The Kraken

I've actually just got off the blower with a very good friend of mine who looks after player recruitment for Cardiff; he's said that he was a bit surprised to see that we went for Fox as we already had Harding and Dickson plus Mills, but he thinks that in Fox we've got a very good player who's better than all of them.

I agree about Waghorn and wouldn't be massively enthused if we went for him. I'm hopeful that's just agent-talk for now.

I think my point was that I don't think we are signing squad players. Guly played most of the back end of last season; he's a different player to de Ridder entirely, I think de Ridder is more of a direct replacement for AOC. So maybe a squad player, but with first team intentions firmly in mind while offering a completely different alternative to the current incumbent. Fox, I really can't see us lashing out nearly £2M on a squad player, I think he'll soon be the number one left back. And as I said, Fontaine I think is targetted as a starting centre-back with Fonte. You say we don't need more squad players and I agree; anyone we sign should be a first team player and that's exactly what I think we're looking to do.

In a way you're right, but you need to look at the players we've actually signed on an individual basis: Chaplow: originally went straight into the team, and bolstered what was a weak squad (we only had Hammond and Schneiderlin as viable CMs). Forte: Squad player at best and admittedly not inspiring. Cork: Excellent signing. de Ridder: Time will tell, looks like he's being given time to adapt to English football, and is being kept out by Guly who is one of the best performers of the season so far. Fox: Too early to tell but has Premier League and SPL experience, I expect him to be in ahead of Harding before long. Fontaine has 4 years of Championship experience, finishing 4th, 10th, 10th and 16th with City; he seems like a first choice signing to me.

Plenty of people saying he is their best defender; would you get any on here saying the same about Richardson or Fonte?! Lots seem disappointed they're losing him; others not so bothered. General consensus seems to be that he has takent but has stagnated a bit in the last season or two, possibly due to being played as one of various different centre-half pairings. They say he's quick, which is a leg-up on Gorkss. He's been a fixture in a side that has finished 4th, 10th, 10th and 16th in this league in the last 4 years. It's also rumoured that we've gone for him after turning down the opportunity to sign Gorkss, so if that's true we see him as a better option than someone who is nudging 30 and has signed for £1M for a significant rival of ours.

Last rites for Puncheon, Dickson and Holmes?

And the same board that gave SCW £1M per year for a similarly pitiful effort.

St. James Road, in the little parade of shops just down from the back of King Edwards school.

Exactly what I came in to suggest; portion sizes are amazing. My friends also live right by it.

Isn't that Bertie Bassett? I've actually got no idea why he's called Harry.

I think we agree; as I've said, putting Woodward in the DoF role was lunacy, as he knew next to nothing about a football club and all that it entails. Having him learn his trade with us (on a £1M p.a. salary, is that the best apprenticeship wage ever?) to eventually take over the first team was madness of the highest order, especially considering we couldn't really afford it. But I do think that, under the right stewardship, someone like Woodward (would have to be someone cheaper though) could potentially benefit a football club. For Saints at the time though it's difficult to see one area where it did or could have succeeded.

And you'll see that's not what I'm advocating by any stretch, and is indeed where our way of doing it went so drsatically wrong. But there is clearly scope to have a Woodward-type role work at a football club; we are living proof as I previously said, Les Reed occupies the hot seat. But the main man simply has to understand every single aspect of how a football club operates. There are so many areas where experts from other sports could have an input into the way football clubs operate, I've already mentioned some of them, you have fitness and conditioning experts, food nutritionists, all sorts who previously have had success in other fields (predominantly athletics, I would suggest). Closing off to the possibility that other sports could offer something new (and better) in certain areas is naive IMO.

I don't quite understand this point of view. That coaches successful in another sport cannot transfer some of their skills to benefit a different sport. The madness of our whole idea was that the "Woodward role" needed to be undertaken by someone who knew all about the inner workings of a football club. It's exactly the same role that Les Reed currently has with Saints. But to say that you should instantly rule out sprinting coaches from athletics, fitness coaches from rugby, and all sorts of other individuals with a huge variety of different skills, is thoroughly closed-minded IMO.

Woodward always worked to the idea that the easiest way to significantly improve the performance of an elite athlete was to break it down and instead of finding a 10% improvement overall, find 10 different things that can be improved and improve them by 1% each. It's fairly common sense and nothing really innovational, but demonstrates how you use the likes of fitness coaches, vision coaches etc etc to look outside the box and work on the whole field of athlete skills. I've said before, the idea of Woodward in such an advanced role for us was complete lunacy. But there are definitely parts of his skillset which can be applied to many sports (which I guess is why he is in his role with the BOA right now). Football teams have used rugby league fitness coaches before. Athletics sprinting coaches (Darren Campbell) have been and still are employed to work with football squads. Just because someone comes from a different sporting background it really doesn't mean that they have nothing to offer to football. Which is why I can see there is potential for cross-sports training iniatives. What we did, however, was never, ever going to work in principle as it was far, far too much too soon and gave far too much responsibility to one man who effectively knew nothing about the inner workings of a football club.

I think some of the principles could have been excellent; Woodward was seemingly very good at surrounding himself with experts and raising individual performance levels by one or two per cent at a time to get elite athletes performing at their optimal level. Unfortunately, the costs involved were astronomical at a time when we'd just lost the financial security of the Premier League. We could have put the money spent on Woodward into the team and invested in the sports science as and when we got back to the top table. Trying to put together the costs of the whole exercise would just reduce me to tears. Allegedly £1M per year for Woodward. £300K per year for Clifford. They refurbished parts of the training ground setup, putting in various costly gadgets, gizmos, playstations and such like. I'm pretty sure they hired a "vision coach" too. And I've probably erased from memory various other hair-brained schemes that took up vital funds and neglected the playing side of things.

You're trying far too hard now.

The thing with that statement, and basing on a supposed track record, is this; of all the players we are (supposedly) tracking, none of them have a track record better than players we have now. Out of Maynard, J-Rod, Sharp etc, in terms of track record and divisions played in, Connolly comes up much better. Barnard and Lambert have comparable scoring records, albeit they've rarely played higher than League 1. But you wouldn't hold that against Rickie right now, he's one of the first names on the team sheet, so by that logic you shouldn't hold it against a new signing. Yes, we should sign players better than those we currently have. Of course that's right. But knowing just who those players are, and how much we should/could pay for them is a lot more diificult. You could argue that Rodriguez is unproven, as he's still young and hasn't done it over a number of seasons. Yet he would cost more than £6M, and it would still be no guarantee of success.

Or it might me that you are massively tedious, as well as being abjectly dull and incorrect.

Please say it isn't so, that would be utterly tragic.

Which made it all the more preposterous. We needed to drastically cut back on expenditure, yet we lashed out huge sums on such a badly thought out notion that you couldn't make up the sheer absurdity of it all. Woodward allegedly on £1M per year, Clifford by his own admission on £300K, God only knows where else we threw money down the drain while neglecting the area it was really needed, on the pitch (£90K on Fuller was all we spent during that summer if memory serves me). The post-Strachan era at Saints under Lowe was just a complete catastrophe: Sturrock binned, the Wigley debacle, the whole Redknapp charade, Woodward and Clifford, Poortvliet, Wotte. Disaster zone.

Stalker alert.

There's no doubt that Bassett and indeed Redknapp were set in their ways and completely resistent to change. That said, what Lowe tried to push through was complete lunacy. Think about it, he was trying to promote a management duo who had zero experience in professional football. Zero. And he was seemingly prepared to allow carte blanche to a rugby coach having a play around with football, and a guy who made his name adopting a system of soccer schools for 10 year old children. Of course Bassett and Redknapp were going to resist what Lowe was forcing on them. And knowing how confrontational and arrogant Clifford is, you can bet that he was busy undermining the work of the coaching team for his own self-promotion and benefit. say what you want about Redknapp (and I'll be happy to say plenty about his time with us), he has a decent track record in football by doing things his own way. To force this comedy duo onto him was a moment of madness from Lowe and was destined to failure right from the very start.

When it comes to his constant rhetoric about all things Hoddle I do the same, as his argument is as thoroughly boring as it is ill thought out. Originally I hadn't realised that same undercurrent of banality existed throughout the rest of his posts; you soon learn though.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest they wouldn't give a flying f*ck what is being sung about them in an already sh*t song.

Pinch of salt time, I'd suggest. Clifford is one of the biggest self-publicists there is. The whole Woodward episode was just stupidly bizarre from start to finish.