The9

It also depends on whether you think it makes the blindest bit of difference to the team, who for all you know might have been completely in agreement with the fans, as well as whether you're remotely bothered about the JPT. The 8000 attendance suggests not, and most people last season weren't bothered until the Area final either. Personally, get us out of the cups so we have no excuses for the league - but of course now we have one of those as well, because the idiot Chairman has sacked a perfectly good manager with the best squad in the division half way through his promotion plan.

I was completely in support of the "one Alan Pardew" chants too, I really couldn't give a crap if he was sh@gging the whole team and their wives provided they were winning matches and heading for promotion. As it is, any "the manager was involevd with X's wife" story is almost certainly made up, just like all the "X is an alcoholic" ones are (where X is not equal to Clough or Kendall).

I couldn't really see the tackle due to the bodies in the way (thoguh what I could see of it didn't look too bad, but that was only the sliding bit!), and had assumed from 70 yards away the first (yellow) card was for a Swindon player retaliating to Barnard.

Less idiotic than judging him without having seen him at all.

No, no he wasn't. And if he was the rest of them were diabolical. Firstly he was out of position, so a bit unfair to judge. I'm assuming that was to break him into League One football gently rather than play him in the hurly-burly in the middle immediately, he's used to having more time and always getting the ball to feet and that was obvious. I'll give you quick (when he chose to run) and good in the air. His touch was also fine, but he lost the ball too much in possession from trying tricks to suggest hold up play was good, and his languid style is going to REALLY annoy some people. I think he's got potential but he needs to add workrate or up his speed of distribution and make himself more available for passes.

You're taking "17-year old playing in one of his first professional matches works his backside off" as evidence there was a problem in the squad are you ? I think that's a bit of a reach, he seems happier than most. He also did the same thing under Pardew. Deserves a start based on last night, but then he's been working well as an impact sub too, and that would have been a matter of time anyway. There aren't that many squad players who deserve to be in the team, and the ones who aren't are MEANT to be peeved.

I'd heard that Reed is Cortese's "footballing advisor" now too. Strange to see the comments on the Sun's website about the reasons Cortese gave the players : "He said he was concerned that some players were not getting a chance and he wanted all the squad to feel part of the club, not just from one to 11 but from one to 30" So having done that, the first team selection afterwards shows only Guly making a debut, and he'd only just signed anyway. Wilkins out...!

Bigger picture required on that one, I think. Sacking a successful manager = "not good at being Chairman". Voicing concerns to said Chairman at earliest opportunity = "good at supporting club"

No, but I expected them to improve things, rather than recreate some of the worst decisions made by the people preceding them regarding poor communication, marginalising fans and sacking managers for no apparent reason without a contingency plan.

Having witnessed it, I'd add Kelvin Davis and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain (who was phenomenal in effort and skill for the time he was on there) to that list. We were just outright bad at the back at times, the second goal was just utterly diabolical set piece defending. I actually took a photo of the shape immediately prior to the free-kick and Jaidi and Fonte were a clear 10-15 yards apart, you could have got the Bargate between them into the space Swindon scored in and no-one tracked the runner into the box - at a set-piece. Fonte at least did well on the ball going forward, but was guilty of some heinous hacking at points too. There were some similarities to the second half performances against Plymouth and Orient, and even without "Pardew's instructions" we still hoofed it aimlessly on occasion and showed no central creativity. But all that shows is that without motivation and effort there's no hope against any opposition.

Don't worry, I'm pretty sure you're not "sheep" no matter what happens, you'll be out there on your own, finding your angle. There is a lot more to being a decent manager than being the kind of "name" that often gets the majority of fans excited, as Shearer proved at Newcastle when overseeing them falling out of the Premier League, amongst many others. The beauty of the original Pardew appointment is that we found someone with name value who could also bring plenty of the qualities required of a lower league manager, even one with a cheque book. That was a good choice, as evidenced by us winning the JPT and getting the team off the bottom of League One into a Play-Off challenging position in a relatively short time. Nothing much had changed between March and August regarding the team's level or expectations of success over the season, so sacking him with what appears to be (so far) no back-up plan seems to show less good judgement. The RIGHT appointment won't be a problem, even those critical of Cortese for some of his finance-base decisions will put up with his policies far less begrudgingly if there's on-pitch success - but it can easily be argued that we already had the right appointment, and Cortese hadn't directly affected performances until now. He's now taken himself and the club from a position of relative strength and at worst mass ambivalence to one where he HAS to pull the rabbit out of the hat to get people back on side.

To be honest after the response last night even BEFORE we looked crap on the pitch I'm pretty confident that the feeling at the moment is that I've gone from having a minority view in being wary and concerned about Cortese's decisions, to suddenly finding the masses in agreement. The crux of the matter being that now it's detrimentally affected the team, rather than just "off the pitch stuff". A lot of people can ignore the background noise if the team is performing, but when the be-all and end-all is affected, they become bothered and vociferous pretty quickly. Certainly anti-Cortese feelings were in the majority amongst the kind of person that wants to see Saints in the JPT first round last night, albeit only 7500-ish of the "hardcore", there were hundreds of "what's he done that for?" and significantly less complimentary conversations in the concourse. Of course, with the right appointment all the sheep will fall into line again, but that won't fix the terrible PR and dubious exploitation of revenue streams, or the OTT legal letters to the local paper for requesting an official response for the shocked people of Southampton to Markus' death.

Woo-hoo, so now we have a club that doesn't represent any of the things we used to like about it anyway.

I'm assuming sarcasm in the OP, but if not... On the contrary, his mistake is underestimating the intelligence of some of the fan base - people actually going to the trouble of finding out that the reasons for not having an instalment plan were risible, challenging his unverifiable statement about Markus supporting his decisions (and then dumping the manager as soon as he realistically could after Markus' death nevertheless), looking at his fallings out with the local and national media and deducing it can only be for ego-driven reasons, terrible PR or at best an unworkable business model. Transparency for those who can be bothered to ask and want to know WHY, along with the sickly-sweet sanitised versions on the OS for those who just don't want to know or don't care. And FFS, free photos for all.

We've moved on from THOSE crappy decisions to the ones actually affecting the results on the pitch now, thanks.

They were as bad as I've seen us all season, and the ref was slightly worse.

If Lowe was still in charge I'd have had this down as a heavy-handed damage limitation rumour, like all of the ones we got about a day before all of Lowe's appointments in order to make the guy he did appoint look relatively better. As Lowe isn't in charge I can only assume it's been started by a Skate with a sense of humour. And my God Cortese will get some stick if it is true.

Using the West Ham Scale, I'm not sure why we'd sack Pardew and appoint a bloke who did less well at the same club in a similar situation anyway. And I'm pretty damn sure the best person to know what Pardew's vision for the signings he's made would be Alan Pardew as well...

Oh yeah, and I'd like to take this opportunity to thank CB Fry for taking all the heat from my response to Cortese's "nothing's changed" statement in the wake of Markus' death. To recap, after a hefty thread of "woo-hoo, everything's fine and we're still loaded, and poor Nicola" posts, I had the temerity to suggest that actually it probably just meant Cortese was dragging Markus down in his absence, if not passing on some of the blame for unpopular changes by claiming the decisions were jointly made, when there was no-one around to verify this any more. The fact that the first thing he's done is sack the manager they clearly did "jointly" appoint right at the start implies Mr Cortese will do what he wants now and if Markus was involved previously it was probably providing balance for some of his more stupid ideas. Anyway, there I was, waiting for the shoitestorm for not immediately buying into Cortese's statement when literally every other post on the thread was supporting Cortese, but CB Fry had immediately replied with "I agree", and the 3 pages of bile were then aimed at him instead. Playing the man not the ball much ? This place is weird.

Well, yes, but to make the comparison takes away from the dubious actions of Cortese viewed in isolation and makes it about mapping them onto things Lowe did, which isn't really helpful in discussing the matter in hand, as it immediately polarises people into well-worn camps of luvvies and haters and gives people a nice pigeon-hole to dump valid opinions into (on both sides).

I didn't. I pointed out that by your definition he was "successful" and he still got the boot, and went on to say that I think Cortese is acting strangely enough that we should be concerned about a lack of stability. Other than asking you if you were perplexed too, it wasn't really about you.

Agreed, but don't get into it... it's just not worth it.

I don't think anyone's boycotting, we'd only sold a few thousand tickets even before the sacking. I'd happily join in with a few, albeit pointless, pro-Pardew songs. I'm unwilling to specifically make Cortese-annoying noises in the ground because I've seen the kind of havoc megalomaniacal Chairmen can wreak at other clubs when the fanbase turns against them. I'd rather he just sodded off now before he does some serious damage and left someone competent in charge of our "trust fund", unlikely as that is.

I believe the answer to this question is "fackloads of cash", which is a small matter the football world outside League One seems to be blindly ignoring, thankfully to our benefit.

And you having made a massive big deal about Pardew having delivered instant success last season will no doubt be as perplexed as the rest of us to why Cortese would sack a manager just as he was in the position to deliver, and a few months before any minimal 18 month deadline for LEAGUE success could be judged. So just to clarify, spend a year putting your squad in place, but get a couple of injuries and then lose one and draw one and you're sacked? Even preseason in Switzerland was clearly NOTHING to do with the manager's choice. Let's not sugar-coat this, Cortese's shown all kinds of signs of being an egomaniac if not megalomaniac and his first acts after Markus' death are to firstly make the unverifiable claim that Markus was happy with all of the decisions that had been made, and then to fire the manager, which is the one appointment decision we can be sure they made together, coming so soon after the club purchase was made. The fate of the club lies entirely with his mood. We should be very, very concerned.