verlaine1979

This is all very underpants gnomes: Phase 1. Collect football clubs Phase 2. ??? Phase 3. VAST INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECT PROFIT!!!

I'm sure you realise this, but both Fonte and Lambert transfers were either record fees for League one, or very close to it.

Not a chance. You think she fought that hard to liquidate the largest part of her inheritance, only to lock up the vast majority of her capital in the same place a couple of years later? She supported Gao's legal appeal against the league's initial finding that he wasn't a fit and proper owner, despite her due diligence (undertaken by UBS) surely revealing that the person she was selling to was having to borrow the money to buy the club. Those are not the actions of someone who thought she was securing the club's legacy - they're the actions of someone who really wanted to get her hands on the best part of £300m. And I don't blame her really - if I inherited a baseball club that I didn't care about and that didn't make me any money, I'd be desperate to get rid of it too. But please enough with the amateur hour PR briefings - not a single one of them passes the most basic sniff test. Gao is potless, KL just wants to enforce the purchase of her remaining 20%, and we are in the sh*t with very few options.

Didn't some Pompey fans, I mean Paul Allen once say: "Southampton is a sleeping giant, a family-supported club with traditional values, and we see the value in taking the brand global."

Missed out on the top job at the FA, but not high enough profile to jump to a DOF job at a top club. Few years at Saints (assuming we somehow manage to avoid relegation) will pad his CV nicely.

Missed out on the top job at the FA, but not high enough profile to jump to a DOF job at a top club. Few years at Saints (assuming we somehow manage to avoid relegation) will pad his CV nicely.

We're averaging much less than a point per game at the moment. Probably best to leave talk about how we make other teams look bad for later in the season?

Persistent poor finishing is usually one of the most reliable predictors of relegated sides.

Got about as close as anyone else in the league to a Mitchell-esque streak of unearthed gems with Mahrez, Vardy and Kante. Everton wasn't great, but they tried to make a statement spending a lot of money very quickly, which hasn't worked that well for anyone of late. His track record is as good - or better - than we could've hoped for. Assuming he really is coming and isn't the backroom equivalent of Promes.

You'd think that those four, properly drilled, would be a pretty good starting point for a front press.

The weird fullback picks are clearly because RH's entire game plan relies on having wide defenders with enough of an engine to get up and down all game. Hence why Hoj/Armstrong/Danso get put there. Doesn't quite explain why Valery doesn't always play when fit and the only specialist RB, but I presume something about confidence/form/mentality that we're not privy to. As for the reference to Sheff Utd above. Correct, on simple transfer market valuation, our individual players are worth more than theirs. However, their squad has been selected for a specific game plan, whereas ours seems to have developed over the past couple of seasons with no design other than to buy the weakest, slowest players we can find. That is where the problem lies. We don't have the technique to play a passing/pressing game, and we don't have the strength and resilience to be an archetypal limited-but-hard-to-beat Dyche/Pulis side.

Is the Bayern job still open?

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.