verlaine1979

He did, though he also showed flashes of having innate quality while he was at Hull. However, over the last year and a half in Holland he's become a complete beast. Looks Benteke-esque, but arguably with a bit more composure.

Jozy Altidore & Omar Abdulrahman

Pedantic, but none of the teams below us have to win all their remaining games to avoid finishing 18th were we to lose our remaining two.

Played well, but aside from Clyne's shot created only half-chances, which is worrying when we haven't scored in the last three. Still, 2 0-0 draws will probably see us comfortable enough at the end of the season, even if not comfortable during the remainder of it.

Chelsea agreed to pay £17m for him, admittedly with only £10m up front. Now he's had a good season in the premier league, probably worth £20-25m in a market soon to be undergoing a bit of a striker merry-go-round (Suarez, Lewandowski, Falcau, Cavani all likely to be on the move). Out of our price range I'd say.

The 'we used to be free-scoring' thing is a bit of a myth. Under Adkins we averaged 1.36 goals per game, under Poch we average 1.29 goals per game. Less than three goals more when extrapolated over the course of a season.

I've never found one, but if you just change the number at the end of the URL, you can flick through the available channels, and it seems they pretty much have feeds for every single game. http://www.socsportslive.com/pg/number Football usually seems to start around 16 or 17, but that's anecdotal rather than definitive.

Not really, we're pressing well and probably had more possession than Wigan, but a similar lack of cast-iron chances. Despite bossing the second half at OT, they still had the clearer-cut chances to score than us.

Clearly French club presidents are a bit more poetic than their English counterparts.

Tim Vickery less than effusive about Coutinho, and a couple of fairly negative comments from Inter fans: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/21229538

It was you who included a critique of the lower league seasons in your post, which I quoted for your convenience, so I'm afraid you must bear any accusations of fatuousness alone. Moreover, the sale of AOC, which accounts for most of the positive cashflow during the period happened post admin. Since the date range for the figures at the start of this thread is pretty arbitrary, you could extend it back one year, at which point, our expenditure drops to about 6m while Spurs' rises to somewhere close to £40m, possibly explaining why they are currently a CL team, and we are not.

During the seasons in question in which we were in lower leagues our net spend was -£9.65m, so the inference that we over-spent throughout the whole period is pretty fatuous. I'm sure when we sell Shaw and Ramirez over the coming year or so, our net spend will return to somewhere close to zero, and we'll once again look like a model of prudent fiscal management.

Villa have a player on their books that cost them £24m, so they don't really deserve to be spoken about in the same breath as the other teams financially.

I'd be more inclined to credit Chelsea's Champion's league victory to some kind of Satanic pact than managerial ability on the part of Di Matteo. Barcelona missed enough gilt-edged chances over the course of those two games to win the entire CL from scratch, as did Gomez in the final.

Nah, you don't. You're just trying to look cool in front of your friends.

Absolutely sickening. Schneiderlin, S Davis, Puncheon, Lallana & Lambert put in performances probably as good as they'll manage all season. JWP also acquitted himself very well. Clyne was decent apart from the slip, Fonte and Hooiveld did about as well as you could expect, but Fox was awful.

Only watched the stream, but we looked ponderous throughout. Decision-making was slow, so never really got anything together in the final third. Limited to a single long range effort in the first half, and scraps in the second. Thought Rodriguez looked poor in possession and pretty useless out left. Guly had a dire second half and I was amazed that he was kept on. At present that's our best 11, and I don't actually think you can really say that we played beneath ourselves or Wigan played above themselves - last week we could've been hammered, but rode our luck and got quite a lot of praise for being plucky despite losing. In retrospect, it now feels a bit patronising.

Reminds me of when we agreed a fee for Andy Reid on transfer deadline day many years ago. Successfully flushed a bigger club out of the trees and he went there. Spurs, wasn't it?

He popped up in the penalty area at least twice during open play, which is quite unusual for one of our central midfielders - for that alone I think he should start...

It's an old story frrom early May. Bale signed a new contract with spurs since then I believe.

I remember seeing Aubameyang play a couple of times during the last Cup of Nations. Looked a bit raw at times, but also looked as fast and strong as Drogba in his prime.

I'm pretty sure it was Smalling's mistake that allowed Kompany to score. He allowed himself to get blocked off by Ferdinand, which meant he couldn't follow Kompany's run. Keeper had little to do with it.

It's not an inferiority complex if you are actually inferior. Chelsea are the current champions of Europe, and have just paid £32m for the most highly lauded young player in Europe to play on the same wing as de Bruyne. Getting loans from Chelsea would be a sign of ambition for a newly promoted club, not a sign of meek submission to the way-things-have-always-been-done. We took loans in League 1 and we took loans in the Championship, so I see nothing in the 'Southampton Way' that would preclude us taking loans in the Premier League.

Surely they could loan him out to a team playing in Europe next season - probably even the CL if they send him to France, Germany or Holland...

I think it's a myth that you get more time and space in the Premier League. I'd say there's actually a lot more pressing in the Prem, and generally teams are better at it, but since the standard of players is higher, they're better at stepping away from it, or even more likely, not giving the ball to people who are already under threat in the first place.