Professor

If the club survives to play in Div 1, we have no idea what the squad will look like. The current team are not good enough for the CCC so there is no certainty as to how well they would perform in Div 1, but half of them may not be here anyway. Is that depressing enough.......

Why on earth should Lowe spite the Saints fans who have shown such support for him? Fans who stayed loyal to him when he was faced with tough decisions such as removing a keen young manager, Steve Wigley, who showed potential but was unable to deliver, fans who appreciated the aappointment of respected managers such as Hoddle, Strachen and Redknapp and who supported the involvement of a national figure such as SCW, and fans who understood the risk Lowe was taking when he returned last summer to try to rescue the club from the financial mess created over the previous two years by the Wilde/Crouch boards. Why should Lowe show any spite.... Or is it some fans who have shown spite towards Lowe by rubbishing everything he has ever done, blaming him for every failure and giving him no credit for any success? We are not where we are now because of Lowe's 9 months in charge, but because of the catastrophic spending in the previous two seasons that left us at the bottom on the table. Realistically, the blame lies with Wilde and Crouch for ousting the Lowe board in the summer of 2006 on the crest of the 'anyone but Lowe' campaign, instead of staying on board with him and looking for the external investment that was needed, as a united group. As for Lowe, his biggest personal mistake - coming back last year - when he should have stayed away, leaving Crouch, well-meaning as he was, to pick up the pieces of the mess.

So Pearson would have got the players in the Saints squad to play better.......fantasy land I'm afraid... Leicester have money, which is why they've got promotion, its that simple,

Very much afraid this is true.

Cheer up lads, its only football. If the team survives administration there will be another season and another after that. One day, most people won't even be able to remember which year it was that the club was relegated to Div 1.

Pearson was not appointed by Lowe, but Poortvleit and Wotte were. Therefore the logic of anyone anti-Lowe was that Pearson was magic and JP /MW were / are crap. It follows that if Pearson had been appointed by Lowe and had been able to do no better than JP in the same circumstances, Lowe's decision to appoint him, especially after the near relegation last year, would have been criticised with just as much bile as has been heaped on JP amd MW. Its also hard to imagine any manager failing at Leicester this year given the money washing around the club.

Here's a bit of a shock! Does this mean that Mr AS will not be furious with Lowe if the rumour is untrue? And I thought Lowe was not the majority shareholder, in fact I thought his holding was only about 10%, and that he wasn't on the board for two of the past 3 years, but why let facts get in the way.

Posts saying "if only....", really don't tell us anything. "If only Nigel Pearson had been kept on...", "if only Poorvlieit had been sacked sooner...". The fact is that if only those things had been done, the situation could have been better, or the same, or it could have been worse. If Pearson had remained and the team had been in the bottom 3 by September, the only certainty is that the same old names would have been screaming for Lowe's blood for keeping him on. Speculation can be interesting, but don't lets take it seriously.

Thing is Hypo, even if a team is doing well, there is no profit in it. One of the most overused words on this board has been 'invest' when people talk about 'investing in the team'. there is no financial return on that investment, but there may be a return in terms of reputation, celebrity and fame. Only a handful of professional football clubs make a profit, one obvious reason being that the assets are depreciating all the time, so the player bought for £10m is worth £1m five years later, and in the meantime the club pays him another £10m in wages! Business economics do not stand up in football, which possibly Wilde and Crouch did come to understand over the last few years. Lowe did understand the economics, but not many of the fans did, and still don't. So if you are a millionaire with a few million pounds to invest, don't put it into football if you want to have a return. But if you love this club and are a lifelong supporter, or want to become a supporter, and will get your pleasure from being in the boardroom mixing in the glamourous world of football, name in the press, etc., then you will spend your money on Saints to get your personal pleasure. But there aren't many people in this category, so we shouldn't hold our breath.... All we fans can do is keep our fingers crossed that someone comes along, not just with a love of the club, but with enough money to spend and a willingness to accept that they won't see much of it back.

Nineteen Canteen has explained exactly how things are. The administrator is only able to act in the interests of the creditors of SLH, and must get the best price he can for the company's assets. The ownership of SFC is one of those assets. The administrators cannot consider what is best for the future of the club, only how can they raise the most money from its sale. There is no absolute certainty that SFC can survive this process, and those who think administration is a good thing are seriously deluded. A new start is one possibility if the best bid comes from a committed owner, but so is winding up and leaving the league. Anyone who welcomed that risk must be a little deluded, because if we get out of this it will be as much due to luck as judgement.

Might be an idea for people to get their heads out of the sand and realise that there may not even be a SFC by the end of the season, and that will be due to the debts incurred during 2006/07 and 2007/08. Those were the years when money the club didn't have was gambled on transfers and wages that ended with the team bottom of the table and surviving in the CCC by the results of other clubs. Ranting at Lowe - who wasn't actually in charge during those two years won't change anything, but easy scapegoats have been the order of the day at this club for far too long, so that its become way of life. And still there are people saying the club should heve spent even more money this season - who don't seem to understand that if that had been done, administration would have been last October instead of now.

Do we know what the donated funds are being used for, or how they help the situation? I've not seen a clear explanation of Mr Richard's plea, so can anyone explain?

St Mary's was always a risk. At the time, Lowe said that going ahead with it was dependant on the team remaining in the Prem. In practice we were always one of those clubs likely to be in the relegation mix most seasons, so the risk was always strong, but even when we went down it was a close run thing.

We're all entitled to our opinions, but in my experience opinions are stronger if based on evidence, not on conjecture. We know that replacing Pearson was part of the cost-cutting as was the youth policy. We don't know whether Pearson would have worked for lower wages, or whether he would have run the club on the terms required to reduce the costs. Working with no money is certainly not the way he is having to do the job at Leicester. Ergo, its not possible to say whether Lowe HAD to remove Pearson. As for Poortvleit, like all managers, its easier to judge them after the event, ask Dowie, Micky Adams, Jewell, Ince or any of the other unemployed managers, all judged to have failed, but most capable and just as likely to suceed with another club in due course, just as JP might.

Some of the papers suggest that the blame begins with Mike Wilde back in 2005/06 for thinking he knew how to run a football club, and later with Leon Crouch for much the same reason, although to be fair to both of them, they did act in good faith. Its just that they were wrong. As someone else said, this club was run for years by former merchant bankers who understood business, and had the team punching above its weight for years. When the fans turned on them because they wanted someone to blame, the end game started. Its interesting that there are still people on here blaming Lowe, despite the fact that he was only back in charge for 9 months and faced with impossible odds following the Barclay's squeeze on credit. Unfortunately, it was this mindless attitude by too many Saints fans over several years that encourage Wilde in the first place. Had Wilde and Crouch stuck with Lowe in 2005, things would certainly not have come to this and it wouldn't do any harm for a few fans to begin to realise what a mistake they made with their campaigns. The only happy ones will be those who wanted Lowe out at any price, in which case we willl now have to see what price we have to pay.

This is just so true. Sometimes its necessary to state the obvious. The coaches, Wotte and Poortveit before him, did their best to get the best out of what the club could afford, and it wasn't good enough. From all we have heard in the last few days, it was not because Lowe was picking the team, or telling the coach who to pick, but simply because our best 11 was not as good as the other best 11s. IMHO Wotte has done as good a job as anyone could have done since he took over but ultimately the coach is not on the pitch and there is a limit to how far above their ability he can get his players to play.

The more I read this forum, the more I wonder if the demise of my beloved Saints, who I've supported for over half a century, could even be a good thing. I really don't want to see the club wound up, but abuse of fellow supporters, following on the abuse of the chairman and the directors, is almost the last straw. We have supporters who want to attend every game, some who just attend the occasional game and some who follow the team through the papers, net, TV and the radio. Everyone is entitled to support the club in their own way, without being subjected to more mindless abuse.

Whilst its a bit of fun to speculatie on who might be the Saints' next manager, we are more concerned at the moment with the bigger questions: will the club even exist next year? And if it does survive with new owners, what sort of a squad will they be able to afford on Div 1 gates?

Be fair. Rod Liddle is not only a very amusing writer, he also knows a lot about football. He supports Millwall.

You have to feel for these players - most of them probably wondering if they will have a club next season.... Must make it hard to concentrate 100% on the game.

And this just shows the problem for SFC. Lowe-hating became a disease that is still consuming people, to the extent that they cannot work out what is true and what is not. It has resulted in genuine fans not attending games, poor atmosphere at times in parts of the SMS and loss of income. The fact is, Lowe took on the running of the club last year when no one else would. Without the cost cutting by he and Wilde, the demise would obviously have been even sooner - September according the the Barclay's statement. Now that ther Lowe haters haver what they wanted, which was Lowe Out any any price, we are faced with the possibility that there is no one, literally no one at all, who may want to run this club. The liquidator is saying that the end of the club is a real possibility. Its past history now, but Lowe Haters should not be congratulating themselves, instead they should be wondering if they really understood what the outcome of their attitudes could lead to.

Yes, of course it was, but it didn't take the bank to tell the new board when they took over that the club was deep in debt and running at a huge loss. Quite a shock, given that it held been left in a healthy finacial position two years earlier. From the information now available it ishould be obvious to anyone, except a dedicated 'Lowe-hater' that those decisions to cut costs by saving money on the manager, selling players with value and with high wages, and reducing running costs by playing young players, had to be taken. The fault since then clearly lies with Barclays for failing to acknowledge those cost cutting steps and by putting even more pressure on the club by talking about 'targets' that were simply incompatible. The bank say they expected the board to make more player sales, increase income and raise attendances. To do all three would be impossible since more player sales would have made relegation even more certain and gates would have fallen even more. To find that the bank had expected that is incredible. The club's overdraft is not even a large amount of money. You only have to compare it to the salaries and bonus's of just one Barclay's director, to see how the bank's actions are totally outrageous.

Amongst the joy about Lowe resigning from SLH, its as well to remember that things can get worse as well as better. The worst case - SMS and other assets sold off, or purchase by an owner with no money to invest in the team and on to to the best case, which would be purchase by an owner (or consortium) with genuine resources and determination to spend. Maybe somewhere in the middle is the most likely, in which case Div 1 is probably as good as it will get.........hope springs eternal, but so does real worry, and its hard to see Saints in the Prem again, perhaps not in our lifetimes.

With due respect to Fitzhugh Fella, this is the sort of observation that does tend to mislead people. Whatever Lowe may have done to incur debts over the SMS, there is little doubt that the current situation stems from the two years that Lowe was not on the board. We have seen massive cost cutting this year, so the current board are hardly to blame on that side of the account, but the performance of the team has resulted in falling gates and reducing income, which probably is a major factor. The dilemma for any board is how do you cut costs and improve the team at the same time. Its circle that is almost impossible to square, but you can dsee how they have tried by bringing in new players, but ones on lower wages. Lowe's hope was that the academy boys would come good, which some have, but not good enough, so if that judgement was at fault then he's paying the price, but what alternative was there for a club deep in debt?

Personally, I have never understood the hatred for Lowe, particularly because so much of it based on mob anger and scapegoating, but neither have I understood why Lowe has stayed involved when he has been subject to so much vitriol. The Lowe haters must now worry in case the Bates/Leeds plan is in place, whereby Ken Bates recovered control of Leeds after administration by heading the highest bid. I cannpot see why Lowe should do that, but then I don't know why he came back last year, so anything is possible. Of course, the flaw in the Bates/Leeds plan is that they are still in Div One!