Alanh

http://www.utdforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=106892

Who should we have bought then, given that for you money is no object?

Are you saying that we should have spent even more money, or that we should have spent the same amount of different players? I don't really get what you are criticising Cortese / Saints for. We all know that every transfer is a gamble and that for each one that works out there are loads more that fail because the player doesn't deliver what was expected. It's a fact of life in football and happens to all clubs.

Yes, I think that the style of football that we play is generally entertaining, more so than under NA. The way we played against Man City and Everton would not have happened under NA. We moved the ball around more quickly, pressed higher up the pitch and had a tempo about our play that exceeded even NA's best matches. Do we do it every match - no, is that understandable - yes as we are a young team that is learning the ways of the Prem. To say that watching us at the monment is like watching paint dry demonstrates either a poor grasp of English or a poor understanding of football atthe moment. If you want boring and formulaic 'anti-football' have a look at Stoke. They might have more points than us at the moment but their football is godawful, and I believe that the quality of entertainment is what is being discussed on this thread.

It is interesting that our transfer strategy changed in the summer. In the previous three seasons post Leibherr takeover, we bought a combination of players proven in the league we were in, players for the future or players from leagues above who were above the average quality of the league in their position. This summer and winter we bought almost exclusively prospects (Boruc and Davis being the exceptions). I can understand it from an investment perspectiveas buying prem experienced players is a very costly business in terms of transfer fees and / or wages, and the competition for those players can make it incredibly difficult for a newly promoted club to compete. The change in strategy carries a risk in terms of what happens if the new inexperienced players don't make the step up to the level required, but it was obviously a risk that the transfer committee decided was worth taking. Loads of teams have stayed up spending very little and loads have been relegated after spending big. Norwich have done so by buying quite a few Champ players (mainly from Leeds). Swansea have bought a lot of lesser known players from the continent. They have both had successful transfers (Norwhich - Snodgress, Pilkington, Swansea - Michu, Deguzman) and a few failures as well (Norwich - Morrison, Hewson, Swansea - Graham). Whether you can stay up and then thrive is down to the philosophy of the club, the quality of the management and the progressive improvement of all aspects of the squad. I still think we'll stay up because I think we can get another 9 or 10 points from our remaining 9 games and I don't think two of Villa, Wigan and QPR will be able to beat that total (especially as they have to play each other so can't all get the points). I think our points will come from the games against Sunderland, Reading, West Ham, Stoke, West Brom. If we can get anything from Chelsea, Liverpool, Spurs and Swansea that should be a bonus.

Nothing wrong with discussing this, however I don't think that people are holding onto possession stats and analysing other teams fixtures as a comfort blanket, or that they are doing it any more this season than the last two, when our need to win games was equally important but for other reasons. As for your reasons: 1. Poor purchases. Disagree with this as a blanket statement. Boruc, Clyne, Yoshida, J-Rod & Davis have been decent purchases, certainly on par with the best made by the other newly promoted clubs. Ramirez has improved our side but I think that all of our fans have an inflated expectation of him given his price tag and his protracted transfer. Gazzanigga, Mayuka and Forren haven't succeeded yet, but Gazzanigga is the only one of those really given a chance so far and could be said to have failed. 2. Squad not strong enough for Prem. Hardly a surprise given the speed of our rise from L1 and a reason why we purchased 9 players over the season. 3. Amateurish mangerial decisions. To an extent, but I'd say that having two mangers who do not have experience in the Prem meant that they both needed to find a way to instill belief in their players and chose to do so by implementing a system that they believed would work and convincing the players to trust the system. On occasion the players haven't been up for it (Sunderland, West Brom, West Ham) and on occasion a better team has nullified those managerial decisions (Man City away, Liverpool, Arsenal away, Everton away). For me the reasons we are in 16th place at the moment are: 1. The prem has been a steep learning curve for everyone at the club 2. Retaining Gazza in goal for more than his first match and not getting Boruc in goal sooner 3. The injuries that kepk Cork and Shaw out of the first 10 games of the season 4. For a newly promoted club to not be in a relegation scrap after 29 games is the exception, not the norm.

If the definition of establish ourselves is to stay up this season then I'd say with 10 games to go that we are on course to do that. We should be able to get another 10 points and I believe that will be enough. I think that was pretty much the concensus view for our objectives this season, but your definition of 'establish ourselves' in one season might be different.

You could argue over who's a squad player and who isn't - I'd say that J-Rod and Davis are more established than the likes of Gazza and Mayuka and could be classed as first teamers, but the point is you need 25 players in the squad and so the question is whether they are better than those they have replaced in the squad - the likes of Hammond, Sharp, Seaborne etc. Also, in Prem terms, £15M for 5 players is pretty much the going rate for players who fit our strategy of being able to step in and do a job when required and who also are young enough to have potential for the future, not have huge wages and hopefully have a sell on value.

It's a squad game so you need to ask whether the players brought in are better than those they replaced in the pecking order. Not an easy question to answer in all cases because often the new players haven't played anywhere near the same number of games or because the players they replaced are still in the squad, just a bit down the pecking order. I'm sure that none of use would be happy this season if the likes of Kelvin Davis, Jos Hooiveld, Richard Chaplow and Fraser Richardson were still first choice, or Dean Hammond, David Connolly, Dan Seaborne, Bart or Billy Sharp were still in the squad. We needed to bring in new recruits like all clubs every summer, some of those new recruits have become first choices every week. Others do a squad role, but I would say that they all do a better job than the players they 'replaced'.

Based purely selling him to add £6M to what is likely to be an already large transfer budget then the answer has to be no. He is too valuable to the way we play (at least at the moment) to sell for £6M. Related to the story, wasn't the agreement with Carrol and West Ham that they had a firm deal to buy him for £17M with no get out clause provided they stayed up?

He's got huge potential and I hope that we get to enjoy much of it in a Saints shirt. His composure on the ball is excellent although I'd question your claim about him being good in the air. I think that's one area of his game where he needs to improve to be really top class.

Disagree that we were very poor for 90 mins v QPR. We dominated every aspect of the game (apart from goals scored) - possession, shots, territory, but we couldn't find a way past their very deep defence and two holding midfielders. The Sunderland game was pretty similar, also the Wigan game. Losing Lallana before half time didn't help with the lack of ideas in the second half in addition to Puncheon having a poorer game. I can understand people having a go at the team / MP for the QPR game but the bigger question for me is whether MP has delivered an upgrade on NA. Six games is probably too few to judge him on, just as judging NA on the first six games of the season was wrong given the opposition in those games. Give it another 4 games and consider whether Mp has improved what we previously had with NA. I think that there are very promising signs, exemplified by the good spells in the games listed in the OP (IMO approx 60% of the time played), but more needs to be done to improve the consistency of performance.

Hardly surprising that you will always get someone who decides to have a go at a player after a poor performance. It's just the nature of internet message boards that people tend to experss themselves in black and white terms and then rarely if ever return to the same subject to praise a player when he has a good match, thereby redressing the balance. Also, there's loads more debate generated from a bad performance as the board discusses what can be changed to rectify things, and that debate leads to people taking entrenched postions. This situation is never going to change and I think it would have been more interesting to start a list of players that have never been written off by someone at some stage. that would be a short list.

PKF have to save the club for two reasons. Firstly they can argue that a football club running as a going concern is better equipped to pay back debts over time compared with the one off revenue that they can redistribute after liquidation. Secondly they have their own reputation to look after and they will look better as a company that saved stricken clubs than one that liquidates them. Selling to the Harris bid might be the best deal on the table at the moment, but the FL can see that it's a trojan horse bid which is going to store up problems for next year / the year after because Chinny will still be involved.

I'd say that is almost certainly the case. Chinny want's his £17M and retaining a stake in the club / ground while taking rent and being secured should the new 'owners' go pop is his way of ensuring he gets that money. The FL statement suggests that they are also sure this is what is happening and they are going to do their best to stop it for the good of their member club.

I thought Cork was close to MotM last night. His willingness to show for the ball all the time, to close down on Everton players and cover space when the likes of Shaw or Clyne went forward was excellent. He just looks like a completely natural footballer who reads the game very well and is very comfortable with the ball at his feet. Having said that, you could apply almost the same praise to Morgan except he blotted his copybook with a few silly fouls.

This, pretty much. No-one knows yet whether this decision is the right one. It's not popular with the fans and NC will have to answer to the Liebherrs if it goes wrong, but until that time as fans we've got to continue supporting the team. Read on another thread the theory that perhaps Adkins wasn't an attractive manager when it came to signing some of the bigger name players that we are after and that NC saw that as a stumbling block to his ability to bring better players to the club.

Agreed. Best manager we've had for years. Thanks for the promotions Nigel, you'll get another job and another crack at the Prem enough.

That's all well and good in theory and I'm pretty sure that we do plan the areas that we want to strengthen and the players are identified months or even years ahead of time. However it's not like going into a shop and picking something up off the shelf. Players take their time to make decisions, weigh up their options, so do other clubs and agents. Sometimes we can't persuade the player to join us, sometimes we get beaten to a player by another club. Everyone would like us to get the right players in when we want them every time but football ain't like that for any club and the vast majority of us (including you I suspect) understand that.

The Cure at Glastonbury and also Poole Arts Centre. Dull beyond belief, no rapport with the crowd. Human League at Guilfest a couple of years ago were poor.

I think it's as simple as Umbro didn't have a striped template this season and wouldn't make one especially for us. As a result we ended up with the pinstripes and bolted on the all white option as a way of marketing the total kit as red and white. Back to stripes please next season.

In the build up to the Sunderland game the commentators on Solent said that REL had just completed on the land deal with Miland and the fact that this deal hadn't completed was the reason why the court case was delayed a few days earlier.

We can't match Chelsea either player for player or in terms of squad depth. I think the only member of our squad that would get into theirs is Gaston. There is a huge gap between the mega rich elite and the rest of the Prem. At this point we want to survive so you need to compare our squad to that of the other clubs in the bottom 6. If we survive and consolidate in a couple of years hopefully our squad will compare favourably with the likes of Fulham, Stoke and West Brom (in terms of PL quality and experience). To progress from there is going to take phenomenal scouting, negotiation, profiteering on homegrown talent and bold investment (think the Gaston deal, but bigger) allied with talented management. It could be an exciting journey.

I'm guessing, based on your normal style of posting and self confessed posting history, that this is a wind up / ironic and that in fact you really want to see as many of these things as possible. Sorry I can't help you myself as I wouldn't be seen dead in any of the above but you go for it.