Arizona

It's not that I am upset at our best players leaving. Every club is a selling club to a varying extent. My gripe is more the fact that every time a good player was sold, he was replaced by a cheap bargain. You say no club can spend money it doesn't have. Check "investment" in the dictionary and you will sort of see what I am getting at. January 2004, the squad badly needs strengthening to avoid relegation. We sell Beattie for £6m, spend £2m on McQ, bring in 3 loans and a free transfer.

Hmmm. Just shame about Gillett, James, White, Mills, Hatch, Thomson and Lancashire. And I still have my suspicions about DMG, Dyer and BWP.

I wonder what we are the model for now then... I am pretty sure that given a bit of decent investment, we wouldn't have been relegated and ultimately, we'd be much financially better off than we are now. One of the main factors in our relegation was constantly selling the likes of Richards, Bridge and Beattie and bringing them in with cheap bargains on CCC sized transfer fees. I am not saying a massive fee guarantees success, but players like McCann - £1.5m, Jackobsson - £1m, Yahia - £300k, Nilsson - £500k... FFS!

Well, I was when we sold players like Bridge and brought in complete gash like Neil McCann.

BWP seems to have one good game (take Burnley (a), Barnsley (a) or Bristol City (h) last season) then be complete gash for the next 5 games. Hasn't scored since Burley left either.

Indeed. Think more "Wild West" than Rednecks. Arizona is more like Texas or Nevada, neither of which are particularly redneck areas. Scottsdale is also a really nice part of Phoenix, or at least that's where the best nightlife is to be had.

I'd hope for better, but with this squad, 21st really would be a good finishing position this season. Our target this season has to be to avoid relegation. I really am not expecting anything more than a brave fight against the drop.

But we can afford to pay Wotte AND Poortvliet and fork out £300k a year for the next 4 years on Schneiderlin's transfer? I have never heard of any club releasing their manager because they couldn't afford him. It's ridiculous. JP and Wotte's appointment was about Lowe doing it his way, plain and simple. FWIW I think there is no point in bringing in Davies. Our problem at the moment isn't so much the manager as having a ridiculously small squad, short on quality and experience.

I guess without wanting to go off on more obscure tangents, I just think Saga is the most complete striker we have (had). Last season he struggled to perform and I wont deny I was disappointed with his goal tally. He takes a large share of that, but so do Burley, Dodd and Gorman, as well as the midfield which was so hopelessly uncreative in the majority of games he started. People are saying at the end of last season if you had a choice, everyone would have kept John, not Saga. I wouldn't. Knowing we were implimenting a system with one up front, I'd have kept the striker with the work rate to go it alone, as well as the capability to score goals and defend from the front. I'd say every player bar John, Vignal, Skacel and Davies was poor last season. We had several players like Surman, Rasiak and Saga who, used and motivated correctly, could perform so much better.

1. I make it 4 goals - Palace, Preston, Barnsley and Sheff Utd. Which one aren't you counting? Anyway, splitting hairs, not important. 2. Perhaps, but John doesn't treble the strike rate of the striker he is playing along side, or defend from the front. 3. DMG didn't score at all last season. Are you saying he shouldn't be in the side not because of that? 4. 4 in 8 is a very good return for DMG this season, however I don't think he is capable of scoring 20 a season, but Saga is. Defending from the front not his strong poing either. 5. Pearson was appointed about 1 hour before that game, you cannot seriously include that. It even said on the OS, "although Pearson was nominally in charge the team had already been picked and prepared" 7. Many people go on about Saga's tally last season, but nobody except John really excelled. Rasiak got something like 7 goals in 10 games, before Burley realised this was dangerously close to the 19 goals he scored in the first half of the playoff season and dropped him again. BWP pretty much matched Saga's scoring rate and was like a fish up a tree in most other aspects of his game. 8. If you noticed point 6 was missing you really need to get out more.

Who is that?

Have only seen the Blackpool game this season, so I can't really say whether our current system is the right one, but might going back to 4-4-2 be a better idea? I was thinking along the lines of: Davis Gillett Cork Perry Mills Lallana Morgan Surman Skacel John Pekhart Forts? I reckon it would get more out of some of our players, specifically Surman, Skacel, Gillett and John.

Not sure you can be that short and be effective in a central role. Some smart a*se is now going to point out Dennis Wise or something, but I think maybe Gillett CDAJFU at RB.

He was always the striker we should have kept. Last season John managed a massive total of 5 goals in the games Saga wasn't on the pitch. His work rate creates chances for others and prevents defences taking their time and building moves from the back, which pretty much translates scoring more conceding less. We never lost a game Saga started under Pearson. Oh what might have been...

IMO he is just an attention loving tw*t who keeps on spouting offensive jibberish in the hope that someone finds it funny. It seems he has found an audience for it though, probably the same people who think big brother qualifies as entertainment. I don't get why women find him attractive either. Looks like a complete fruitcake to me.

What's the difference between a Ferrari and a box full of dead babies? I don't have a Ferrari in my garage.

Hoos also stated that Rasiak was offloaded to help clear the "logjam of strikers." We then went 3 months with nobody but John scoring from open play. It was all bulls*t. It can't be a coincidence that him and Rasiak left within minutes of each other (plus the alledged Viafara to Stoke deal which fell through), the evening the transfer window closed. More to the point, I've heard from a seperate source that the club made "significant" financial gains from both loans, and the offers were too good to refuse at the time. How can it be that 7 months ago we had a huge wage bill and were trying to keep Skacel, yet now every man and his dog has packed up and gone? I am sure he did want to go to Hertha. Skacel turning down a move to Hertha would be like one of our youngsters turning down a move to a midtable Prem side. What about the last 2 games he played in midfield, when he was by far the best player on the pitch? Or the one before that when we beat Wolves 6-0? Or the 4 goals he scored by Christmas 2 years ago? Or having the most assists AND joint most goals from midfield in the playoff season? Nope? Ok, he's sh*t.

I once saw a documentary on ambulence crews, and one of their call outs was to some bloke who had twisted his ankle playing football. What was weird was everyone, including the ambulence crew, thought this was a legitimate reason to dial 999. Anyway, that story seems to be making a meal out of what was, in all likelyhood, a prank call.

The new Sergei Rebrov...

Southamptons runway is 1,723m. Ryanair will not fly to any airports with a runway less than 1,900m at the bare minimum. There are very few jets in service smaller than the 737s Ryanair opperate, other than the small regional jets flybe already uses. Width could be a factor, but it would have to be a f*cking narrow runway for the engines to overhang the sides. Edit: Just checked, Southampton's runway is 37m and 46 is pretty much bog standard for most airports, so they would probably have to widen it by about 9m.

As airlines go, flybe are a pretty safe bet. In fact they are one of the few airlines in Britain currently taking delivery of new aircraft. I believe they also made a proffit last year, could be wrong on that.

Okay... 1. "We didn't want him to go to Hertha." Who do you think you're kidding. It became apparent that we weren't going to get promoted after the Norwich game and Crouch was trying to save money. I supposed Rasiak leaving and Viafara having a deal fall through, at the same time, 2 hours before midnight is pure coincidence? 2. He wanted to go to Hertha. Now there's a moral dilema. Sit on the bench at a struggling 2nd Division side, watching Euell do a very bad impression of a left winger, or go and play in the Bundesliga and (sucessfully) fight for a place in your national squad for the European Championships. ANY of our players would have done the same, ignoring the fact that Berlin is much closer to Czech Rep than Southampton. 3. Priced himself out of a move. Would you take a 40% pay cut to go and play for Ipswich? That doesn't mean he doesn't want to be here at all. It means he doesn't want to go to Ipswich. 4. You blame him for missing preseason and seem to be implying that because he chose to represent his country at the Euro's he doesn't want to play for Saints. Do you suppose Liverpool want rid of Torres for the same reason? 5. You "believe" he was poor in half a game? So you didn't actually see the game, but it sticks with your oppinion that he is sh*t and lazy, so you are taking it as gospel? 6. Even assuming he was poor in those 45 minutes (I'm not saying he wasn't), I'd say Davis was the only player who hasn't had a poor game so far. Better to try something that might not work, rather than stick with something which definitely isn't (a lesson Burley never learned). 6. He should be in the team because he has shown in the past to have natural ability on the ball and has more first team exerience under his belt than Gillett, Shneiderlin, DMG, Lallana, White, Surman and Holmes put together.

SFC, like any business, supplies a product to draw income. And, like any business, if you seriously degrade the quality of the product, you will lose customers. This is made worse by the fact that the price hasn't been lowered in accordance with the drop in quality. Lets take it in some other context. Say a cinema was in financial difficulty and to save money they sell their projectors and sound system and replace them with a black and white projector with subtitles. Them to save money they only show old movies from the '80s. Would you pay the same price as before to go and watch a movie there? Would you then tell the people who didn't to show more loyalty to the cinema? If you lived in say Bournemouth, London, Oxford or even further away, would you travel to Southampton and back every weekend to watch Saints play? I am willing to bet the answer for a fair few people is no at the moment.

WTF are you guys basing this assumption on? Just because he hasn't been picked for the team, doesn't mean he doesn't give a sh*t. Sometimes I think people have been completely brainwashed by the "youth team good. Old players bad," propaganda on the OS.

Two thoughts on this. 1 - Since leaving us Hoddle really has acheived very little and would do no better than any other manager out there IMO. 2- I think our problem is the squad of players more than the manager. Our squad is just woefully should of both quality and depth and we are only shooting ourselves in the foot refusing to play Skacel. No manager would excel with this lot.