The Kraken

Quite surprised to see Fonte being put in there; and especially no Hooiveld in the squad. The latter leads to the former, I guess. And echo the Guly comments; most odd. I did notice that on Saturday he was sat outside the players' box fiddling with his phone for most of the game and looking disinterested. Understandable really. A decent line-up though, and hopefully the young-uns can get a decent run out. Might also be an opportunity to try Rodrigues in a slightly different and more central role than he gets in the first team.

There's various things they could do to improve matters and they just haven't/won't. Tokens would work, to a certain extent. Bottled beer only stands would help (the one in the Chapel was closed on Saturday). Having more kiosks to actually process sales. Have the mobile beer backpack sellers that other grounds use. And that's all before we get onto the whole "staff training and competence" issue. Mr. Cortese highlighted these problems when he first arrived; and yet there has been seemingly no improvement since then. If those fairly simple remedies can't be implemented in 3 or 4 years, then I'm not sure if they'll ever happen.

Don't really care either way TBH. The JPT was great to win and obviously provided some really good memories, but it's pretty low down in the general scheme of where we've been and where we've got to so far. I can't say I paid much attention to whatever Pompey fans said about it at the time. It IS a low-brow tournament; but then I'll take that, we were a (relative to now) low brow team at the time. In any case, its not as if Pompey fans aren't already massively hypocritical; denouncing the Premier League riches that they themselves lapped up just a few short years ago.

This thread has made me hungry. Anyone know where I can get a good cheap pastie from?

Sturridge has to be picked, he's a very good player and has showed both at Bolton and now at Liverpool that when he's given a chance up front he will score goals. Rooney and Welbeck will be automatic choices, you'd hope that Lambert can squeeze in for a squad place at least. Hodgson would be an idiot to not include him as a squad member, but soemtimes you just never know. My money is on Rickie making the squad but getting very little if any game time.

I get what you're saying, but is Cork really all that versatile? He's a very good defensive midfielder, but I think we all know his attacking skills are pretty limited so he won't play much further up the pitch. I think the real Sociedad game highlighted what quite a few people have said for some time; he really isn't a very good right back, and in front of him there we have Clyne, Chambers and Yoshida at the very least. He genuinely isn't a centre-back either. So while he's played around the park before I think its been more out of desperation than anything else, and I certainly hope any performances we see from him are at CM. If he ever plays RB or CB then something is very, very wrong.

Wow; ruling a player out after just 45 minutes on the pitch! Perhaps a new record; top work.

I'd imagine it might not necessarily be exclusive to City if it takes off; Oliver restaurants of one form or another are all over the country and this is just another thing for him to put his name to. Probably not before time that football clubs got their acts in gear, stadium food has been basically dreadful for too long. Personally, food in the stadium is not for me. Mostly because a day out at the footy is exactly that, a day out, and its much more pleasurable to eat a decent lunch in a nice pub than some reheated mess in a dark concourse. To each their own though, and if it can bring in more revenue it can only be a good thing. I'd prefer it if something could be done about the size of the queues at half time but they've been shocking even since Mr Cortese promised to sort it out when he first got going at St. Mary's.

Fair point

I wish you would, it would spare me from your constant idiocy. Remind me who it was that bustled into this thread with the abuse and insults? Have a look at yourself before throwing out the accusations, pal.

:lol::lol:

Agreed. If anything I thought the times we did cross it in towards the forwards were from decent areas. Lambert had a couple of really good headed opportunities, one a classic RL back post header where he isolated the defender and that he really should have done better from. JRod should also have scored his header from Osvaldo's cross. Aside from those decent efforts I don't think we were too direct. I do wonder what our team would play like if we added someone like, say, Oxlade-Chamberlain or Walcott on one of the flanks. I'd love to see us give it a try and it's one way that I can see we can definitely mix things up and inject something into the side that we really don't have at the moment, a pacy player who can get the ball and take a full back on rather than have the team try to play through the opposition defence with intricate passes more of the time.

Lallana IMO is better when playing through the middle in the number 10 role, rather than out wide. Out wide he looks a lot more predictable, he's not able to take his man on so will look to cut back most times. Through the middle he can influence games a lot more. As for JRod, I'm still not quite sure what he does. He had a purple patch for a few games after new year where it seemed to click for him and he was a bit unplayable; but since then he's regressed and I can't say that I think he deserves a spot in the first team on merit. He has an abundance of pace but we very rarely seem to look to make use of that. And I think he's often nowhere near composed enough in front of goal for a top striker; his "goal" was taken very well but his header from 6 yards out was powder puff stuff. There's clearly a good player in there trying to get out but something isn't quite clicking IMO.

Good insight Pat. One to miss then. I wonder what Michael Gilkes is doing these days. Apart from Spanish Dancing on Ice, of course.

Well this thread went well for the OP No, we shouldn't cash in on Cork. He has lovely hair and is quite dreamy.

I'm sure Harry Redknapp will be whoring himself about for the triffic job he did in developing young Gareth's career when he was unknown left back who signed from a backwater club for Tottenham.

Sorry Avenyoo; I was trying to agree with you but, hell, I just couldn't do it!

Indeed. Always. When Rupert Lowe said ""The shields are up and the Klingons are shooting at us and every time they land a punch they are sapping our power", I looked not at the messenger but only at the message. And thank the lord I did. Oh, hang on a minute....

Seething :lol:

Jesus Christ :lol::lol: That really is the low point of a sh*thouse journalistic portfolio :lol::lol:

This is the one that intrigues me. JWP is clearly not a wide player in the attacking sense, but he wasn't helped yesterday by the fact that Chambers was clearly on a brief to not bomb forwards as Clyne does. With a rampaging full back you often need an RM who will sit in, so it could well work out that the two of them work out quite well. As it was yesterday in the first half we didn't do enough attacking down the right hand side.

We also need fans to chuck forward the Kieron Dyer argument to dismiss that opinion. Well in.

It's a pedantic point but yes, the main culprits were the players who let him drift off behind them (especially Lambert who completely got the flight of the ball wrong and ran past his man trying to attack it). To be fair, Chambers didn't cover himself in glory either and got stuck between sticking to his man and attacking the ball; in the end he did neither and allowed the free header. In all, shocking defending all round.

Also Diggers, a similarly easy way to see if there are tickets available is to check online on the official site. Although saying that, Chris says that he normally takes 30 minutes to trawl through the site. Granted, he seems to also think you have to pay money to access this information, so we're perhaps not dealing with the sharpest knife in the drawer. Hopefully this new info will mean that people like Chris won't miss future games when there's really no need for their absence. Saintswebforum help at its best.

Wanyama was excellent yesterday; and JWP was superb when he came into CM after half time. It didn't look disjointed at all; if anything we looked better in the second half than the first.