trousers

Indeed. Like it or not, Cortese has a blanket policy of keeping what goes on at the club inside the club. This IFO organisation (which I'd never heard of before) obviously don't have the power to demand evidence from 'the defence', otherwise Cortese would have had no choice but to comply at the time of their enquiries. If this IFO organisation is going to be 100% effective (i.e. able to come up with judgements based on having all the facts disclosed to them) then it should be given the appropriate levels of authority within the football industry to achieve this. It all sounds a tad half baked to me - an ombudsman with, ultimately, no powers. The words 'chocolate' and 'teapot' spring to mind....

Tokio Marine Best Marketing Campaign Barnsley - Get What You Want Colchester United - The Colchester United Voucher Scheme Derby County - Black and White Forever Doncaster Rovers - The Rovers Roadshow Reading - Engaging Female Supporters Sheffield Wednesday - Season Ticket Holder Birthday Bar Southampton - 125th Anniversary Kit Launch Southend United - Thriller Campaign Fat chance of winning that one. The PC brigade will be voting for Reading in their droves..... ;-)

Indeed - it does look bizarre on the surface. Which is why I suspect there is a piece of information that the club has withheld (for whatever reason) that would help explain this apparent bizarreness. It's only bizarre because we don't both sides of the story. It could of course still be a bizarre if we did know the facts....will we ever know?

If such a tactic is good enough for Pompey..... ;-)

Chamberlain up for one too.... Football Manager Apprentice of the Year - npower League 1 Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain - Southampton Dale Jennings - Tranmere Rovers George Baldock - Milton Keynes Dons

The way I read it is that they weren't privy to all the facts as the club refused to divulge all the facts (as they see it). So, the IFO found in favour of NI precisely because that's all they had to go on. (as far as I can tell) So, yes, the club are guilty......of not providing the information requested. And, yes, I think it's odd that if the club did nothing wrong (in their eyes) that they didn't give the IFO the full picture. It could be said that this implies they have something to hide. There again, it could imply that they didn't see it important enough to get embroiled in. All of which supposition means that I will remain a relatively lone voice and not cast judgement on either side.

Alas, that logic seems to be falling on a few deaf ears....

How can we be so sure of that? We know what the club did but what we don't know is why. Unless I, and the IFO, missed it somewhere? I totally agree that all the anecdotal evidence points to the possibility that the club have handled this shabbily, but we have no tangible evidence to back that up, just anecdotal evidence. In this country, saying "No comment" does not prove guilt. It's a basic right of defence whether we like it or not. Saying nothing doesn't prove anything one way or the other. Yes, it can imply guilt, but that is all.

Minimum of 6 in the main cabin. If memory serves me correctly, we've had a 7 seater before -> 4 seats (with table), plus 3 seats behind that (+ driver and passenger seats at front of course) We've used http://www.vansforbands.co.uk before but they're based in Oxford so looking for something closer to home cheers edit: this is what we've used before (although not quite as posh as this one!)

I don't see a huge number of people leaping to the clubs's defence TBH. I see plenty of people criticising the club (quite rightly in terms of how they seem to have handled the communication side of things), plus there's some of us sitting on the fence until we know what happened on both sides.

Were there any discussions as to the future of The Saints Trust between Nick and SFC prior to this event? If there was, do we know how amicable those discussions were?

Blimey,. That's nearly double the amount of threads we have about them.... ;-)

If I send you a PM asking for a free slot, how will you know whether I'm PM'ing you in response to your 'sexual problems' thread or the match day thread? I feel we need a mechanism for differentiating the two.

I read it (between the lines) slightly differently....my GUESS is that the ticket purchase was denied because of the channels that were used to question the policy (i.e. Saints Trust / Echo) rather than the fact it was questioned per se. For example, I'm sure if I'd written to the club asking them to explain their policy, and they replied to me to explain, then I wouldn't have been denied a season ticket (whether I agreed with their reasoning or not). Yes, on the surface it looks "petty and childish" but we don't know what happened, from the club's perspective, leading up to this dispute....

Monday 26th December this year

Blimey. That's twice this year already that someone's agreed with me. I'll be hitting double figures by Boxing day at this rate....

I agree with Phil

They came to their judgement in the absence of a full explanation from the club. It was quite clear from the tone of their "judgement" that they were hacked off by the club playing their "we reserve our commercial right to sell our product to whom we choose" card. The IFO seem to be playing the same tit-for-tat game that we're accusing the club of playing.., I will continue to reserve my own judgement until I know the full facts.

That may be so but until we have both sides of the story (if we ever do) we've no idea how "childish" the other side were. Without being in possession of the full facts I'm reserving judgement.

P.s. I jolly well hope none of my taxes pay for this IFO quango... ;-)

My GUESS is that the new owners were keen to start with a clean slate which meant severing all links with previous regimes at the club - including those organisations that held said regimes to account. I would venture (again, pure guesswork) that the club made it clear to the people running The Saints Trust that it was a link with the past and that they wanted to use different communication channels to communicate with the fans (e.g. More emphasis on 'official' announcements via the OS and more personal 'dinner with Cortese' events). The Saints Trust probably disagreed with this stance and thus things headed down the 'tit for tat' route...(SFC: "please remove affiliation with club from your website"; Trust: "we're complaining through the press about your season ticket plans"; SFC: "if you don't like it we won't sell you one then"....blah, blah, blah... If the above is anywhere close to the gist of it then I'm pretty sure NI would have had a season ticket if heels hadn't been dug in to keep a (some would say) 'without mandate' organisation going... None of this is my opinion nor is it observation of fact. Just putting a theory out there which may or may not be near the mark. For what it's worth, I tend to agree with the club in principle (i.e. That the Saints Trust served a purpose when the club was a plc, but not now) but also tend to agree that the way they apparently handled it was poor (I believe Cortese admitted in his December BBC interview that all communication last summer wasn't up to scratch, for obvious reasons)

Well, this is more important than the affect of wars, civil unrest and famine on the world economy, so understandable...

Does anyone know of any vehicle rental companies in the Hampshire area that hire out splitter vans? (mini bus at front / equipment storage at rear) An initial Google search has been pretty fruitless. Cheers

Cheer up me ol' mucker - we just won a game of football - and that's what it's all about - ooooooohhhhh the okey cokey......