The9

Pretty sure all the serious collectors will already have had theirs through the post ! What it should say is "extremely rare Saints programme for nosey barstewards who have to know what all the fuss is about".

How did they get a ZX80 to do streaming, that's what I want to know ? Probably using the resources not allocated to the website any more. Minty, do you think you can allocate some numbers for this so we can reference them all next season ?

I thought it was a clever ploy to let the police cameramen get another go at capturing decent images of the same kind of mongs that were involved with the trouble at the derby. It was like entrapment... without trying. And fair enough, the repeated announcements were bloody annoying (not that anyone in the Northam could hear any of the last two due to the deliberate noise-making), but it's pretty specious to try and claim they or the lines of stewards actually CAUSED the pitch invasion, which those mongtard d111cks were going to do no matter what. On the bright side, the 20,000+ still in our seats had the chance to let them know what we thought of them potentially messing up the lap of honour : "Off Off Off" "W'nkers, w@nkers, w^nkers" "na-nan-na-naaaah...Fcvk Off" It seriously is the ubergheyest form of desperate, deluded self-promotion. Eejit : "Look at meee, I'm on the pitch - I'm clever !!" 20,000 people : "Er, no you're not".

I can't see Pardew having any say in the matter. I can't see it being withdrawn "because of a sponsorship issue", as it would create shedloads more sponsorship issues from people who've paid for adverts having to be refunded, etc. We KNOW the paper quality isn't the issue. It doesn't look like there's anything obviously problematic in the text either. So it remains a bit of a mystery. Someone needs to get the staples out of it and whack a pdf online for a little while, I think, at least to let people speculate from a semi-informed position. Didn't Saintsweb have some kind of Sponsorship Player Profile thing in there this week too ? That thing's cursed, I tells ya.

Harding is a left back, never a doubt to that, only played right back in an emergency. Otsemobor might have a shout of a deal even if we sign Calderon, as Murty is unlikely to get another deal. I can see Bournemouth picking him up on a pay-to-play, not sure we'll offer that to him. James is a defensive midfielder primarily and was clearly inferior to Thomas, Murty and maybe Otsemobor too, will struggle to make the XI next season anywhere. I THINK Thomas' contract is up, in which case we should probably let him go unless we can renegotiate it downwards, he's done reasonably well when given the chance, but he was (reportedly) overpaid for his impact.

Yes they were, and no doubt some people do have them - we had this discussion leaving the ground, I think a mate's mate (I know, I know...) got a copy - but as we also discussed, as only about 1/3 even buy programmes at the ground, how small is the proportion of people who actually get the thing sent to their homes beforehand going to be ? At most 100 people I'd say. Steve said (in the pub on Sat night) there was nothing at all wrong with the quality of the programme, so it's not that. He also said to me (and on this thread) that there's nothing particularly unusual about the manager's comments or anything else in there too. As it's the only thing they've suggested and isn't true, I also doubt Solent's word on pretty much anything now, based on the little I do know (and have shared) on the programme front.

Steve Grant has seen and read "that" programme, there's nothing like that in it. My most logical conclusion regarding the programme so far is Cortese has used it to illustrate a point about pricing due to supply and demand regarding the lack of sponsor on the new kit. It's preposterous, but it's as good a completely made up rumour as any...

I'd say it was pretty standard for a fan of a side playing their first season in a League lower. I'd never heard of any of them in August, and had only heard of Puncheon by the time we signed him. This coming from someone who could tell you the squad number of any player in the Premier League in 2003... The main point stands though, we probably won't know much about the half-decent Championship players we sign next season - might get a few League One players who've played well against us though. So we can rule out Lewington of MK Dons!

Oh, and just to round this thread off, I went back in the club shop today, and they've got a load of Saints/England world cup themed t-shirts now on the hangers. Does seem to be a slightly strange approach by Cortese regarding kit (un)launch, manager "support", local media relations and Season Ticket sales so far...

Swindon's kit is crap and the pattern for their home kit is two years out of date. Adidas (and Nike now) just give every team the same three templates in different colours - at least if you get Umbro they're bothered enough to switch the designs around a bit.

Definitely Parc Guell, maybe the Aquarium down by the marina, there are some nice seafood restaurants over to the east side of the waterside near where the beaches are, Sagrada Familia is a must, Ramblas and the nearby Placa de Catalunya at least have to be visited, and if you don't like cable cars across the marina get the Funicular cliff-train thing to Montjuic instead (Olympic Stadium). And if you find any decent bars let me know, I've been 4 times and rarely happened upon a bar I'd want to buy more than one drink in !

And you can usually tell when you won't know even if you do.

Well, yeah, but he clearly isn't going to be allowed to tell me, so what's the point?

Nice 5-a-side kit. I know its not Tailored, but then most of the second season Tailored shirts aren't anyway, they're just rebranded 2009 templates (plain V-neck like Sunderland or squares like Rangers). Though obviously Teamwear is teamwear, different animal. I'm still thinking of getting one of those myself just for the hell of it. I'd forgotten he was the Matchworn bloke. I suppose as a clue Vasco covers it nicely.

Anyone been in there today yet ?

Thats because they can't. The 2 members of the forum who have seen the shirt had to sign a disclaimer, however if you read the last shirt thread they as good as say it, Matthew Le Tissier linked a picture of a Vasco De Gama Umbro shirt which is very similar to our new design, this does not break the NDA. Well, it's got a sash and a collar. But he wasn't ITK as far as I could tell. The Umbro "Vasco" teamwear shirt *I* posted would be more in line with the basic "Tailored By" approach anyway. That faffy collar isn't current, and as a "clue", well we kinda all think we already know that much.

That's already been done for the last 2 months or so, all the away shirts have been 50% off for a while and they've sold almost all of them. This is what's happening after that. If it was just sale stuff they'd be trying to fill the rails up and spread them around the store so it still looks well-stocked, not clear them out. Home stuff is still there in bulk and reduced - so they won't be launching a home one while that lot is around and on show - so it has to be a new kit (we had a new Tailored By Umbro training range only month or so ago), and it is likely to be the away one. Wouldn't be surprised if it gets shown on the big screen or paraded around before, after or at half time. Because usually there's a launch and then a launch date, but I'm guessing this time it's a big bang, "here it is, buy it now" approach. I still haven't seen anyone who'd know ACTUALLY say the home shirt is a white/red sash anywhere though.

I'll happily hand out STs at my own expense to anyone who can prove they were outside the ground protesting against Lowe for the entire season of 2008/9, rather than just not turning up because they didn't want to watch us lose or were skint. We'd have still gone into Admin by now even if all those people had turned up to every match.

I was already in the club shop, and when I saw the big gap I took a picture on my iPhone. It took about 3 seconds, having figured out that something was up and people on here might be interested (and want to see some evidence). Not so much sad as, let's say, "public spirited". I can't believe that anything other than a new away kit is getting launched - if it was the home kit they wouldn't still have the home kits out. As for "chuck the away kits in a basket for a fiver", they already don't have any left in any regular sizes, but they've completely taken all remaining stock off display. And we're definitely wearing stripes tomorrow.

Yeah, but I doubt there were 4 or 5 rows of empty rails all together looking QUITE so blatantly like "something" new was due...!

I wandered into the Saints Shop in West Quay about 7pm this evening. There were a significant number of completely empty rails and hangers near the window, with the current home shirts still on display near the tills. No away shirts anywhere, but If I was guessing, it looked like they were all set to fill those rails with a new range of kit. As the home kit was still there, I can only assume the club is ready to launch the away shirts imminently, maybe tomorrow or Saturday? No idea whether the rumours of the yellow kit are true or not, no clues at all.

I think you've answered your own question then. It's because it's in England. FWIW, about the only thing I'm with the Tories on is Unionism, mainly because as an English-only speaking Newport-born British person it makes me sick to my stomach the amount of taxpayers' money wasted by artificial regional bodies, and the preposterous money wasted on crap like enforcing the Welsh Language Act. 2% of the population of my home town (now city) were "welsh speakers" when I was in school, yet the local train station (and all others in Wales) announces destinations in welsh before English. Still, I got p1ssed off enough with it that I moved to England, the train station problem is solved anyway. And don't get me started on the renaming Western Isles either, how many Gaelic Scots are there, FFS ? I haven't seen any of your rants on proportionality, but they sound like fair comment. At least England had the sense not to go with regional assemblies.

When you see the kind of popularity contests that dominate prime time UK tv, and the way it has moved to the presentation/sound-bite driven US Presidential model it's hardly surprising people are basing this on superficiality. Blair did a hell of a job killing off the relevance of manifestos in 1997, but from the VERY limited coverage I've deigned to watch, I've been mildly surprised to see that policy debate has stayed on the agenda. I have a suspicion that the "voting culture" that X-Factor and the like have fed amongst the younger members of the electorate might see much a larger turnout than expected. Even idiot teen/first time voters I know, the likes of whom would have dismissed voting out of hand 10 years ago, seem genuinely excited by it. Though they can't txt their vote so they might not bother anyway. Utopia is getting rid of party allegiances and having the constituency represented effectively - which is actually possible nowadays. In fact logically there's no reason for government to exist at all now, as everyone could just get online to vote on what's on the agenda and vote when asked. We'd suffer massively from the problem of unintended consequences, and no-one would ever pay tax or get their potholes filled in, but that's extremism for you. Or save everyone the trouble and just put me in charge.

They've just addressed it as far as they're likely to, they've just redrawn the boundaries for 2010 (including Romsey now containing Bassett and Swaythling). As far as the IoW goes, they're not going to split it to be two constituencies of 54,000 people as that's too few, and the wetness of the Solent and I dare say IoW island politics would pretty much prevent anyone on the mainland from being part of their constituency, so they're stuck with it. If you want a real grizzle, have a look at the number of Scottish and Welsh constituencies compared to English... the provinces (lol) are massively over-represented in Westminster.

I looked at this yesterday, it's got some useful info but they way they choose to use the data is ridiculous, and as a tool for PR it doesn't really work because there's no effort to explain how PR would improve things. For a start according to them NO-ONE'S vote is worth "1 vote", even in the most marginal constituency on the list. Clearly if there's a scale, either 1 needs to be the midpoint as the expected mean value of a vote, or to use their 0-1 scale, 0.5 needs to be the midpoint. For instance in somewhere like Romsey & N Southampton which is expected to be a tight contest, the vote is only worth "0.981 of a vote". Every vote will be more important there, so the headline stat should be based on marginality alone : "Voters in Romsey & Southampton North have 3.88x more voting power than the UK average". THIS is the real stat that shows the value of a vote by constituency. "The equivalent of 0.981 votes" is basically a garbage figure deliberately designed to imply no-one has a powerful vote, and it includes the barely relevant comparison of voters per constituency, which is only really a factor if turnout is 100% or there are massive fluctuations in constituency size - which there aren't. Most bizarrely, the logical conclusion of the whole thing [for as long as the PR alternatives aren't discussed] is that if you don't want people to waste their votes, the best situation is to only have one candidate per constituency, or a form of totalitarian non-election. Blunkett's Sheffield Brightside support is 70%, so only 30% of votes are "wasted" there. Is this a GOOD thing ? In a truly close 3-way contest won by a single vote, 66% of the votes will be "wasted", but each one of those is actually vitally important as if there was one more of them it would tip the balance. If there's only one candidate, there's no wasted vote. Utopia ?