The9

And who the hell is "Giancarlo" Zola anyway? Does he have a famous brother who used to play for Chelsea, knows fack all about League One and achieved nothing even close to the previous manager's success at West Ham?

I have assumed Cortese has reanimated either Busby or Shankly to justify this one. Nice to have all my fears about his uncontrolled egomania confirmed in one fell swoop... Oh no, not nice, what's the word... Worrying.

Barje is at the Belgian GP this weekend.

He seemed to take up a lot of wide positions in that YouTube video, maybe we'll drop Puncheon. Just trying to make the thread a bit more interesting.

Oh b0llocks, knew I should have gone to Bristol. Terrible news... for me.

I doubt you've successfully tracked those peoples' opinions to know it's "the same people", when you can't even keep a record of your own opinion. It's also a sweeping generalisation to say that everyone pinpointed the end of August as their cut off for mad panicking. Different people have different expectations, but I think there's a general acceptance that we have one of, if not THE best squads in the division already, and that a couple of loan players from a higher level might help out, but we're plenty good enough to have been winning games already, we just haven't taken enough chances.

Nicely put.

A tired Lambert (from about 2 minutes in) wasn't anywhere near the goal at the vast majority of times on Tuesday, irritatingly enough. Presumably he's already tried that, probably numerous times and all throughout training. If the players don't retain the information or ar making fatigued decisions, the manager has to do what he has to to get the message across. I'm pretty sure Bolton's Reserve Defenders of ALL footballers will have had plenty of practice at clearing long hoofs down the pitch to a physical striker given their time under Allardyce and Megson, so adopting that tactical approach consciously would have been pretty silly, and unlikely.

I'm pretty sure the T&Cs of the match ticket, the law regarding crime prevention (excerpt elsewhere on this thread) and endless hours of watching my missus watch TV Cops-type documentary/reality shows indicates that anyone can video anyone in a public place, and that you don't have the right to complain about anything. I should think St Mary's being subject to smoking legislation (in theory) covers the definition of "public place" too. As far as the bigger picture goes, I'm pretty sure they're videoing to get better images of people they're interested in already for other incidents. As far as getting shirty with the guy for doing it, well fair enough if he's in your way, but someone getting lairy about the idea of people being filmed, then losing the plot and being abusive for no particular reason (or worse, just "because it's the police") is exactly the sort of imbecilic thug behaviour at football that I'd LIKE the police to be monitoring, thanks.

Just because they're paying for it doesn't mean they get any say into what happens during it. Come to think of it, that Cortese letter hints at one or two issues in how the policing liaison has been dealt with, not that it's like Our Glorious Leader to have problems with anyone else's decision-making of course, oh nosirreebob...

Most people are quite "meh" about it because they've seen the performances and know we can't keep failing to get results when we play better than the opposition the majority of the time, give it a couple more games and if we're still scuffling about in the bottom half then it's a problem, not a blip. As usual however, you want to slate anything and everything...

The involvement of the crowd in determining results is preety much cobblers to begin with, we proved that in the League Cup at Watford in 2003 when Saints were 4-0 down and staged a mighty comeback to lose 5-2 whilst 50% of the Saints fans were cheering for Watford.

Um, no. Lambert was tired and isn't match fit, it achieved the goal of saving him for the league and forcing the team en masse not to be lazy with the ball.

Hardly, I'm annoyed at our rubbish results, but we're not "playing hoofball" and the manager has explicitly said he took Lambert off on Tuesday to prevent us resorting to it, so just ignore all the evidence to the contrary and carry on your merry, ill-informed, measurably wrong, way.

Basically we play football first half then, depending on your view, either get lazy or tired and whack it at Lambert / Barnard and/or they defend sensibly and leave us with few passes / let us give the ball to a centre back who can't pass. Exactly the same as last season really, and we did ok then...

And also a figment of your imagination.

By conducting a complex statistical analysis that proves it's (probably) no more or less likely than him scoring against any other team he faces ? EG most obvious recent example Antonio at St Mary's preseason for Reading, but neither Matt Mills nor Alex Pearce scored...

Too many people are parked on the pitch.

Agreed. Stop talking sense, the hordes will turn.

I did it ages ago during Admin, along with loads of other people who were just banging on about the same thing all the time. Then I had an amnesty, so everyone who hadn't been banned already came off it. It's impossible to avoid him anyway due to quoting.

I think it would be nice if people could get over the whole Antonio thing. Preferably 3 months ago.

Me too. Oops, hi.

Oh really ? 1) Fair point, Bryan Gunn was obviously crap (he'd already just taken them down) and Paul Lambert was a good boss. Pardew has only presided over improvement and success at Saints until now. 2) No, he's had one season and 2 matches, and we've won most of them since he had his own team in place since, say, last October. 3) He already did most of that last season and we were one of the top form teams for most of last season, there's no reason to think that won't continue with our resources. 4) Completely irrelevant, we had a 10 point deduction and a totally different squad composition and new manager. I wouldn't say 3 games in a row was "a long unbeaten run", but actually if we won 3 games and then lost one in the League all season long from now we'd be on 100 points after 46 games, which would see us promoted easily. P 46 W 33 D 1 L 12 Pts 100.

Hmm, though I can pre-order on the website, and then cancel the order after the code is emailed...

In that situation I'd say he'd wait two weeks then complain about the lack of new signings.