The9

The long and short of it nowadays is that kit manufacturers will have no more than about 6 basic styles of kit in use at any one time, probably 3 or 4 new ones a season with the 2 year old ones dropping out of use - there are one or two exceptions, and there's a distinction between "proper" kit deals and "teamwear" deals in which the (usually lower league) teams just wear kits which are readily for sale to any parks side. So it's more a matter of Umbro saying "here are your options" from their range, and Saints offering suggestions. As we didn't have a striped kit this season the club could use any of the Umbro 2010/11 OR 2011/12 striped styles and it would be fresh to us. They're not likely to go with something that Sunderland have already used though, this season or next. It's probably not dissimilar to the sort of thing we've been doing on here, with a couple of people suggesting tweaks until they come up with something everyone's satisfied enough with. Though I've put a collar style that's unlikely to be used onto the standard 2010/11 Umbro striped template, which probably isn't going to happen, and I'm not claiming anyone likes them ! From a personal perspective, I hate the long England collar style, and I don't like the white collar with the stripes (too Stoke). I also prefer the black collar on the white central stripe rather than the red, and the sponsor with the white surround to help it stand out - rather than a patch. Will be interesting to see what we get. I might have a mess with the single central stripe based on the current Hearts kit as well.

Agreed, no, we won't catch them even if we beat them.

FWIW 1) Lallana - we're just not the same side without him. 2) Fonte - a class above this division and very few mistakes all season long. 3) Barnard - just works and works for the team, great finisher.

Yeah, but they *were* right for about 3 years.

I like your approach, but even as an estimate, there's no way the difference between 8 and 9 points will be such a drop off of 25% in likelihood of going up - and I'd be VERY surprised if only getting 9 points would be enough to stay ahead of Huddersfield AND Peterborough 60% of the time, far too many points dropped.

All in all, I thought we played alright, with a weakened side we were still good enough to win. Both Orient's goals were clearly offside - and having seen that vid above, the second shot WASN'T going in anyway. Butters got caned by Cox all match long, but Chaplow didn't give him any help. Kelv made two excellent saves, the tip over the bar at 1-0 was vital, the scrambled stop which I think also hit the post at some point kept our 2 goal buffer late on and kept us from nerves. Harding made one excellent decision when 4 yards out with a striker behind him ready to score that he couldn't have expected or known about. You also have to love our squad depth that we ended up with 4 centre backs in the back 4 to head everything away, as all they did for the last 30 minutes was wang it up the pitch. Jaidi won EVERYTHING and kept the heat off, Fonte did the same and brought the ball forward well a couple of times. Barnard ran all day and Lambert was Lallana for us in terms of holding the ball up and showed great composure late on to keep the ball in their half and play in Barnard for the clincher. The only weaknesses were the midfielders who had to pass on a bumpy pitch, and Butterfield who had no support. Ryan Dickson was excellent after twice getting clattered early on. Hammond went 90 mins without getting booked, so the suspension has been avoided. Even Guly, who was quiet, nearly accidentally chipped the keeper from 35 yards when trying to pass the ball out wide to Lambert thanks to a divot !

Nope. The draw means they both drop 2 points, total 4 points "gained" as opposed to Peterborough not losing any and Hudd dropping all 3. With a Peterborough win they're still a major factor, the draw eases them out of the picture a little more, and puts us ahead of Huddersfield which is a huge psychological advantage.

We need 5 points to be guaranteed at least a play-off place, just for the record... or a win against Rochdale and one more point.

I'd stick to not assuming they're going to lose and shooting for 5 wins from 7, then the target can only come down. So 15 points, 5 wins to be mathematically guaranteed of going up, and assume nothing.

I don't think the attraction is SO great at that price that there's enough interest - taking out the 40-ish people who've already done it. Personally, I played in match 1 and I don't feel the need to do it again, I would even have to think about it seriously if it was only £100 for 90 minutes - but that's mostly due to my massive ego and the fact I have a "played 1 hour, scored 2 goals" record at St Mary's that I don't want to mess up !

Thing is, the most likely way that Brighton can win the title against Saints is by both teams winning all of their games until that point. Anything else and they'll either have already won it, or won't be able to clinch it on that day - unless everyone up there starts losing every game. And given that we need 15 points to be mathematically certain, I'll take us winning the next 2 and then needing at most three wins from the last 5 matches no matter what anyone else does.

Photoshop and the short and long sleeve templates downloaded from this forum : http://forum.fm-view.com/topic/12214-ss09-11-template-thread/ You just mess about with the layers and colour overlay, and if you're feeling adventurous you can drag and drop different elements to different shirts (as I have with the England collar here). Saints and aap3 logos are just Google, copy, paste and then delete any surrounding colours on the layer. It's pretty easy if the templates exist, not so much if you have to create the patterns yourself.

Last one...

Not really. The Admiral kit had black piping surrounding each stripe whilst this has no black on the shirt itself, the Admiral kit had black cuffs, and both collar and cuffs had a white/red pattern. As well as that, the whole shirt had a horrible repeating diamond patterned weave all over it. Thankfully polyester jacquard weaves are no longer "fashion" in football.

I could do the panel, but I think a white surround to the letters probably looks better - and there aren't currently any Umbro kits out there with the black pinstripe, so I'm not going to do that one.

You might want to check out the new song before committing support for it...

Honestly ? Slightly more accurately fits my opinion AND a zillion times better.

People keep saying we haven't actually paid anything towards it... ...not to mention that Markus clearly would have been part of the decision to redraft, whether he was still alive when the application was put in or not.

LOLz, Steve doesn't have an agenda against Cortese, and all he's done is cut and paste publicly available figures, you're a mentalist. That full, controversial, agenda-ridden, biased tirade against Cortese here : Errrm, I don't even see an opinion, never mind a headline.

Agreed, those two drawing is an excellent result even if we completely ar5e it up at Orient. Still leaves us within 3 points of both with games in hand. FWIW I'm still a bit worried about Hammond's 9 yellows and potential 2 match suspension...

Realistically at this stage of the season you have to think that the top side, two play-off rivals, the team in the relegation spots with the best form, one of the bigger mid-tablers with decent form and one team we also have to play, is about as difficult as it's going to get.

There were 300-and-something Charlton, extremely low for them even compared to their season away average. Thanks for shouting, btw.

Funnily enough I was working this out the other day as well. I'm happy enough with this scenario too, because it's only relevant if we win all of our matches as well - if they win the next 3 we have to win our next 3 or they're ALREADY champions when we play them !

In the England style...