Dusic

A shame that Sport Republic can't clone Rasmus Ankersen. The team he is Chairman of has gone from strength to strength whilst the two overseen by the now departed Kraft have suffered.

LB Stephen Crainey?

I have a "Best Saints Dirk" thread scheduled for November 2027 so hold that thought!

Don't think any clubs interested will be too bothered about his current form in a shambolic team. He has already shown his ability. In fact, it probably suits them as can try to lower the fee.

Moran, Wood, Davis, Williams, De Ridder, Wigley, Basham, Caulker, Grant all viable candidates but who gets your vote? #steve

Dipepa has done really well since joining from (I think) Port Vale where he was in first team squad. Looks physically strong as well, a bit different from many of our academy forwards of recent years. Think he has a chance.

Not as good a finisher though as David Connolly - what a player he was when fit. On the other side you have Jonno Quick. Just terrible.

Of recent times Shano and Brett Ormerod stand out. Looked for one purple patch like SL had cracked out but lets face it, you were more suprised when he scored than missed. Expert at winning cheap free kicks though Both combined well with more accomplished players which was basically their job. Other shouts?

Another hattrick for Oyekunle today - one to watch. On pro deal til 2026.

Promotion winner so fair shout amd especially compared to the replacement!

Personally would be high pressure, aggressively positioned full backs, wide players who run towards the penalty area, with a deep lying defensive midfielder similar to during the Pochettino era. Proactive, high energy out of possession - the best template IMO to catch cold teams who have better individual players. Formation not important, but always a back four.

Understood and agree to an extent - just feel that largely the managers that have done well at Saints - e.g Strachan, Adkins, Koeman, Hasenhuttl - have been strong personalities able to build a rapport with fans quickly to bring a bit of calm authority in their various ways and a personal opinion is that given the magnitude of the fuck up this season and type of character required to reunite the club (again) I'm not convinced that Cooper is that guy. Can't think of any of our "dull and uninspiring" managers who have done a good job tbh.

Not with fans by and large though. And certainly handled the summer period very well. With players also.

I'm certainly not disputing Cooper's achievement with Forest but personally find him so dull and uninspiring. One thing Russell Martin did well was galvanise a club that had just been relegated and in part that was due to personality, media handling etc. We will definitely need that from whoever takes over (and its one thing Juric has massively failed on). Personally don't see Cooper as that type.

Not sure that is fair. Shields and Wilcox both did enough in a short time to be poached by the big boys and Goldie seems to be doing ok with the Academy after a poor period previously. Their off field appointments have generally been fairly decent I would say and not their fault that those guys were approached by Chelsea and Man Utd!

He showed enough last night that one vs one he is still the best we have. Cleaely at times he has been disruptive but in the absence of being able to sell him it does seem a bit odd that he wasnt tried before now in a team that has conceded lots of goals for ages. Hopefully he plays til end of the season and we might be able to get some cash for him.

We seem to be so bad at selecting L1/2 loans for our better academy players. Both of Ballard's loans this season have seen the manager fired just a few weeks after he joined and he looks set for a 2nd season in a row of barely playing unfortunately. Shame for him as he definitely has something but in danger of just being good in age group football...

No issue with flexibility but you certainly need some overarching principles. Both Iraola and Frank play slightly different shapes but regardless the type of players they need are the same despite that. Same with Pep who often switches between 3 and 4 CBs but the overall style remains. We have shifted from pressing to long ball to men behind the ball to extreme possession to man-to man...no wonder the squad is a bit of a mess. We need to stick with something for longer than 6 months and back it up with 3 or 4 windows in a row of decent recruitment, get better at managing contracts, selling assets rather than losing them for free and somehow get fans engaged again (I like many are as unbothered as I have ever been about games now). Over to Spors. Massive job on his hands.

Its actually more of an issue that a.) Our recruitment track record the last 6 or 7 years is poor, and b.) we keep changing the "systems" and therefore have players who are not suited to what the current manager wants, e.g having no left footed CB for a manager who exclusively plays with 3 CBs. Recruitment is at the core of the reason we have been so poor the last two PL seasons and the 5 permanent managers we have had in that time have all wanted different things. Recipe for disaster.

Its obvious we didn't have a good enough squad to stay up in August - not enough goals and likely to concede quite a few. But managers both should have got a little more from them to make for less embarassing season. Martin had us playing 'nice' football that with a few tweaks he was unwilling to make could have got us level with Ipswich, Leicester. Juric has just been a disaster and seems to have fragmented a squad that was already low on confidence.

Notice they have all gone quiet too. Rudderless. All we can do is trust in Spors that he makes a good decision in the summer.

We have definitely become worse under Juric than we were under Martin (except for perhaps the last game). He is even more inflexible and clearly doesnt have the players needed to play his way, hence ending today with a back of a RB who couldnt get in our team in the Champipnship, an attacking midfielder and a player who hasnt played for 2 years. Madness.

Aside from perhaps the very end of RM's tenure it definitely is worse. There is no sense of playing to any kind of plan (whether a popular or unpopular one) and nothing positive ever happens under managers to whom this applies. It was always going to be very tough for any manager who came in at that point to be a viable option for next season, but with every passing game the chance of Juric still being here gets ever smaller.

Juric plays a different style so would of course have signed some players of a different profile. But as pointed out further up, pretty much every fan wanted us to sign THB and Downes. Wood was a low risk £3m signing so will likely be very useful next season and clearly wasn't signed to be a key player. Fraser was a poor signing but also cheap, its not like we signed him instead of getting someone for £20m. BBD and Archer on the other hand were obviously signings seen as starting XI options. Just because we signed them it doesnt mean they were #1 on RM's list (they weren't). It means they were the deals the club was able to get done. Swap Delap for Archer and we definitely have more physicality and more points. My question would be why did Delap prefer to go to Ipswich over Saints? Why did they find £25m for a goalkeeper when we could have signed one on loan and spent that cash on a proper attacker? Why didn't they stump up 500k to bring Welington here in the summer? Why didnt they replace Wilcox properly when he left? These are SR questions not RM ones.

Usually you are fairly balanced and reasonable but this is an odd one. RM was the manager but he wasn't the person negotiating signing players and wasn't the Head of Recruitment. I doubt any of our genuine first team signings were first choices, we already know most of them weren't because we were clearly in for players like Delap, Carvalho, Clarke (just off the top of my head). Its fairly likely many were quite far down the list. The blame for recruitment clearly lies at the door of Sport Republic. They failed RM in the summer, as much as he messed things up himself. Re Juric...seems odd in our situation to get a manager who is very fixed in terms of formation when we knew we didnt have some profiles for his setup.