The Kraken

I hear Dibden Purlieu is a nice area. You should check it out.

Definitely. I hope we get an owner like Vincent Tan or Assem Allam.

I heard it was £25K a week, in the Championship. Just rumours, of course.....

Even in the West Brom game when he came on there were ironic cheers when he got the ball and passed it off. The amount of simpletons that attend games at St. Mary's really defies belief on a game by game basis.

Ah right. So your original statement of "Unlike Guly who came, tried, failed and is unfortunately given yet more chances." was only intended to cover his Premier League appearances, was it?? Riiiiiiiight.

Probably being a core component of 2 promotions, I'd have thought. You'd have to be a bit simple to think he did anything but a good job for us in the lower leagues. 19 league goals and 12 assists over 2 seasons, often as a bit part player.

The album version of Bring it on down was pretty average, I thought. There was a live version on the B-side of Shakermaker and that was properly good. Live forever is the song I'll always think of first with Definitely Maybe, but my favourite has to be Slide Away. What an album.

Rumours were that Lee was on relatively high wages even in the Championship, so we may as well pay him up and let him go. He was absolutely nowhere in our current plans and rightly so. If his departure allows us to bring in someone else in this window then fantastic; if not then we've lost nothing.

For me, those are major reasons why this season has been better than any other Premier League season. Many of those we're tepid in the extreme. This current side feels much like Chris Nichol's side of the late 80s with MLT, Shearer, Rod Wallace, Dodd etc all coming through.

It probably means (at least to me) that, looking upwards rather than downwards we are close to the limit of our potential in the league. Finishing 8th or 9th would be a great achievement this season, no doubt. But there's the nagging doubt of how much further we can realistically expect to go. Plenty of people are happy to consider finishing 7th and 8th as a true measure of success and contentment. Others aren't so much,in that finishing 6th and upwards currently seems beyond us and fighting out for 7th and 8th with no tangible reward on offer is a strange thing to get used to.

I'd give her the worst 5 seconds of her life.

I know it gets trotted out the we use the younger players, but in reality it has been a chance to use the reserves, with one or two new youngsters given a go too.

Of course it is. But there are various people (me being one of them) who would have preferred to see us prioritising the league cup in similar fashion. Alas it wasn't to be. Others are glad we didn't do that, which is of course their right, just an approach I disagree with given our prospects for this season.

Well Adrian, I'm pretty sure the opposite of prioritising the cups is what we did for the League Cup. We openly had a priority in that competition of playing second string players and hoping that would be enough to progress as far as possible. Thankfully our approach to the FA Cup seems rather more focused on putting out a strong team, I hope it continues (and I feel it will).

Individual. Young players being told they'll only get on the pitch from the bench if the manager gets their appearance/win bonus. On a regular basis. Also youth players being "forcibly encouraged" to sign with certain "friendly" agents. All theoretically speaking, of course.

It's an open secret within football circles that JP's comments are not without basis. Allegedly, theoretically speaking etc....

Agree with the sentiments of the OP. As impressive as Saints have been since coming back up to the PL, it seems to me we are fast reaching the limits of the glass ceiling. We've been one of the highest spenders in two summer transfer windows, so our growth has been very impressive, but making up ground just to challenge for 6th or 7th is going to be just as big a leap. The cup really is our best chance of success in the short term so I hope that becomes a priority, we're quite obviously not going down so I'd hope we have a real crack at it. This PL twilight zone, as somebody above penned it, is a very apt phrase.

"Shut yer noise you f*cking old c*nt". It's like something out of a Danny Dyer movie.

Quite right too.

He really wouldn't.

Is this not the case now, then? Gibbs picks up sporadic caps here and there, so (I'm just guessing here) perhaps Hodgson sees something in him. Just maybe. The Saints issue is irrelevant, really.

No idea mush. But he's currently behind three players, not only the two you mentioned.

He also quite clearly has Kieran Gibbs in front of him.

I'm reasonably confident that Saints wouldn't look to reinvest £30M in a replacement full back, so I'd always be a little worried as to what we'd get in place of Shaw. But Clyne for £2.5M shows the type of player that is available. Sadly £30M isn't as obscene a sum of money as it was even just 5 years ago; it essentially gets you Gaston Ramirez and Dani Osvaldo. So I'd be careful of what I wished for just assuming we should take the money, and I hope we hold off for as long as possible.

Who knows why we were in the market for another LB, but its not exactly beyond the realms of possibility to suggest that it was to eradicate the need to use Dan Fox. Shaw didn't break through until a few games in, so he wasn't the de facto first choice when we looked at Buttner. Perhaps Shaw's rapid progress was a surprise; but Fox still played in 20 league games that season, so he got a pretty good run which Buttner would likely have had were he here. We still need a better reserve option at left back than Fox so Buttner could have been a decent option.