CB Fry

Maybe she's really proud of their little kitchen.

I care. Nothing worse than the do-gooder let's-have-a-fans-parliament Anoraktivists. Maybe serial killers. Maybe.

LOL at MLG tonight. File this "reserve team" alongside "Saints are bigger than Everton" as one of his greatest hits.

You can predict demand, but when you have a fit for purpose modern football stadium currently selling out only for the visits of the mega-clubs, then there is little need for vague "prediction" of "potential". What is needed is quantifiable demand outstripping supply - games selling out weeks (or even just a week) in advance, a waiting list for season tickets and so on. Not just a prediction based on what we might have sold for the FA Cup final...if we are plucking random outlier attendances out of the air, why not tonight - we only sold 10,000. An equally irrelevant attendance. What cannot be forgotten is extending the ground is a multimillion pound commitment and something, once done, that cannot be reversed. And something that, if we had done it this summer would have left us with, what, seven, eight, nine, ten, twelve thousand empty seats for the Wigan and Villa games. Your thoughts on the matter read as if extending the ground is like borrowing next doors patio chairs for your own house party. A jolly nice thing to do and lets see how it goes, fingers crossed. So with that in mind, it really is not "anyone's guess". It is something we need to do with a rock solid business case.

Our strategy is very similar to Chelsea, just at a smaller scale, and you disregard everything Chelsea do while bigging up everything we do. You might say all we have done is spend our TV money this season, but we came into this season having already invested millions to get promoted, and invest in the training ground. We could have used the TV money to balance that off - that would be self-sufficient and sustainable. But we haven't done that, we've spent millions on new players instead. If all we are doing is spending the TV money, how come Blackpool didn't spend £30m on players following their promotion? How come Norwich and Swansea didn't? Is it because those clubs are following a tighter, more sustainable model than us, and we are splashing cash like a mini-Chelsea? The simple answer is yes. Which is fine, but let's not kid ourselves it is any better than what Chelsea do. We are not self-sufficient and definitely won't be this season....unless, of course the owners write off more debt, which is, in itself not self sufficiency, it's just being given free money. And to focus on your capitalised bit IF THE OWNERS PULLED OUT....you have no idea whether we could pay the wages or not. No idea at all. If the Leibherrs pulled out tomorrow I think we would be in some bother on the wages front and I think we would see a significant change in transfer business. Look, lets enjoy everything that is happening right now, let's rejoice in the fact we aren't doing what QPR are doing, but let's not pretend we are prudently building a sustainiable club just yet. We are doing generally the right things but we are significantly over spending at present.

If I was running a club hell bent on being self sufficient in the Premier League, I seriously doubt my starting point would be becoming the seventh biggest spenders on transfers in the whole of Europe. I think I'd follow the Blackpool model. Or the Swansea one. I think we are far closer to Chelsea in or actions than either of those two. We're a million miles away from self-sufficiency.

Abramovic and co have been talking about being sustainable for some time. Really very little difference between them and us, except scale.

Cortese does have the Apple mentality but not the way you think....Apple is not about selling absolutely as many smartphones/tablets as humanely possible, otherwise they could just pile Ipads up in Asda and chuck em out for £150 each. Apple is about maintaining price premiums and creating desire through great design, great product and great advertising/PR. It is about as far from your let's build a stadium.....then slash the prices to fill it as you can possibly get. You can go on and on and on and on about this idea build it/slash ticket prices to fill it but nothing whatsoever, nothing at all, nothing, Nicola Cortese has done at this football club suggests he is ever going to do that. We had between 6 and 8,000 seats at every match last year that he could have sold on the flexible pricing model. Ship em out at a tenner each. Did he do it? Did he hell. You say businesses with "common sense" plan ahead, who is saying they don't or they shouldn't? Maybe, just maybe, the forecast gates for the next three years is going to be somewhere around the 32,000 mark. Maybe, just maybe season tickets will go from 21,000 to 21,800 to 22,500 over the next three years. You can happily play line graphs all day and just draw lines into the sky of 42,000 gates but I think that is total pie in the sky and nothing in our history suggests we can get close to those gates, even if we finished top ten five years in a row I don't think we would do that. Once you've finished 8th twice in a row, the following season is really not that exciting. Not 10,000 more fans exciting. A couple of final points: Not sure how someone continually talking about multi-million pound investment with the express intention to devalue the core product and reduce revenue per item can claim the high ground of "common sense". Shoot for the moon all you like son, but don't dress it up as common sense or some kind of business plan. And I am discussing the merits and the issues around this. Thinking we won't any time soon be filling 42,000 seats is a perfectly valid stance to take. The fact you see that as a "negative" or "anti-Saints" or not common sense is your problem.

What is the definition of "survive" now? Does SaintAndy666 think Chelsea are going to disappear down a black hole leaving only a pile of dust if Abrambovic walked away? If we can "survive" without the Liebherrs, Chelsea could "survive" without the Russians. I mean, back in 1984 Chelsea only got 13,000 through the turnstyles.They'd just go back to that.

Correct. We are not being run in a self sufficient way right now, not by a long chalk. I'd compare it to post-Burley. I genuinely thought the cash he/Wilde spent at the time was parachute dosh/Walcott/Crouch/etc revenue and we could afford our spending. Turns out we couldn't. Our spending right now exceeds revenue - as it has done all post-takeover seasons. And although debt has been rolled up into the club, thats not quite the same as free money. But that's for another day. The important thing is we're not some miracle club balancing the books. Far, far from it.

Well the stupidity is on the side of those saying we have "maxed out" St Mary's and we are desperate for an extension. Those other games you mention are a good example of the general slow downturn in attendances at the top level that has been happening for a while. Use that as a reason why Saints might not want to rush into a multimillion pound chase for 8,000 new seats and you get attacked by the nutjobs on here ("intelligent posters", sorry) for being "negative", "anti-Saints" and with a "Dell-sized mentality". For the reasons you state above we do not need to rush into any expansion of the ground. Unfortunately the pro-side of this debate were so utterly moronic over the summer that these threads will be around for some time yet. Our ground is perfect as it is for now.

Only pyshcologically. Statistically it is impossible to be cut adrift after five games. After five games the teams third/fourth/fifth from bottom were only ever likely to accumulate 2/3/4 points. 5 at most.

Not that hard really. We could have lost yesterday and still not be cut adrift.

We were missing a goalie up until yesterday. Not sure you can describe him as a summer transfer being that it wasn't done in the summer and isn't a transfer but there you go. He's in. Think a second centre back or a left back would have been useful too. We are injuries and suspensions away from looking very thin back there. But other than that, good business over all - delighted we haven't gone down the QPR route of Shuan Wright Phillips/Zamora/Kieron Dyer wage-drain deadbeats.

Civil war? Not really in that play off season.

Feels like our stadium is kinda the right size, doesn't it?

Burley had the benefit of the Saints go Wilde euphoria in his full season. And pots and pots of cash. And six months "bedding in" before that season started. Everything, everything, everything that experts on here like to say a manager needs. Burley had it all. He blew it. We dribbled into the play offs when we should have strolled in. Don't make out he was hard done by. He was one of the luckiest managers we've ever had.

You did read the breathless "£6m is an absolute bargain" stuff about Butland in the summer? On the back of half an hour in League 2. Butland makes this kid look like John Burridge. Edit: actually no he doesn't. I thought he'd played all season for Gills. Oh well. I liked that John Burridge line too.

I heard Alan Nixon made it all up.

Including me. Did a good job at Derby in fairness. With Raziak and Idiakez when they were good.

I don't think it's a press release, it's an interview. Any journalist is going to ask Adkins about his future right now - we've lost four in a row, and like it or not he is favourite for the sack with the bookies, and there has been a little bit of speculation about it too. Nigel's comments are fairly standard issue in my opinion. Nothing in that interview has radically changed my view about what might happen if we, say, lose two from the next three.

Bizarre. You could read your original statement 100 times and it reads like you are comparing Hillsborough to VE Day, you are suggesting that TDD should "feel the same" about Hillsborough and Easter Sunday and VE Day. that's what your question implied. The phrase is "mentioned in the same breath" which is what you did. Anyway, you're saying you didn't mean it like that, which is fine, but don't suggest that is everyone else's fault. Why anyone would want to have a Liverpool song on their ipod is beyond me but fill your boots.

When?

Personally, I think Dodd is a legend.

I think it smells strongly of Lowe recommending the club to Cortese and Harry Redknapp ringing up Leibherr and convincing him to buy the club. Or whatever garbage you were coming out with the other day. They call you the Fox for your razor sharp perception, do they not?