CB Fry

To be fair, this is exactly the "why don't you invest in the team" argument that everyone wanted him to do for years. Problem is everyone wants to have it both ways.

The sooner the money runs out, the sooner we get an eleventh hour deal. Crouch putting money in to salve his own ego is just slowing everything down.

Do they even do finishing money in that division? I thought it was just a prem thing. Pretty sure there is no placement money in any other league.

Christ. The sun is shining, you know. Cheer up. If we're in L1 for more than three seasons I'd be amazed. Where do people get this idea that we are some washed up flea pit club like Aldershot or Bradford Park Avenue and are therefore doomed to "fold quite quickly"? We'll be playing in SMS well into the next fifty years and we'll be CCC standard within three years from now, and then who knows.

If you're happy to write off the chances of Sheff Weds, Notts Forest, Leicester, Leeds, Norwich, Ipswich etc etc of "ever being in the top flight again in my lifetime" then fine. But I think all of those clubs will be back in the top flight one day, and so will we. We're not going to fold, for god's sake I wish people would stop being such drama queens.

But Mawhinney has said the "sporting sanction" has to be seen to have punished the team. That is the spirit of the law he was talking about the other day. Stockport haven't been punished at all, especially as they have gone into admin as tactically as we did when they know it won't hurt them. This one does stink, I'm afraid.

Be fair Jonah. Lowe going along to watch Saints at the invitation of a competitor chairman is the thing that's "weird and quite obsessional". I think a normal person would either a) go off and do something else and give up Saints as a bad job badly done or, if we are going to accept he does have feelings for the club b) have enough empathy with the fans to understand his presence on Sunday would antagonise them, be easily interpreted as a f-you and completely counter productive. You can't blame fans for feeling sick he's going to be there. The "weird and quite obsessional" thing is him thinking going to the City Ground would be anything other than an appalling idea.

Correct. I am one of those that is not questioning our deduction or how it is applied in our case - we've broken the rules and its a fair cop. But this is unfair - the punishment is, according to Mawhinney, supposed to be applied when it hurts the most - either to relegate a club or start the season on minus ten. Stockport haven't been punished at all, and now have an unfair advantage over us next season. A complete joke.

I'm not a great student of it, but it always seems to me that the JPT is normally always won by a League 2 team. I get the feeling it is a bit of a Carling cup for the teams pushing for promotion to the CCC - an expendable waste of fixtures. Don't be too surprised if we don't go all out to win it. That said, I think we should - if we are going to go up it will be through the playoffs and getting a trip to Wem-ber-lee under our belts earlier in the season would be the best preparation you could get.

I'm not sure I buy into Crouch screaming about Lowe's "cheek" when the multi millionaire Leon Crouch has been walking round St Mary's with a bucket asking for donations from average wage earners to fund a business he is a significant shareholder in. And that bucket money going to pay the wages of men on five grand a week. That's cheek and absolutely obscene in my book. But should Lowe be at Forest? Of course not and this just goes to show what an odious, snivelling little git he is. He'll get a mouthful from me and 2,000 others on Sunday.

Christ. Just felt longer then!

Correct. Leon&Lawrie appointed Godd and Dorman because "the ship was steady". All of several weeks later L&L appointed Pearson to "steady the ship". These are genuine quotes from the two press conferences at the time and illustrate perfectly why Leon not being anywhere near the red buttons in the future can only be a good thing. I won't go into the "we can make the play-offs" routine on the appointment of D&G as well. That and the Radio Five Live thing the other which has been mentioned before I believe.

I'm not an expert, but you're better off offering a lump sum to write the whole lot off - Marcus Evans remember got that cracking Ipswich deal pre-credit crunch. So its not that you couldn't negotiate staggered payments, but it would be advisable, and probably preferable to Aviva, to do a deal to buy the whole lot for cash. I'm saying £7m would get you the lot. And then New Saints will be laughing.

I think the last thing Aviva need is Richard Chorley padlocking himself to the stadium gates and protest marches through the city calling Aviva all kinds of names under the sun. If they kick Saints out they have a piece of land that is worth jack ****, because knocking it down and building something else in this climate is not viable, plus the added grief of Chorley on hunger strike means no developer is going to go anywhere near it. It's a toxic debt on a useless piece of land. It's not like there's a shortage of land to develop at the moment - development is grinding to a halt, and the council are hardly going to rush through someone proposing to bulldoze St Mary's. No doubt about it it is a negotiation and a stand off for the reasons you say, and the reasons I and others have given. But there will be a negotiated settlement, and that settlement will see Aviva writing off huge, huge chunks of the debt. Because a £7m agreement on the stadium is £7m more than a useless piece of waste ground you can't develop or sell and the whole of Southampton and wider football fanbase calling you **** on Sky Sports News. You may have noticed the banks have something of a PR problem already...?

Even Exeter fans don't think they have potential to go into the Championship, they've barely been higher than the bottom division in their entire history. Their natural level is fourth tier. They have a 8,000 stadium in a footballing backwater. Tisdale would take the Saints job like a shot. it's a job ten times bigger than the Exeter job even if we had a thirty point deduction and Exeter started the league season with ten bonus points. And I am not some "head in the clouds" dreamer. It's simple size and scope of the respective clubs. Anyone who takes over at Saints whoever they are will be taking over a Premier League standard club with facilities putting us in the top 30 in the country. And whoever takes over will think they can get us in the Premier League. Being honest you haven't a clue.

I think the notion of "perfectly good debt" went out the window about a year ago. Aviva will settle up for whatever they can get, pretty sure of that. What our prospective new owners need to do is screw Aviva down on this one as much as they can. I think we'll see the stadium debt written off for something significantly less than £10m. ...which is where our administration is "better" than Leeds was, or Pompey's will be in a year's time. Football wages have to be covered in full so there is no escape from the dopey cheques that lot down the road have written.

Well done on all your proactive preparation by starting your eight thousandth thread about Rupert bleeding Lowe. This is the kind of can-do attitude we need at this time. What would we do without you?

Bet we don't. We've broken precisely the same rules as everyone else who has been deducted points and as a result we've been deducted points. An appeal would be just further bloody embarrassment. The football league's defence will be to stroll into the court room with an old fashioned cassette player, play a recording of Leon Crouch's five minutes of glory on five live, tip their hats and stroll back out of the court room. Suck it up chaps. Ten point deduction, fair and square.

If anything it would be have been Cotterill to work alongside Redknapp not Woodward - he's Harry's man. Redknapp and Cotterill go back a long way and Stevie wasn't far off from going into Pompey as Harry's number two a while back. Redknapp often had very good things to say about Cotterill and made a point about mentioning the good work he did at Burnley when Spurs played them in the league cup this season. Anyway, more than happy to have him at Saints. Cotterill that is. Redknapp is a c***.

Quite a nice read, but it does read like a CB Fry tribute act. I came up with a line about selling kidneys to pay BWP's wages on here about two weeks ago. But who's counting? Anyway, Crouch is almost certainly not part of the long term solution, his cringworthy buffoonery on Five Live the other day confirming this. Just a clean sweep of the lot of them would be fine, thanks.

LOL. You should write a dissertation on the meta-textuality of british sports television cameramen. I saw Brian Laws spit on The Championship the other day and I am pretty sure it was filmed as a satirical comment on the current situation in Rwanda.

Which is what?

McDonald, Monk, Howard were let go when we were a Prem side and none of them have proved to be Prem standard, with Howard possibly getting into the Prem with SUFC this season, maybe. But basically their subsequent careers have shown we were right to get rid when we did unless you seriously think our retention policy should be based on the assumption we'll be two divisions lower than we are in the future - should we now give contracts to all players at conference standard just in case we find ourselves there one day? Blackstock was sold for a profit, and we did have loads of strikers at the time, so letting one go was broadly sensible. Again, he is now playing at a club a couple of places above us in the league, so hardly a glittering star we let go. Kevin Phillips is just a dopey example you've used for filler. Every club in the land does that. Why didn't you just chuck in Dennis Wise while you're at it. Boa Morte was a signing and then a selling. It happens in football. He's having a good season now, but he's had one hell of a patchy career. hey ho. And you have acknowledged the fact that the vast majority of footballing prospects fail and I bet the list of players we've let go over the last decade who have done absolutely nothing is at least five times if not ten times longer than your list above. And in the case of people like Howard it is the rejection that spurs them on. It doesn't prove that they would have been just as good for us. Look at the career of Kevin Davies for how moves can affect performance at Saints (great), Blackburn (poor), Saints again (patchy) to Bolton (great again). It's a hell of a stretch to assume if he'd just stayed at Blackburn forever he would be playing as he is now for Bolton. And finally, it isn't actually the fans that sign, sell, buy or release any of these players so having a go for people expressing opinions is missing the point a bit.

No it isn't. The Paul Allen story was everywhere, including a full page (page three, yes I can remember) in the news section of the Guardian. Yes it turned out to be garbage, of course, but lets not pretend it didn't get a hell of a lot of media coverage. It wasn't a creation of this forum. Edit - Put "Paul Allen Southampton" into Google and look through the results including the Daily Mail, the BBC, the Guardian, Reuters, countless American Newspaper sites and then the comments, blogs etc arising from the original story. Then put the names of these two geezers in and nothing, so far. I'm not judging these two guys but lets not pretent they have achieved anything like the coverage that the PA story did.

That really can be the only reason he is saying he wants to stay - its hard to believe he has enjoyed playing for us this season as being a keeper single handedly keeping a poor team in a match for us only to lose anyway cannot be a satisfactory way to earn a living. Fair play if he does stay, but lets not be surprised if he doesn't, because who can blame him? He really hasn't much reason to be loyal to us because with the managers we've gone through and the turmoil the club has put him through he is well within his rights to say "look, I've more than done my bit, I might see how I get on somewhere else".