sandwichsaint

Shocking, it wouldn't at all surprise me if it all comes out that these Russians are in fact, directly or indirectly, some sort of state-funded, para military terrorists.

Des Walker must be disappointed he can't get in that back four, Rio would be a shoo-in, with his street shoes on. We really are blessed to watch VVD and Fonte every week.

Agreed, I can hear her now, 'I told you not a penny less than £8m/year, tell'em to stick their £7m/year where the sun don't shine'.... that seems the most obvious reason for the hold up when you look at it like this.

That'll be Martin Allen, with the swimming trunks and the river Itchen then. That'll show the modern player.

Not sure about Pelligrini, positives: experience, track record, big name, nice guy, good hair, could attract name players. negatives: his teams seem to play in fits and starts, doesn't appear to be tactically very flexible, could be looking for one last pay day, very expensive, seems to have wasted a vast amount of money at City (tbf he probably doesn't buy the players but would have had some sort of say). Looks like a very non-Saints appointment and he could be a bit of an expensive vanity signing, though would obvs worth every penny if he could push us into the top 4. Seems more like a smoke screen while we smuggle in the usual below the radar appointment.

1970, 1973, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1995, 1998, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2015, 2016, complete list of the two seasons Saints have finished above Everton. Oh, hang on, it's 13 times, not 2 times. Two things flicking through those old tables, for a big club Everton have had relatively little success and have indeed steered very close to relegation themselves on quite a few occasions. Flicking through it is also clear how well Moyes did, achieving and then maintaining top 6 finishes over a sustained period of time. Everton are definitely a bigger club though; any club that can spunk £10m-£12m on a manager that might move them up 3 or 4 places in a couple of seasons before he then fecks off to his spiritual home (or even drops back down a level or two if the £££ price is right) have truly earned themselves genuine BigClub bragging rights.

I saw him on the box the other night with his son Jamie, proper football people.

Slight correction having now read it .... no replays in the 6th round (last , there are still replays in Round 5 (last 16). There's been no replays in the semi's for some time so in fact they have only added in one extra round of non-replays ... I think my 5th round thing is probably better than their 6th round model!

Or as us oldsters know it, the 5th round. Sad but kind of inevitable really, but glad they've kept them for rounds 1-4 though, that's probably a decent compromise. I pretty much gave up on the FA Cup when they moved the SF's to Wembley. I probably see more League Cup football than FA Cup football on telly over the course of a season.

I remember being massively under-whelmed the first time I saw Anders Svennson, it was away at Gillingham either in a pre-season friendly or a league cup game. He had been massively bigged up on what would have been the old version of this site and he wasn't at all what I was expecting, just a bit meh. He was always competent but never really that top-level cut-above than many thought we were buying.

Charlton fans have boycotted their ST renewals, I understand up to a 1000 have bought West Ham ST's. Could be an unfortunate by-product for us if we went too big and too cheap, a 1000 fishy folk in the ground every home game.

Just need to get rid of Pelle now and then we can install the wet-dream team of Austin and JRod, not sure who would play in the other 35 games though.

If these were the only three clubs we could buy players from then 'yes' to Redmond and Townsend. Ruddy CDAJFU in the Stek role, personally I would rather have Darlow at third choice and move Gazza on, no thanks to Wdam, I can't stand players that only play at home, though obviously he's Dutch and therefore guaranteed to improve his effort/attitude under RK. But being as we are not restricted to buying from just these three clubs I seriously doubt we will get 50%-plus of next year's stock from the three relegated clubs.....

This was the single best piece of the whole night! Totally deluded ... !

Mitrovic is an utter thug, hopefully that's the last we see of him in our football.

Yay! I opened mine a couple of weeks back and thought, nice, they've used the view exactly from my seat to sell STs! A couple of slow thinks later and I realised that they had probably personalised them! Nice touch by the club, got mine on the office wall.

Au contraire there's never been a better time to expand, and that window may never come again. 6-year upward trend, massive feel-good factor, new TV money , stable and well-run, excellent succession planning (we've hit the jackpot with our last FOUR managers), we have demonstrated that we are able to sustain and in fact increase footballing performance at the same time as running a financially sustainable model. We have an ageing fanbase that will need supplementing by another generation that has the habit of going to live and affordable football. Not saying I necessarily agree with all that and there's a bit of devil's advocate in there but I do think if you look at other clubs and project forward 5-10 years we risk being stuck in a modern equivalent of a 30,000 seat Dell while all our rivals are playing in 60-000 seat stadia. 'Risk' being the operative word, not sure there's an easy answer either way.

Slightly torturous logic, we need to expand the stadium in case football becomes less popular at some time in the future? I think you'll have to run that one by the bank manager again.

Agree with the above, this does happen occasionally, at the moment they just put the free kick a couple of yards in their own half, presumably under this rule they would take it where the 'offside' player played the ball or interfered with play.

Maybe the ref/lino did take all this into account and decided that Forster hadn't been disadvantaged? He clearly had time to get himself into a position where he could have gone down with his hands and collected the ball a stride ahead of Son. The fact that he was caught in several minds and didn't do much of anything isn't really any fault of the ref, or of Kane (unless Forster could prove that his failure to make a fairly routine-but-brave piece of goal keeping was that Kane had got in his head). I thought it was a goal, and I'd be unhappy if we had a similar one chalked off on Sunday.

It wouldn't be the end of the world if De Boer took over in the next month with a full pre-season, as opposed to keeping RK into his final year and him becoming a bit of a lame duck as we are battered by constant speculation as to a) where he is going next, and b) who's coming to us next. It could be a bit of a bloodless coup/perfect succession planning by Les if you will. FWIW my preferred option would be RK to sign an improved contract, keep Mane and VW, buy a couple of starting level players (improvements on what we've got); if we did all that we could have genuine aspirations on the top-4. Will be interesting to see how it all pans out but De Boer is a pretty decent Plan B.

Maritinez and de Boer looks a bit 2+2, let's hope RK's not the answer.

Iconic pic, you will be seeing this for the next 20 years. A muslim women and child are rescued by a couple of NF/BNP/UKIP/WHU types who forget their prejudices and remember their humanity. The authority figure is totally clueless (or uncaring?). Look on the left and everything's for sale. This is England, on several different levels.

Who's getting the keys to a new Ford Cortina before kick-off? TBF it will probably be upgraded to a Focus ST in today's money - my money's on SRL.

Utter joke.