CB Fry

https://www.fotytv.com/2023/05/southampton-vs-fulham-preview.html Surprising good site, have been using for a few weeks now - probably will be shut down before long.

I wish we were Leeds

Good line up to be honest. 4-1 Saints no bother

I can't believe we're going to be relegated entirely because Newcastle can't even beat Leeds 😪😪🤬🤬🤬

COME ONNNNNN NEWCASTLES

We are an attractive proposition. We have money and should go into next season as one of the favourites to go back up. Graham Potter is not going to be our manager. Both of those things can be true, and they are.

It's a nonsensical idea that the only thing stopping us getting Graham Potter is us "paying out" enough and somehow the club will "choose" between paying out for Potter and paying less for someone else. You realise Potter himself has a say in these things, right? He is not going to be our manager, get used to it. Honestly if he did take the job I would seriously question his sanity and judgement because it would be a pretty mental thing for him to do at this point in his career.

It's almost like there is no magic formula.

Quite like the look of our entry Mae Muller but I'd be really nervous about letting her wank me off.

Yes but really effective, successful CEOs use someone else's money so well that they keep getting roles and opportunities to apply their skills to new and bigger businesses. You know, to deliver on a return on that investment, not just merrily spend their way through a vanity project. The Italian never worked at any other football club, anywhere, at all ever again. Which is weird what with him being such a visionary genius and everything.

He got us to 8th. We finished 8th under Strachan. In the seasons around Pochettino doing it the clubs that also finished 8th included Swansea, Fulham and West Brom (and Pompey). I don't think I will ever understand this bizarre/skewed interpretation of what actually happened. Especially as what did actually happen is we were significantly better in subsequent seasons under brand new leadership and a very different team.

We had a lot of money for league 1 and the Championship but not compared to the Champions League clubs. Honestly this is pretty basic stuff.

We should have offered him a contract extension and £100k plus a week surely? We'd be in the Champions League by now and no mistake

So "phenomenal" that he never worked for any other football club anywhere on the world ever again. Spending a fuckton of money to get promoted out of League One is not actually "phenomenal". Teams like Burton or Peterborough or Rotherham or Bristol City can do that without smashing transfer records to buy in players from the division above. Ditto the Championship, it's not that "phenomenal" to do what Swindon or Barnsley or Blackpool or Wigan or Brentford have also achieved. It was great, Adkins and the team did great, but hardly mould breaking. Club spending loads of money goes up. Yep, great. Not phenomenal. He got found out once he hit the big leagues, crashed and burned and was never heard from at any football club ever again. In fairness that bit is phenomenal - pretty impressive to fuck it up quite so much that no one in the sport gives him another job. We went from strength to strength after he left. So good to finish 7th then build on it to finish 6th and then 8th again, great. A great job from the club leadership to rebuild and take the club into a much stronger place. Stronger than ever. We made a disastrous appointment in Pellegrino and we know the rest. But loads has happened since then too. Where we are now has nothing to do with the club that got promoted 12 years ago, and nothing to do with the achievements of the new leadership that got us that truly phenomenal 6th place either. The current owners bought a club with great infrastructure but it's their decisions that have relegated us. The current owners spent hugely summer 2022 and made their own managerial choices. Those choices have taken us down. Other leaders could have come in and made choices where we did not go down in 2023. It's pretty obvious that relegation was not an inevitable thing under Sport Republic. They made very bad choices. It really has fuck all to do with 11 years ago. You weirdos can keep pretending 2023 is some outcome of binning that Italian after his little season and a half in the top flight more than a decade ago but obviously, obviously it isn't.

We spent huge chunks of that season in the top four, and followed it up by doing it again the following season and finishing sixth. The best Premier League squad we ever had and probably ever will have. Ever. But yeah, lets work up "alternative realities" to those seasons. Jesus wept.

Counter-factual does mean an alternative reality scenario so it does imply "fiction" because it is can only ever be assumptions (counter to the facts). So it is the right word. Leicester is an irrelevence to be honest - they did not "build up" to winning the league, they finished 14th on 41 points the season before, they'd just come up and subsequently changed their manager that summer. They won the league out of nowhere. We finished 7th that season under Koeman so were far better placed to win the league than Leicester were when that season kicked off. We finished 14th on 41 under Adkins/Poch so our league winning season should have been the season after that, 2013-14....funny really because at that time we had a driven ambitious Champions League focused chairman but got nowhere near achieving what little old Leicester did from exactly the same starting point. Ain't it strange?

We finished 7th the following year and 6th the season after. I know it's a massive inconvenience to this counter factual story but there's nothing to suggest that Luke Shaw staying results in anything better than that. And we're dishing out £100k to a full back so how much are we paying Jay Rod in that scenario? How much are we paying Morgan and Lallana and Lambert? I worry we would be spending far more to not really do any better than we did anyway.

And if you think a "sound business model" means we finish eighth or better every single season forever than God help you.

If it's all luck then you can suck up this season then. We're just unlucky to go down. Right?

You took your time with that reply. You seem to be arguing a load of points that I haven't even mentioned but carry on frothing sweetheart. Mane was a record transfer at the time - definitely was Liverpool's biggest ever fee - so obviously not "pathetic". Grow up. The issue I have is people twatting on about Adam Lallana, about Nathan Redmond, and the fee we got for Mane. Wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah. Wah wah wah of course the decline all started in the summer of 2014, nine bloody years ago....A "decline" that involved our two best ever Premier League finishes that we will likely never repeat. Of course that was a decline, of course it was. Jesus wept. We've changed owners and managers multiple times since. So our relegation this season has got fuck all to do with selling Rickie Lambert, fuck all to do with Koeman leaving, fuck all to do with Van Dyk, fuck all to do with Les Reed, fuck all to do with the Hockey guy, fuck all to do with Mark Hughes or Danny Ings even. Fuck all. We spent £150m net this season, we're under new ownership and we made some disastrous decisions on managers and players. You're twatting on about the "selling players" routine like some chump pundit on Talksport but we had a close season last summer where we didn't sell anyone and spent a fortune. Just a load of cliche half thought through shite you can grab at but not the actual issue at all. Wah wah wah. I know you are in a breed of people absolutely desperate to draw everything bad back to wah wah wah Cortese left us but grow up. Nine years ago is irrelevant. Irrelevant. Grow up.

No one's saying that. We're just saying you're an old perv.

Look, I'm too busy masterbating over Penny Mourdant to give feedback on everyone's contributions on this thread.

It was the Coronation of their majesties King and the Queen as on the invites and all the coverage so if you are going to talk about "technically" this or that then get your facts right. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean you can just lie about it. The two boys are grown adults and I wouldn't expect any grown up children of mine to decide who I married or not. And Charles and Camilla are heads of state, the whole thing is not just there for William and Harry, so I don't see how any of that stuff is particularly relevant. As your snidey misogeny shows you don't like Camilla, as was clear in previous posts.

This. The Jones appointment said relegation to me and here we are. Replacing Ralph needed a big personality with relevant experience and a bit of spark to inspire the team and fans. Basically like Ralph Hasenhuttl in 2018 which felt like a big, significant appointment. Once we decided not to do that, and replace him with a too-clever-by-half appointment, we were done for. I didn't quite think we'd finish the season on Watford/Sunderland/Norwich level on mid 20 points but here we are. Bring on the Championship....

The point is the first 11 won't be the players we have now plus two. The whole squad and team will be thrown up in the air and none of us have any idea what the 1-11 will be on August 1st.