Ted Bates Statue

Radio 5 commentator on the Man City v Arsenal game claiming not to know the meaning of 'ominous'. "It's a big word", apparently. For the health of certain posters on here, I won't be divulging her identity.

Bring back the Pellegrino days when we hardly ever dropped points.

Jermaine Jenas. Which result is he talking about?

Yep everyone was drooling over this guy as our new Tadic. Happy to hold up my own hands and admit to trying to add Ings and Vest to the list of shit players not good enough for us.

Wolves up from 47% to 67% possession. FFS!

Apart from getting Sheffield Utd this is the best draw we could ask for. Mind you, if we were to slip up I could well imagine plenty of us turning on Hasenhuttl amidst the wrist slitting. Hopefully that will just remain a figment of my horrible imagination.

Website was initially claiming 'VAR check - goal not given' 🤢

Adam Blackmore on Solent reiterating that if Dagrosa had anything like the money needed to buy us, he would have kept his mouth shut and bought us already. Confident we will get sold once the pandemic ebbs away.

Yes, it surely can't be coincidental that all of our covid affected players (Ings, McCarthy, Armstrong - don't think I've missed anyone else?) have struggled to return to previous levels of form.

Bring it on!!!

No, that would be Dave Merrington.

I miss the days when we would ask for a different referee just because Clattenburg hurt Adam Lallana's feelings.

Funny you should bring that up. When I read about that in the news, one of the thoughts that sprang to mind was that it reminded me of the lunacy of reading this forum pre-Liebherr takeover. Earlobe analysis, yacht watch, the axe of administration hanging over us all season, and "It's definitely happening on Friday... no I meant next Friday." Rupert Lowe must be grateful that we only sang about swinging him from the Itchen Bridge and didn't actually bother to storm St Mary's.

Probably getting a bit too big, considering it's now one of the longest threads on the board. Maybe worth retiring this to Golden Posts and starting a new thread - "LOL at Pompey" would be an appropriate title.

Big shame to lose him, it seemed like he was preferred by the club over Targett and he would have been ideally placed to fight for Bertrand's place. We're fortunate to have not had to worry too much about that position since Shaw came through.

I don't know, but it must be the same reason why we blast out music to an empty St Mary's so loudly that you can't even tell what song it is any more.

Wasn't his transfer fee in the 10-20 million range?

I presumed he spontaneously combusted around the time we finally finished 17th.

We're not even halfway yet and Everton, Chelsea, Leicester, Spurs, Liverpool and the Manchester teams have all topped the table at some point (possibly not Man City?) and been considered as title contenders. Plenty of twists and turns in this title race to go. It would be a very good season to get amongst that group, although I'd personally settle for a Cup Final win

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/jan/15/secrets-of-hasenhuttl-southampton-success-set-plays-and-self-criticism Considering that Dave Watson has seldom been spoken of in glowing terms in his time here, credit where it's due. Perhaps the most intriguing observation in the article however, is that JWP only practises twelve free kicks a week. Quality over quantity indeed.

Looks like Ralph has been reading the forums.

Any takeover without plans for a monkey chicken petting zoo is going to struggle. DaGrosa realised this before fully committing and has since turned his attentions elsewhere.

So here we are having played our last game of 2020. It's fizzled out for us somewhat over the Christmas period as we have arguably dropped points against lower ranked opposition. However, they say the table doesn't lie and in the annual table we stand 5th with 56 points. https://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/premier-league/jahrestabelle/wettbewerb/GB1/saison_id/2020 For comparison's sake, this is our 4th best annual performance, behind 2016 (63 points), 2014 (62 points) and 2002 (58 points). Encouragingly, we have only played 35 games unlike others where we have played a minimum of 38 (40 games in 2002)! Maybe given our recent form it's no point expecting much from Liverpool, Leicester and Leeds but if we take our last 38 as of today including 2W and 1D at the end of December 2019, this has been one of our best long-term runs of form in the Premier League. Only Spurs are able to go above us with their game in hand, so it's really not been a bad year for us. We compare highly favourably against the likes of Chelsea, Spurs, Everton, Arsenal 🤣, Wolves and Leicester - all of those sides have been flavour of the month at some point in the last twelve months, all having spent a shit-ton more than us. Perhaps it says as much about them as it does us, as no team aside from Liverpool is really putting a run of results together. It would be really good to make it count and have a strong second half of the season after a few years of dross. Here's to 2021 then. If we are going to get more of the same 2020 shit, I'll happily take Saints being one of the pace-setters in the top division, if nothing else. 😇