The Kraken

He was superb; and goodness knows how good he could have been were it not for injury. I was in the front row of the upper tier at QPR when he had an absolute blinder; scored both our two goals and rattled the post late on with a long ranger that would been the winner. My view of it was aboslutely picture perfect! I noticed him outside St. Mary's for the Fulham game; it looks like he's associated with a football agency who represent a number of minor Saints players.

David Hughes; Jeff Kenna; Neil Maddison; Tommy Widdrington; Matthew Oakley, amongst various others who came through and played a season or two for the first team, didn't make the grade at Premier League level but went off to make hundreds of appearances in the lower leagues. Not bad a period which was considered the weakest in terms of our ability to bring through first team players.

Its all the Northam's fault really. Them and Guly.

Correct Nathan, that certainly does argue your point.

"People"? One person mentioned his accent; one. I don't think there's a huge outbreak of anti-geordie sentiment about to break out, Dave.

Fair play to the PST; they've miracled £6M out of nowhere. Impressive effort; that wouldn't give me any concerns whatsoever about the accuracy of their financial predictions....

What Saints really don't want to do now is..... I do enjoy the Alan Partridge soundalike with big Dave though. I hadn't listened to Solent for ages before the Spurs game; its an uncanny likeness.

In which case you're free to choose how much you apportion blame to each for our predicament. I blame Adkins, Cortese, Reed and the players collectively in roughly equal measures; Adkins for tactical and selection mistakes, Cortese and Reed for what I consider a majority influence in transfers, and the players for committing heinous mistakes on the field too numerous to mention that have seen us leak goals like never before.

"It has been mooted that former Saints striker Alan Shearer would be a high-profile candidate to succeed Adkins." Yep, that sounds reliable enough to me. Welcome on board Alan...

A big problem was that Paul Scholes was given the freedom of St. Mary's to spray the ball around; our tactical changes did absolutely nothing to try to negate that threat. But at the end of the day you also can't legislate for atrocious defending from Fonte to first of all give a needless corner away and then fail to pick up RVP from it so that he had a free header from 6 yards out. Conceding one goal was fairly predictable. Conceding 2 in the manner we did was inexcusable.

Dear me; of course it isn't speculation. Cortese and Reed have both stated that they sit on the transfer committee; Cortese has stated that he has the final say on all transfers. That isn't speculation, its fact. Your solution is to blame NA because he puts up with the situation; that he hasn't walked away makes it 100% his fault in your eyes. Lets say he had walked away and we were still in this perilous situation; who would the blame fall upon then?

:lol: Its nothing like what you wrote!! I said Reed and others must share some of the blame. What was it you said?

Its simplistic because you look to blame 1 individual, 100%. You fail to recognise that we have a transfer committee who, to some degree (extent unknown) take responsibility from the manager for incoming player recruitment. That the manager identified targets of his own in the summer and didn't get them. And that Adkin's only option if he doesn't like it is to walk. Adkins is somewhat to blame for our malaise. As is Reed. As is Cortese, and others. To what exact degree, who knows, but they're all culpable. Solely blaming Adkins is too simplistic. There you go.

I don't think we have anyone else who can play at LM. We almost need another Fox to play there, but just don't have one. Reeves is the closest we have; is he a realistic option? I'd say no, not in place of AL. As for Turkish' I wouldn't presume to speak for him, but the very first post on this thread by him says (when speaking about Redd) "It's my view that this man is equally, if not moreso responsible for the problems at this club as Adkins."

It is simplistic, Mr. Angry. It's weird how you get so emotive, all the time. Hope you're not like that with your kids. I do love your binary arguments though; you consistently miss all the wonderful shades of grey in between.

Ultimately its those who made the decision to sign him. The final decision rests with Cortese; he holds some of the blame. Whoever convinces Cortese to sign the dud must also take a fair share of the blame. The question is; who has the most influence on the transfer committee? As they're the ones to point the finger at. I genuinely think Adkins has relatively little influence other than highlighting positions he needs to fill. It may be true or it may not, but right now its what I choose to believe; backed up in a small way by at least two or three posters on here claiming that Adkins submitted a list of potential signings he wanted this summer and got none of them. Also the Ramirez transfer was clearly nothing of Adkins' doing; he barely knew about it or the player in the saga's infancy.

Agreed; who has said that Reed alone takes sole responsibility though?

Indeed. And I've previously said before I hold Adkins somewhat to blame for poor tactics and substitutions. Hooiveld shouldn't be anywhere near the first team; Yoshida shouldn't be anywhere but central defence. The midfield should be a proper midfield 3, not with Lallana floating about doing his own thing. Mayuka should be playing instead of Puncheon to give us a proper outlet. Lallana needs to work out how to defend better with Fox, Fox equally needs to learn how to properly use Lallana and his CMs. Right now I couldn't care less exactly why we haven't got the players the manager said he needed. The fact is we failed in that regard, and we don't have them. So we need a as settled a back line as possible until we can bring in reinforcements; and bring them in we absolutely must. A dominant, commanding centre half who will organise the back line, and a left back who can actually defend. I think we're fairly on the same page here.

Of course it does. The recruitment department do the legwork; the committee of 4 make the decisions, and Cortese has the final sign off. Claiming Reed doesn't make any decisions and only provides advice was a nonsensical suggestion.

Because the Championship was their ability level. Yep, they're making individual errors and the coaching would seem somwhat awry, but this is nothing new. They were making the same errors last season; they just got punished for them less. Dan Fox could have the most coaching available and I would still maintain that he cannot defend adequately for this league. The same for Jos Hooiveld who looks like a deer in the headlights at this level. Coaching will improve them but it will not turn them into PL defenders IMO; we needed a wholesale change of personnel and we got barely half that.

Fair enough if that's your view. My view is that you can't polish a turd. And that a better executed transfer policy would have seen us focus on strengthening the defensive personnel with more and better recruits, which would have fared much better than the current incumbents.

I don't understand why you're using my response to Turkey with an unrelated statement from norway. But Les Reed is on a transfer committee, made up of 4 people. So its clearly not something he delegates when it comes to decision making.

Who exactly makes up our transfer committee?

That's an extremely simplistic approach.

Unfortunately a goals against average of a fraction under 3 goals per game suggests otherwise.