CB Fry

Still time to enter the sweepstake, as he's still here.....

No, the expectation was that Watford have parachute money, and we didn't. Anyway, you can't have it both ways. Either Watford were a "relegation rival" when we let Rasiak go there, or they weren't. PS. The answer is they weren't.

From what I have seen of this, it looks like an absolute triumph. Brilliant turn out, great media coverage - another snapshot on SSN just now. And no trouble and a focused message excellently delivered. Well done to everyone involved in organising this - great stuff, makes me proud to be a Saints fan.

Watford weren't expected to be our relegation rivals when we loaned Rasiak to them. Surman to Forest is probably unlikely at best. Reading would be a fair more logical destination.

A draw wil still be two points dropped. A team winning one game at home all season at the end of January is a team going down. We really need to win.

3-0. This is not good. I'm worried Adams will get the boot too soon, be replaced by someone like Curbishley who then keeps them up. We need Adams to scrape a few draws to keep him in the job, and then royally f u ck it up in March and April. Any half decent manager should be able to keep that squad in the division. It's going to take some effort from Adams to relegate them.

This is all absolutely fair enough. You're playing devils avocado to my playing devil's avocado earlier, to be honest. My angle is coming from a few posters who talk about Rudi Skacel like he is an under nourished six year old Victorian chimney sweep. You can't move for bleating about how awfully he's been treated. If he was so desperate to play and desperate to give his all for a club that loved him, then he could have gone in the summer. But those are just his surface priorities. Of course he is well in his rights to sieze every penny in his contract, and of course he is well in his rights to dress this action up as a "I love this club so much, but noone loves me" routine. I just wish some fans weren't so dopey to swallow it hook line and sinker, especially as those same fans scream "Ruperts propaganda machine!!!!" when the OS dares to say something as anodyne like "an afternoon in corporate hospitality might be a good present for someone" or "our new signing is a good player and is looking forward to playing for us".

That thread really needs someone posting HCDAJFU on it.

As the man who started the original Skacel sweepstake (also, the original Saints forum sweepstake, what a claim :cool:) I think it only fitting that we mark his departure likewise. Being that we only have a couple of days left, the rules are nice and loose. Pick a day over the next three days (window closes at 5pm on Monday). Pick an hour of the day with that person owning the full hour until 59 mins. And to make it multi lateral, pick a club. I'm not updating a list this time, we'll just go by the posts. Winner is nearest the pin on the day and time and club choice is for a bonus prize*. Time and date is when it is published on the OS (Unreliable I know). My guess is Sunday, 11am, AEK Athens The winner's prize is to be officially named a preferred creditor of Southampton Leisure Holdings once administration is announced on Tuesday at 3p in the pound, and I can personally guarantee you will get your money before those scabs from the St John's Ambulance get their noses in the trough. *Bonus prize is a picture of a train.

As long as that "so what" about who is creaming money out of Southampton football club at a rate of knots and contributing bugger all is applied to everyone. In your case, I very much doubt it. For me a leech is a leech, but as ever with you, it seems your enemy's leech is your friend. £16k a week for six months is knocking on the door of half a million quid, so he's pulling down a hell of a lot more than the club administration will be at present, despite what people might think. If you're happy for him to exercise "his choice" to bleed us for doing bugger all when his leaving would have helped us replace him with someone that actually wants to play for us and keep the financial wolf from the door. But hey, "his choice" to screw us over....

If he was worth the £16k a week we were paying him then another club could have snapped him up months ago. But they haven't because he isn't worth that. That's why he should, and undoubtedly will, take a pay cut.

Why don't we make one with 10,000 seats then, just in case we end up in league 2 at some point in the next twenty years? Or 8,000? We don't want to risk any empty seats now do we?

Yes, I do. The three of them are experts at the basics. Picking players, getting them organised, motivating them and getting them to work for their own development and for the rest of the team. Being aware of what motivates each individual player and acting on it, making the whole team aware that no-one is bigger than the club, the team or the project. Being aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the opponents, to nullify them but not be dictated to by them. Picking an assistant or two to help where help is needed. Managing the fans expectations. The basics, and they are the best in the business. It winds me right up when people say "even Mourinho couldn't do any better at Saints". What utter rot. Of course he bloody could. Jose would get these same players to at least mid table stood on his head. If Boothroyd can promote a shambolic Watford that finished 20th in the previous season in one season in his first job, I think we can assume Jose Mourinho could cope with managing in this league, the one below or any league anywhere.

I don't agree with this in our case - our team is full of a lot of impressionable youngsters so I think a kick up the arse and/or a bit of fresh inspiration from a Boothroyd, Cotterill, Holloway (yes, I am that desperate) or similar could have had a real effect. Plus the old heads might be motivated by a bit of "normality" rather than Project Ajax 2010. Wotte might be the man to deliver the step change, maybe we'll find out tomorrow. Personally I doubt it and I have us down to finish second bottom with a fair wind behind us.

Can you imagine the uproar if we'd have made Perry or Paul Wotton the club captain - that would have decided in everyone's minds that Davis going was a "done deal". This forum is like the Salem witch trials sometimes. Kelvin going it completely possible, I'm not saying it won't happen. I'd be surprised if its Sunderland purely from Kelvin's previous experience, that's all. What would be the point?

Do remind me why Hetha Berlin, who obviously loved and cherished the little mite with all their hearts, didn't take up an option to make the loan permanent - after all he's a super hard working wonder player with the greatest attitude in the world, whose problems are all the fault of Southampton FC, right? And if all he cared about was being wanted and loved and cherished, why didn't he go to Ipswich when he could have done in the summer? (Clue...Kerrching) Where is this queue for Rudi Skacel's services?

Where has it gathered legs? Kelvin going to a cushy number at a southern club going places - QPR - I can see, but why go to Sunderland to be a reserve keeper at a club where he was lampooned and despised during the worst period of his entire career? And if he had a sniff of that move (and he would by now) he wouldn't have agreed to be club captain. He's not a complete idiot. And have to live around bloody Sunderland? And be relegated with Sunderland, again? Can't see it. People can say "money" but Kaka could have gone to Man City for "money". He didn't go because the move would be pointless. Kelvin going to Sunderland would be pointless. Really can't see it.

I'm not sure I ever said fans would be active in terms of running the club in a picking-the-team way, that seems to be something you decided I thought. All along my argument has been that to set up a fan run club along the lines of the OP would require the anorak mafia of the usual suspects of fan mobilisation, and the subsequent ego-age would strangle the thing at birth anyway. Like who, in this country, in the top two divisions. Seriously, you've said you piece about it, I couldn't give a flying fu ck what's been happening in Germany for the last sixty years. It is not going to happen. You might as well go on about Ice Cream being made free on the NHS. Blinding theory but never going to happen. Like who. Please do not reply with the list of two bit lower league and non league nonentities. I'm sick of people wetting their pants over AFC Wimbledon and FC United. Small fry cottage industry. I know you do. Stop arguing with me then. I did say that about four posts ago. No, my premise and I will repeat it again, is that to get this thing off the ground would require it being started, and the people starting it would be the anorak mafia of superfans who have so far proved to be unable to organise the sandwiches at a whist drive. The key point is that lot would never get the sod off the ground in a million years. I'd give it a month before half of them walked out over a debate about the acronym for the group. And, actually, with the egotists involved in such an operation, I stand by my assertion that their egos would need sating with glory and recognition on a weekly basis. Lord spare us from being owned and run by ver fans.

Sorry, I resent being called ignorant. Your starting point for debate is a fully formed working active democratic fans co-operative working wonderfully and you attack me for belittling it. Well, sorry, but my starting point is Southampton, England, January 2009. No fans collective, no fans co-operative, no fans mutual society. So who is going to start it? What's it called? Who's the chairman? Who's going on Solent to announce it? What's the structure? How much is the membership? Who's the treasurer? What's the view on the manager now, the team now? Do the bond holders get a season ticket discount, I'd want to know before I sign up. When is the first meeting? Who's going? Who's allowed to go, do I have to register on a website first? Who's running the website? Do I have to pay another fiver to join that one? What did he just say on Sky Sports News? And he's representing us? What a t w at. I'm going to start my own group up. Who's with me? Don't tell me I'm cheapening things by my approach which is grounded in as much reality as yours. And you know as well as I do the chaps who would be calling to order the first meeting of the Save our Saints Co-operative Mutual Fans Society would be the usual suspects. It isn't going to land on SMS like some mothership. Someone needs to create it. Like someone needed to create one statue and co cked it up like no-one's business. The concept of a fully formed successful statue was pretty easy to revel in as well. So I think the ignorance is in avoiding the facts of creation in preference to glorying in the wonder of if it did happen. And you talk about "absense of rational argument" on my side, which would be fine were the rest of English football signed up to your way. But they aren't, and that's a fact, Jack. So the rest of the league are all irrational by not being in Spanish collectives and being just as bloody skint anyway. Oh, for such rationality! And you've admitted yourself it isn't going to happen, so now this just seems like a debate about a religious belief. Either that or you're going to hit me with the facile "they all laughed at Christopher Columbus" routine. And that is futile..........

Relegation was out of our hands on the last day of last season. What that means is we could have gone out and "done our job" and still gone down. What that also means is we hadn't been "doing our job" in the weeks leading up to that weekend. That is just a fact, there's no need to get silly about it. My perspective is twenty twenty and was my original point - when Crouch came in he was talking about success as the play-offs which did not come to pass, as relegation was out of our hands on the last day, which, apart from actually being relegated is about as far from the play offs as you can get.

This is a nice entertaining debate, thanks for getting involved. We are converging - you mention utopia, and we're more or less in the realms of the"brilliant theory" argument about communism. And you also say it in all likelihood isn't going to happen. So defending the concept is pretty futile isn't it? I'm sorry I've touched a nerve on fans groups but I have seen enough live and played out through the old fanzines and the forums to know that these kind of concepts will be strangled at birth by the same people that gave a six-figure commision for a city centre life size bronze cast of a hallowed public figure to a man that carves wooden eagles because he supported the same football team as they did (and this is not a myth). So you carry on reading about German fans collectives in When Saturday Comes and I'll carry on sticking in a few snippy jibes at the great and the good of the fandom aristocracy and we'll meet in the middle and agree that it isn't going to happen here anyway. I know that doesn't solve anything about how to run SFC, but I look forward to seeing a collective fans' endeavour that will succeed kicking off nicely on Saturday, which might lead us somewhere better. Here's hoping.

The league is the league. Leicester definitely deserved to go down. My point is only that the great escape was not that great - we needed results to go our way to stay up. "It's still in our hands" is always the most precious commodity in the relegation battle, and losing that is second only to being mathmatically down, and we lost it. The point is Crouch came in talking play offs and we ended up with relegation out of our hands on the last afternoon. That is as close as it gets.

Okay. The figures in this link are pretty eye watering and probably over-egged but do go some way to illustrating my point that Spanish football is run on fairyland money so any real comparison with that kind of set up in the UK or specifically with Saints is pretty fanciful. http://www.goal.com/en/news/722/la-liga/2009/01/07/1048072/new-report-reveals-massive-debts-in-la-liga The presidential elections in those clubs seem to me like a bloody circus of over inflated promises followed by disarray and fall out. The bottomless pits and reputations of the big two mean of course they get success but it always seems on a knife edge most of the time. And Germany - everyone knows the old chestnut that you can buy a season ticket for Bayern for what you pay for a bag of chips in Woolston, but again, that aint going to happen here, co-operative fans collective or none. So, great, you can read up about fans collectives all over the world, but you have to start one here. In Southampton, in 2009. You're not starting one just after Atlee swept in to power. When the leading lights and ex members of the Saints trust can't seem to agree on the font for the letter head the chances of anyone getting a mutual society off the ground in Southampton in 2009 is pie in the sky. You can carry on looking at "the trees" of how they do it across the pond, but all I can see is "the wood" of reality of why it can't and won't happen here. So you can accuse me of myth making, but let's say this in response. I will whole heartedly sign up to a fans collective running Southampton FC once you can show me five more clubs from the top two divisions in England running one first.

Might be worth starting a list of players at one time the media (and some of the fanbase) had decided were much, much better than that washed up Beckham primadonna who should never play for England again.... Aaron Lennon, anyone? Shaun Wright Phillips? Kieron Dyer? David Bentley? Must be a few others I'm missing... Beckham is an absolute legend who will only be truly admired in a decade's time when England are lumbered with the arrogant baby bentley tw ats coming through the ranks now.

Can I take that as a compliment, then Um? Funnily enough I think you have hoisted yourself on your own theory a little here. Your 75% rump of fans could, easily, dominate every EGM and every decision. Your 75% could have fans on the board, fans on the touchline, fans in the kitchen, fans under the stairs, fans everywhere. Your 75% could have kept Pearson or appointed any number of eligible managers. But they don't. It's not active ownership, is it? What the original poster is suggesting is the old chestnut of the Barcelona style super-fan-ownership and by default fans running. You get enough umbridge against the anonymous suits "taking our money and not listening" when fans are "only" stumping up their £600 season tickets. If they are ploughing in another grand, two grand to own the thing that level of shoulder chippage and inflated "we're the lifeblood" importance is only going to swell. Sorry, a fan-led mass buy out could only lead to fan leadership. I find it almost impossible to envisage x thousand saints fans all stumping up a grand each to get their club back only to hand the whole lot over to some rent-a-Hone-or-Hoos. And even if they did the disillusionment would kick in within a fortnight. Plus the very fact that some fans would have to lead and run the mass buy up already would create enough egoage to puff up a fleet of balloons to cross the atlantic and those self appointed saviours are hardly likely to decide to stop there and give up their created empire. Sorry Um, got to disagree - fan ownership would lead to fan running and the dogs breakfast* that would ensue. *current dogs breakfast at club does not make this alternative a success by default.