ooh it's a corner

Can we still qualify for Europe, or am I being overly optimistic?

YEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSss

If they don't sack him today, I will think the club's season ticket renewal letter will be met by a comparable level of disinterest in my house..... Unforgivable mismanagement from the top down.

Tell that to the Liebherrs.....(although I do concede they will be in a truly small minority of football club owners). Equally, maybe he bought it as a very public way of extracting money from China, without the hoops that he would normally have to go through. Who knows. It doesn't make a lot of sense in any direction at the moment.

I put it down to a change in culture. English football clubs are very quick to pull the trigger against the manager. This is only logical if nobody else is contributing to the team's success or failure. Chinese culture, especially in business, is much more longer term. Decision making can be based on what is going to happen in the next decade, or next 30 years, rather than the next 10 weeks. Perhaps Mr Gao sees the beginning of the end of the premier-league cash cow and is happy to bail out of it now, reduce the wage bill accordingly and rebuild for a post-cash-cow era. Then again, perhaps he just doesn't have a clue and thinks he will make himself unpopular by firing the manager. Ultimately, he is the majority shareholder. The buck stops with him. He must be happy to continue with Pellegrino, otherwise he would pull the trigger.

Decision at 5pm today. I would be surprised if Police/Council want this to go ahead. There's about 4 inches of snow across Southampton, which is enough to stop everything. Fan safety walking to the ground will be a problem. Keep your eye on the news this afternoon

There's a Persian rug shop in the Triangle, obviously he'd buy it from you at the lowest price and sell it at the highest, but he is a good guy and would talk to you sensibly about options/cleaning, best place to sell it....etc

I think we lost all rights to bleat on about fit and proper persons when we allowed a court confessed briber to take ownership of our club...... It just shows how little influence football fans have over ownership and how completely useless the FPP test is. Money talks, it always has and it always will. Even if you have to snaffle £5m from your wife.... Come on, we've all done it.......maybe just on a smaller scale....

In fairness he has a point. We all live to our means and if you earn £50k per week, you will live in a multi-million pound house and probably have a mortgage like the rest of us. The stress of seeing your income cut significantly due to relegation is enough to keep anyone awake at night....... (My heart bleeds for all of the poor little lambs. Doing what they love and getting paid a mint for it. What a terrible life. I suggest they jack it in and go and work in Sainsbury's, it will be less stressful for them). #Snowflakes, could've been penned for Premier League footballers.

I had us third bottom, but with Brighton on 34 points staying up in 17th place. I don't think it will need many more than that, but we have to win our winnable games........and we could really do with a win against one of the big boys..

Does anyone know for a fact if season ticket sales were down under Puel? I have heard, third-hand, that season ticket sales were exactly where we would have expected them to be, so Puel going was not down to a potential decline in gate revenue...... Either way, we appear to be stuck with this clown for a while yet. Win-one, lose two, keep your job, get relegated with thirty odd points.....

From the Red and White Kop, some of these comments about Lallana could have come from us lot; He needs a shave, a haircut, a shower and to get himself fit. He looks like an angry homeless person at the minute. No one who looks like that is going to play well. Should have got a red for the hair, beard and general scruffiness alone. : Looking back through Klopp's time at Dortmund you will see many first choice players getting phased out at 29/30 and then gone from the squad completely by about 32. Ralf Rangnick at Hoffenheim was doing this even earlier at around 25/26/27. It seems high intensity pressing relies heavily on fast-twitch muscle fibres and once a player peaks at 27 you need to start planning to replace them in the squad over the next few years if not sooner. Based on that and Lallana's struggles with injuries and fitness this season, I would be surprised to see him nail down a starting XI place in our side again. Which is a shame as he is one of my favourite players and perhaps the best (only) proper needle players we have now Coutinho is gone.

Get in. Well done boys

5 fecking minutes.....

come on boys......

Come on Saints, ten minutes plus added time. Dig deep.

At least we did it our way.....

I can't forgive Hughes for not moving down here when he was playing for us, we had to fly him down for training every day...... Presumably that would be the same if he was boss?

Yes I do, you are right. I appreciate that I made an analogy that implied that recently sacked football managers need to find the next gig before the money runs out. I should have made the analogy more along the lines of "being out of the media limelight thus reducing their capability of landing the next job". Keegan left Newcastle with an alleged £10m contract to pay off. He never worked in football management again. Howard Wilkinson left Leeds in 1996, hung out for the best job possible and fairly quickly disappeared off the radar. You need to be up front and central to be desirable in football management. (Unless your initials are MP, you're Argentinian and fancy s stint in Hampshire)

This is so simple for an unemployed professional football manager. There are about 400 jobs in Europe that could interest you. Of those 400 jobs, 395 of them currently have an employed manager. If you are an unemployed manager you have two choices, take one of the 5 jobs, or wait (and not earn any money). Of the 5 jobs that may attract you, I can almost certainly guarantee that the English Premier League job pays the best, both before tax and after tax. Take the premier league job, who cares how long for. simple. as. that. We could recruit Bilic/Hughes/Silva etc in a heart-beat

Trying to be objective about this; Lowe bought us something that no previous Chairman had bought, despite strenuous efforts, and that is a new stadium. He was able to do this because he understood financial management and the needs of those institutions that lend multi-millions to business. He was perfectly skilled to establish credibility with the money lender and £30m of their money (or whatever the stadium cost). He tried to generate further revenue streams for the club, with radio station, credit card, concessions on beers and pies etc. He wasn't especially successful in these ventures, but at least had the imagination to try. On the footballing side, he always wanted to buy cheap, or perhaps more accurately, buy within the financial constraints of the club. This frequently meant buying players from lower divisions, with a mixed bag of success and failure. At a managerial level he knew the financial constraints of the club meant he couldn't attract a manager and give them free reign over transfer fees. This limited his managerial candidates to people who were tolerant of a "selling club". Naturally this caused friction with the higher profile managers (Strachan/Redknapp etc) but seemingly caused less friction with the guys who were happy to be managing SFC (Dodd/Wigley/Poortvliet etc). It was almost inevitable that a continued buy cheap/sell high approach to recruitment runs out of luck eventually and we got relegated. At this point any goodwill aimed at the board disappeared and Lowe became the target man (with a huge amount of justification). Lowe was well reimbursed for his services at Southampton, and being a posh bloke, who admittedly preferred hockey to football, was never a hit with the fans. We couldn't relate to him, and he couldn't relate to us. He left as hated as Brantfoot. Compare the Lowe era to Les (or perhaps more accurately Les and Ralph). Ralph has so many similar traits. He is not a football man. He clearly is able to achieve credibility in certain spheres. He struggles to relate to the fan base, as we do to him. He has tried to raise the profile of the club in overseas markets. I am not sure any of these financial efforts have born much fruit. He is articulate and a credible figure head to put in front of the national press/cameras, but he comes across as an aloof, out of touch, distant, Chairman. He too is well paid for his services and I doubt we would miss him one iota if he jacked it in tomorrow. Les has a history in professional football. He will understand and appreciate the operational needs of a professional football club. This does give him a slight advantage, however any operational leader worth their salt would pick this up very quickly, so I don't see his football experience as a massive advantage (other than the perception that he is a "football man" as opposed to a "hockey man"). Les has followed a model of buy cheap and sell high, married seemingly with a promote the youth policy. However the promote the youth policy seems to depend on who the manager is, rather than a mandated "you must play at least.......youth players". Les has come unstuck over recent seasons with both managerial appointments, player retention, player contracts and player recruitment. I cannot understand how repeated record buys have been bought to bolster the first team squad, rather than become first team regulars. This seems odd. Anybody who oversees a relegation is going to be unpopular. Under Lowe's stewardship, his reluctance to spend money on footballers cost us our premier league status. The 11 players assembled were simply not good enough at that level. Under Les's stewardship, his reluctance to fire the manager could cost us our premier league status. The 11 players are clearly good enough at this level, but are being mis-managed. If you look at legacy. Lowe definitely has a legacy. that of the stadium. Les has overseen a meteoric rise from League 1 to Europe and a major cup final. However we have enjoyed Europe before (and presumably will do so again). If we get relegated this season and Les retires, there will be no legacy. Thanks for your hard work Les but adios. Les is probably just about as unpopular now as Lowe was in our first relegation season. Lowe hung around and outstayed his welcome by a long way. This compounded the hatred for him. If Les is here when we get relegated from the Championship, he will be just as unpopular as Lowe. I understand the OP question. I would imagine most fans think Lowe was far worse than Les, but I think if we judge the pair of them after they have both left, I think we will view them both in equal dislike. If we go down Les will be comparable to Lowe on the dislike barometer. If we stay up, Lowe will continue to be perceived as the biggest villain we have ever had as Chairman. Right now, I would guess that Lowe would be comfortably ahead on the dislike stakes.

I have clung to the hope that the board wanted the window to slam shut, before announcing the replacement manager, using the excuse that they gave MoPe the best chance, the most time they could afford, but it hasn't worked out. I fully expected just the one signing in the window, and the new manager to come in after it has closed. Here's hoping today is the day. But if it is not, then I think my season's depression will reach a new low. we cannot survive with this guy at the helm, he simply isn't capable of picking up enough points.

We need to doctor the image of Dejan's daughter in the Nou Camp, holding up a sign that says "Where's my Daddy's friend Virgil?"

That is very funny. £75m and presumably not match fit (coz he has been ambling around the pitch for 6 months). I would be bloody furious if I had signed a £75m guy, playing in the same league as me, and he can't manage a couple of games in a week.......

Rory Delap for £4m. The stuff that dreams were made of. (or a hugely underwhelming record buy). But not quite as disappointing as the back page of the Echo headline from 1986, "Saints sign World Cup star"...... thoughts of Maradona, Burruchaga, Rummenigge, Beardsley even, but oh no, Colin Clarke..... Not a record signing and in fairness to the lad he did well for us the following season, 20 goals or so, but not quite the headline act I was hoping for. Wind forward 30 plus years, and not much changes.....