Professor

Be i8nterested to hear an opinion from Peter White. As a high profile blind supporter, how he feels about it could help form opinions one way or the other.

Not picking on this comment in particular but it is representative of several that are quite inaccurate and misrepresent the discussion about players in the market. If there has been any post as per this claim why not quote it? Because such posts can't be quoted if they don't exist. Talking about potential transfers does not imply any expectations that deals should be made in haste so why are a few people keen to discourge discussion and why include insults about people who are fellow Saints' fans?

Could be true as Adkins does seem keen on players with a S****horpe connection. Thats OK as long as he gives as much consideration to the great majority who don't know where S****horpe is and wouldn't go there even if they did. The last manager who seemed to give extra attention to players who had played for him before was George Burley. Nothing wrong with knowing a player from having worked with him previously, as long as it doesn't rule out other options who might be even better.

Does the Limerick connection mean that Terry Wogan could be a Saints fan?

Whats this olympic torch they are talking about?

Yes, I'm assuming the club will want someone to complement Morgan in the attacking MF role.

Just as well for Beattie to have a skill to use when football doesn't provide an income any more. Is he a bricky or a chippy?

CM is obviously a key role. We have Chaplow, Hammond, Cork and Guly who can fill the position but real quality there could make a difference. I just wonder if Adkins is going to see if James Ward-Prowse could step up and if so, wait until after the first few games to decide if he needs to buy or not .

Just looking up for a moment from watching the paint dry, wondered about Tom Ince or Matt Phillips from Blackpool and whether SFC is really trying to sign one or the other. Can't imagine it would be both and of the two, Phillips for the right wing slot looks the best option. SDR not getting a first choice slot in the Championship suggests there is a risk in going to lower league sides abroad and if the policy really is young English players where possible, Phillips fits the bill, even if he has chosen to represent Scotland at international level. IMHO filling the gap left by AO-C is crucial. We got away with it last season because of the all-round ability of the team, the passing game and having acceptable subs on the RW but it looks like the manager knows that in the Prem, that won't do. Now, how's that paint doing.......

With Jay-Rod on his way, barring unforeseem obstacles, its more interesting to discuss the other areas that need strengthening rather than to respond to paper talk linking just about about every player in the market with the Prem new boys, West Ham, Reading and Saints. One striker will surely be enough, so that should rule out a lot of names still being bandied about. Two players in midfield would seem to make sense an attcking MF and a winger. If one of those is Tom Ince for Jason Puncheon plus cash, that would be a good improvement. All that leaves is the defence where one extra CB would help, perhaps letting Dan Seaborne go. So, if Jay-Rod comes, very well done, and now lets have 3 more please.

Eden Hazzard says he's going to Chelsea. Couldn't SFC pop in a spoiler bid of £35m and £250K wages? After all, football is supposed to be played on a level playing field?

Why bother with Sky at all? There's plenty of free TV and other things to do if you don't want to watch TV. If people refused to pay the exorbitant prices to watch sport on Sky, they'd have to close down and sport would go back to BBC and ITV.

Is there a treatment room at Portsmouth? Good luck to DC going there, in fact maybe the way to end the animosity would be if they signed a full team of ex-Saints so Pompy could become the Southampton pension scheme.

Man City and Chelsea to raise doubts about obscene sums of money buying success.

If Jay-Rod is used to travelling to football training on a tram thorough cobbled streets with his fellow passengers hunched in old coats, wrapped in scarves and with caps pulled low, why would he want to leave his homely mill town to live in a leafy Hampshire with its unhealthy sunshine where there isn't enough rain for footballers to use a hose pipe to wash the 4x4.

Its the way to go for Saints' home games, so from where I live, going the Southampton Way is the A272 from Sussex back to Hampshire. For you, of course, it might be entirely different.

Managers do come and managers go, and as has been said, fans live with it, the verdict often depending on how well the replacement does. Losing Pardew was seen as a blow at the time, softened slightly because the start to the season hadn't been quite as good as expected, but then came the 4-0 win at Bristol Rovers just before AP left with no job to go to. There was no Plan B, because we know that other options were in the frame, including Eddie Howe but ultimately all worked well because Pardew's team played well under Adkins. This thread was about whether we expect NA to be here at the end of the season. There appear to be no reasons to believe he will not be so it must be very probable that he will be.

PS. I don't usually see thedelldays posts but as Glasgow_Saint has quoted one, I'd just say that RMF seems an area where our weakness at the moment might call for two signings. If so, one could be an established player already at prem level here or abroad, and one could be a prospect such as Ince or his like. It doesn't seem to be a postion where we have another Walcott or Chamberlain coming through from the Academy. SDR hasn't made his mark, staying as a sub option in the Championship, and otherwise we seem to have covered the position with central midfield players. Its not been often recently that you've seen the ball into the empty space towards the right corner knowing we had a winger who would be first there.

Re Tom Ince - upsetting Ian Holloway wouild be a shame, or a bonus, depending on how you look at it, but after Ince stood out in the Play-off final and his club has missed out on promotion, it seems reasonable to think that Prem sides will be looking at him. His contract with Blackpool ends in 2013 and even though they have a one year option that makes their bargaining position weaker than if he was on 3 or 4 years. He seems to be a talented winger of the kind Saints need and at 20 he's the right age to step up. It does seem a case of HCDAJFU, which is what this speculative thread is all about.

Would it upset Ian Holloway if Southampton were to make a bid for Tom Ince?

To say that a manager should be kept on for 10 years regardless of how his teams perform over that time would be just as wrong as to say he should be sacked in his first season in the Premier League if the team are not at least mid-table. Two consecutive promotions are obviously to his credit. For Adkins to stay for 10 years would depend on performance over time and so is entirely unpredictable. To hope that he does is another thing though, because that would mean the team were performing well enough for his leaving never to have become an issue. Ironically, if they did extremely well, he might not stay for 10 years because he'd be head-hunted to work elsewhere! As for the sacking issue - Adkins should survive if the team doesn't do well although it might depend on how badly things went. If we were points off the bottom by the end of November a change of manager would be an option for Cortese but even then the other option would be to give Adkins the money to bring in new players in January. He'd surely have to do very badly to be sacked in his first Prem season but in football you can't rule anything out. We have a successful squad that is used to winning and we are told there will be one or two quality additions, so whilst it may not be possible to compete week-after-week with the strength in depth of the current top 6 or 7, there's no reason why we cannot be comfortable in mid table by November. There is one thing I would like to see from Adkins though, and that is for him to improve his interview style by avoiding the repetitive lines he has used over the last couple of years.

Sorry if I wasn't clear - what I'm saying is exactly what Michel Platini is saying - that for football competitions to be meaningful, clubs should compete on a level playing field (no pun intended). The EUFA Fair Play rules might do something about it but it will be a hard fight against the vested interests. In the meantime, if Saints can make 10th in the Premier League given the imbalance of financial resources they will do very well, but many fans will simply see avoiding relegation as success.

With respect, the opening post was rather a statement of known facts plus the bleeding obvious. We all know who the 3 up and 3 down are. We know that the teams that finished in the top 8 of the Premier League this year are likely favourites to do similar next season. All are mentioned in the OP except poor old Everton. Probably the most depressing thing this season has been that the Premier title and the Champions' League title have been taken by the two clubs that have had obscene amounts of money pumped into them and are therefore massively in debt to their owners. The third most depressing thing is that Dalgliesh, whose public personality I don't find particulary attractive but who has taken his club to the FA cup final and won the trophy, has been sacked! So winning the FA cup is no longer good enough for these wealthy foreign owners of what used to be English football clubs. As it is we are fortunate in our foreign ownership but if the Leibherr's were required to put in tens of millions to compete with the Manchesters, Liverpools and Chelseas, would they remain as benign? Who knows, because money has an insidious impact and we can see it is the main factor in which teams head the Premier League. If we play fair, evolving the squad with 2 or 3 signings and bringing on our best young talent, we may well have team we can be proud of, but realistically it will be lucky to get as high as 10th place. Personally, I'd be happy to see us achieve that, rather than have the Leibherr's looking for a big name foreign manager to sign a team full of players who have no idea where Southampton is. One or two, fine, because you must try to compete, but not the wholesale foreign imports and their Italian manager that were parading the Premier League trophy.

According to the Barnsley website, Luke Steele has a contract that expires at the end of next season. Wonder if he might be on Saints' radar?

Have to wait and see how wrong you are, but with 7 subs and the ex-Academy players judged capable of first team football, Pilchard's prediction seems quite probable (except there may not be many times we are winning by three goals!). A place on the bench for a young player is not a sub place blocked, it is a sub who is an option to come on and do a job. Adkins and Crosby are not going to put an ex-Academy player on the bench just to so he has a better view of the game; it will be because they believe the boy can play.