trousers

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......

People like moaning at people who moan. We're all in the same building. Simple as that.

This is true. Sorry if I sound like I'm having a Victor Meldrew moment about this. As others have pointed out, it's not the end of the world. That said, we do have this statement towards the top of the main forum page: "Please note that, at busy periods, you may have to be a Registered or Full Member in order to view the main forum." Which would lead one to believe that there is a configuration switch somewhere that could be flicked. I'd be inclined to restrict it to "Full members only" at really busy times, just to see how it panned out.

Beat me to it....! :-)

So, why (seemingly) don't they do it? Or pehaps they do and we don;t know about it?

This

It's the people that constantly moan at the wrist slitters that depress me most.... ;-)

It's what is known in the trade as "reverse psychology".... ;-)

Lol

I'm just off to check if the stable door is shut and whether there are any horses still in there. Back in a sec.... ;-)