The Kraken

By "the area", you're really talking about the city. Any inner city location is going to be a headache for any club; it's not an issue that is unique to Saints. The area will struggle for the extra traffic but it will cope. Besides, I'm sure any planning permission would be entirely dependent on the provision of much improved park and ride and other transport schemes. I personally see absolutely no point of expanding beyond 40,000. We just wouldn't get any more than that except for games against the big 4, and even then its debatable how much above 40K we'd get. So we're only adding in 8,000 extra customers, or 25% extra than current capacity. The area can cope with that. Whether it makes financial sense to pay anywhere between £16M and £24M to achieve that capacity is another matter altogether.

I think reactions like this to leftback are more tiresome tbf. If you don't hold much stock in what he has to say, then ignore it. LB clearly has an avenue to infirmation from the club that most don't, so I for one welcome his (admittedly agenda-strewn) messages.

Quite frankly, I couldn't give a toss. Pardew is gone, for whatever reason; it is immaterial now. Hearing some newspaper tales of their view of the events holds no interest for me, its old news (and not very important news at that).

To be fair, I think it'll be years before we can hail the appointment of Adkins as a masterstroke. I still maintain that, even despite a poor start to the season, we would have achieved promotion from this division with Pardew at the helm. The squad we have assembled is such that, whoever is in charge, it will be a failure if we do not go up this year. The whys and wherefores of Pardew's sacking are immaterial; I expected promotion with him in charge, I expect promotion with Adkins in charge, and anything less than that is simply not good enough. Where I think you may be proved right in the masterstroke claim is that Adkins does seem to be a very progressive thinker, and can perhaps adapt to situations better than Pardew. That said, Pardew's record in the second half of last season in uparallelled in Saints recent history. So, for now, its swings and roundabouts. If Adkins gets us back to the Prem within the 5 year plan, then yes, his appointment will be a masterstroke. Until then, and while we remain in League 1, we are very much a work in progress.

No thanks. For reasons I've stated above I think Stoneham would create a completely soulless footballing experience and have a detrimental impact on crowd numbers.

And the police will have to prove that those charged were indeed throwing objects. Pretty much all of the accused have admitted that they shook the fence but deny throwing anything (though I think one admitted making a throwing gesture but did not actually throw an object). Without any CCTV I'd say the police wouldn't have a prayer of a conviction, so I imagine there must be evidence to back up the accusations otherwise it really shouldn't have even got to court.

Lets just be clear about these so-called "lads", those in court are aged 43, 28, 49, 46, 29 and 36. In other words, old enough to know better.

If we're going to go for a city centre location then there really isn't a site that would be much better than what we have. Getting 30K to 40K people into and away from a city centre location in one hit is always going to be a logistical nightmare, no matter how good the transport links are. That site above from Joensuu would kill that road out of town, it's completely grid locked as it is with Ikea, throw in a football stadium and it would utter chaos. I think our best bet is to stay where we are; I think our gates in the Prem reflected that we had a good inner city location. I think a Stoneham type development would see numbers drop off, a day at the football is more than just the game its the social aspect before and after, and without the options the city gives you with that I think it would be a major detraction for many to attend. Gate money pales into insiginifiance in comparison with the TV money on offer from Sky; I personally don't think even with a good run of form in the top division that we'd justify a stadium much bigger than 40K. And certainly not for games not involving the top 4 or 5 clubs. In any case, the problem we will face with funding for a new or redeveloped ground is that football stadiums just aren't worth as much as they cost to build. The cost for our stadium was £32M, and as soon as it was built it was probably worth less than half that. Because it a totally unique facility that is of little good to anyone except the football team. If we get back to the top I believe we'd be much better served maximising our current attendance before jumping head first into a ground development which doesn't give us an enormous lot more than we already have, but that will cost almost as much as the original cost of the stadium.

10 mins or so left racine is on for mcnish. gobern and holmes also off as a few under 16s get late runs out

70 mins GOAL! and that's number 5 as ben reeves crashes in a low shot from the right at the near post

47 mins GOAL! Saints 3-0 up doble again with the assist for mcnish to grab his second of the game

43 mins GOAL! Saints 2-0 up callum mc nish taps home at far post from doble's pass almost identical to the first on the other side. Half time: Saints 2 Bompey 0.

Doble almost makes it 2 moments later but his effort trickles wide of the far post

25 mins GOAL! Saints 1-0 up harlee dean taps home doble's pass

From Saints twitter: Team: bialkowski, dickson, a.martin, tafazolli, argent, holmes, dean, gobern, mcnish, reeves, doble. Saints looking comfortable on the ball early on mcnish going closest to a goal so far with a shot just over the bar. Ben Reeves hits a low shot on to outside of the post from a Lee Holmes cross.

Richardson was not out of contract; we paid a fee "believed to be in the region of £450,000". Dickson went to tribunal.

Driving distance, Plymouth to Swindon: 159.5 miles. Driving distance, Southampton to Nottingham: 166.5 miles. I suppose those 7 miles make all the difference.

I actually thought it was more like £3K per additional seat, so even less value for money. I think we can add 4,000 seats above each of the Chapel and Northam stands, and 8,000 above the Kingsland, so we could potentially have a 48,000 seater stadium. That is way, way too big as far as I can make out. No doubt against the likes of Man U, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Tottenham and Man City we'd likely get towards 40K without too much problem. I can remember, even as a member, how difficult it was to get tickets to these games. The amount of away tiickets on offer could also potentially increase (though I don't think you have to give any more than 3,200 by premier League rules) so perhaps, if we were doing ok, we might nudge on up towards the capacity once in a while. That said, games against the likes of Blackpool, Wolves, Blackburn, Fulham, Birmingham, Wigan etc etc are just never going to get too much beyind the 30K we used to average before, so we'd have a stadium that was near on half empty for most of our games.

Your maths are wrong in the Dagenham write up. That record is 20 points from 10 games, 2 points per game.

I think he's a brilliant striker. Maybe the best at the club. But what I don't think anyone else has picked up on, is that it's likely he'll be back in the treatment room soon enough.

Fair enough. I think the digs at Shrewsbury were petty and unnecessary; there were many other ways that the article could have been written in order to express the story of prices etc, but the club chose a deliberately aggressive, patronising and ultimately offensive posture. And I think Shrewsbury's reaction to it was pretty much spot on, being how far we've fallen we'd do well to publicly show a bit more humility. I don't disagree with us fighting our corner for ticket prices; but then I don't disagree with Shrewsbury's right to attempt to maximise profits, it's what pretty much all lower league clubs will do. I just think the tone of the article smacked of brinkmanship and, ultimately, pettiness.

Being as the story still appears on our website after all the publicity it received, I think it's fair to say that whether he wrote it or not Cortese sees it as fair comment and is happy for the club to stand by the sentiments expressed.

OK, maybe I'm being harsh on him. Like I said, while he's been steady I don't think he's set the world alight. But then again he's a full back, so I shouldn't expect so much.

Warnock also used to play Clint Hill as a left back, as he preferred a solid, defensive first back line. We now look to play with width and get the full backs up in support of the midfielders.

With Butterfield I'm largely going off what I was told by a few mates who support Palace; that he'll do a decent job at this level, could probably still do a job at Championship level, but was more of a utility man than a really good first choice. As steady as he's been, I haven't seen too much to differ from that view. I think the answer to the question is maybe formed from what we want to achieve in the Championship. If its just to play in the league and survive, then yes I think most of our players are up to that. However, if we want to push for promotion then I believe we would need quite a few new faces. A lot of of players would be good for backup but I think we'd need better to achieve promotion. In any case, we're well ahead of ourselves!