Ted Bates Statue

I wasn't talking about regular attendance, I was referring to the recent match at which all tickets were offered for free. To be fair I think the club did a piss-poor job with marketing it.

Interesting point. How exactly are those clubs competing then, considering crowds are tiny and TV money must be similar? When everyone else is being subsidised by men's football, I am not entirely surprised that Saints have decided to 'hold station' in the Championship if we can't get over 10,000 at St Marys even when the tickets are being given away. Maybe give it a few years and the WSL will merge to create a 20-team division. Just a shame we aren't using these formative years to create a solid side that can compete in the top tier.

Maybe I'm being naive here but have you considered the possibility it might have been a genuine and sincere appreciation of previous posts?

even going by the usual standards on here, this has escalated impressively swiftly

Worth pointing out that this takes the 22/23 season results in isolation... his overall PL win percentage is comfortably over 30%. Still, even at his worst ebb, it shows how further ahead he was compared to the three that followed. But hey, the players were sick of him and did you know he cried in public once.

Surprised it hasn't been mentioned on here but during yesterday's Going Home podcast, Blackmore let slip he had been told around the time Sulemana joined us that he had an ongoing long-term injury. To think that we signed Ross Stewart just months later, that's a combined £32M towards injured players (and our top scorer since the start of the year is a defender who cost £5M...)

I despair at the lack of English being spoken on our High Streets.

That pie looks tiny, are they charging £5+ for that?!

Hopefully without the touch of a rapist

Oh that's all well and good, but I'm sure it was much worse under Hasenhuttl when we were 91st out of 92 league clubs for some nonsense stat that nobody cares about in 2025, now that we got him binned off, let his replacements spend all the funds he should have been granted and have us dead cert, dead last, relegated twice in three years.

Seeing as we have been Southampton Nil ever since you cursed us by pointing out that actually we were doing ok for scoring at home, it's a good thing we wouldn't suffer from this sort of annoyance. edit - I've already mentioned this elsewhere, but this alcohol trial starts against Sunderland on Sunday 19th next week for which tickets are free of charge. There is admittedly a clash as the men's team is away at Forest but seeing as I was looking for a distraction, it made a lot of sense and might prove a welcome diversion for others too.

Their DoF seems to have done a fine job with recruitment since he joined them a couple of years ago. Some bloke called Ross Wilson. Why can't we hire someone like that?

I agree to your overall post as it has crossed my mind a lot recently, although I would actually say Leicester are a prime case in point. They are so lucky to have had a striker average around 15 goals a season and they've managed to hold onto him all this time. He's got 6 already this season FFS.

Trousers' pockets are full of receipts and nobody is safe from his meticulous record-keeping. Used to be a time when a member could post all manner of drivel and cherry-pick the best ones to flaunt on a later thread, like they were some kind of footballing nostradamus. Not anymore. (Mind you, that doesn't seem to discourage some from carrying on - see above for several examples)

Free tickets available for the Sunderland match on the 19th. There are just over 500 tickets remaining in the Northam/Itchen corner although maybe they will open up more blocks as they appeared to be doing before Xmas. https://x.com/SaintsFCWomen/status/1867527000400994339

To be fair to @saintant the increase seems to reflect our summer transfer window performance. We had a net spend of 75M, Dibling came through to add roughly an extra 20M, and the remainder can probably be attributed to Fernandes as the only genuine bargain for us. And unfortunately our rivals are still worth much more - with the notable exception of the other two promoted clubs. Speaking of our fellow promoted clubs, for some reason Transfermarkt seem very shy about drawing attention to their percentage increase for Ipswich. https://www.transfermarkt.com/premier-league/marktwerteverein/wettbewerb/GB1/plus/?stichtag=2024-01-01 Just to finish with a bit of positivity, my prediction is our squad value will uplift towards the end of season as results improve marginally and VAR eventually stops screwing us over.

I would imagine his due diligence would have been more along the lines of 'can you afford the club and keep running it to a greater extent than the current absentee owner' rather than arguing the toss over whether the likes of Bazunu, Mara and Orsic can cut it in the premier league. For all the faults of Sport Republic, we appear to be better funded now than at any point in our history. The problem is how they choose to spend it.

He would have been able to play yesterday but I can't believe we have a captain who has been unavailable for half our matches played due to his own ill discipline. I suspect he may not feature so much in what remains of this season (and hopefully not due to future red cards). He's ok for backup and in the EFL Championship but not every week in the PL. I wonder what must ABK be thinking while he's been bombed-out of the side.

If he can get us something like 20 points from the fixtures in second half of the season, there would be more than enough encouraging signs that he could crush the Championship and bring some momentum on our return to the PL to give it a proper go next time around, a bit like Marco Silva with Fulham or Benitez at Newcastle.

Sample pages for those who are as intrigued as I was by this book recommendation. It's pretty wild, but not surprising considering the source material https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=703035333043899&set=a.359435304070572

They say it takes one to know one

On this occasion @trousers has completely left you off the hook. First off, you casually mention your dislike of underlining, but the use of different font styles is literally your trademark posting style. Then, you completely fail to address his actual question about paragraphs. My theory is that you draft your posts in something like Notepad with word wrap turned off, so by default all the words appear on a single infinite line. Nice anecdote about how substance is king, btw. All in all, it's a classic response. Never change, David.

Roll With It to replace Rockin' Over The World for the post-match stadium music. Status Quo is fine (music-wise, not in terms of the football club), but especially want Danny Rohl to be our manager now that you've suggested this

I should expect big news to emerge on Friday, as per time-honoured tradition established by Paul Allen.