Fan The Flames

Refs have enough problems making that split decision about a dive, force them to have to give a red and they will be even more reluctant to call a dive.

I play football on a Friday night in Kent and the non-prem fans outweigh the prem fans by about 2 or 3 to 1. Amoungst the ood Arsenal and Chelsea fans and the ****in southern Man U fans, there are two or three each of Palace, Gillingham, Charlton and then there is West Ham, Leeds, Forest, Leicester, Saints and Oxford and Im probably missing a few. The pint afterwards is dominated by Championship talk it's great.

The 'cost' of going up wasn't about ticket prices but about the good things from lower league football that we will miss out on.

Its all about how quickly you got in to the top flight, with one up one down the top flight were protected. So once you were in there you were pretty safe. If we had been given our equitable position we would have got into the top flight sooner and become one of the big boys of English football, we would have been more successful, had bigger crowds meaning we could have handled the ground debt. We was robbed by northern power monkeys.

The FL invited the London clubs to really damage the SL and we were a victim of our geography. I guess its all about where the seat of power is and the FL league where determined that it remained in the North, however with the London teams in the SL and their access to a large metropolitan area was as threat to the FL, so by poaching them the FL consigned the SL to a definite decline. The FL and SL should have merged and each team given its equitable place.

You are looking at it from the clubs perspective where as the OP is looking at from a fans point of view, so it is possible for fans to not want us to go up, or in other words prefer life in the Championship. Of course fans want SFC to compete at the highest level but the OP is exploring the cost of going up.

When you look at the Saturday results the champ has ten games with loads of goals and exciting scorelines and is littered with good teams. Look at the prem there are five games with at least one goaless draw and a few one nils. All the good games are spread all over the weekend, bring back Saturday 3 pm. The big boys won't form a European league whilst they are allowed to dominate domestically as well.

Do you really think that the Arsenal PR department know about or are bothered to react to the few on here getting ancy about the young lad kissing the badge after scoring his first goal for Arsenal.

Kissing the badge is great and its in my top three of goal celebrations if I was a footballer. It about the timing, some might see this one as a bit early but the young lad can be forgiven for that, was it his first goal for Arsenal after all.

Aldershot away please and no switching of grounds.

It was being abused in the past so the club had to do something.

You've hedged your bets between 5 and 10000 fans.

Is it in all regions.

Next to Beattie

With the chance of becoming champions would we really fix the game. Was it regarded as a fix at the time or has the myth developed over the years by our sad south coast cousins.

Gulys finish was sweet.

My mate is an Arsenal fan and he put his name down for a season ticket years ago and every year he got a letter telling him where he is in the list. Last season he was down to 13000 in the list, this season he got a letter saying he is now eligible for a ST. So that means that a combination of 13000 people have either given up their ST or declined the offer of a ST that they have been waiting for for years. He didn't take up the offer either, he like a lot of us has got the disposable.

We got promoted so the relative rise would be less than these absolute figures. As a fan base we are not used to promotions and the associated increase in ticket prices, that incidentally happens at every club.

Claridge was very complimentary of us earlier on 5L.

The FOTB thing gets slagged of a lot on here but at the time a lot of people thought that the club was running out of control and contrary to the desire's of the fans. It would always have been impossible for a Saints Trust to buy the club, so some people thought a FOTB was a compromise and one way of trying to influence the running of the club for the good of the fans. It was dark times and people were thinking of anything to make things better, so should they be knocked for trying to find solutions to the problems of the time. Anyhow its all in the past and we can look forward to much better times.

Early yes, embarrassing hardly, right probably.

very very happy

Congratulations boys, top of the league again.

Sven said yesterday "now we deserved to win this game", which emphatically means he thinks they didn't deserved to win our match. What is a better loss 1 nil or 3 2, it has to be the one that the league table rewards more.

Apart from Middlesbrough and I guess Derby, the results were kind to us.