Ted Bates Statue

Looks like the time has come to sound the Graziano Pelle klaxon.

Easy to point fingers at a few members of the public, the newspapers, and I get that it's now a national pastime to give the BBC a kicking simply for reporting news. But I expect that most people do not have the opportunity to spend all day sitting in queues merely to fill up a few millilitres, and that the demand has been caused by those who would normally fill up £10 or so regularly, but are now filling their tanks to the top when they do get around to it. I can't blame them either because if you find a petrol station that is open, it might be the last one you see for a while. I was fortunate enough to have filled up on the evening before the chaos began, but I've had two near misses trying to find a petrol station so that I can get home without running dry. I highly doubt there are very many bathtubs out there laden with fuel or jerry cans stored in the kitchen. Just a hell of a lot of people who are expected to not WFH, while relying on the internal combustion engine for work, living in a country where public transport infrastructure projects result in white elephants such as HS2. I wonder how are we getting on with installing electric charging points everywhere so that petrol becomes obsolete?

We need six points minimum from these fixtures. Not asking much, just two wins before December. Anything less and we are looking at a "Mark Hughes" relegation zombie start to the season, and another manager about to be relieved of his duties. I agree that it would certainly not set the world alight but I think we have to be realistic. We're not going to suddenly average nearly 2 points per game, no matter who the opposition are. If there's anything that I've learned following Saints, it's that we pull out decent performances against top sides but trip up against the lower teams. Where Hasenhuttl has done fairly well in his time with us is that we have tended to get three points in our matches against relegation-threatened teams. He now has five games to do that and save his job. In 2004-2005 what did for us was failing to win all but one of our six pointers with the bottom four sides. With our reduced goal threat my worry is that we might be better than we were last season, but we won't have enough to convert draws to wins. If that happens, then I expect we will have a new manager in December.

It's fascinating seeing how even clubs like Leicester can fall flat on their faces after a certain point. It's like they're a similarly sized club but with a massive case of the Midas touch, they can do no wrong, but then they overreach and troll us by signing our average personnel only to find that actually, Puel, Vest and Bertrand really weren't that great after all. The Vestergaard signing is particularly humorous considering there were rumours about him joining them ever since the first 0-9.

As ever, a great read with a healthy dose of wit to help stomach the dampened expectations.

At first glance I thought that makes him sound pretty good, until I realised that Lampard was actually working for them at the time. On the positive side for us, Hasenhuttl has also made Chelsea look shite on a number of occasions. Hopefully we can take points off them again.

Ah but you forgot Branfoot's win percentage which would make Ralph look like a twat if it got shown in comparison.

Agreed, although contrary to your subsequent post I think Blackmore and Merrington are very good by the standards of local radio, and I cannot fathom how people tolerate the bias and yelping on any other channel. The other South Coast commentary is much lower standard, and that seems to be the case across the board. Case in point - the commentary of Le Tissier chipping Schmeichel in the 6-3 sticks in my mind, "Oooh and he chips... Schmeichel and THAT...! is a sublime piece of skill by one of the most skilful players in the Premiership." Like Alan Partridge on tranquilisers. I assume it was a Skate on commentary that day.

Does he know which side he is playing for? Sounds like he was the opposition's best player. I presume Sheffield United are the side playing in red and white tonight. A debut to rival Alan Bennett (he turned out ok... eventually). Bednarek on, what a relief.

Ask me for the lottery numbers, or when we get taken over.

I know we're only supposed to talk about the calendar year table when we're really shit, but we've just gone unbeaten against the top 3 sides of 2021 - the Manchester Clubs and West Ham(!)... I didn't see this coming but it's interesting to see this side evolving into a team that's hard to beat, for the first time since Puel left.

I can smell their chips on shoulders all the way over here. Imagine if we were in a title fight and our manager asked us to come down and make some noise, I doubt we'd get so upset amid the vertigo. They've obviously changed since the days of filling Maine Road in League One.

Juanmi scored twice against Celtic this evening in Europa. I read an interview with Hugo Scheckter a few months ago about a former Saints player whose Spanish wife settled so poorly in England that the club were forced to let the player leave for a lot less than his market value. No name was given but I presumed he was referring to Juanmi as the only Spanish player to leave in recent years, although I don't keep tabs on the nationality of player's spouses so it could have been someone else. There I was thinking it was that he wasn't really suited to English football.

I had dismissed it as a pre-prepared slow news day story, but the name is a bit too random. Allardyce or Pardew would be a more obvious name for a hack article. Either Crocker thinks that Hasenhuttl is underperforming, considering the newcomers to the squad, or Steve Cooper's agent is touting him for a new job and putting pressure on other clubs to sign him up. I believe that Hasenhuttl will get until the end of October to justify his continued presence and he's doing ok for now, so my guess is that it's the agent.

Totally agree - just like Gordon Strachan and Lawrie Mac, all were proven to be absolute frauds on the basis of their records after leaving us. If only we had competent managers in charge. But thanks to those buffoons, we will never truly know whether we could have benefitted from the delights of promotion, European qualification or even the occasional final.

That would about be as likely as Clive Woodward ending up in club football... oh.

It could well be a fairly ugly start for a few weeks, but I think we will finish comfortably above the relegation places and achieve a magnificent record-breaking 13th place trophy to silence all the doubters.

...I don't know.

Did anyone watch the game last night? Grateful that the drain-circling racism analysis has been moved to a new thread.

All this serves to reinforce the sense that a club lives and dies on its scouting department. They're unsung heroes, rarely made up of household names and others take the glory when they do their job well. You can talk as much as you like about fancy facilities, black box, 443 throughout the club, managerial philosophies, attitudes and playbook, but without the keen eye of the sort of people like Georges Prost or those individuals who warned Les Reed not to sign Guido Carillo, it all falls apart like a pack of cards. Same with the academy - if we are having problems in that area now, then you have to look back a number of years to identify where things went wrong.

Think the last time they posted they were dropping heavy hints that Flores was going to be our next manager. Honourable mention to EricB and LeG. Also SKD for quite a while.

Please score this.

Never mind this week's result, losing 7-1 and simultaneously blowing a 4 goal lead? Lawrie Mac must GO for the good of the football club.

I've had enough of other teams' players making history against us. Happy for him to give us a miss.

Interesting anecdote and to revisit the background on the original thread, I didn't know about any of that. I only recall he struggled for injury with us. Seems a bit shocking but not entirely surprising, tough decisions have to be made sometimes and we let go a lot of decent performers as we went up the divisions. In the strikers department alone we also showed the door to Barnard and Sharp despite all of them providing useful contributions in their short times here. Can't blame him if it left a bitter taste in the mouth though.