CB Fry

"Central South" is not a region, Pompey weren't in a one horse race. It was Pompey/Bristol/Plymouth. So there was "more than one bid" but the region was the "South West".

Yes, you're right. No Saints fan has ever had a single bad word to say about Harry Redknapp, Chris Nicholl or Gordon Strachan on their tenures at Southampton. Not one word of criticism from any Saints fan, ever. What a total spanner you are.

Who's talking about Pearson apart from you, you sad obsessed idiot.

Why would it be unlikely? He's been working in this country in a similar capacity over the last few years including a Pompey and at one of the biggest clubs in the land, and in his last employment he managed said club to the Champion's League final. Refusing a work permit on Grant's CV (on paper, not saying I'd want him at Saints particularly) would be the unlikely scenario in my book.

Didn't they get into the play offs in their first season from a 15 point deficit? (PS. I know the answer, and it's yes they did.)

He managed Hearts for twelve whole games, so there is absolutely no way anyone can judge whether he was a success there or not. A glorified caretaker manager tenure that the Burley worshippers rave on and on about like he won the frigging Uefa Cup there.

Surely it's Naaaarch? We'll bounce back, but no clean sheet. Win 3-2, with the scoreline flattering them.

Nigel Worthington had more of a turd and has delivered comparative success. Mcleish and Smith had the same turd and did infinitely better. Burley has frankly lost it. Did well at Derby but was a dreadful, shameful disaster for us and the Jocks. No doubt we'll be flooded by the loons on this forum who fete Georgie as some miracle worker achieving unbelievable results against all the odds . As if £12m to spunk up the wall on any players you like and the regime with the biggest non-Swiss feelgood factor ever seen at SMS is "all the odds".....

I'm not defending SaintRichmond who is the biggest spanner on the forum by a country mile - I'm only surprised he didn't manage to blame Lowe for yesterday such are his scattergun garbage rants - but Pardew has spoken about aiming for the play offs this season. At no point has Pardew said he just wants to consolidate this season. I can't remember what Cortese has said, but Pards is definitely still up for top six. He aint no George Burley aiming as low as humanly possible and then make out he is a managerial mastermind by achieving it.

No it isn't. There is absolutely zero chance of us being relegated. Zero chance. It's whether or not we make the play offs, and to be honest it's a long old slog but still possible.

Nah. It's not happening today boys.

Pretty sure that come 2013 the digital switchover will be complete, or near as dammit, so there is no issue whatsoever with access to channels and the BBC or C4 could show it on one of their platforms, to everyone. And, more importantly, Sky could show it, for free. And I disagree with your last line - back in 2005 it was a new experience for a hell of a lot of people. In 2009 it was an experience for a handful of people who already liked cricket. Most people didn't have the opportunity to say "I saw it all four years ago, I won't bother" - there was no option to watch it, so the casual fans just got on with their lives and left the 2009 Ashes to the ever diminishing pool of cricket fans. Who needs new supporters taking an interest, eh?

This is just a figment of people's imagination. Much like the countless weeks of people saying we were definitely definitely definitely going to get more than ten points deducted. Definitely. And we didn't. The ten point penalty was correct and deserved.

Yawn. No response whatsoever on the sensible points made I see, just the usual grandstanding. But there are lots of rules that you could say is "physically impossible" to implement correctly unless you want 10 refs all sat round the perimeter like tennis umpires, or every whistle blown (or not blown) is discussed and counter discussed by video refs. Offside is a judgment call made to the best of a linesman's ability, much like all of us make judgment calls in life about things all the time. And life aint perfect, so yearning for every single decision made by a football official to be scientifically perfect is building a ladder to the moon. Pointless. Who wants scientifically perfect football matches? Not me.

Dopey idea. The off-side rule is the whole point of football. You have to get through the opposition team to score a goal by passing or dribbing through their last line of defence. Not booting the ball to someone already the other side of their last line of defence. If you remove the offside rule then the whole game becomes some kind of kicking competition with five attackers in the box with "quarterbacks" booting the ball in and goal hangers looking for scraps. How can someone who is a bloody football historian not understand that. Maybe you need to find an aussie rules team to support.

Correct. Correct.

Not really. For one, those creditors are not going to walk away with nothing with "new" Pompey trousering the parachute payments. The creditors will take absolutely everything that isn't nailed down. And, I doubt any "new" Pompey would have any rights over the stadium or the land surrounding which is of course worth £900billion if you listen to the Pompey divs on here. The "new" Pompey will be bought for a pittance but that's because it will be an utterly worthless shell.

But it won't work like that. The Prem games are already packaged up to the TV companies now - ie all the games between the big four, plus Spurs v Arse, Man U v Man C etc are in the top twenty (and always on Sky) all the way down to the low grade dregs games which tend to be Stoke v Liverpool, Fulham v Man U, Spurs v Blackburn (and on Setanta or ESPN) etc. That's why Setanta failed - they had games that the Sky subscriber in the main thought "yeah, I can live without them". So in the shakedown Sky would overbid for the P1 games and underbid for P2 leaving it for some Mug channel to lose their shirt on. The next round of TV deals would then see P1 get stronger and P2 get weaker because by then it will be explicitly clear that, for Chelsea, sharing their TV revenue with Bolton becomes an even bigger nonsense than it is now.

I said this before but this is Gartside as a turkey voting for Christmas. A "Premiership 2" with Bolton, Blackburn, Fulham, Forest, Middlesboro and yes Saints is simply not a Premiership 2. It's just a different version of the championship. Nationally no-one would be interested any more than they are interested in the CCC now. Who really cares about Wigan v Pompey or Bolton v Stoke now outside of the respective fanbases? Internationally no-one would give a flying bo lloc k. If there is a league serving up variations of Man v Chelsea v Liverpool v Spurs v Rangers v Arsenal v Celtic week in, week out then that's what they'll have. They'll live without that league with Bolton in, thanks. Sky would pay over the odds for Prem 1, and farm off Prem 2 to some mug broadcaster to bankrupt themselves on it. Hello ITV Digital, Hello Setanta. In the cycle of one TV deal Prem 1 will be the Prem, Prem 2 will be nowhere. Gartside will be left with a much smaller slice of a much smaller pie. He's a moron.

This kind of thing gets wheeled out quite often about assistant managers and I have no idea how anyone can really know. It wasn't that long ago that Brian Kidd was being hailed as the real reason Man UTD did so well.... I didn't notice much of the Poyet magic at Spurs when they had their worst start for several thousand years last season. All the credit for Leeds, none of the blame for Spurs. Being an assistant manager is a pretty easy life. Good luck to him, but he might not be the messiah.

They are far too good to go down. Their galactico captain said so. We'll ignore the fact that said Galactico only last season was struggling to hold down a place in Blackburn's second string and take him at his word. Far too good to go down.

Quite. Any news from the pontificating patronising "reality checkers" telling us what a fantastic achievement it would be just to stay up this season? Let's see whose reality is more accurate come season end shall we? I wonder if we're allowed to say we're a bigger club than Yeovil Town yet? Or that still too "arrogant".

Gartside wants to be careful what he wishes for. What he'd end up with is not a second tier Premier League, but just another version of the Championship. The top 14/16/18 in the new Premier League are not going to give up any European Places, and Sky will just give more money for exclusive rights to the games in that division. That's all they really care about, and world wide that all the markets in Asia, Africa etc care about. The rest of English Football is low-cost schedule filler. Sky would probably encourage some chump broadcaster to stump up over the odds for Premier League 2 because they know those games won't pay back and said Chump broadcaster will be lumbered and then bust, just like Setanta with a load of monday night games involving Bolton and Blackburn no-one cared if they saw or not and ITV Digital before that. Bolton v Blackburn, Wigan v Wolves, Coventry v Birmingham and, yeah, Saints v Fulham is of minimal interest beyond the fanbase of each club. Sky will not pay over the odds for those games. A second tier "Premier League" is just nonsense. There's Premier, then there's nothing. It'll be worth jack **** and Gartside and his dull old club will be more out of pocket than they are now.

Harsh - the current incumbent is definitely in for the long term. If, like Fahim, the long term is "at least six months". They'll probably beat Blackburn tomorrow. Remember, all relegation seasons have some hope and we can't expect our meagrely supported friends down the road to crawl out of the division on single digit points. They are going to win some games.

Maybe, although it still sounds like a game that Setanta or ITV would have shown last year, which channels round the world would pick the feed up from. The point is to show a game live you need lots of cameras to get the replay angles, managers reaction shots etc. To deliver highlights you can do it with one camera. If a British based broadcaster is not showing the game live then I cannot see any other broadcaster stumping up the required infrastructure to show a FA Cup first round game live. We've had all this before when Saints play on Fridays or Sundays and not on Sky, and it is always a blind alley. ....and there's your business plan for these sites. If they do show it, fair play but I remain dubious!