The Kraken

This place was brilliant before they all left. The likes of you have ruined this place since.

Or dead....even an old school defender like Lawrenson is defending it. "Its what happens these days". I do hate that attitude.

3-1 now. But the amount of diving and cheating is off the scale.

The best. Oh I yearn for the good ol' days.

I preferred BournemouthSaint.

Not me though

Having lived in the US for 2 years, and visited the country on over 50 separate occasions (34 states and counting) the first line in this is the most accurate statement I've yet seen on this thread. The second is equally true.

Oh, and rallyboy for top spot. A genuinely cleverly hilarious man.

For me, and in terms of SFC related ITK-ness: Essruu, VFTT, FloridaMarlin, THEVMAN. For basic enjoyment of the forum and those who actually get the idea that its a place for a bit of p*ss taking and being taken the p*ss out of from time to time: CBFry, SmirkingSaint, Turkish, DogDog, BearFeatures, Tokyos and probably a few others who I'm too lazy or carefree to mention right now.

If you think those are the two only major downsides you've missed an awful lot.

You won't win respect like that, son.

And/or the booze....?

miltonroader07 and ART. They always speak sense.

For those who do travel abroad; I take it you do it as its a good opportunity to spend a few days away rather than for the game itself? I went to the pre-season game against Wolves last season at St. Marys and f*ck me it was a tiresome game!

If aliens do/have paid us a visit, I hope the last place they go/went is America.

Spain is looking good at the moment

Luke Shaw will the latest acid test. If we can keep him until he's in his 20s then we might be onto something. Anyway for me its a little irrelevant trying to stave off the big boys; its making sure we don't lose players to the tier two type sides such as Everton, Newcastle, Villa and previously Sunderland. We've lost the likes of Beattie, Kachloul etc to those clubs in the past, if we can cut that out as being seen by the player as a significant upwards move then that'll have more benefit in fighting a losing battle against the top 4.

And I've got no problem with that way of thinking. Look at the current batch of Saints graduates and your "1 a year" assertion isn't too far off. Its been a really good turnaround of players. Expecting us to hold onto those players? Much more difficult. As soon as top 4, Champions league clubs come in we're really, really up against it. And it will be the exception rather than the norm if we can keep those at bay. We've had a brilliant youth system for many years, if we can just look to continue and develop that I'd be absolutely delighted. Putting limits and unrealistic targets on it is a bit pointless IMO.

So we only had to keep hold of £80M rated Gareth Bale. And England stars Walcott and Chamberlayne. So close.

And these were the words from Les Reed in 2011, so I think the original sentiment was actually correct. "We’ve got an ambition to be not just a Premier League club but a competitive Premier League club,’ says Reed. ‘If we want half our team to come from the academy, which we do, the recruitment needs to be the best, and the development plan for each individual needs to be excellent, as do the facilities, the sports science and the technical quality of the coaching."

Kind of a pointless stat then, really. To "graduate" from the academy it means that you've been through the youth team and then been selected first team squad through that. So "graduation" in itself is the art of being selected for the first team squad. Unless they're saying they want half the Under 18 team to "graduate", its pretty much unquantifiable.

Anything less than the play-offs would be a massive failure for them. Their chief-exec keeps banging on about his limited budget, but its still well up in the top 5 of 6 of the division. even if they'd have been given -10 they'd have had a decent chance of promotion. And div 3 has three automatic promotion spots, top 7 gets you into the play-offs. To miss out on that would be an epic f*ck up. I don't think they'll win the division but pretty sure they'll get one of the automatic spots, their budget alone dictates that they'll do ok.

The whole "policy" of having half a squad full of academy graduates is a pipe-dream anyway. A great ambition to have, but neither a ground-breaking one (every PL would like to do it if they could) nor a terribly realistic one. A PL bench with 7 players gives a squad size of 18, that means at any time we'd need 9 players good enough to play for the first team. Even to fill half a team we'd need 5 of 6 academy grads; a very tough ask at any time. But then I think the talk of the "policy" was just talk anyway. Saints have always had an excellent history down the decades of bringing youth team players through, a continuation of that would be just fine.

Good. Competition for places is exactly what we need. Cork got taken off fairly early in games towards the end of the season, if anything he looked weary from a long campaign. Fair play to Schneiderlin for keeping the performance levels up to then end. Having three players to be able rotate is sensible for a side looking to push on and improve, and also gives us more potential for midfield variation against different sides.

It was great for a year, the second year was great as we got out of it. Doing more than 2 years in the lower leagues would have been a chore, the relief to get out of it when we did was enormous. The Championship, I'm still of the opinion that that was my favourite year as a Saints fan, although common logic will dictate that you strive to be in the highest division you can. That lot should have a laugh for a year or two down there, and I'm sure they will. But if they languish in League 2 for any time (or even League 1 for that matter) the novelty will wear off pretty quickly.