Ex Lion Tamer

How is Viera any different to Lampard, Gerrard and Rooney?

I thought your post was funny and summarises a lot of the mistakes that have been made, but if we're being fair, it wasn't SR who gave McCarthy the new contract or left Onuachu/Mara on the bench

This is interesting because we've actually got quite a lot of players who you could reasonably hold onto and think they would be quite good in the Championship. Obviously we'll lose our top players but could easily keep Bednarek, Stephens, Lyanco, Bree, Tino, S Armstrong, A Armstrong, Sulemana, Onuachu, Edozie, Mara, maybe Perraud

Can you explain what you mean about Blackmore? The club want him to ask tougher questions?

This is too passive. They need to set out a vision involving investment and promotion and sell it to the players. Inspire them and persuade them to stay

It doesn't feel so bad this time because I think we have the financial backing to give the Championship a good go. Also the 26 year record felt like something special that had been lost. And it was the first relegation in my lifetime

Yoshida was a good back up CB. The problems only came when he was played out of position at RB or as a first choice CB for too long

Was Fonte even a good leader? I thought the consensus was his form fell off a cliff when he didn't have a dominant centre back alongside him

Maybe we offered him a contract that reflects his true value, which would result in a big pay cut, so he's decided to move on

11 years in the Premier League is actually a good achievement. How many other clubs have done it? Let's rebuild, do it again and have another glory day like this one. Reminder of the only teams to be on a longer stint in the Premier League than us: Arsenal Man City Man Utd Tottenham Liverpool Chelsea Everton (going down with us?)

He'll be a key player for us next season

The whole thing about youth recruitment is that you invest in a load of players and then one of them comes off, which pays for everything

What is it about the £126m we've spent this season that makes you think we'd weaken our team in a key position to save money?

I honestly don't know why people think Sulemana will leave. The guy has no end product. No one's paying close to the £20m we bought him for

Because fans judge players individually and usually based on what they do with the ball. Managers are interested in the team shape and what players do without the ball

I wonder if the high fitness demands of the modern game make these sort of players less viable. Walcott was lightning quick to start with so perhaps is able to still cut it

Obviously relegation is the likely outcome but any/all of our last three games could be against teams with nothing to play for. They're all winnable

This was a problem under Ralph and its a problem for us again under Selles. The pressing game is great against a team that comes forward because you can disposess them quickly and break. Breaking down teams that come to St Mary's and sit back was a problem under Puel as well, come to think of it, although not in that case because he played a high press.

The thing is, the nature of our model means we shouldn't really judge most of these players until they've been with us for a couple of seasons. The trouble is they're being thrown straight in and expected to get us out of a relegation battle

A year in the Championship might be good for him though

He was only a sub at Rennes. He may have potential but it was visible a mile off that he wasn't going to come in and improve our team

Also a reminder of why there are still plenty of points for us to pick up this season even against teams we wouldn't ordinarily back ourselves against. (although to be honest I still think we're getting relegated)

The counterpoint being that we wouldn't have put the club on as strong a footing long term. We might have stayed up which is obviously a good thing but after a season or two we would find ourselves with lots of ageing players who would need replacing for even more money, and less scope to make profit on the new players. Also we tried to sign a £40m striker and couldn't pull it off for whatever reason. Relegation is shit obviously and I wish it wasn't happening. But we do have a really strong pool of talent now that we can either sell for decent money or keep and use for a rebound

Clear thread across almost all of those signings are that they are promising players but not yet good enough to keep us up

If you have a list of candidates in order of preference with Selles in the middle, it makes sense to slow things down once you've crossed off everyone above him