Ted Bates Statue

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!

Hard to take seriously someone who claimed that we were hoping to replace Hasenhuttl with Nathan Jones, I mean what kind of basket case club would do something like that?!

Yes, see John Boy Saint's comments on the first page. The individual decisions in themselves seem fine, but it's a question of what the ref chose to let go. I can only imagine Fulham felt similarly aggrieved to lose their heads recently.

Dodd got frozen out by Redknapp if I recall correctly and went on loan to Plymouth Argyle. Baird was in the midst of a bizarre wilderness spell between the FA Cup Final and his emergence as one of our best players in the Championship, and barely played a minute in 04/05. That aside, tombola sums it up perfectly. Defensively we were disastrous, and a prime reason why we could only manage six wins all season. When you can only manage six wins it's hard to justify that we were good enough to stay up, notwithstanding the goalscoring talent we had up front.

Good to see none of the Big 6 have betting sponsors as their main shirt sponsor. Therefore it would only affect fodder clubs who don't really matter, and Newcastle who don't need the money anyway. And it's years away from happening, so no excuses to not find deals elsewhere (from other sponsors, or on other parts of the kit). Another morality win for the Premier League 😇

You better believe it, pal

"Saints Go Wilde" on steroids

Match day 30 and back then we rounded off a 5-game unbeaten run winning 1-3 at Middlesbrough, to give us 27 points from 30 matches. So currently, we're four points behind our worst PL season. We would go on to only win once more that season for a total of six wins. Even if we do go down again, I would like to think that we can do better and at least surpass the 32 points total that we got that season.

Late response to this thread but in light of the recent Mitrovic incident, finally someone has uploaded footage of Prutton's 2005 sending-off to youtube. Judging by the title and further comments, the uploader isn't much of a fan of him. Not sure it was that much worse than Mitrovic but it certainly provides a precedent. Reading the match reports from the time, you would have thought he shoved the official to the ground like Di Canio. He wasn't exactly chasing the ref around so much as practising his French with the linesman as he left the pitch.

For the same reason we are told by the forum's pathological optimists that we should go "all out" and get one of the following names who have popped up on here this season: Thomas Frank (the original heir to RH...while he was still managing in a lower division) Poch (for old times' sake... despite him ditching us while we were still a top 10 side) Thomas Tuchel (similar to Poch, he wasn't interested 7 years ago) Brendan Rodgers (criticised us for lacking ambition as, yet again, a top 10 side)

I lol'd at the chap who looks a bit like Jonah Hill wearing the white shirt right in the middle of the third image. Must be taking in the sense of occasion, but looks utterly spaced out.

Can't be easy telling the world about how you almost broke the only football club you ever played for. I can accept him writing whatever he wanted for his book as far as I'm concerned, like that throw-in betting story which may have been the first step in tarnishing his reputation for some. Certainly seemed to have been told with a lot of artistic licence. The trouble with the crowd that he's now firmly embedded in is that they don't want to hear nuance and backtracking, because let's face it, conspiracies are much more fun to discuss. Same with a lot of so-called right-wing journalists who are often much more centrist than they let on, but balanced views don't pay for their lifestyle. Tucker Carlson on Fox News is the latest, "hates Trump passionately" as confirmed by private messages from the defamation case, although he gets paid very well to say the exact opposite on camera.