CB Fry

Would be a coup to get him but if LVG and MUFC want him we have no chance.

Most players signing for us won't give a sh it about brand Southampton. Not being in Sunderland, and being quite close to London will give us an advantage from the get go.

So players want to see a "statement of intent" from us but we lost out on targets because other clubs offered more money. Okay then.

I agree with the first bit.

I like your theory best of all.

Sure as hell outranks all the forum bol locks about broken hearted players not believing in our vision anymore. Or the guff around if only the club had returned all of Adam Lallana's phone calls he would never have dreamed of leaving.

How about replying to them then?

A strawman built by a master craftsman. Well done, son.

I don't call giving Shaw and Lallana six figure weekly wages "modest spending". Just fairyland stuff, I'm afraid.

Because it would still cost a fortune to create a CL squad and give CL pay rises to the existing squad. We were miles off that. Miles.

Ranting it over and over again will never make it true.

They must be with all that top 4 interest in them.

I really hope Les gets his act together and we try and sign some West Brom players this summer. Champions League class, the lot of them. ***Scrunches eyes shut and prays we sign Chris Brunt and Graham Dorrans but knowing we could never prise them away***

If only they'd all hired a PR agency to explain to the press that they weren't selling clubs.

As a team, we weren't. We have players, like Shaw, who were/are. We had more than other recent 8th/9th placed teams. Go us.

None of that would have made the slightest difference.

If we're such an easy target, how come we haven't sold anyone to, say, Villa or Stoke?

Funny last season back when we were the glass ceiling shattering football revolutionaries there would be plenty on here who would have been horrified to be compared to those fly-by-night one season wonders West Brom and Swansea. Turns out, in fact, they were chock full of Champions League quality players that the top four were desperate to get their hands on. How brilliant that their super strong board said no means no and kept those teams together. And my, did WBA and Swansea power up the league in the following season. That champions league quality really did tell for them.

They are incredibly useful when securing high transfer fees. That's primarily what they are for. And for players to get pay rises. A one year contract, on the other hand is effing useless, except for very old players desperate for one more season.

No, no one wanted Allen. No one. http://m.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/19215804

Remind when they built on their cup winning glory season with an even more successful season the year after?

In the last few years we finished 7th then 2nd in the third tier, then 2nd in the second tier, then fourteenth in the top tier. When Cortese quit on us (he was not removed) we were all of ninth in the top tier. Ninth. Basically we've been higher those spots plenty of times in our history. Even in the Lowe era we were fourth at Christmas once. Dave Jones and Paul Sturrock steered us to 12th. You getting carried away with "hope and expectation" on the back of a flurry of pretty mediocre (in the wider scheme of English football) league finishes is your problem. Nothing we'd achieved in the last five years suggested we were ever going to break into the highest echelons of the game, so not really sure what you were expecting or where your "new confidence" was based on. I, for one, am supporting our new manager and whoever we bring in. Let's have a solid season in the league but go for it in the cups.

You do realise ML died when we were in L1? Oh, and you don't know what sibling is, either.

Well, they do. We've shown plenty of intent to keep Lovren. If this was a fire sale he'd have been long gone. Schneiderlin we shall see but again, in a fire sale we'd have taken twelve million for him before the World Cup. You need to actually read what Les Reed actually said before deciding what you think he said and then getting upset.

All a bit Tottenham 2013, really. It's easy to "win" a transfer window. Let's see if they are actually any good come November.