The9

I suspect we will be trying to "not lose" as opposed to "beat". I'm sure we'd take a win if it came along though. The order of fixtures hasn't helped us much, when Sparta and Inter play Be'er Sheva away they'll already know if a draw is good enough or if they'll need to go for the win.

Can someone remind me if that Robinson bloke, the property developer who facilitated the sale of the areas to Tesco, was/is any of the following?: Portsmouth fan, "High Net Worth" owner, still involved in club-decision making?

I'm quite enjoying Plymouth showing them what being a big club at this level looks like. I wonder how many Plymouth would get in the Prem? Oh, 17,800, which is the capacity of Home Park - about the number Fratton currently holds depending on the current safety certificate isn't it? Strange how Wikipedia still says 21,100... or 20,662 according to the Football Ground Guide... I wonder how many it actually is? Couldn't find it on the Skate OS.

Sam Gallagher, seriously. 2 goals in 6 games for Blackburn in the Championship this season, 2 in 20 for Saints in his only run in the team, not quite got the pedigree yet.

Won't be far from that starting XI, maybe Romeu on the bench and Hojbjerg as DM?

I see Saints legend (put him on the banner) Iago Falque scored for Torino today in their 2-1 defeat to Atalanta, in which Joe Hart made his Torino debut and contrived to make a mistake to gift Atalanta the equaliser. Anyway, after his one game for Saints in 2012 in which we lost 2-0 at home to Leicester in the Championship promotion season, he went on loan to Almeria and Rayo Vallecano, before Spurs sold him to Genoa, who sold him to Roma, who have loaned him to Torino. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iago_Falque Are there any other Saints rejects who've ended up being alright after all? Whatever happened to Nicholas Bignall, Thomas Pekhart and Romain Gasmi? I can't be bothered to Google, so...

Seeing as we've played Man U and Arsenal away and lost them, I'm not too bothered so far. We're doing ok, haven't had the run of the ball, playing without the record signing who's clearly meant to help us create more chances and we've missed a few chances - the odd bounce or decision here and there and we'd be a few points better off - that stuff's going to happen some times and sooner or later we'll have a game where we have 2 shots on target and score them both and win... like Arsenal did on Saturday.

Refs hadn't been given the directive on clamping down on shirt-pulling in the box then.

Wanyama played in eight successive matches where we conceded a goal at the end of last season.

It was a penalty for the foul on Giroud in isolation, but the ref should have stopped the game for Koscielny's head injury AND he was arguably offside from the ball into the box because he was impeding Forster's movement and therefore interfering.

I thought our booing of Cech for taking about the same time as Forster had to take his kicks was fairly amusing. The early booking of Forster just gave him the chance to take as long as he liked later, the ref was never going to give him a second yellow for it. Interesting to note the number of Gooners going absolutely apoplectic about Forster "timewasting" when he had the ball at his feet after the drop ball and no-one went to close him down. They were then booing when he picked it up and released it into play three seconds into the "six" seconds he actually had to release it within the laws. One area where Madeley got it absolutely right was adding the 3.5 minutes of injury time in injury time - we'd played all of 15 seconds of it when the injury treatment started, and it ALL went on after the 4 minutes indicated had been played.

Picked the team for Thursday and only Long's finishing, and Fonte apparently missing the pre-season meeting about shirt-pulling in the box, cost us a win. I was pretty happy with the overall performance.

Not by you, I took your comments at face value for what they actually said. Though only you can confirm that the other 128 responses on the thread aren't barking up the wrong tree...

He's clearly already left out Hojbjerg and Long (and maybe Austin) with a mind to Thursday.

We should focus on getting through the group stage, then if we get a game or two to rotate the players more significantly we can do that then. I'm not particularly bothered about whether we come 8th or 16th in the Premier League tbh, we're not close to being bad enough to go down and people should stop flapping about it. It would take an injury crisis of ridiculous proportions for us to be anywhere near the bottom 3 at the end of the season. We'll be picking teams based on the squad needs for multiple competitions and people should also probably just accept that before they start getting sh11tty about the rotation we're clearly going to be using.

I'd expect us to start with Forster, Van Dijk, Fonte, Bertrand and two from Tadic/Redmond and Davis from Saturday, with the rest the obvious replacements who didn't play (Martina, Ward-Prowse, Hojbjerg, Long and Austin).

Presumably UEFA rules that we can't, seeing as they've gone to the trouble of sending out the Europa League cards to print the tickets on.

Looks like my mate's got his ambulant ones up front for being special then.

As the only 4 players guaranteed to start every match are Forster, Bertrand, Van Dijk and Fonte, and we have two players for every other position of similar abilities I'm not sure what you'd consider "the reserves", so I don't really think it matters. Hojbjerg, Austin and Long didn't start the last match, presumably because they were being "rested" for Sparta on Thursday. People need to realise we're picking the team with multiple matches in mind and we're going to have to make some compromises.

Weird assumption that this has anything to do with selling the club full stop, tbh. There are all kinds of opportunities to market Saints in China that could bring in loads of cash and "grow the brand" in the way the club has said they will try to which don't involve the club being sold, all of which could involve our owner meeting some Chinese business people.

Most non-British clubs don't even produce match programmes. A few only do it for English opposition to make a few quid. Also interesting you think we should be trying to beat Be'er Sheva out there in our first away game - 3 wins and a draw would usually get us through. I suppose it'll depend how Thursday goes.

They've been sending them out since at latest Wednesday, my mate had his yesterday morning. Mine arrived today. Shouldn't take 3 working days for anything to get delivered.

I can't.

They'd be in the Super-dooper Bestest League.

I *think* they were just joking about the threat, more from historical reputation rather than any recent problems. Thanks for the bar recommendations though, if we get to spend any time in Be'er Sheva either side of the game we'll check them out.