CB Fry

Never claimed to be a forum guru. That's for others to say. Being that we won nine of our last ten to secure second place, it's safe to say what I was saying was right. Pretty sure personally I never said we couldn't do it (there's one for you freaking weirdos trawling the threads of 2010) although I did say we would need to go on a phenomenal run and I also said lots of things about Adkins being under huge pressure to deliver promotion that season without fail. I wonder if anyone is going to dredge up the horse sh it threads talking about how we should all leave Adkins alone to "build his own team" and shouldn't be all horrible to him and let him have two or three years to get promoted from League one. Or the gazillion arse-aching bores going on about how there is no such thing as instant success and only immature people believe there is and that managers can't just come in and deliver success straight away blah blah etc etc? Come on weirdos. The forum guru demands it.

Beat me to it. This article is clearly more evidence of evil lying journalist scum and of course the entire media having an anti-Saints agenda. Funnily enough there was a thread on here only a couple of days ago of the usual betwetting divs saying we don't need a Sunday newspaper writing positive stories about us and quite frankly they can all leave us alone. Why don't the Mail leave us alone then - it's a disgrace this has been published, surely?

You're forgetting our gigantic official "catchment area" meaning we've got the likes of Portishead, the Wurzels and XTC in the west and Paul Weller and Suede over to the East. Oh, and Radiohead, Supergrass and Ride because we've got Oxford in the bag as well.

It's more like our appointment of Nigel Pearson than our appointment of Nigel Adkins to be fair. When we appointed Adkins in League one he'd already been promoted from that league twice before. This new guy is clearly someone with potential but completely unproven. Being that they are skint and probably a season away from being relegated the similarities really are spooky.

Thanks for the supportive post. But our man MLG has ruled out an price rise strategy, even though it is a very simple mechanism to deliver cash to the business to spend on players and the squad. His strategy seems to be to not worry about having no season ticket waiting list and no evidence of sustained over-demand, build the xx thousands of seats anyway, and then give those seats away in family and school promotions, and charging less for tickets than now, with the sole requirement of the development, er, "paying for itself". Which is a strategy that at the same time as delivering no extra cash to the business to invest in players or wages it also creates complexity and ties up funds in infrastructure there is no concrete need for. In his head it's a 100% vanity project to build seats just for the sake of it. It really is truly, truly amazing.

So we're now building hotels and leisure complexes are we - this was a debate about seats in the ground, so no idea what you are talking about there. If Cortese wants to stick a Casino on the side of the ground to generate revenue then fine if the numbers work. Never have I stated any objection to anything like that. I talk about season ticket waiting list above. Basically, it's a good, genuine bellwether for demand. True demand. Not demand made up in your head. I notice you didn't actually answer my question about gate prices - it is a far more efficient and immediate way to "increase revenue" (and to evaluate true demand) than spending millions on seats with no clear demand for. Also a far more efficient way to "increase revenue" than building hotels and casinos. You live in a silly little computer game world where the only way to increase revenue is to spend loads of money. Not true. Just drive value from the demand that is already there. After all, there's loads of it according to you. So not "done". You didn't answer the question.

That's funny, because the Leibherr's bought St Mary's for far less than the list price to build the thing, so that development lost a shed load of money. The one thing you "completely overlook" is the high likelihood that if we had a 40,000 seater stadium would probably deflate demand, especially as you're planning to build it with no season ticket waiting list. A massive reason people buy season tickets is to guarantee seats for bigger games. 40,000 seats to chose from makes that a much lower imperative.

1. Have we ever had a waiting list for season tickets in the St Mary's Era? 2. Do you think we should put prices up significantly to maximise revenue from this amazing demand for tickets for a couple of seasons before we spend £40m on infrastructure we could otherwise spend on players? You know, generate some money before just spending it again. Do you think you could answer those two questions to move the discussion on. Thanks.

Hang on, you're the tedius pedantic one on here - Wayman said "it won't be 32k every week". You said rubbish, but it isn't because previously it wasn't, those numbers prove it and it won't be again. Did we have a waiting list for season tickets? No. You don't spent £50m expanding a perfectly good stadium on the off chance of us having lots and lots of better seasons than the Rupert Lowe era, which did see us finish between 12th and eighth up until relegation. And being that Stoke, Fulham, Bolton, et al have had better seasons than we have on smaller gates, a bigger ground than 32,000 is not a pre-requisite for having better seasons than finishing bottom of the Premier League.

Lighthouse's post above prove Charlie Wayman's point. We didn't sell out every week. So, not actually rubbish at all.

Indeed, but we can have an educated stab. Well, really? That time to break even is time and money not spent on wages, which would put our squad and our top flight position in peril and is funnily enough one of the major contributory factors to our going into admin in the first place. Here's a simple case study. 40,000 gates at £40 a ticket - £30m gate reciepts over a 19 game season. Lovely. A whole £6,000,000 more than 32,000 seats at the same price. But at a conservative £5,000 a seat to build those seats, that's a bill of £40,000,000 to cover that. Stick that on a 20 year mortgage and you're going to need to be coughing up something like £2.5-£3m a year, so that's your return down against the old stadium to £3m already. If we stick it on a "that's nothing" 10 year mortgage, well, we're making no money at all, are we? So what's the point? Stick a fiver on average seats, though, and with no outlay your turnover already up by £3m. Stick on another fiver and bingo, another £3m. No outlay, no risk, no mortgage, just £6m worth of juicy turnover straight into the coffers. If we want money to compete then "sweating" our resources is a far more sensible option to exhaust than seat expansion vanity projects. If we are selling 31,000 home to West Brom at an average of £50 per seat, with a season ticket waiting list of at least 5,000 then yes, there is a case for expanding the ground. Until then, there really isn't because it makes very little economic sense.

The usual drivel from the usual suspects, I see. Love these threads. If there is significant over demand for tickets at SMS when we are in the Premier League, then the first thing a sensible business focussed leader should do is not spunk forty odd million quid on a eight thousand more seats, even if the thought of it does make MLG's willy go all funny. The most efficient and effective thing for a business like SMS when faced with this massive over demand that the "believers" are claiming we'll have is to do one thing. Put the price up. Then put the price up again. Then, put the price up again. When faced with significant demand for a product with a finite supply the sensible thing is not to suddenly make more of the product. It's to make as much money as possible from the product you already have. If, like some of the experts claim, we'll have queues round the block for a November home game against Blackburn, then charge £50 a ticket. They want to cram in, they'll pay it. If, like the "look at Wolves look at Wolves LOOK AT WOLVES" idiots think we can fill 50,000 seats on a wet Wednesday versus Fulham, then charge £55 a ticket. We only need 29,000 to pay that much anyway. If, like the "they said you couldn't climb Everest" spanners think we can sell just as many tickets at Liverpool, then charge £60 a ticket. After all, they said man wouldn't walk on the moon and that means everything is possible and everything will definitely happen. Charge more money. That route will make us more money, allow us to sign better players, pay better wages and also won't saddle us with a load of pointless debt, as outlay would be zero. Nothing. It's not as sexy as the dopey little dreamworld of 50,000 stadiums the wallies like to cherish, but it would be a billion times more sensible. And it would definitely work. After all, something about Chelsea in the eighties and Roker Park and Everest and the moon and they all laughed at Christopher Columbus or something so there.

Presumably you are referring to this thread: http://www.saintsweb.co.uk/showthread.php?33055-Are-we-afraid-of-success...&highlight=afraid+success+failure Being that the thread you started wasn't actually about whether we would (or could) go up or not this season, not sure where on earth you have drawn the conclusion that you encountered lots of "non believers". No-one on that thread could be called a non believer in the possibility we could get promoted this season. Not one person. But to be honest I don't think anyone had a clue what that thread was about, least of all you. The only non believers on that thread are the ones challenging your misguided belief that Few can doubt that if we are still at the top came January that the Liebherr family wouldn't give the nod to an extra 40-50 million out of their coffee money to give us the edge in the transfer market and seal promotion in obedience to Marcus Liebherr's dying wish to see " his club " get to the top flight Which you soon downgraded to 20-30 million spent in the next transfer window. So if you want to call me a non believer that we will spend between 20 and 30 million in January, then I'm a non believer.

Yes, but I think it is true that they are the only team in four divisions (excluding the teams that have never been relegated from the prem of course) that have never qualified for a single play off match. Season after season after season of mid table tedium in the Championship. A season in League one would be preferable to eons and eons in total mediocrity.

Obviously not "irrelevant". If we weren't in administration, the Liebherr's would not have bought us. We were available with stadium at an absolute steal of a price. Leibherr wasn't making anyone "offers they couldn't refuse" he bought us at the lowest price the administrators/Aviva had to take. Completely different.

So Paul Lambert didn't assemble quality and harness it then? Nigel Adkins and Southampton have some kind of monopoly on football purity have they? Like it or not Norwich won League One, we didn't, and they have been promoted to the Prem which we haven't yet achieved. Really don't think comparisons to Norwich are that lazy, and for you to make that kind of comment you would have had to have seen Norwich City play just as much as you've seen Saints play in the last two years, otherwise maybe it's you that's lazy?

Over the summer there was an absolute avalanche of contributors to this forum saying how this season's Championship was infinitely harder than last seasons because of the strength of the relegated clubs, and because of Brighton coming up too, and Leicester having loads of money etc etc etc etc. And here we are, head and shoulders the best team in it. Every season is all much of a muchness in all honesty. I don't think any of us needed reminding that we managed to get relegated from the prem bottom of the table with a team managed by Bryan Robson snivelled to 34 points or something. The "standard of the league this/next season" is a complete misnomer. You've just got to do what you've got to do.

Our home record is simply breathtaking. Next best to us (at eight out of eight) is WHU and some others on 4. Derby and Leeds could get to 5 tomorrow but you feel that at least one of them won't. Across the leagues only Sheffield Weds, and Man City really compare with our fortress. What a team.

They you go, this gives us 18 points and still pretty likely to be top of the league by the end of it (we'd be on 1.9 points per game, which is where QPR finished the season last year). To be honest, the defeats I just chucked at a couple of random teams. Someone, somewhere is going to trip us up. Our second favourite Nigel is a decent bet for killing off our home record though. And I notice I followed that up with two additional home non-wins. Let's call that our mid season wobble.

Too right - twenty points from the next ten games would be breathtaking and we'd be pretty much guaranteed to still be top of the league if we achieve it. You don't need to be a pessimist to know we'll lose at least two games between now and January, and christ, that's absolutely fine. Let's not start being a **** about things - we won't get, and we really don't even need thirty more points by year end.

Here's what I said on that thread, before some revisionist weasel posts it up for me because it doesn't fit in line with the happy-clapper opinion police. Happy with what I wrote at the time, and note the use of the lines "so what do I know" "good luck to him" and "lets hope Adkins can step up" before some utter dinlow decides that what i was really saying is "Adkins is going to be rubbish" We appointed a manager, I gave my opinion - trepidation - at the time. And if people want to have a go at me for being trepedatious, there were plenty of happy clapper idiots saying we needed to give him two or three (yes, some said three) seasons to get out of league one.

Alan Pardew is currently fourth in the Premier Leauge, level on points with Chelsea with a game in hand. He won't stay there, of course, but he's done pretty well so far, and has previously taken a club to eighth in the Prem and a cup final. Not bad. Burley has finished fifth in the Premier League in his time, but was a complete disaster for us ultimately. Sven, has won leagues and cups in Portugal, Italy and Sweden but would never even consider changing his team to attack another team's weak spot. Never. Oh no. Adkins is brilliant. Love the man. Personally I have only seen the team live twice this season in the East Midlands but we played flipping well both times despite winning neither game. That's why we're just so good this season - we even know how to not win with panache. But this overhyping of him is a little bit wearing. Come on. Great passing game, holding possession, amazing team spirit, interchangable team selections, brilliant brilliant brilliant. But he is not reinventing the whole of football like some try and make out. I remember a couple of weeks ago we had a load of comments about the "amazing risk" he took of, er, bringing on a third sub after 75 minutes or something, which was "groudbreaking" because a player might have got injured and "other managers" would never do that. Come on. Calm down people. He's good. We're brilliant. He's not the messiah, just a very good football manager at this time.

What I love about our forum is the absolute down to earth realism of every single prediction, and, even better, when we lose, how everyone goes out of their way to praise, admire and support the team that have just beaten us. The bedwetting on this forum gets worse. I'm surprised no-one has yet said "that Boro forum has an anti Saints agenda". We're top of the league. Why the desperate need for affirmation from opposition fans. I tell you now, next time we lose 3-0 away from home this forum will not be awash with pages and pages of Saints fans saying how brilliant the opposition were.

Oh yes, they'res plenty of them folk. Anyway, who cares. We are destroying Boro at the moment.

So have the sun said in their apology that Cortese didn't say "all these people wanting freebies here, freebies there" then? And does it mention Le Tiss or just Lawrie? If they haven't then who was Cortese talking about? And the thread at the time was full of plenty laying into "nothing but employees" Lawrie Mac and Matt Le Tiss. Will those people apologise as it turns out it wasn't them he meant?