CB Fry

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.

Yes, thank you. My point wasn't that Premier League teams don't make uninspiring appointments - Blackburn's promotion of Keen is Wigley-tastic of course. And Laws was unemployed when Burnley took him on of course. My point is that a Prem team approaching Adkins is incredibly unlikely, he hasn't achieved enough yet and he's not a famous ex-player and has no specific links to any big clubs like Coyle and Laws did. And even if a Prem team came knocking, it is a decent bet that Adkins would stick with us in the interim. It's widely known that Nige turned down some other jobs while at Scunny. In short - a Prem team is only going to be interested in Adkins if we are top two in the NPC. And if we are top two in the NPC then Nigel won't leave anyway.

We'll keep him. He won't be going anywhere for a while. If we go up, there is no club in the NPC that could tempt him away, the likes of a freshly relegated Wolves or Wigan really not that much of a step up if Cortese continues to invest. In the unlikely event that a Premier League club comes calling, maybe he'd go, but really not that likely. He's not done anything above tier three as yet and he isn't high profile enough, even for a Bolton or a Blackburn. He's ours for the forseeable.

What a load of utter drivel. No one is saying boycott the ground or doing any of the guff you're coming out with. Pat yourself on the back for being the very bestest super-dooper Saints megafan in the world and sod off onto a different thread.

SaintRichmond was absolutely wetting himself about SISU and apoplectic when it fell through. I remember trying to point out at the time that his naked enthusiasm for the venture capitalist SISU boys was somewhat at odds with his holier than thou "football is not a business" routine, but he was and is a classic anyone-but-Lowe idiot and was up SISU's collective arse like the proverbial rat up the proverbial drainpipe. Oh dear. But then he also said that Portsmouth would show Saints the right way to build on a cup final appearance by investing in the team.

Err, not really. If a magazine asked me to put together my all time Saints team there is no way Keegan or Paine would be in there. Cockerill might not be in my team either, but I could at least impart some memories about Cockerill - his Charlton like screamers against Spurs, being at the wrong end of Paul Davis, becoming Captain Craaap. Keegan and Paine - never saw them play, they mean nothing to me, just historical greats. Magazine articles like this need to relay the experience of being an actual fan, not just bore-a-thons about the usual suspects. O'Connell picking Cockerill in his team suggests far more genuine fan dom than just reeling off the obvious names.

Give me fu c king strength.

EverythingonTV (link above) is the best stream I have ever used. Couple of shaky moments and a couple of brief cut outs, but nothing like the jerky, blocky garbage I'm used to. Highly recommended.

To be fair, in most professionally run companies that is what an executive board is - the heads of all the departments and the chief exec. So that is directors as such and it is a board not a "board". Non-exec boards is a slightly different thing of course, and they can perform a positive guiding role, or a negative interfering role. There must be that layer somewhere at SFC for the Leibherr family or the people running ML's interests now to have their input. If the club is being run by an exec board chaired by Cortese as described then that sounds good to me.

We wouldn't be anywhere near. Top spot pretty much always goes to a team on two points per game. We've been nowhere near that, and apart from Brighton, no-one has. Last season Leeds, Norwich and Millwall were challenging for top spot. This season it's a one horse race with four clubs battling out for second, all of which have had slumps or periods of inconsistency.

When was this then? The only reference was to the fact that Howe had departed, but was the architect of where they are now. And I think a reference to "Eddie Howe's former team" right at the beginning. You can't accuse coverage of being crap if you can't even be bothered to listen. Mark Clement follows football league clubs all season and has done for years so I bet knows a hell of a lot more about lower division football than you do.

Well, sorry, but yes it does. There is a reason that Stoke has a statue of Stanley Matthews outside and not a statue of Dave Goodwin. There is a reason why Wembley decided on a statue of Bobby Moore rather than a statue of Tony Daley. There is a reason why Blackpool recently decided to name a stand after Jimmy Armfield and not Fred Pickering. Well, this is just the most extreme end of the discussion. The other end of it (and just as silly as yours) is to tear down the Ted Bates statue and treat every single player as being of completely equal worth. Hey, why don't we pay them all the same, from 17 year old 1st year pro to 30+ year old Goalkeeper who turned down a move to the Premier league to stay with us. Why doesn't Nigel Adkins play all players in the squad an equal number of times? Oscar Gobern is the equal of Richard Chaplow. Aaron Martin is the equal of Jose Fonte. Everyone is the same, everyone is equal, it's a team game after all. See, silly isn't it? It's about being appropriate in the moment, not sliding scales. If Francis Benali dies next week, it's worth marking properly. If he dies at the age of 84 when no bugger watching Saints can remember him then it is worth bundling into some All Saints Day type thing. I've said it a couple of times - Dean Richards is a player most fans now can remember watching play. That's why it was appropriate. This isn't some inside right from the 50's. Do you honestly believe if, say, Alex O-C died tomorrow the club should do absolutely nothing until the official mourning day in November. Seriously?