sandwichsaint

Like for like replacement then. Forgot to add, mate got back to work yesterday after a 4 week tour of France and Spain including a trip round the Nou Camp, kudos to the two Saints fans who turned up for the Barcelona stadium tour wearing full replica shirts and shorts and socks, pictures please!

When a picture paints a 1000 words! You haven't got one of an overweight man in a replica football shirt, or a geeky teenager on a football game, pulling the same sort of moves have you?

Agree that we have to consider coaching/training/medical costs but they are still not excessive if you consider the ratio of number of players to number of 'staff' and the fact that 'players' earn disproportionally (far) more than 'staff'. Your argument that the 'headline' figure we see for players' wages doesn't include NI/pensions/bonuses etc distorts the wages more in the favour of the players, more against the club. I've given you a speculative (and completely made up) figure for players' wages (90% of wage costs); you're happy to pontificate on this sort of thing, what do you think they are? (I 'know' you don't 'know', just give me your best-guess).

And therein lies the rub, what is the split between 'players' wages and those of all 'all staff'? Top players earn stupid money, pretty mediocre players earn fairly silly money. Do SFC pay their cooks, launderers, receptionists and car park attendants 20k/40k/60k a week? Unlikely, they probably earn much the same as those professions in the real world. How many 'staff' do SFC actually, directly employ? Presumably catering/stewarding etc is contracted out. How many non-players at the club take a decent/big wedge, probably under 10, probably fewer than five. I would hazard as an educated guess that player wages equal over 90% of the SFC wage bill. I would suggest that over 90% of our wage bill goes on players.

Hope it's an automatic Redmond's driving cos he'll struggle if he has to use his left foot for anything more than standing on.

They can have JF for 24m ....

If we were serious about being in CL in 3 seasons time we would have been better off paying RK what he wanted and keeping Mane another 12 months ..... just saying. Who is the mystery manager in waiting who is only available for another three years? I'll say Eddie Howe. Good penalty analysis too, agree with all of that.

Clever move, and a win/win for Virgin, they get the publicity/PR for sponsoring cheap away tickets but more importantly they ensure that their team/their brand is regularly seen playing in front of a 'full-house' with a decent (and hopefully, for them, noisy and colourful away support). No more empty-seat misery on match of the day, hate that when you go to a game, there's 30k plus in the ground and a decent atmosphere and you go home and watch MOTD and there's a gaping empty block right in line with the cameras. Great move for Virgin, not so sure about for us, hopefully there is more upside of having 3000 away fans at every one of our home games then there is downside.

Definite work in progress, not sure why some are saying it was a good or enjoyable game, a lot of it was pretty poor fare and pretty dull too. An interesting watch rather than an exciting one. We seemed to have lots of bits n pieces players and very little cohesion first half (what have we been doing for the past 6 weeks?), the second half was better, particularly with the introduction of Hojbjerg. When we can field these six: Forster (...) VVD, Fonte, Bertrand, PEH, (..............), Tadic, then we have the basis of a very good side. If we could add some genuine attacking quality (hopefully the hinted-at big signing, a actually materialises, and b is genuinely a cut above what we already have and is ready to go straight in to the side) then the future could be pretty good. The Long/Redmond attacking combo looked very lightweight, particularly without much midfield ooomph behind it. Not sure we learnt much at all yesterday, Cedric still hopelessly inconsistent, Yoshi is a willing and athletic defender but will always give one big chance away, VVD total class, Targett is a work in progress (and better suited to wing back than LB in a back 4), Romeu is a solid competitior (who was hung out to dry yesterday in this formation and personnel), JWP doesn't contribute enough either as an attacker or a defender, SD is a solid continuity player but he is not a creative number 10, Tadic is quality on the ball but won't score too many goals (will create loads of assists though), Long isn't at his best constantly rotating position or playing out wide, Redmond is a young developing player and is in the right place to improve. Hojbjerg absolute class, Pied was pleasing (we haven't seen his defending yet but if he is fit I would probably play him on Friday night), Austin is a lumbering oaf, he needs to get in the box and have some service. Overall, after what was supposed to have been a decent pre-season it was all a bit of an anti climax, Watford were honest but limited (I can't see them going down, they were hard-working, organised, played with good spirit and have got a goal in them, they will be very pleased with an away point at a top 6-8 side!). Saints have a lot to do to maintain last year's levels, but we knew that already. Top 6-8 not impossible if we bought in at least one attacking upgrade, 10th-13th more likely based on yesterday's showing.

We've won on the opening day in all of our PL seasons just twice from 17 attempts, comfortably the worst stats %ge-wise in the whole of the league (yesterday's Sunday Mirror if someone can find it/link it). A betting man might say one of two things: pile on Watford, Saints rarely win in the first game, or, in a contest with three reasonably equal outcomes there is a good chance of a sequence of 2/17 becoming 3/18....... 0-0 looks a good bet, 1-0 if we can nick one, 1-1 if we score and cock-up! Haven't really seen much of pre-season other than some of the comments on here, the comments on the defense are reassuring, the comments on the lack of goals/creativity are concerning. Guess we will see on Saturday, a solid 2-0 would be just the ticket!

If anybody needs a new dog-food related put down then you can have 'whine-a-lot' absolutely free of charge.

For most people yes, unfortunately you are going to have to pay in dodgy sterling so suck it up, Morecambe and Margate are likely to be cheaper (and safer) than Marmaris for the foreseeable.

Send for Boris?

Superb, he has been an absolute legend as 'club captain' and hopefully he can still do his bit to keep the together-as-one flame burning brightly.

I'm not a huge kit fetishist but thanks for the link, an interesting 5 minutes if you have the time to peruse all 20 home and away shirts. Not much bothered either way but ours doesn't look any better when stacked against all the other offerings, in fact considering it's a 'new' offering from an established and usually decent manufacturer I'd say somebody, somewhere has dropped a huge bollock, it's shocking.

Let me stop you right there ...... ££££Sterling is today's correct answer. happy memories (above) of his screamer away at Stoke in the LC, but popular (mongboard) wisdom has it that he only scored at home. does anybody have a breakdown of where in terms of H/A his goals occurred?

Is that the new Everton away kit? (not read the top of the thread yet).

Can I just be the first to say that if we are going to spend £12m on Joe Allen we might as well have kept Jack Cork (..............yes, I know he didn't want to say/we didn't want to give him a better deal/behind MS and VW for starts etc etc). JA is definitely not an upgrade on our current options, more of an addition; he would be an (expensive) squad-filler but he would be an ideal DAJFU-budgeting-for-11th type of a purchase. We could probably get better value abroad but the bottom line is we are already well-stocked in what he offers, we need a decent destroyer and a decent creator, we already have plenty of water carriers. A big 'NO' from me.

[h=1]Live M&G and Aviva suspend property fund redemptions as Brexit fears mount – business live[/h] Pound plunges to new 31-year low as property funds refuse to let investors withdraw money after a rush of post-Brexit redemption requests Read more M&G, the fund management arm of insurer Prudential, suspended its £4.4bn fund this afternoon, citing an increase in redemptions since the referendum. The move came hours after Aviva Investors blamed “extraordinary market circumstances” for its decision to halt withdrawals by investors in a £1.8bn fund, which suffered a surge in requests by backers to redeem their investments because of fears of a property crash after Britain voted to leave the EU. Their decisions came 24 hours after Standard Life blocked investors from taking cash out of its £2.9bn commercial property fund. The suspensions came on another day of drama on the financial markets, 11 days after the vote to leave the EU wrong-footed markets and sparked political turmoil. Among developments: • The pound plunged to a new 31-year low against the dollar, falling 1.8 cents to $1.3090. • A closely watched survey of the services sector, showed a worse-than-expected reading of 52.3 in June, down from 53.5 in May. A reading above 50 indicates growth. • The Bank of England warned that the economic risks caused by the referendum had “begun to crystallise” as it eased regulations on banks to allow them to release up to £150bn of loans to households and businesses. • Chancellor George Osborne held a summit with the heads of the major lenders who pledged to avoid a new credit crisis by making loans available. A spokesman for Aviva Investors said: “The extraordinary market circumstances, which are impacting the wider industry, have resulted in a lack of immediate liquidity in the Aviva Investors Property Trust. Consequently, we have acted to safeguard the interests of all our investors by suspending dealing in the fund with immediate effect.” Aviva said the suspension would give the fund time to sell assets to remain liquid and meet obligations to investors seeking to redeem their holdings. >> From this afternoon's Guardian, #it's happening, #we got our country back.

If Pellegrini has turned £300m into Joe Hart and Raheem Sterling and if the Southampton way has produced/nurtured/improved Clyne/Shaw/Bertrand/Lallana/Forster and possibly JWP too, all on about a quarter of their budget, then I'm very happy that we have appointed a hands-on track-suited manager and player-improver, rather than an expensive trophy-wife type of a manager.

Whatever gets you through the night. In my day we did with Suzi Quatro, Penelope Keith and Anthea from the Generation Game.

Good luck with squaring that circle! There may well be no second referendum, there may well be no re-entry, but if we have those two conditions then it's a given that we have an austerity budget however you wrap it up.

Pic of Roy with giant headline 'Cod Piece'.

...

Big ask. New man will do very well if we get either a top 8 finish in the league OR into the last 16 in the Europa (and then finishing comfortably outside relegation 12th-14th). Not sure we can get a top 10 and a EL run from where we are starting from (unless we are appointing Klopp:o).