The9

I refuse to acknowledge the existence of an opinion which states that Jake Thomson is "slow". Absolute, utter cobblers. He is one of the fastest players at the club. No end product, maybe, lack of confidence, probably. Slow, no.

So noone knows?

Except by definition if the number of fans equates to the likelihood of winning then an away team will only win if they have more fans than the home team, so this isn't much of an argument. Middlesbrough A in the relegation season, few fans, won. Blackburn, few weeks later, shedloads of fans, balloons, noise, nothing. And we scored more goals against Watford in the Lge Cup 5-2 thrashing when most of our fans were cheering Watford after we went 4-0 down. There's no correlation whatsoever, it's just a load of cobblers made up to support a weak argument.

Which is exactly the point. And those who can't be bothered deserve tickets less than those who can.

Because I'm not from the area, every single person I know in Southampton is through football, and I assure you that not each of them has a non-intersecting group of people which operates completely independent of others. A quick look at mutual friends on Facebook confirms that. You might be able to shift your ticket 30 times but there's no guarantee that each of those people hasn't got other people also prepared to give them tickets.

We don't make any money on away tickets do we?

I don't see the problem with asking people to do slightly inconvenient things in order to ensure that the people who get tickets are the ones who deserve them.

The best logical way is how NHL ice hockey statisticians do it - Goals For/Against and Won/Lost record whilst on the pitch in the form of +/- stats. Good luck working out that one... in my experience only *I* am sad enough to work that out, and I can't be arsed. FWIW I'd suggest that as Lambert signed quite early and had to play with the rejects for a month or so there will be a skew against his stats even based on this.

This is weird, I've spoken to all three of these so-called individuals, and haevn't noticed either the Scott Mills or Alan Davies things. Maybe they have, (bwahaha) special "Radio Voices" ?

Hmm, that's weird, I've just clicked on the link and it doesn't have my list of Stokey/Saintsy players on it, which means BOTH this thread AND that link were duplicates of one already discussing it. Scary.

This is only possible if HMRC ask for it, and they've already made it clear they intend on winding the club up as they are insolvent.

No, he made an entirely self-interested point based on Arsenal's standing if the Skates drop out of the league. For the integrity of the competition, fairness should be seen to be done, which means expelling teams who aren't financially solvent or attempt to cheat to win matches by playing players they don't own and have no intention of paying for... oh, and not making special cases where someone has massively screwed up by getting greedy, refusing to address the issues and then not paying the right bills in the right order as it all falls apart. The whole transfer money thing is a PR stunt, the only issue is the registration, and if that goes through, forget about all integrity, they may as well bring in a rule granting different clubs different numbers of points for a win.

Hallelujah.

Frankly the only decision the PL should be making at this point "to preserve the integrity of their competition" is to expel the Skates from their League. They're not going to do that, and the FIFA thing is a smokescreen for PR purposes, unless what they're actually requesting is the right to waive registration rules. I still can't see FIFA waiving those, or the Premier League voting to bail them out. For every West Ham who'd lose 6 points from the loss of the Skates there's a relegation rival who would be marginally better off for there only being 2 relegation places. To be honest, if they go ahead with this totally unfair and preposterous charade I'll probably never watch a Premier League game again, even if we win the CCC in the next few years. It will of course hasten the rush to the closed-shop of self-interest that the owners are so desperate for - when the only REAL solution is joint ownership WITH SHARED REVENUES. And they'll never agree to that. Hi btw, first post on this thread .

Looks like FIFA may be waiving the registration rules then... http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/p/portsmouth/8522283.stm Frankly this makes a mockery of the entire competition. Why would any club now adhere to the transfer window rules ? EDIT : Though to be fair there's a big leap between "FIFA looking favourably on a request to do something they are already allowed to do" and the assumption in the BBC article (as of now) that that will allow players to play for other teams in the Prem. Grabbing the text before they update it : Fifa could support Portsmouth request to sell players The Fratton Park club survived a winding-up order last week Fifa has indicated they will look favourably on Portsmouth's request to sell players outside of the transfer window, BBC Sport understands. Pompey have debts of about £60m and are due in court on 1 March to contest a winding-up order by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. The Premier League will ask the other 19 clubs before making a decision. It is likely any players sold would only be allowed to play in the Premier league, not any other competitions.

The free bus stubs could be used on either.

According to FIFA's rules they are able to sell players at any point, but those players won't be able to play for anyone else until the transfer window opens. They've ALWAYS been able to sell players at any time and I'm not sure why they even asked - but the question is, will FIFA now allow those players to play for other teams by waiving the registration rules - which is clearly wrong. The other thing is no-one will want to pay for them if they'll be free if the Skates go bust anyway - and a lot of their players are loans. Some have also already played for 2 teams this season...

Option 2 then - but you still don't remember the stubs on the tickets for every season until the present one ? We have slightly different stubs now.

Have you got a short memory, do you live outside Southampton, or have you only been going to games for 18 months ? There used to be free bus ticket stubs attached to every match ticket with "IN" and "OUT" marked on them. For the first 7 years at St Mary's. Until the end of last season actually - though we couldn't use any of last season's due to a Lowe edict in pre-season "to save the club money" though the ST holders had already paid for as part of the ST cost and it was thus free money to the club for a service they didn't provide. It was part of the agreement for building the ground where it is - that we didn't clog the City up with cars on match days.

Why does no-one ever use the massive wealth of available statistics to prove or disprove this kind of thing ? Is it because over the course of a season the teams (artificial deductions excluded) will finish in exactly the order they should be in over the number of games they play ?

You know what I mean, the ones on the match tickets for free travel from anywhere in the extended Southampton area, rather than just a railway shuttle to the ground.

Any details ? I seem to recall him coming down on the side of clubs in financial trouble getting bailed out by the Prem (no shock, when it would be free money for him) a few days ago, but he also has a vested interest because West Ham lose 6 points if the Skates disappear, throwing them back into the bottom two of the remaining 19. He must think they're better off with those points and one relegation place all but tied up anyway.

IIRC, when the corners of the ground were closed and the free bus tickets [that we'd already paid for as part of the "same cost as the previous season" ST] was removed at the start of the 2008/9 season, we were told that in line with Southampton City Council's green transport policy, free buses would be reinstated if Saints had more than a certain number of 20,000+(?) attendances in the season. Can anyone remember how many matches this was supposed to be, and whether we've reached that threshold ? The Blue Star tickets are a rubbish substitute... More to the point, why hasn't the council started kicking up about it when its their policy ?

Its true that lots of STs will take up the +1s, what's not true is that they will be able to get rid of them easily. Up to 12500 ST +1s will be floating around, many of whom will have bought without a clue who they're going to give it to - and a load of people who want a ticket might have asked 4 or 5 ST holders for it, so there will be a load of +1 tickets that ST holders think they have a taker for, but that taker has got a ticket from someone else already. Basically what will happen is a large scale ticket exchange of +1s where people have been let down - and if tickets are on general as well, it might be the case that people go that route instead of getting an offer from someone they might barely know. There will be shedloads of spares requests and offers on here to prove this anyway, probably more than for any other game.

Seems pretty bloody straightforward to me.