The Kraken

Well, I'd suggest in the long term it would have a detrimental effect to any club/company. Especially so when it comes to attracting sponsors and advertisers. What do you think is more appealing to a potential sponsor looking to advertise the kit? a) The sponsors name appearing in photographs on the back pages of every single national newspaper, and various regional papers. or b) Those same national and regional papers either not using any photographs or going to ridiculous extremes such as using mocked up cartoons and subbuteo action shots to convey the action. Yep, option b is definitely the image that a forward thinking company looking for worldwide exposure and revenues should aspire to, isn't it?

Of course we do. What a masterstroke that was.

For Les Reed, he does have that title but is also an Exec Director. Nicola Cortese is Chairman but also Exec Director.

Christ. You think we benefitted from it? OK, that's enough of this, I'll leave you to it. What a ridiculous suggestion, that we actually benefitted from looking like amateurs in the national media and having to apologise for it. Ok then.

Les Reed is Executive Director of the club. He makes up one of four members of the club board. Cortese is one other, plus directors Brendan McGlinchey and Lindsey Hyde.

Beg to differ all you like, but you must have some very well tinted red and white specs if you didn't see the mocking we received from the national media at the time. first of all, it was clearly a c*ck up. One which our chairman had to go cap in hand to apologise for. If he went to such measures to apologise for it, how was it not a mistake? And yes, we were a national joke, albeit for a short time. We were ribbed in various media outlets for a really daft business idea, and the media came together to make an example of what was a needless and foolhardy idea. Nicola Cortese has done some very good things for this club, in a massively short space of time. He's also made a small number of errors, and it shouldn't be such an outrage by some to identify that.

Jesus. The amount of people here willing to defend the indefensible in the face of simple business sense is quite cringeworthy. We massively c*cked up with the South Coast Club thing. For that period of time the club was a national joke in the media; not bad considering we were in the wilderness of the third tier of football. The club then had to apologise, kiss and make up for that particular bit of idiocy. There's a big difference between playing the media to your advantage, and pandering to their every whim. While a club is doing well the media will be onside, so previous claims of "it hasn't done us any harm" are a bit daft. Banning photographers, plus the moron Jordan Sibley shooting his mouth off on twitter, that is completely amateur hour and doesn't reflect well on the club. No matter how many Cortese fan-boys there are in a desperate attemp to to insist it doesn't matter one jot.

You realise they still have a good chance of going up in the playoffs, right?

Seriously, if you're going to take the time to pass on respects to a man, is it really beyond you to spend a few seconds to learn how to spell his f*cking name correctly?

Sha la la la la la la.

http://twitter.com/#!/thebig_sam

Please, please tell me that means you'll never mention it again? Somehow I doubt it.

Messi, Cronaldo and Iain Dowie out of retirement.

Could've at least spelt his name correctly.....

Nope. The whole point of it is that there can be no breaks in play; the referee will get an alert within one second if the ball has crossed the line. No other stoppages, referrals etc can form part of the system, it has to be a totally instant alert that there's a goal and nothing else. If the system can meet the benchmarks prescribed then it will be implemented, if not then quite simply it won't. It can only benefit the game, if only in a small way.

Why not? In what way will this make the game worse?

The whole point of it is that the decision has to be electronically relayed to the referee within 1 second. So its pretty much instantaneous and won't require stoppages to the game for review. That's the benchmark (as well as 100% accuarcy) that the trials are to judge.

The English language is historially based very heavily on German.

Couldn't agree more. If we do clinch promotion, and if you can't take anything other than complete joy from the past 2 seasons of success, then I'd suggest you probably won't find anything about supporting this side to make you happy. Which kind of sums it up, really. Yeah, its tinged with disappointment that Reading have usurped us, but my God, look at their form over the past few months, 15 wins and 2 draws from their last 18 games if I'm not mistaken. That's just incredible form by any standards, and there's no shame whatsoever to finish behind a team who can put that set of results together. And West Ham have perhaps completely bankrupted themselves in an effort to go up, finishing above them would be a huge achievement, let alone the fact we're a team who had just been promoted from League 1. I'm still completely staggered by how far we've come in such a short space of time, and if we can top that up with promotion tomorrow, in whatever form that takes, I'll be one of thousands of fantastically proud Saints fans.

....

i don't think that too many people would disagree with you that, in the longer term, that's quite a likely scenario.

And it depends how far you want to go back, but yes, they have. Palace and Norwich both came third back in the early 90s. Ipswich I believe finished fifth too. Those are just off the top of my head, I can't be arsed to look in any more depth. But the simple answer is yes; yes they have.

Maybe we should build an 80,000 seat stadium then. We'll definitely win the league using that criteria.

Sunderland have had a 49,000 seater stadium for quite some time now. They have never finished higher in the Premier League than 7th; one place higher than our best ever finish. Just saying, like....

A substitute who doesn't get to play.