aintforever

I think you will find by far the most spending was done when Wilde and later his execs were in charge. Crouch was only in charge from around last January to the end of the season, during this time he made cutting measures like loaning out Rasiak and Skacel, his only spending was hiring Pearson and bringing in loans like Perry and Wright - which as they probably saved us from relegation was a pretty prudent move. It's a good question though, what exactly did Lowe do to change/influence what was going on when the club were clearly overspending? From the outside it appears he did nothing.

The lack of any Lowe out movement is purely down to there not being an alternative, should one raise his head then the "anyone but Lowe" opinion will surely be the most popular again. Of course "anyone but Lowe" could mean out of the frying pan into the fire but when your ass is being fried like a piece of bacon you might as well jump and try to miss the fire. It's just one sad sad state of affairs, IMO admin is inevitable. There is not even a hint of a take over and our only hope is for Jan and co to do the business. A change of manager now could work but would be very risky. We had one chance, and that was to get a good manager in during the summer and build a team who could punch above their weight and grind out enough points to stay in this league. We chose a crazy dutch total football experiment and just have to hope it works.

In terms of making dumb decisions, sacking Pearson for this Dutch clown will prove to be up there with the Steve Wigley episode IMO.

I tend to agree with this to an extent, the problem, is I don't think we have a chance of staying up with the way thing are. These kids cannot handle the pressure of playing at home at the moment - imagine how bad they will be during the REAL pressure of a relegation dog-fight. The games at the moment are relatively pressure free, experience is worth it's weight in gold when things get serious. IMO we will only stay up if we have a mid-season purple patch. If things are still so poor come Xmas I think we would be wise to bin the experiments and get a proper gaffer in.

The main reason fans are staying away is because the team is ****, the Championship is **** and people are not spending money like they were before the crunch. However Lowe is a factor for the fan who doesn't mind **** football and has a bit of disposable income. If he had came in, showed a bit of humility, apologised for his previous ****-ups and outbursts towards the fans it might have helped. What he did though was come in and sack a perfectly good manager who was popular with the fans. He basically slapped every fan in the face and said like it or not I'm doing what I want, your opinion counts for nothing. If he wanted to lose all support he couldn't have gone about it any better, you have to question his intelligence in that respect.

I have to agree with GM on this one, whatever your views on the muppets running SFC, now is not the time for boycott's etc. I hate Lowe with a passion, and understand why people would not want to line his pockets but there is little or no alternative - the club needs support - it's as simple as that. Staying away because of Lowe is just a poor excuse for being a fairweather.

I'm fed up with hearing this, football is as much about defending as it is attacking - look at the stats/league table - we are NOT playing good football. We are playing open attractive attacking football, which looks good going forward but clearly DOES NOT WORK in this league with these players and this manager.

Being so close to admin surely doesn't tie in with the fact that we have brought in 12 players plus given Perry a contract since last season? Championship clubs on the brink don't sign players on loan from Chelsea or 3rd choice keepers from Spurs. Plus spend decent money on untried French kids. We might be skint but I expect admin is quite a way off, Lowe is not exactly renowned for throwing money around we don't have.

The whole bunch of them need the bullet.

I agree that the gamble was the best thing to do, we should have done it the first season down instead we got Lowe's laughable 90k "repromotion" attempt. Wilde was right to gamble the following season but when the parachutes ran out we should have consolidated and planned long term, promotion that year was so unlikley it made the gamble very foolish.

I thought Duncan came across very well and I agreed with pretty much all he had to say. The only exception was his views on Leon Crouch. whilst Crouch wasn't in control when we stupidly ran up the clubs debts he was still part of the decision making during the whole going Wilde **** up. If I could be convinced that Crouch could run the club as a viable business I would definitely prefer to have him running the club to Lowe. This whole dutch head coach/Lowe DOF thing is a disaster. We have some good players, we could stay up with a decent manager no problem.

Getting to the cup final was the start of the decline IMO. As a footballing achievement it means next to naff all, the win against Spurs was good but what followed was a spectacularly lucky run of games (luck that we were long overdue). Any club from the top two leagues could have pulled off what we did - just like Millwall did just after. Getting to the cup final (and into Europe - as if they were two seperate achievements) just feeded Lowe's ego. He thought he was some sort of genius and that Saints had gone to "the next level" meaning that when he had to next choose a manager he didn't have to listen to anyone, we wouldn't go down so he could **** about with managers as he saw fit. If our chairman understood the nature of football and wasn't as arrogant we probably would have built on our cup final season.

Agree with your sentiments about Lowe but never ever want Saints to lose. Win, lose or draw tomorrow will make no difference to wether Lowe stays or goes, it just makes relegation and administration/liquidation more likley.

I think it's perfectly understandable for fans to assume the worst with Lowe. Taken in isolation these comments could be interpreted in many ways. The thing is they are taken in context of other comments/rumours about the way Lowe works and other facts that we know about Lowe. You would have to a fool to just ignore them, especially because of the cloud of secrecy that surrounds anything at SMS, gagging orders and such, which mean all we EVER hear is rumour/gossip and the odd comment from people like Basset.

Obviously a good manager given the right resources, he clearly wasn't motivated though so has to go down as another bad managerial decision by Lowe. Renewing his contract after relegation was a disaster, how Lowe and his Motivational genius friend Woodward didn't spot his lack of enthusiasm I do not know.

Depends if you have sacked a perfectly good director to hire one that implements your suggestions.

Basset's had more clubs than hot dinners, whilst none of us knows (or ever will) exactly what went on I am pretty confident Basset wouldn't be bothered to make up stuff just to get at Lowe.

He's the most over-rated under-rated player ever IMO.

It's just confirmed what most of us have feared all along, we are ****ed as long as this interfering moron remains in charge. I just dispair at the "head in the sand" comments of some on here, Basset has no axe to grind with Lowe, he's been around the game long enough to not give a monkeys, he's just a ex-manager telling us how it is.

When we are supposedly too skint to keep hold of a decent manager it seems weird we can afford to blow money on wages for: Pulis, Gasmi, Forecast, Smith, Robertson, Peckhart. Plus what was the point in giving Perry a contract if were going to be playing a bunch of kids instead? All seems a bit hit and miss, we bring someone in on loan - he plays a couple of games then is dropped.

Complete rubbish, we were obviously forced to play some kids, just like every other skint team has done in the past 100 years. There was absolutely no need for experimental set-ups or gambling on untried foreign managers. We've brought in 11 - 12 new players this season so there was enough scope to do things differently.

Every other club in the country is in debt, not too many taking crazy gambles like Saints though.

I would be happy with Micky Adams, persisting with this this Poortvleit experiment is pointless, it was doomed from the offset and will only get worse as the pitches get heavier and the games get more pressurized.

Since last season we have signed 11 new players: Paul Wotton Lee Holmes Tommy Forecast Romain Gasmi Morgan Schneiderlin Jack Cork Tomas Pekhart Jordan Robertson Ryan smith Anthony Pulis Alex Pearce This new set up has had the resources to build their own team, there are teams with less resources than us in this league so there can be no excuses if we go down.