to overlay the sponsor like that.

You need to cut and paste the "pop-up" URL (which ends in "theater") into the address bar, then right click the "normal" pic and post that URL as the img link : Awesome effort, I think you've got the new badge spot on.

Open entry and first timers encouraged, if it's anything like it used to be...

Good God there's not much of interest in there...

Guards of honour mentioned between two clubs (not for individuals, or kids mascot-style line-ups) in the first 13 pages of a Google "football guard of honour" search are as follows : Chelsea v Man U 2007 : http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/6633875.stm Real Madrid v Barcelona 2008 : http://www.tribalfootball.com/articles/laudrup-tells-barcelona-no-shame-guard-honour-182485 Accrington Stanley v Aldershot 2008 (start of following season) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBKXIKs16FA Lyme Regis v South Petherton 2010 : http://www.viewfrompublishing.co.uk/news_view/5061/5/1/lyme-regis-football-defeat-but-a-proud-day Whinging about guards of honour : Luton v Crawley 2011 : http://www.dunstabletoday.co.uk/sport/football/local-football/brabin_unsure_over_guard_of_honour_at_crawley_1_2587450 Brighton v Saints 2011 : http://www.northstandchat.com/showthread.php?199528-Southampton-to-not-form-a-guard-of-honour/page4 So frankly, basically no-one does it in the first place, and absolutely no-one outside Sussex gives a crap. Oh, and Lyme Regis won the league, got the guard of honour and then lost 5-1.

Oh, and I think this is underrated :

Grammatical quirks aside, telling a manager he can't just go out and spend fcvkloads of cash on any player he wants hardly constitutes "interference", even when he's got previous for buying absolutely shedloads of crap and hoping some of it sticks.