The9

That's completely irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. I was expecting prices to be about the same, anything under £400, £350ish for a renewal where I was, was reasonably expected, and easy enough to pay off over 6 months... as usual. The possibility of not being able to pay in instalments didn't even cross most people's minds - and for anyone to suggest they should have been saving in advance is a bit silly given the circumstances, and to say "get a credit card" ignores the people who already have them, and that 99% of other clubs offer instalment plans. It's the lack of instalments, not the total cost as far as I'm concerned. I'll soon get used to not going anyway. :mad:

The best thing about British football pundits is you can generally ignore them entirely and not miss a single useful comment about the match. Annoyingly the Beeb has also signed up Roy Hodgson so I'll actually want to listen to him, just not the rest of them.

I may be a little late to the show here, and i won't be around til lunchtime on the Sunday, but if you need someone to fill in I'm yer man

Interesting inability to distinguish between success on the pitch with success as a business there. I'm expecting Saints to win a lot of games, but it won't mean all that much to me if I've been price-planned or Cortese Taxed out of seeing it...

But that wasn't "the plan" until last season's post-Admin rush for STs - until last year's exceptional situation the club had happily ofered an externally run payment plan for at least the previous 7 years at St Mary's.

I'm perversely looking forward to the spin in the announcment about memberships, which at the moment looks like a charge to be given the right to pay one of two additional taxes on the announced price of a ticket. On the bright side, there are going to be a lot of empty seats. I'm starting to think my Saturdays will consist of going to the pub with my match-going mates, then going home again. Because when it comes down to it, do I really give a toss about watching Saints play Hartlepool at St Marys again ? Especially if it's expected to be a foregone conclusion and I have to roll up on the day and pay per match because the club has made getting an ST awkward, or pay extra online pay per-booking charges ? Kinda strange that I'm more likely to boycott this crappy situation than I ever was when Lowe was running the club into the ground in 2008/9. Anyone would think it was financially motivated, rather than a protest...

You'll have about 28,000 seats to choose from judging by this thread.

I shall bear this in mind whilst not being able to sell my house at £60k less than it was worth in 2008, with a hugely reduced overdraft.

Or maybe Rickie happened to discuss it with him when they were teammates.

In which case why publish information in December 09 about season tickets that had been already sold (mostly) in July/August 09, and then renege on that agreement before the next STs are sold ? Ridiculous piece of un-PR.

It will be a colour with an Umbro logo and Saints 125 Anniversary badge on it, and a tailored By Umbro label in it. All joking aside, most likely it'll be very plain with a round neck and white cuffs, possibly with extremely strange elasticated elbow-bits, like the England keepers' shirts and the current Umbro England compression gear.

Long and short of it is that I've got savings too, but it's going to get spent on one-off "life" stuff that's due by July, along with some other unavoidable expenditure due to my house sale falling through, before Saints have a chance of getting hold of £328 of it. And I already have a 0% credit card. As for finding £80 for two new kits...

So you might be forgiven for not understanding how annoying it is for the club to withdraw a facility they've always previously provided at St Mary's with 30 minutes' notice, leaving a significant number of people having to make alternative arrangements in order to continue to give their money to the club then ?

I am assuming you have £400 spare to buy a season ticket ?

Of course, the fact that I'm not holding out any hope for the latter in the face of Cortese's total intransigence on every other matter so far is the crux of the problem. How can they have mismanaged so badly that an anniversary season of celebration in which we're expected to challenge for promotion is already turning into a farce ? There's a red nose on the badly redesigned badge, a large chunk of the fanbase are unable to afford to pay to renew STs due to ridiculously short notice, no instalment plan and no communication from the club. We managed not to have match programmes for the last game of last season, there's a booking fee on ticket purchases with the pay on the day surcharge being lower than the pay early one, and all of it has been met by resounding silence from the club to an increasingly disillusioned fanbase. Without regular wins to distract us from what's happening with the club itself, it looks pretty poor. Other than Cortese's nice PR piece, has there been a single decision made since the JPT on the non-playing side that hasn't been a complete and utter ar5e-up ?

No-one saying "you should have saved, now get a credit card" has yet managed to explain why people who don't now have the cash hanging round should have been saving for an ST when all previous indications from the club are that there would be an instalment plan. Or what people who already have a 0% credit card and are responsibly managing their money on that are supposed to do ? ...nor why the club mentioned providing an instalment plan for Season Tickets in their Dec 09 Charter document when they haven't sold any new FULL STs since then - if it was only for half STs for 09/10 as claimed, why didn't the Charter say that it only applied to Half STs ? The answer presumably is because at the time it was the plan to have instalments for STs (like everyone else does), and only now the club has looked into it has someone thrown a wobbler about the charges (I wonder who?) and has this unsatisfactory half-baked mish mash of a "policy" emerged. I heard a rumour that David Luker had nothing to do with ticketing at all, and is innocent in this debacle, seems logical when you consider he's been involved with Saints STs all the time we've been at St Mary's and there's never been a peep about methods of payment previously (and that he's been headhunted by Prem clubs previously). Of course, he's the one who gets to respond to the emails...

That video is pants. It misses out massive swathes of kits from the early and modern days, has some pathetic zoom effects leaving jaggies all over the place, has a big ugly jagged graphic running over the top of it (just like the big ugly jagged graphic on the OS a day or so ago) and serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever. In fact it's exactly the kind of p155-poor quality I'm starting to expect from the new regime. Anyone else get the impression Cortese runs around like a far-too-busy dictator barking half-considered orders to people, who he then shouts at when they don't do exactly what he expected, rather than what he actually conveyed to them ?

Gosh the shock, it's Tailored By, just like the training kit we've had in the club shop for 3 months...

Not if they'd assumed that the club would offer the same sort of finance or instalment payments as pretty much every other club in English football... Where's the logic in saving up for something you're expecting to be able to afford anyway?

Probably explains their efforts at pricing people out of buying the bloody things, just leave the kind of people who don't need finance going to matches... blue-chip fans to go with the blue-chip sponsor Cortese has no chance of getting in League One as well ? :confused: I am not entirely serious btw...

Fascinating theory, apart from the fact that not making STs available to the widest number of potential purchasers reduces the amount of money coming into the club by significantly more than any finance deal would have done.

Wrong. Ironically in an article about Gareth Bale, the confirmation near the bottom that Walcott's deal was renegotiated for £9.1m http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/growing-pains-at-the-lane-face-to-face-gareth-bale-943923.html

Skinner and Baddiel are doing Absolute Radio podcasts, pretty sure that's all they're doing too.

Oh for goodness' sake give it a rest. When he chucks it in it won't have anything to do with some crap results against crap teams in a league that was crap and that we were ten points behind when he bought us. And if you want some "look at me" appreciation, at some point in the future Liebherr will stop funding Saints, you have predicted it already. Great stuff, really tricky that one. No doubt at that point, no matter what the actual reasons, you'll probably claim it was due to some average away results in 2009/10, so well done, have a cookie.

No Theo is fair enough, but no Theo and TAKING SWP INSTEAD ?!?!?!? Mental.