James

Very encouraging. More cutting edge and we will be extremely good this season.

Yep. At what point do we just admit it isn't going to work out for him here...

We essentially aren't playing a striker. Armstrong totally anonymous.

Would also be absolutely amazed if Lavia played...

God he looks horrendous in that video. Great scouting Saints.

Agree. Given that I'm nervous of getting a result against a glorified League One side it also shows how far off Premier League quality we were last year.

I think the team will be: Baz Manning Janny B Stephens KWP Smallbone JWP Alcaraz Tella Adams Edozie Possibly Arma in for Edozie.

Gutted to see Tino go. Annoying also that all of these protracted summer departures seem to be speeding up on the eve of our opening league game. Fingers crossed that (a) we aren’t too disrupted/have enough to put away some of these early teams and (b) we have replacements lined up ready to go. As West Ham are finding, once everyone knows you’ve got cash burning a hole in your pocket then suddenly the price goes up and a few more games go by before they are in the door/up to match speed with a new team..

Isn’t this TacticallyMatt guy just a BS merchant anyway?

Yep - next step in the Liverpool play book is Klopp encouraging the player to go on strike...

The way that the Liverpool based journos decry our player valuations whilst Liverpool themselves are pocketing overinflated fees from Saudi for their castoffs is just weird. Smacks of a completely entitled club. Didn't see them complaining when they pocketed £25 million for Rhian Brewster despite him barely setting foot on the pitch but suppose that's OK as he is from the mighty Liverpool.

Yeah, I mean one way to "free" him is to stop making such low ball offers.

I think we need to move for Piroe. Sounds like Leeds interested too so getting him also takes him away from a potential promotion rival. We desperately need a striker and RM knows him well.

If by injured you mean bottling it then yes.

If you thought that was bad then I suspect you are going to be disappointed for most of the upcoming season. Honestly, I don't know what our fans expect sometimes.

Not sure how you can say we "never looked like scoring" when we had, at a minimum, a stonewall penalty appeal declined. I'll accept that some of our nice looking build up play lacks a cutting edge but think you're being a little harsh.

As we know, a Rueben Selles managed team doesn't really give you too much to think about.

Half watched the game and half only saw the result?

Agree. Pretty encouraged ahead of the new season. We do need a striker though, that is glaringly obvious…

You watching the game or just the score? We’ve played some nice stuff, many more chances and Bazunu has had barely anything to do. Clear we need a striker but we are more than holding our own and this lot are no mugs.

Odd take, he’s been pretty good in my view.

Might just be me but some of this is pretty promising. We know we need another striker (hopefully we find a buyer for Adams as, on this form, I’d rather keep Armstrong). AZ are a decent outfit and we are matching them. Controversial opinion maybe but won’t be sad if someone takes KWP off our hands. Really has been shocking recently.

Hardly…we’ve played some quite nice stuff at times. Very difficult to please some it would seem.

Cannot understand selling Tella unless he wants to go. For a team that's been so poor at scoring goals it seems absolute madness to be selling the top scorer in the Championship last year for £15-20m. I'm not sure we'd get a better player for that money. Hope Wilcox knows what he's doing and that Martin is on board with this as things looked pretty good after the Reading friendly and in parts against Bournemouth but latest rumours seem to have us getting rid of a lot of our better players. If we really have targets lined up then they are going to need to get signed pretty quick and hit the ground running extremely quickly to ensure we don't lose too much ground.

I can't believe its even up for debate that (a) Bazunu was nowhere near PL standard last year and (b) there were PL quality goalkeepers available to us that we could have signed instead and probably for less money (most of them have been mentioned). Whether Bazunu is good enough for a promotion chasing Championship side is yet to be seen and whether he turns out to be "quality" in the future is, again, to be seen but personally I haven't seen much to suggest we've got a top keeper in waiting. It's a concern that he's making silly errors in pre-season, let's hope he gets those out of his system before we start in the league, but we know that those types of mistakes are going to cost a team like ours points - as encouraging as yesterday was, this team had a serious issue scoring goals last year. I hope Bazunu turns out to be good, every Saints fan does, but so far he's quite a bit worse than Angus Gunn (to compare to another keeper we paid big money for from City) and we got rid of him quickly enough....