CB Fry

Why? PEH has been no better than JWP this season. If anything JWP has earned his place in the side, especially recently. PEH will come good but probably late this season/early next.

In a calculation universally known as "The Match Reporter's Opening Paragraph Writes Itself Coalescence" a player with the same or similar name as a former legend of host/opposing club is more likely to score than not score in any given match at 1 to the power 12.4. This increases to 7-2 on favourite if said player is on first visit and even further to to 93% if said player is a maverick Italian who looks like a scarecrow.

Well, we've been on a poor run recently and haven't won away for ages so I reckon we're definitely due a win today.

Okay then. It was football players and football managers that got us to the Prem. All led by Les Reed.

Reed was in charge of all the football decisions, which is what that post was about. Cortese was the commercial "brains", which at a club our size was nothing short of a clusterf uck of gaffe after gaffe in his time, from the humiliating photography rights stand down to multiple fumbles with sponsorship deals and bungled kit contracts with atrocious designs or designs we couldn't actually play in. Our first full season in the Premier League, the world's most lucrative sports competition the short one left us with commercial revenue LOWER than then-Championship Watford. Round of applause for that one. If those issues were translated into sporting decisions I'd wager we'd still be scrabbling around in League One. Anyway it's been in the Premier League in the infinitely more successful Ralph Krueger era that Les has gone from strength to strength, this seasons couple of blips excepted.

He ain't playing on Saturday, work permit or not. If he's fit enough to be on the bench at the cup final we're doing well.

Weapons grade.

Best midfield options in the Premier League.

Being that for the entire season our manager has not picked an unchanged side even once, I'm not quite sure how you think we are in a situation where our first team picks itself.

Our thoughts and prayers are with MLG at this time.

Indeed, it doesn't make sense. If he was being groomed to be a future manager and he didn't want to go, why did we sell him? Especially when you add in the repeated rumour that his agent was advising him to stay. So based on this info that'll be all three parties - Club, Agent, Player - all want him to stay. But we accepted a fee and the player went. How does that work?

Please do this. Please. Make it as high profile as possible. Helpless fans all over the world need to be inspired to fight back against the misery we have had to go through under the brutal Reed tyrannical regime. I mean a club of our stature reduced to 13th in the league and in a cup final. Unspeakable horror and a stadium walkout is only the start. Sit in protest is a must. Get the light aircraft banner ready, print out red cards for every seat and for gods sake can someone throw a pigs head on the pitch.

This is utter drivel from start to finish. Your point about Fonte being the last piece of the Cortese era is particular garbage as Yoshida, Davis, JWP and Jay-Rod are all still in the first team squad.

If anyone can get him firing, Puel can.

Swansea v Leicester next weekend too, so there's three points for either team to have people ****ting themselves.

Agree with this. I like Les but in this case he has to take criticism, he misled the fans and utterly cocked up what should have been straightforward. I'm sorry but I do not accept the "we just got unlucky at the last minute" excuse. For these reasons: a) we supposedly plan windows in advance, therefore we should have been ready to move early in the window. West Ham United, for example, signed their centre back target on 20th January, 11 days before the deadline. Absolutely no reason at all we should be still dithering about on the last day and wasting time that day signing yet another third choice keeper instead. And/or b) If and when things went wrong - target player gets injured, current first team centre back gets injured, other team jacks up price - all of that is easily managable. That all happens on deadline day. No problem. You quietly put down the phone to the agent telling you the deal is dead calmly and simply. You then turn to Jose Fonte, sat waiting for his Uber to take him to East London and say "sorry Jose, the deal's off, you're staying to help us for five more months". Simple. What happened in the window was an unquestionable and pretty much unforgivable utter fu ck up. There are no excuses. Scattergun West Ham United can sign a European Championship winning centre back with 11 days to spare and we can do nothing in two entire windows. Absolute joke.

No it doesn't. I'm happy to say Cortese was a superb lower division chairman and did fantastic work at that level.

£16m on a striker.

Someone will be along shortly to correct you that Les Reed oversaw only the rubbish bits, mistakes, errors, defeats. That's entirely down to him and his fault 100%. Anything good or any progress that has happened was overseen by someone else or written off as Les getting lucky and has nothing whatsoever to do with Les Reed.

Dean Wilkins is a manager of Southampton in our official history and everything. Of course he is. Does he get a blue plaque over his front door? What that era has to do with now I have no idea. Why did you start at Strachan and not Chris Nicholl or Ted Bates?

You're counting the likes of Dean Wilkins and also Dodd/Gorman as two managers not one. Brilliant.

In fairness there were posters like Crab Lungs who were clamouring for Silva then as he is now. Silva had a mixed reaction then, it's forum mythology to pretend he was dismissed out of hand. He had a similar mixed response to his potential appointment to, for example, Claude Puel.

The ship has sailed on Rudi Garcia now, hasn't it. Never mind Les. He was only completely, perfectly qualified you absolute helmet.

Love it.

You've done this one already. But absolutely love the italic work on assistant manager. I can't even do italics on Tapatalk, so well done. 3.2/10.