VectisSaint

Brilliant result. We never used to be good at holding on to leads. Just for a few minutes we were 4th and in a CL place, maybe thats what Artur meant when he thought we could challenge for CL this season:D If only Wet Sham had equalised against Everton. Well done to the lads, saving MP from the sack.

Ah, glad to see that Baird has found a decent club, I missed that elsewhere. Are Reading becoming our new reserve team?

Reached by UEFA, hardly surprising given the vested interests of the UEFA major leagues. FIFA organise the World Cup, not UEFA.

No one has an obsession with you, only in your tiny little mind could anyone be obsessed with a pathetic WUM. You are just a sad little troll who does not know the meaning of common decency and continue to post offensive material without understanding even how it is offensive. The pity is that the Mods continue to completely disregard the board rules that you break many times per day and they are the ones who in the end will have no forum to moderate.

He knows exactly how offensive it is, and takes great delight in offending as many people as he can.On a good forum moderators ban trolls and those who are offensive continually but here Turkish gets away with it and his infantile behaviour is encouraged to develop as a result. As a result due to this and a couple of others most of the good posters have either left or are no longer full members and rarely post.

Just a thought but maybe that was because (a) he was injured (jet ski accident) and then (b) he went out on loan to try to regain match fitness. Difficult for MP to have selected him as such, though it is feasible that he could have stopped the loan, possible but unlikely. Adkins clearly rated him prior to his first injury. It looks therefore like the managers didn't agree with you.

Not so much passes but his free kicks and corners. Gary Neville was waxing lyrical, about the only quality in the game apart from JJ.

He misplaced rather a lot of simple passes and often put us under unnecessary pressure. I really like VW but today he was awful. I thought MP should have hauled him off after his yellow. Had a couple of good attempts in the 2nd half, but was woeful first half at the job he is supposed to do.

To say much else really just smacks of a lack of ambition. VW stated goal this season is to do better than last. Seems perfectly reasonable. After that who knows, but if we enter a competition with an ambition that says we should aim to finish 5th or lower what sort of lily-livered outlook is that? It may seem implausible but aiming for 4th place (or 3rd if you think like me that Champions League actually means not having to go through qualifying) is surely not being over ambitious. I know when Ted or Lawrie were in charge the ambition was to win the sodding league, not aim for 5th place. Times have changed but if you don't think there will ever come a time when we could aim to finish 3rd or 4th then why waste time supporting the team. I doubt I will ever see it happen in my lifetime, but there's nothing wrong with having some ambition and some dreams. Some people hang on the words of people too much and use those words to mock, but would mock equally if our stated ambition was to finish mid-table every season. Seems to be too much of this lack of ambition these days in this country, always happy to be also-rans, the plucky little losers. Well done VW, at least we know what you're trying to achieve (even if you may be a little deluded). Lets get the first bit done first and do better than last year.

Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

Not much doubt why we signed him in the first place, those that saw him play in the NPC before Guly did his thing know that he was a talented player. He's taken a long time to recover from that and a foolish accident with a jet ski (apparently) but he always showed that he was a very useful footballer although he probably needed to toughen up a bit for the PL. Shame is that **** happens like this to many players during their career, would be good to see Chung involved again though, but doubt that he will trouble our first choice strikers. I guess it is more likely that he will eventually get a loan or transfer back to Japan when their next season starts in Feb/March 2014. Not much else we can do with him until then.

Why does anyone take any notice of what Glasgow has to say? He is a troll, and a troll that doesn't even know what the word prolific means. Surely no-one really took GS's pathetic posts about Billy being prolific seriously did they? He is just on a wind-up and it seems to have worked. I guess I have fallen for it too, but just put the dimwit on ignore along with a couple of others of similar ilk.

There is a lot of sense in Higgy's article, experiences I have seen for myself. The schools of excellence and academies are all very well, but taking the best kids out of the grassroots game at such early ages is part of why the game is dying in this country. Not only do the best kids need to have fun playing with their mates rather than with a bunch of other promising youngsters, but the other kids who are not so promising need the good players around to help them and their local teams. They also benefit from the parents of the better players who are often enthusiastic enough to be coaches and helpers in local kids football clubs, take the child away to play in academies and you lose the parents as well. I've seen this first hand where local teams effectively fold because they lose one or two of their best players. The academies and schools of excellence prohibit their players playing for any team other than the academy. It may be OK in bigger cities, but in rural areas particularly it can have a devastating effect. But the FA bods just don't see this and only have thoughts for their "elite" players. Kids need to just enjoy playing football without too much involvement from coaches, unfortunately society nowadays does not encourage the ad hoc kickabouts that many of us enjoyed in our youth, everything has to be organised to the nth degree with adults supervising everything and stifling enjoyment. Higgy sees some of the things that are wrong and well done to him, the difficult bit though is doing something that positively changes the status quo by de-assembling some of the structure that has been put in place in the last 20 years. Charter Standard clubs do little or nothing for kids enjoying playing football.

Can't see anything petulant about Giordano's comments. Petulance is your stock in trade. Your comments about Gaston have become so tedious like another poster's comments about Lallana. You continue to spout absolute rubbish about Ramirez the sort that those who seldom watch games (one friendly in Austria) might do. I accept he he has not shown world class yet, but he still shows more class than I saw from 21 players on the pitch in Kiev last night and I believe he will start to show more of what he can do in the coming weeks. There is always an air of excitement in the ground when he comes on because everyone watching live knows that he can (sometimes) bring touches of magic to a game, and thats what we all go to see. I think a lot of people forget that he is 22, slightly older than Clyne and over 2 years younger than Lallana.

You forgot Wilner.

There are a few trees at Chadwell Heath though where their training ground is.

Well, it looks that way now, I'm sure I posted this on the Rio thread, and clearly I was responding to a comment by you about Rio. Looks like the Mods have been playing around with threads and combining things a bit randomly. Comment still stands though. It amazes me that we supposedly have one of the best academies in the country but did not have a successor to Crocker lined up, and in the meantime the results of our u18s and u21s have started to go pear shaped.

Still bothers me a bit that we have not replaced Matt Crocker. Not having a head of Academy is a bit strange.

The age thing I really don't get. OK he will probably be too old after the World Cup (although Sheringham played at top level at older age) but he will be spot on age wise when the tournament takes place. All this tosh about building for the future is rubbish, England should aim to take the best players to each tournament, the squad is plenty big enough to take a few youngsters as well for the experience. People seem to forget that Rickie is 2 years younger than little Stevie Gerrard and 4 years younger than the boy Lampard. Will Lampard be shoved out before Brazil next summer when he will be 36? Not likely. Gerrard will be 34 next summer, Rickie will be 32 and a bit. I also don't really agree about the pace thing, OK so he is not super quick, but he is no slouch either. His footballing brain makes up for any shortcomings in this area, its only thick idiots on the TV who still see him as just a target man, he showed on Friday with the 2 assists that as we all know there is a lot more to his game than being just a target man, ironically both his goals so far have been headers, and I don't ever think of him as being particularly outstanding in that department. He should also push Lampard out of the way and take on the free kick duties. Don't know many who really are not pleased for Lambert and who "hate" him, just a few pathetic TV pundits who have no idea what they are talking about, even Townsend who I loathe was singing his praises on Friday night. Still it was nice to hear that SRL used to work in a beetroot factory, something I had not heard before.

Good stuff, these Serie D sides are top class opposition for Italy "B", bit like England playing the Skates.

In all the games I saw both play always thought Chung had more about him than Mayuka, but his injuries have wrecked his time at Saints. If the comments about loans and work permits are true, and they probably are, then there is little option because he won't go back to J-League until end January, their season is nearing its end (round 25 of 34 this weekend I think). Still think if he can get back to match fitness he would give us a good option from the bench, because we are short of options up front, especially if we get an injury or two. He can't be too far off full fitness, I don't believe he was "banned" from Staplewood, just not involved in the first team training, so there is no reason why he could not be fit, he did play for u21s once in pre-season as well. Don't think he will ever be the £10m star though, but he did show that he is a talented player with bags of energy, and like Sharp a very likeable bloke. Hope he gets the chance to show us what he can do again.

Must have missed his appearances for England

What a shame they got the 1975 FA Cup winning team. If they had waited a year they would have got Saints instead. I don't think anyone in 75 Final (West Ham v Fulham) ever played for Saints but could be wrong. A few of the 40 should be easy to get (current players). Wayne Talkes still lives in Southampton (remember him from my old school in Sandown, saw him play several times for Island schools team along with my "cousin" Brian Humber who played for Saints Reserves but never made the first team), look up his address on 192.com (sub needed). Ali Dia might be difficult, although anyone could pass themselves off as Ali, just as Ali passed himself of as a footballer. I heard recently that Ali has not been heard of now for several years, not sure how true this is.

The article is very poor, not only for the reasons already stated but clear confusion between English and British players and interests, the article is supposed to be about why the England team is poor, so how buying Welsh, Scottish or Irish players would help is beyond me. On a side note I would love to know why Swansea and Cardiff should have any interest in promoting the England team. One of the problems of allowing foreign teams into England's Premier League. Still they have their own problems, no Welsh players were bought by EPL teams this summer at all (though one was sold)

Thought Chris Baird was signing for Arry, must have fallen through. Danny Butterfield is free again, played twice for Carlisle then left.