Ted Bates Statue

I think the red sash with red arms is a decent effort. Always appreciate a sash shirt, except for Boro five years ago when it looked like it had fallen off. Your login issues might be related to having to verify your email address. I can't find the original forum message but think it was meant to have an effect from this month.

Must have been the 8/10 transfer window.

Can't remember for certain, but being a local lad and (I assumed) supporter, I always felt his preference would have been to stay with us. Obviously it didn't work out that way so it's completely hypothetical.

Late 80s style maybe...? Some call it 80s Denmark, I call it pink and red

There is no god.

There is a competition for junior saints members to be in a photoshoot around St Marys and become one of the first to wear the new kit. Closing date is 12th June so I think we are still a few weeks away from seeing it, unless it gets leaked sooner. Until then, we'll have to put up with other Hummel releases or mock-ups on twitter by people with maybe a bit too much time on their hands. I'm going to stick my neck out and say it will be "back to basics" stripes.

It's being streamed legally on youtube. Dortmund have pulled one back but running out of time, they need two more.

I'm doing mental gymnastics to see how he could be persuaded to stay. Perhaps he could do what Niemi did, stay and see how we get on until January. By that point we would have an idea if we're in the hunt for promotion, if it looks like we're drifting then he moves on, fair enough.

I would be willing to bet that a lot of Everton's players don't have relegation clauses. If they go down, it could get painful for them.

I won't begrudge the club for being ruthless, having been relegated with multiple games to go. If we were still in with a chance of staying up at this point, I would be calling shenanigans like when Adkins got sacked having steadied the ship after our tough run.

Hopefully more along the lines of 2006, without breaking the bank this time around. I think we spent quite a bit more than the sums below suggest, relatively speaking. For some reason Rasiak is missing although thought he originally joined on loan, and then signed for £2M in the summer. Bradley Wright-Phillips Man City Nominal 05 Jul, 2006 Pele Belenenses Signed 10 Jul, 2006 Jermaine Wright Leeds Free 10 Jul, 2006 Kelvin Davis Sunderland £1,000,000 21 Jul, 2006 Rudi Skacel Hearts £1,600,000 29 Jul, 2006 Jhon Viafara Portsmouth Signed 04 Aug, 2006 Chris Makin Reading Free 16 Aug, 2006 Inigo Idiakez Derby £250,000 31 Aug, 2006 Marek Saganowski Troyes Signed 28 Jun, 2007 https://www.soccerbase.com/teams/team.sd?team_id=2471&teamTabs=transfers&season_id=136

That's sound logic but you need to factor in the cost of living crisis and inflation, it will be higher than you expect as a result.

Being a cynic, he might be planning on helping Saints by getting a move elsewhere and freeing up transfer and wage funds. £25-£30M to a midtable side might do it. Personally however, I would prefer him to stay. It's not his fault that we failed to get a striker for him to partner.

To be fair, it's quite rare for a young player to give a good account of himself in a relegation campaign, particularly at the end of one. Only instance I can think of is Adam Lallana in 2008 when we stayed up.

I get what you're saying, but it's like penalty shootouts. You don't really want to contest one if it's your own team, but the drama for neutrals is huge. Sport at its best. As a consolation, it might galvanise them to get the job done next year - think Huddersfield Town the year we pipped them out of League One.

The De Zerbi bit feels much like someone trying to cover for themselves, a bit like when Les Reed would get his mate Jeremy in the Telegraph to put out a friendly article to control the narrative. Easy to say "oh, we almost got it spot on." I never heard of him until he pitched up at Brighton, and i don't believe for a second he was on our radar. On the other hand, there were rumours swirling about interest in Nathan Jones for a while before Hasenhuttl got sacked. We got the man we wanted all along, simple as.

Vibes of "We should sell him to Watford for a tenner" circa 2018 in this thread. Also, the same shit was said about Hojbjerg and he's been playing for a big 6 side ever since he left. No, we're not going to get an improvement on JWP in a lower division.

Bit of a late one but it's the Hampshire Senior Cup Final - it's the penalty shoot-out

It's a must-win game if we are to have any chance of staying up. Need to treat every game like a cup final from here on in. Fingers crossed our home crowd can roar our lads on to victory and help Selles stake his claim to being our manager next season.

And the other two were Leeds and Forest winning against us. That's shocking, I feel even worse now!

I was one of them on that occasion, and for that reason I can't get behind a "fan-pleasing" inexperienced rookie manager appointment ever again.

Yeah, it's like Liverpool take our best players and then Leicester attempt to troll us in a different way, by taking our dross to see if they can do any better. Puel ❌ Vestergaard ❌ Bertrand ❌ Nope, nope and nope again. Says a lot that half of our recent defence (and Janny B) can't get anywhere near the matchday XI at other clubs. Just Jack Stephens doing the business for Bournemouth.

Always felt after Koeman left that we were about five years from a relegation battle, momentum sliding after Liebherr's takeover. The reality is that it can come from nowhere, a perfect storm of complacency and poor management. There are few teams in the world where the fans are satisfied with one's lot in the long-term. In the PL that would be Brentford - years on the cusp of promotion to the top flight coming to fruition and continuous improvement every season. Man City also - plucked from mid-table obscurity to dominate, but still unable to claim the Champions League trophy. And that's about it. Arsenal's PL drought may reach 20 seasons, Man Utd have been drifting for a decade. West Ham have had it good lately, making a better fist of Europe than we did, but it's never long before they find something to have a whinge over. Leicester, even under the stewardship of Rodgers until recently, look almost as dead and buried as us. And then there are dozens of teams similar to us that demonstrate that we have no divine right to competing with the top 20 sides in the land on a regular basis. Coventry, Sunderland and Derby to name just a few. There have been a number of mistakes by Saints this season and it is disappointing to see us go down, but I don't fear for the club's future like I did when we were owned by Gao. I could be wrong, Solak could be the equivalent of Saints go Wilde... Now, Everton could be in really deep trouble should they go down, and they've frittered away hundreds of millions and getting very little out of it in the last ten years or so. Our club may be in a rut, but if we do take an opportunity to re-build the team and our optimism, hopefully it won't be long before we get a team that's playing with confidence again, hopefully in the top division and competing for the cups, surprising the bigger sides, bringing some of our youngsters through - and maybe one or two from elsewhere! Starting with the manager, it only takes an appointment like Cooper at Forest, Carrick at Boro, Silva at Fulham to transform a team from being in the doldrums at the lower end of the table to being on the edge of promotion. Up the Saints.

Southampton match centre does my head in with these VAR calls - so often seems to give the wrong verdict when updating the score.

Guessing it would have been done for one of the mid-late 80s matches, shortly after Channon left them? In which case he probably had more of a connection with them (and Alan Ball) compared to the youthful side coming through at Saints. So at that snapshot in time, I can understand if he felt a bit of affinity with Pompey. Anyway his son used to write for Saintsforever, so make of that what you will - I highly doubt it was an act of rebellion against his dad!