sandwichsaint

I just hope that the person in the crowd with the transistor radio gets the right info out to the players, we don't want another Bally.

Long also contributed one of the highlights of the season away at Millwall - his 'air shot' then crossing the ball off his wrong foot, it was stunning live and something I'd never seen done before.

Nice touch including Forster.

Was dreading this after the Leic game but as someone once said 'a week's a long time in football'; I'm massively looking fd to it now, the players will be on a real high and we've hit some form just when we need it. Clearly City will be a 100 times better than Villa were yesterday but you'd have to fancy our front three against anyone if they all click again, and a welcome return to form for Clyne yesterday, and prob JWP's best game for Saints. My only grizzle is I hope we play Gazza, he deserves it after yesterday and playing in a 'big' game will do wonders for his development; I love KD and he's been a brilliant club captain but there's no room for sentiment (for me) in a game that has a fair bit riding on it.

Footballers eh? More spin than Strictly ..... .

Or as some of us call it 'living in a democracy'. Just because we've had an election it doesn't mean everybody has to 100% fall-in behind the winners for the next 5 years. Debate, disagreement, alternatives, choices (and more regrettably hatred and bigotry) all carry on regardless, and for the most part that's a jolly good thing too. (Sorry if this doesn't relate to the link, I haven't read that, just replying to UJ's reds-under-the-bed paranoia).!

Very tolerant people the Brits, 5m votes for 2 seats! That's indefensible in any language. Chuck in another 2-3 m who didn't bother voting cos their votes make no difference and the same again who voted 'tactically' ie negatively, all based on polling info which we now know was utter horsec9rap. Not sure how we get there but I'd be astonished if we still have FPTP in 40 years time.

We haven't played Fonte+Toby plus VW+MS since the game we lost FF..... coincidence? I don't think so, those four are as good as anything in the league and clearly a level above any of the other combinations that we have played there.

Cambiasso was excellent yesterday, worth every penny if Leic stay up.

Here's a tiny little and quite superficial insight and I put it out there without any spin just as I saw it. Me and the missus stayed up at Leicester on Friday night, decent hotel on the outskirts, we rocked up at 8-00 and I jokingly said to Mrs Sandwich is the team bus here yet? She said, what, do Saints stay here, i said i don't know but it's the sort of place they would. Didn't think any more of it and we were sat down in the lobby/lounge area at about 9-25 when lo and behold I look up to see RK and group of players heading across the lobby. Players and entourage enter (we must travel with a total complement of 40-plus people including players and staff) plus assorted kit and medical bits and pieces. Slightly surprised to see Les Reed was at the centre of it all, no particular reason he wouldn't be but i was surprised to see him so hands-on with the team, does he travel to all the games? Hotel was virtually empty, couple of families at the door with kids and the players very relaxed and signed autographs and did pics etc. Players very polite, very relaxed, and super proffessional in the public areas. They had all the first floor booked out and using the business suites for team meetings and physio etc and ate upstairs, the staff ate downstairs with the general public. Saturday the staff were up and about pretty early, players appeared from 09-00 and ate upstairs. At this stage I got chatting to someone with the team about the routine for the day, just generally interested in their eating and prep etc. I asked him if they were late last night (9-30 ish). They said not particularly late but it did make it tight for physio etc and an early night, the players had trained at Staplewood on Fri, evening meal there, then flown (to East Mids presumably?) and then coach transfer. I asked him the arrangements for the morning and he said the players would come out for a walk after breakfast at about 10-00 and would walk around the car park and the local area (a bunch of out-of-town trading estates) for about 20 minutes just to relax, get some fresh air and help digest their breakfast. Players came out bang on cue, it was a blowy morning and they walked once round the block and were back inside within 5 or 6 minutes. Players then either went to their rooms or sat in the public area reading papers and magazines. I did get a chance to speak to Harrison Read and asked him if he was playing, he said he wouldn't know until the team meeting at 12-30, and we small talked across the foyer area. So that's it really, a tiny snap shot of the life of a pro footballer so my conclusions on the public face of SFC (?) Saints players really are a credit to the club The whole team (players and staff) are very relaxed and there appears a real positive buzz about them In fact the atmosphere is so laid back they are almost horizontal The players clearly want for nothing, everything about the set-up is PL and very professional Players may have some autonomy, clearly somebody made the decision they would only go out for 5 mins rather than 20. Footballers are very young and very lean when you see them up close in their training kit! I'm sure if we had won 2-0 yesterday I would be posting up brilliant, superb preparation; when I was walking out of the King Power yesterday I was cursing the whole set-up and wishing that they had slept in tents and had tripe and onions for tea!

Yeah, pretty s5hit day out really, total no-show by us on the pitch and we were completely owned by the Leicester fans off the pitch. I get it that there's not much to play for and we've had a really good season but the King Power was not a good place to be for a Saints fan yesterday. Team lacked any sort of shape and discipline and it was like time-travelling back to a time when we always used to be pretty gutless away from home. I'm not one to moan about our support and all that but this was my first away league game this season (I did the league cup games) and it wasn't what I was expecting at all. I've always rated our away support as pretty good but it was pathetic yesterday. Some of the people round me made more noise and appreciation at the end of the game than they did for the whole 90 minutes. Did people really clap the team off yesterday? Probably 50% did but there was plenty who told them what they thought of them too, I was firmly in the what-they-thought-of-them camp! And someone sort Mane's diving out - it's getting beyond embarrassing now.

Remind me again, exactly which bits of Labour's manifesto were actually 'red'? Stay in NATO Keep polaris Not repeal trade union law Not re-nationalise the railways Keep tax and spend broadly where it is now Maintain and improve the NHS Encourage the private provision of houses (both for sale and social housing) Not take back academies and free schools into local democratic control. There must have been lots in there I missed cos I'm not seeing any red there.

Tories are in a very difficult place, they can now govern on their own wit hno LD concessions, but with a majority reduced from 70 to close to zero; their big-business backers are very much pro-Europe and moving out of the EU is generally seen as being bad for big-business/finance/city of London. The leadership will now be forced to squirm between their own big-business backers and their hard-line anti-Europe back-benchers. UKIP offered two distinct (but connected) policies, namely coming out of Europe and reducing immigration. I would suggest the majority of UKIP voters voted for the latter over the former. While Ukip clearly do attract voters from right across the spectrum including plenty of bright and articulate people (step fd our very own Lord D.) my, admittedly anecdotal, evidence based on what I've seen/read the last few weeks and living in Farage's actual putative constituency and having seen Farage and his followers canvassing down my actual street is that the majority of Ukip support is concerned first and foremost with 'immigration' and rather less with more peripheral concerns about sovereignty. I'm not sure you can take the Con's 36%? + UKIP's 10%? = 46%? of those that voted as a 'massive endorsement' (of ONE single policy)? For what it's worth I don't disagree with the first part of your post, the EU has clearly grown and become increasingly undemocratic with little say from the people, but that's the price of a parliamentary democracy, we elect people to make decisions for us, we don't vote on single issues and parties don't stand on single issues, and we don't (generally) have referunda unless it's on big one-off issues, the EU has been established through 'creep' over 30+ years. Clearly it is time for a straight in/out referendum with all sides agreeing to be bound by the result for a set number of years (20?); clearly in real life that won't happen, the side that loses will be back picking at it within 6 months (see Scottish devolution!) Probably like a lot of issues in politics 'Europe' is massively important, but to a relatively small number of people. The reality is a lot of people give it little thought and to all intents and purposes it doesn't impact overtly on their day-to-day life either positively or negatively (although of course in reality Euro law underpins a lot of day-to-day stuff). If you ask people in the street or pub or at work their concerns they would be more likely to say: health/housing/cost of living/immigration/education/local issues before they ever say 'Europe' Out of interest what do you think the split would be on an in/out vote? I'll go 55/45 in favour of staying in.

It's been my though for a long time but this election absolutely confirms it - they should ban publishing opinion polls from 60 days before the election. They add nothing to the debate; as we have seen (again) they are all froth and ******** but they are covered in depth as 'news' and 'facts' by the media. All they do is create a false choice for voters and add to the general terror, in an ideal world people should vote for who they want (in a fully PR system) but all they do in FPTP system is encourage tactical voting on what we now know to be very partial and selective information. Did the ConLab vote really split from 34/34 to 36/30 in 24 hours? Of course it didn't, someone somewhere is telling us a load of porkies, who those people are and why they would do that I couldn't possibly begin to speculate.

How weird ... I don't think I once heard the Tories say the election was about keeping Red Ed out of Downing Street. Oh, hang on, I don't think I heard 'anything' else from the Tories in the last 2 weeks of the campaign - the Tories started off negative and it went downhill from there. Their original tactic was to marginalise/ridicule Miliband and when people actually saw and heard him he started to gain some traction they just set out to destroy him, classic playing the man not the ball stuff. Tories played a blinder, over-cut in the first 2-3 years, got people used to the austerity narrative, then spent blindly on an inflated property bubble for the last two years. Didn't engage in much public debate, didn't particularly campaign on their record, didn't particularly have a view going forward of what they actually want for the country, backed into a corner by Ukip and their own 'looney right' into offering an in/out EU referendum, were allowed to float completely non-specific cuts of £12,000,000,000 to welfare, and then produced an astonishing list of un-costed magic money tree proposals right through the campaign (inheritance tax, extra £8b for NHS, right to buy, various tax cuts + threshold changes, extra child care) and the ultimate humiliation the Conservative and Unionist party reduced to pleading with Scots to vote Nationalist! Labour, again, have failed spectacularly. Their core strategy of getting 35% of people into their camp was blown away mainly by the SNP and UKIP, and surprisingly at least some of the ex-LD vote appears to have gone to the Tories rather than Labour. Labour have never recovered (and looking at the 'new' electoral arithmetic) may never rule the UK or the rump-UK again. They have paid a massive price for the lies and myths that have grown up around the 'great crash' and I hope the guy who wrote that silly note about running out of money feel suitably pleased with himself this morning. The most negative campaign we've ever seen in the UK and the most 'presidential' too, there were very few personalities on show (from any of the parties) and the more extreme (or the most challenging/interesting people depending on your point of view) were kept safely locked up and out of site for the duration of the campaign. Very few issues 'ran', it was the economy, economy, economy day-in, day-out. There was very little honest debate or vision about anything very much at all - health service, education, transport, all got tick box, sound bite type coverage but no deeper vision or analysis. Virtually nothing about 'internationalism', defence, environment, justice, social justice, future of the welfare estate, equality/inequality. People have voted out of fear, rather than hope, the mantra appears to be 'I'm alright today, and if people below me who are already suffering badly have to suffer a bit more for me to keep my place in the pecking order, then that's just the way it is, the natural order of things. Things probably won't get much better for me but if I can keep my place things hopefully won't get worse for me either'. Interesting times ahead, and the prospects for millions of people are about to get much harder, can you buy shares in foodbanks?

They'd kill for 17th place.

I wouldn't have expected him or the local paper to say anything else; having a PL football club in your city or region is 'massive' and they have certainly shown good fightability to retain this status over the last 6 games or so (and we haven't particularly, esp away from home). Doesn't mean that if it's 0-0 at HT or other results start to go against them then their crowd won't get anxious, all crowds do.

'Interesting' angle but not sure I entirely buy it, I'm not sure a player would be considered 'fit' in one position and not in another (and I'm pretty sure Athletico wouldn't be over-joyed if they knew!). As for your DM v CB thing I'm pretty sure CB would be more stressful than DM on a potential dislocated/damaged shoulder - most risk would surely come from pushing/pulling/holding at free kicks and corners, landing awkwardly from ariel duals, falling over the oppo and crash-landing during a heading duel, ditto having the opponent land on top of you after a heading duel, getting cleaned out by your own keeper etc ... all more likely occurrences at CB than DM in my risk assessment. Equally don't buy the hamstrings thing either, if we wanted to nurse his hamstrings we could arguably do that easier at CB than DM too. It looks blatantly obvious from a number of selections/permutations that RK thinks that: Fonte+Yoshida and VW+Toby > Fonte+Toby and VW(or MS)+Reed , 'most' on here would disagree especially if you put KD in to the mix too ... but are ours is not to do, ours is to get behind the team as selected!

I had pretty much switched off after Saturday but I have just re-energised myself by buying a ticket, amazing how having a ticket in your hand turns you from half-empty to half-full in the time it takes you to say t-h-i-r-t-y-f-i-v-e-p-o-u-n-d-s. I'm not on the beach yet and I don't expect the players to be either. Entertaining draw for me, 2-2 or 3-3; I can't see a clean sheet all the time we refuse to play our best back 4, but I think we can score plenty* against a desperate team with an anxious home crowd on their backs. COYRs! * That'll be the Spurs Pelle and not the Sunderland Pelle then.

Triffic, the best idiot's guide to football finances I've ever seen. Must-read piece but allow yourself 20 mins+, I've just skimmed it in 5 minutes but will read it properly tonight.

I agree, it looks like we can remove those quote marks in the title then.

Pap, back in the day.

My youtube is blocked at work, who won it that year?

You wonder how far Brian Clough would have got in the media age, you would like to think he would have done equally as well if he had been able to tolerate the goldfish bowl all of PL football has become but no guarantee he would have been prepared to play their game. I don't have a problem with NP being rude to journalists, it just looks poor on him and his club but if it gets the job done then he's entitled to say he's done it his way. I guess his fans would see it differently to how others see it as outsiders, not sure WGS is half as funny as we all thought he was at the time. He could also come over as quite boorish and borderline rude to journo's but we all lapped it up, I'm sure others didn't find him half as funny as we did. NP was also a very good manager for us, he got the job done with a minimum of fuss and he would likely have carried that on if we had appointed him the next season.

Ye, but if Bournemouth are going to be the new Swansea won't they also be qualifying for Europe themselves by then?