CB Fry

Sorry, disagree. Sacking Curbs was clearly an error but Zola was given pretty much two full seasons (longer than, say, Nigel Adkins has had to get us promoted, or Owen Coyle needed to turn around Bolton, or Holloway needed to promote Blackpool, or the same time as Arry needed to take Spurs into the Champion's League, less time than Poyet needed at Brighton to win the title, or the same time as Lambert needed at Norwich to nail two promotions, or Mark Hughes needed to take Fulham back into the top half). To suggest Zola was some victim of a Lowe style revolving door policy is stretching the truth a bit. The stability of keeping Zola on was only going to end up with Relegation anyway. It's not managerial unstability that did for the Hammers, it was just appointing the wrong manager twice in a row. Both of them had “time”. A straw poll of WHU fans at the end of Jan to choose between elbowing Avram, and wonderful "managerial stability" would have only gone one way. And I doubt any WHU fans today would put their hand up for "managerial stability" and keeping Avram versus making a change. No doubt some smart arse will wheel out the Lawrie got relegated in his first blah blah blah, but I don't care. It's not 1975 any more. Managerial stability, in itself, is not good. Having the right manager is good, as we currently do. No West Ham fan is going to put their hand up for managerial stability today. They'll be happier with a new manager. They just need the right man.

Which is why we're no more stable today than we were yesterday. When we've had a manager at the club for four years then we can crow on about about managerial stability. Until then the fact is our current manager has yet to complete a full season in charge, and our current chairman has sacked two managers in two seasons. The contract signed in January didn't make us more stable, the announcement of it yesterday morning doesn't make us more stable. Contrary to popular misconception, managerial stability in itself is not the aim. It is not, in itself, a good thing. Success on the pitch is the aim and that is always a good thing. West Ham stuck with their manager and gave him time to bed in, settle in and all that boll ocks. West Brom booted out their relatively successful manager quite brutally. Hands up all the Hammers fans craving managerial stability....

Finally the day has come. I Agree completely with a dalek post. Spot on. We are what we are, and that's that.

Lyon and Ajax survive by selling all their stars to england, spain, italy or even germany. And their managers tend to flee to bigger jobs too. And those clubs get regular european football on the back of being in weak leagues. Clubs like that prove how hard it is for small english clubs. Lyon in the PL would just be a mid table feeder club. Saints won't be anywhere near the champs league anytime soon. Which is absolutely fine by me. After all, i happen to live in the real world, not the world of the idle pipe dreams of our current chairman.

The usual patronising shi te from you then. No other clubs are going to be interested in Nigel Frigging Adkins, he's not a big name and hasn't actually achieved anything of note yet. If we're doing poo next year he'll be sacked without a minute's notice. Utterly meaningless contract extension. But by all means carry on pretending we're going to be just like Chelsea playing in the champion's league in front of 50,000 regulars.

We have no more stability today than we had yesterday. If Adkins coc ks it up next season and we bob about at the bottom end of the Championship he'll be out on his ear. Stability is measured backwards, not forwards. When Adkins has actually been here for five years you two can merrily toss yourselves off till the cows come home. Until then the facts are that Cortese has sacked two managers in two seasons and our current manager has not completed a full season. What a model club for stability.

At the end of the day Adkins is unproven in the league above. If we're anywhere lower than 16th come christmas he'll be sacked, regardless of the piece of paper he signed three months ago. Good luck to him but he's not the messiah to me yet.

I thought Morgan was an Arsenal player all along and he was with us on some complicated loan deal? That was gospel truth from some of the cast-iron ITK bull-shi te merchants on this forum not that long ago. Rumour built mainly on the fact that Morgan is French and, err, it sounded like something clever and a steward told me in the pub. Anyone who was peddling that guff care to explain how come Morgan doesn't yet look like pulling on a Gunners shirt?

Not really. Pearson got saints into the championship for the following season quicker than adkins did, he did it in about 15 games. Pearson wins. Oh. Your comparison is utterly pointless Nick.

Eh? Pearson got to fifth and a play off final in his first full season in the championship. Saints have indentical levels of resources that LCFC had then. And our Nigel has managed in the championship before. Adkins will need to do a lot better than top ten to be 'honours even' with Pearson.

If there's one thing this season has proved it's that pre-season really isn't that important. Last season we had people bleating on about "Pardew had no pre-season" until about February, we won the trophy and were in play off form. And the same thing happened this year with Pardew's poor pre-season and then Adkins of course having no pre-season (and no time to "bed-down", "settle in" and all the rest of that guff). We got promoted with a game to spare. We might have a good pre-season, we might have a rubbish one. You can bet your arse we'll buy more players in the last week of August than in the whole of July, because that's how the market works. Will any of it matter a damn in April next season after eight months of football? Not really. Anyone really remember how good our pre-season was in Strachan's last season when we were fourth at Christmas? Anyone remember the pre-season in 1975 before we won the cup? Or in 1983 before we finished second? So my only plea is to stop working pre-season into this miracle period that decides our fate before a ball has been even kicked. Go and beat some Norwegian team 8-1. Whoopee-frigging do. Lose 1-0 to Cheltenham Town. It's a disaster. Don't sign anyone at all until the week of our first game. I want to kill myself. Pre-season, Schme-season. Roll on August.

Why on earth would this Norwich (or whoever) want to appoint a manager whose season "hasn't gone exactly as planned" and is "languishing in mid-table" in the second tier? Adkins will only be of interest to Prem clubs if Saints are solid top three and challenging to go up automatically. And if we are, then its unlikely Adkins would want to leave - he might as well finish the job and promote us, rather than take over a relegation bound Norwich/Blackburn/whoever.

Not really. I notice you're too much of a weasel to quote my entire post. My point all along was that Adkins had to deliver automatic promotion. Anything other than that would have been a failure, and it would have been. Sacking a manager when we did was, and is not, best practice, now is it? It worked, but it doesn't make what I said in mid September 2010 wrong. I was right. We had "wasted games" and that "perfectly good manager" is now two divisions higher and sitting very pretty in the richest league in world football at one of the biggest clubs in the country. We had no "lives left" which is why we had to go on this amazing run to secure promotion. Adkins has done great. Doesn't make our sacking of a manager in Sept 2010 anything other than a co ck up, unless you're recommending doing the same thing next season? "Ha ha" to you, you tedious dweeb.

I'm looking forward to the day we take our rightful place back on the team news pages on BBC teletext.

That bloke on Solent is a moron. Win on Monday and we're up. Simple. There is not going to be a 15 goal swing. Pedantic pr ick.

To be fair mate, they do. If they used FPTP the program would be over after the first week. It's all a bit academic though because the NO campaign are going to walk it. Which really, will be fine. Landslides and Coalitions are just as likely in both systems, and both have their merits and faults. The key thing to remember is that all governments are coalitions. All of them. Michael Howard and Ken Clarke sat round a cabinet table. Gordon Brown and Alan Milburn round a cabinet table. Norman Tebbit and Leon Brittan. Clegg and Cameron have got as much common ground as any of those pairings. Landslide governments often have to have as much compromise as a hairline coalition because of the sheer volume of backbenchers to contain. Thatcher and Blair had plenty of that in their "strong governments". Our big political parties are huge coalitions of opinion. It's certainly not a bad thing. Whoever wins the next election, they'll be a coalition formed, even if there's a landslide.

The only "reduction" that went on in that leadership election was a reduction in the candidates. They were whittled down using a AV system. I am assuming you are not thick enough to describe that Cameron v Davies run-off as "first past the post" but no doubt you can still surprise me.

Oh behave. It's not hubris to say that Saints are far too big a club for this division. We just are. Even if we don't go up this season, perish the blimmin thought, we will still be far too big a club for this division. Just like Sheffield Wednesday are. Just like Sheffield United will be next season. Just like Man City, Nottingham Forest, Leeds and Leicester City were. Just like Bradford City are too big for the fourth tier. Just like Oxford and Luton and Grimsby are too big for non league. The "look at the table" line is really quite annoying. Like we don't know what division we are in and where we are in the table. Thanks for being so patronising. This is about something much wider than the current league table. Southampton are far bigger than the poxy third tier, promoted this season or not. Sheffield United will be far bigger than the third tier next season. That's not hubris.

Round one - Clarke, Fox, Cameron, Davis. Clarke got the least amound of votes and was eliminated. The remaining four went into the next round. Round two - Fox, Cameron, Davis. All the people who voted for Clarke previously got to vote again. Fox got the least amount of votes this time and was eliminated. Round three - Cameron, Davis. The AV system used by the Parlimentary party now complete there is a final vote for the membership. The winner has to get more than 50% of the vote. That is AV. It's not "me saying it's AV". It is. The only difference is the pleb membership is kept out of it until the end and the rounds get to be run on seperate occasions rather than on one piece of paper. It is, if anything, a purest form of AV. As you so often are, you're pathetically wrong.

I think it will be a bit of an anti-climax, what with us playing our cup final yesterday.

Err, yes they do. You can say it "for the last time" as much as you like but you're wrong. The Tory party (or any party) could have a simple first past the post most member votes wins election for their leader. But they don't. All the parties use an AV system to elect their leader and the Tories definitely do. The whittling down of candidates via the parlimentary party working through second and third rounds of voting is AV. That's what AV is for f u c k's sake. The hilarious mechanism in the tory party of course is that the plebs in the party don't actually get their say until the parlimentary party has whittled it down via their little AV system. You can hardly call the final run off "FPTP" when it's been engineered to two bloody candidates. You might as well call it AV as the winner needs more than 50% of the ballot. The only difference in a national AV election, is that to save time, all the second and third choices are captured on one ballot in one go, rather than multiple rounds of voting. Calling voters back to the polls time and again for multiple rounds of voting would be a little silly.

Oh belt up. We were buried under an avalanche of skate gloating about their state of the art 300,000 seater megadrome to house the biggest most passionate fanbase in the whole of world football. An avalanche of skate gloating about all the multi billion pound players they had bought and were going to buy. How they had cemented their place in the elite. And plenty of skates on this forum saying they didn't care where the money was coming from, or who got ripped off, as long as Skates kept winning. Their fans are inbred pigshi t thick scum. The club they supported cheated football for three or four seasons, cheating other teams of a place in the Premier League and they cheated their way to a major trophy. Their fans portray themselves as the UK's greatest fanbase despite pi s sw eak crowds week in, week out and huge numbers of them gloated and revelled in the cheating and stiching up other clubs and local businesses out of their money. Those fans saluted and glorified the bunch of crooks. I think we are well within our rights to direct plenty of attention to them.

Put it this way - would saints fans ever, ever, ever take the time to write out banners about the manager of Brighton and Hove Albion? They've won the league but proved themselves to be an absolutely nothing club. The visit of Saints was their little cup final. And they lost. Good luck to them in their gigantic new stadium.

And matey from Solent describes him as "open, candid and honest". How is "it's always someone else's fault/we're so hard done by" week after week after week open, candid and honest?

You are negative.