verlaine1979

The falling off might also have something to do with how easy we are to play through if you evade the press or hit us on the counter. If your front few are good at pressing, but your central midfield and defense are as porous as ours, its usefulness as an approach probably wanes quite quickly.

Definitely up there in the 'references I didn't expect to see on Saintsweb' stakes. Kudos.

Yup - watching JWP, Romeu and Hoj stomp around the field is painful. We couldn't have three first-choice central midfielders less suited to playing an energetic press.

Again, you're missing the point. If rh was told he couldn't buy any more CBs because we already had five in the squad, then of course he looks to strengthen other areas rather than just sitting on his hands. We've spent around £40m on CBs over the past few seasons (Hoedt (16m), Vest (18m) & Bednarek (6m). I can more easily believe that a board that doesn't understand football looks at that level of investment and says 'no more' than I can imagine RH telling the board that what we've got already is good enough. After all, he didn't come here intending to play a back five - he had to resort to it after realising that our CBs aren't good enough in his first few games.

You missed my point. If Raplh was told at at the start of the window that he could only bring in new defenders if the club were able to sell some of the old ones, what do you expect him to do? Refuse to play any of our CBs because they're all sh*t and go with a back three of JWP, Armstrong and Long? You seem to believe that it's the coach that tells the board what to do at Saints. RH is operating under the constraints set for him by the people who actually sign the contract when millions of pounds change hands.

True, but he'd only played a total of around 30 games across two seasons in Germany before joining us. Compared to the prior careers of our previous marquee CB signings like VVD and Alderweireld, he was always far less likely to immediately step in and start making a difference. Plus, the club only have him on loan, so are less inclined to invest heavily in him. I suspect that the dedication to the likes of JWP and Gunn is as much about trying to develop and maintain their market values as it is about maximising our on-field performance. If revenue generated by player sales really is a life-or-death issue for the club, then I suppose it even makes an unfortunate kind of sense.

Regarding the decision not to buy a new CB over the summer, I suspect some of the club's business management thought that since we have five on the books, we could only buy a new CB if we sold one of the existing ones. As it was, we only loaned out Hoedt, so only went looking for loans and got Danso. That's exactly the kind of reasoning I'd expect from an executive body that has no real knowledge of football. Presumably if you told Gao that all five bulldozers being used on a Lander construction site were broken beyond repair he'd sanction purchase of a new one to stop the project grinding to a halt.

Though perhaps a desire to get full value for the debt she'd converted into equity on top of the notional value of the club was the reason the Gao deal was effectively the only one on the table?

Do you really think Gao is that naive? The only suckers in this scenario are the fans: KL got to cash out by far the largest asset in her inheritance, and Gao got a secure vehicle for moving cash out of China.

Indeed, anyone interested in the club would probably be wise to wait for relegation and buy us at a knock down price rather than paying top dollar for the club. It's how KL managed to turn a profit, after all.

There were rumours of KL trying to sell pretty much from the moment her father's will came out of probate, but no real rumours of a buyer until Gao came along. I'd guess that she was desperate to sell from the very beginning (Saints probably being the largest asset in ML's estate) but that she struggled to interest anyone else in paying top of market for a mid-level PL club.

This - 47% possession must have been almost entirely passing it between the back five, as the ball hardly stuck for longer than two passes in midfield and attack. None of our CBs are great passers, and yet we're set up for them to be our chief playmakers. Hence the number of times Bednarek ending up passing it straight to Pickford.

I really doubt he took out £200m in ultra-high interest loans in order to gain access to Southampton's hyper-competitive real estate market. We're not talking about a sliver of Hong Kong here - pretty much anyone with a pot of cash and a desire to lose most of it would be welcome to regenerate any bit of Southampton they like.

The more I think about what you're saying, it really boils down to 'our owner is poor, so we can't expect him to invest money that he might not get back'. That's a noble sentiment, but cold comfort when other owners are rich enough to SPEND money and not give a sh*t about getting it back.

Gao has pretty much already said that his purchase was motivated by a desire to move money out of China (I can find the interview if you want chapter and verse) - we don't need to speculate. And every decision he's made since has been in line with that thinking (no fattening of the pig, as someone quoted earlier). To continue the porcine analogy, most of the other club owners in the PL have bought their pigs with the intention of pampering them in the hope that they'll win a rosette at the county show (prestige, politics, billionaire entertainment). Our owner has bought a pig with the intention of making sausages.

I take your point about not wanting to get into a slanging match, but I'm genuinely curious about something: if Gao bought us purely as a vehicle for moving money out of China and into the comparatively safe-haven of UK regulation, are you okay with that? For him it might make sense to only think of the club as a financial instrument, but that creates a situation where the owner's incentives and motivations are completely opposed to the incentives and motives of the fan base - and that's a terrible foundation for the long-term health of the club.

What other owners do isn't irrelevant, because we're in competition with those clubs. You keep harping on about business acumen, but a competitive landscape with topography as obvious as this hardly requires a Harvard MBA to read.

Your reasoning would be sound if return on investment was the chief motivating factor for most top level club owners. Since it isn't, your reasoning falls as flat as your patronising tone. It's not entitled to want your club to compete on a level playing field with everyone else.

Moreover, since debt is converted to equity, the notional value of the club increases by the amount put in. Obviously he'd have to find a buyer willing to match his valuation, but he'd have to do that anyway, and a successful club with better players is worth more than a relegated club with dross.

Because every other owner is doing it (since only a tiny handful of clubs are transfer spend positive or neutral). If those are the table stakes of the game, then anyone who can't afford it shouldn't be playing.

I get tired of repeating this, but NO WE ARE NOT. Owners are allowed to inject up to £105m over three seasons as long as they make good the loss by converting debt to equity. There is no rule preventing Gao from giving a serious and meaningful boost to our transfer budget - especially when we've had consecutive years of profit. In other words, we're about as far from being constrained by FFP as a club in our position could possibly be. Oh, and before anyone brings up wages, there's already a mechanism for annual increase in the FFP rules, and we've sold everyone we had that was decent

He was only on for ten minutes, but we have to build the team around Djenepo. He's the only player in our squad with more than one good quality.

What makes you think Gao is interested in 'delivering' anything? I've always thought the club was a place for him to park money outside of China, with the rhetoric around continuing our 'self-sustaining' model simply a convenient way for him to avoid explaining why he can't provide any additional funds.

Eh, if Rohl was the wunder-coach responsible for all the good things RH achieved, why did Bayern take him to do a video analysis role? I think you've mistaken correlation for causation.

The success of modern German football is all about athleticism, and we must have the least athletic squad in the league. We have midfielders without stamina, central defenders without strength, and strikers without pace. Added to that, there's an almost uniformly low level of technical ability which means we pass the ball slowly & conservatively, and have very few players capable of taking the ball past an opponent. Essentially, our squad is the exact opposite of the one RH thrived with at Leipzig - whether that's his fault for coming here, or our fault for not recognising the disconnect is a valid - but at this point futile - question. From his comments before the 2019 January and Summer windows, I suspect RH expected more leeway to transform of the playing squad - no wonder he looks peeved.