The Kraken

That was the much quoted original price. We also paid a premium to Aviva upon promotion to the PL; for some reason I have a figure of £4M in mind, not sure whether that's accurate. Whatever, the price that was paid was an absolute bargain at the time, even for an L1 club. To now be a PL club enjoying the enormous TV riches on offer, I wouldn't be surprised at all if we were valued easily in excess of £100M; revenues for one year alone almost hit that figure, and guranteed revenues are a decent starting point when it comes to valuing any company.

I've heard that its going to be an all red badge to go with an all red kit. A wise choice.

It really won't. Most fans will just lap it up; others will gripe about it if they don't like it then get on with it.

Staff comps have now moved to the Itchen / Chapel corner. Which is probably for the best, really. Firstly it allows more "proper" Saints fans in there and will hopefully add to the atmosphere. Secondly it gets potential families and such like out of such a rowdy place.

It shouldn't be millions of miles out, but it also can't be classified as in any way accurate. That method of calculating season tickets relies upon the assumption that every unavailable seat is a sold season ticket, when this quite obviously isn't the case. The club will always make certain amounts of seats unavailable for segregation, safety issues, seating for stewards, complimentary seats and seats for guests of staff, plus last season often whole blocks of seats were not made available for sale until other seats had sold out. There's a huge amount of unknowns within it all, and the online system simply has no way of taking any of that into account.

Which was found last season to be an inaccurate method for working total numbers of season tickets out.

It's a disgrace GS. No wonder none of the decent posters bother on here any more; you can see why!!

You must be kidding? What on earth has the delicate flower infracted you for?

I don't understand what relevance that has to, well, anything about this thread really. Other than to prove the point that its a bit daft for a fan of any club, let alone ours, to choose to implicity trust the club over every signing they make simply because they're professionals and its their job. Which was what the comment was in response to.

I was kind of thinking the same. I've watched enough women's football to know that, as a spectator sport, it really isn't for me and I won't bother watching if its on TV. Much like women's tennis; for the most part I find it pretty boring, but even as just a casual tennis fan in general I found today's mens Wimbledon final riveting stuff. Maybe Duncan doesn't like differing opinions to his own; who knows.

If you take that route then there's no point in discussing it whatsoever. Just leave all that to the experts. Kind of defeats the idea of a forum though, where the whole point is to discuss issues, whether (ill) informed or not. It's entirely subjective, but yes I'd say we have been hit and miss, albeit more hit than miss.

Is that not a bit of a cop out? That you trust the club before you make any informed decision of your own? I mean, fair enough if you haven't seen him play; I haven't which is why I haven't contributed to this thread, so I'll judge him if and when I see him in a Saints shirt. But to make any kind of ruling based solely on the fact that we're after him seems a bit odd to me; "we're in for him so he must be good". Especially so as we've been somewhat hit and miss in the transfer department of late.

Very true. This place is still very good for a bit of occasional behind the scenes news, rumours and general Saints chat; but it seems to have become filled with a lot more sensitive posters over the years and lost a lot of the humour that made it really decent.

It's true to say that some of the better posters don't post here any more. The ones who had a bit of wit and banter and could handle a bit of p*ss taking and being taken the p*ss out of while chatting about Saints and other related issues. The infraction system kind of sums up why this place lost it; takes it itself too seriously. The spin off b-anter site tried to keep some of the old site ethos going.

Its not going to change before the season starts, is it?

That was fairly obvious; but that never stops Captain Pedantic from acting the tw*t.

Have you never read a post from MLG before?

I'm not the one saying "look at this game, and that one,, and that one..." when it comes to judging us. I see we finished 14th last season; done, we finished where we deserved. So we move on. You need to look more inwardly to see where the looking back is coming from. Again, looking back. Never mind where we finished and where we could have finished. We didn't. Next season is a whole new year, and to improve on last season the best way is to bring in better players and improve a squad that were only good enough to finish 14th. Obvious. Resting on laurels, blaming luck, and "looking back" simply isn't the way, its a pointless exercise. As for the start of the season; we finished with 4 points from 6 games. So "looking back" at games in isolation is equally pointless.

Because it came at a time when many fans were talking about our unstoppable march into Europe; it was a shot in the arm for the fact that we weren't even a top ten side, and got totally undone by a team who was. If you'd prefer I could also point to our last 6 games of the season where we took 4 points and ended the season with a whimper. But we didn't. We came 14th. We had good luck and bad luck along the way. So its entirely pointless saying that we could have done this or that; we didn't. And quite obviously the best way to ensure we improve is to go actually go and and bring in players who improve us as a squad, rather than lament our poor run of luck that deprived us from a top ten spot which we didn't actually achieve by some distance.

Yep; getting humbled at home to WBA was an indicator of the fragility of the side and how we weren't (aren't) a top ten side. It's all very well saying we weren't far away from 10th place, but we didn't finish in 10th place, we finished in 14th, 5 points off 10th. You can pick the bones out of it and rue how unlucky we were in some games to finish that low; but every other team around us can do the exact same, to some degree. So we finished where we deserved to finish, and need to strengthen to have a realistic chance of improvement. 12th - 16th is the minimum I'd hope for with this squad; below that would be a disappointment. 10th is achieveable with the signing of Lovren, though I'd consider it a fanastics achievement with no more signings. Throw in a few more players in vital areas and top 8 would be great.

6th with a realistic expectation of 10th. Or something.

Cardiff tried to sign JRod last summer and we had to outbid them to get him. So unsurprising big Malky still rates him.

We should be playing four four foocking two.

Which means that in today's money the lethal replacement strike force of Dixon and Speedie that we recruiteded would be worth around £17M. *shudders*

A very good player but a terrible cheat, he'd be an embarrassing player to watch at times. So "torn" would be my answer. Plus worried about where we'd be finding the cash to fund having him.