CB Fry

You cannot finish fifth in the Premier League by fluke.

Well, quite a few actually. And he doesn't need to sign for "many" clubs. Just one. As soon as another club comes in he can start choosing. That may be happening now.

He'll have plenty of offers. I fear he'll go to one of the bigger clubs, like Everton or Villa.

The debate is about Lambert being a "budget striker" compared to JR. Not about other clubs buying Rickie. If you want to wet your pants about that go ahead but I'm not in the slightest bit interested. And if it shuts you up, I completely agree with you. Value is decided retrospectively, but you can still assess risk up front. My point was and is that comparing our £1m L1 signing of RL three years ago with signing JR now is ridiculous. And saying one is better value than the other before one of them has even signed is also madness.

I think you'll find it is The9 looking at value based on price not me. I very much doubt Saints will be spending seven mil on any 30 year olds this close season. But thanks for some of your usual obvious "insights" delivered in your typical tediously patronising way.

How much did J Rod cost Burnley then? Because we didn't sign him last season and he didn't play for us last season.

Nice pastiche. The point is we're not buying RL now for one million pounds. If we were then yes, that's a budget signing. We're also not buying a 30yr old for seven million pounds either. Bad value. What we are doing is buying a 22 year old with bags of potential and wanted by several clubs and sold under duress by his current club for seven million pounds. We wouldn't have done that as a L1 or champ club. If the league a team is in has no impact on the cost of the player, how come league one teams aren't spending seven million quid on players all the time? Pretty simple really. I'll type it out slower for you if you like.

He's a good player. League one team doesn't spend seven million pounds on one player. Premier League team does spend seven million pounds on one player. The fact we (may be about to) do the second one does not make our signing of Rickie Lambert some bargain basement steal. Just dopey rewriting of history.

Well we're not buying him in the prem are we.

How many £1m signings were there in L1 that season? Or even last season, or even next season? £2m signings in the Champ are less rare but hardly commonplace and definitely not "budget signings" especially as we signed him and stuck him on the bench for weeks.

You mean like the loyalty shown by Norwich to Bryan Gunn? Lambert owes Norwich nothing. Adkins owes us none.

Yet the Mega bucks striker didn't score as many goals as either of our 2 "budget" strikers in the same league last season.... Which budget strikers are these then? I can remember Lambert and Sharp playing for us but they both cost significant amounts of money.

Just the £4m for 30plus trundling goal-every-five-games-or-so Zamora? Yes, jolly well done on that bargain of the century. Cisse? Never ever would he get anywhere near St Mary's. The day Saints start spending money like that on players like that is the day we have failed as a club.

....

Norwich, Swansea, WBA and Villa could all be with new managers next season (well three of them definitely will). They can't all be runaway successes so all good for our prospects.

Right. And Celtic fans affilated to PIRA total how many? Celtic Rangers is barely left/right let alone Marx/Fascist and certainly not compared to how much it is catholic/protestant.

...also the Irish troubles by proxy. Fascinated to know which ones are the Marxists? The Unionists or the Catholics?

And I, for one, like it. Premiership is an appalling name. But I think it will take a decade to shift. By which time it will have been rebranded to the FacebookEuroMegaLeague. Which SolentCitySaintsFC will be reigning champions of. Anyway, is he in West Quay yet?

Stalin was as far left as they come and he killed 20 million people. Not all lefties are Michael Foot. But I think fist pump/nazi salute is a grey area so get your general point.

I remember being genuinely excited by us signing Prutton - he was the kind of player that was in all the "young players to watch" articles at the time and it felt like a genuine coup to sign him. In fact, I will feel just the same if we sign JR. Let's see how it pans out.

From what I've seen, and his stats, he seems like a decent prospect. Good start to the season's business IMO.

Obviously a little more difficult to do things on the quiet in the premier league, Nicola. Or even to not do things. Either way, we're in the papers.

It's a shame the North West of England is so bereft of top flight football clubs.

Quite like that. Don't like the red with white pinstripes thing. Hope we don't go down that route, never like the plain red kits, although loved the Denmark Hummell one, which did have quite a lot of red. For our first season back I hope we wear stripes. It's our thing. Give it a couple of seasons - say when we are Champions League regulars with a fanbase stretching to Truro - before we start "experimenting". Oh, and the kit should be - red and white stripes, black shorts, white socks. To much buggering about with that in recent times for my liking. Not red socks. Not black socks. Stripy socks at a push. But white really.

DAB to FM really not that big a leap. Barely any cars have DAB so still think FM is preferable. That's the plum spot on Solent.