FloridaMarlin

I would refer you to my earlier post of November 27, m'lud. I'm sure this has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that Barker and the Chief Exec Mark Catlin worked together at Bury. It's so bloody obvious, this must be what is meant by the new era of transparency. You can see right through this appointment.

Oh dear, this is looking even more like an Old Boys Network. Why would Barker want to leave a club, comfortably in mid-table in League One (only six points off the play-off places) for one that is only two off the relegation places in the division below? Is it the magical draw of managing a really big club? Or is it that his old mate who he worked with at Bury, is chief executive and probably promised him a thicker wedge of cash than he was on at Crawley. It really does show that Champagne Iain and the rest of the star-struck fans on the board do not know how to run a football club. You can picture the meeting, can't you? "Well Mark" says Champers. "We don't have a clue what to do. We've sacked Whitts, but how do we go about finding another manager? You are wise in the ways of football, do you think you could find us somebody? Do you know anyone who might be interested?" "Oh, don't worry chairman, I think I might have one or two names in mind." So all that "We've had 80 applicants and I'm blown away by some of the names" was all smoke. They didn't have any applicants, and Catlin has simply done what other Truss members have done - and will continue to do before it goes pear-shaped - and find a job for their mate.

This could unravel faster than a Fair Isle sweater caught on a rusty nail. As pointed out above; "Despite the board breaking their budget." So that's premise of the truss (the spelling error is deliberate) gone up the pictures. I also like this quote from Catlin. "We are fan-owned club. They are loyal fans, and the time when they start turning is going to have an influence on decisions, whether that is right or wrong." So whenever a fan/owner is unhappy, does that mean he can move to get something changed? A noble thing in principal, but what about those fan/owners who were happy with Whittingham? Don't they get a say? The internecine squabbling and arguing will kick off big-time soon.

Feel a bit sorry for Whittingham. As you would expect of a former serving soldier, he was level-headed, pragmatic, realistic and never up his own backside. He was prepared to work for a low salary and should have been perfect for their predicament, but they are so delusional. Managers of the calibre they are talking about will not want to work there as long as they have got holes in their backsides. These guys are used to working with chairmen who can give them instant decisions, not a bubbly-soaked figurehead of a social experiment who has to consult his co-owners to get permission to buy a bag of toffees. As for Whittingham, has anybody had more qualifications for hero status? This was a bloke who bought himself out the army for £450 to play for them as they had so little faith in his ability that they didn't want to risk the price of a Champgane Iain round of drinks. As Corporal Punishment his goals almost got them promotion and fired them to an FA Cup final. He became villainous when he went to try his luck in the top flight, but then became a hero again when he returned to manage them in their hour of need. But memories are short on the Septic Isle, and because he had the temerity to lose a few games with a squad assembled from footballing pawn shops, his former hero status means nothing, and he is a bigger villain than Harold Shipman at a pensioners' club.

Another myth, that Pompey had a WWI Pals battalion. I've read more than 100 books on The Great War and nowhere does it mention the Pompey Pals. They've simply appropriated the Hampshire Regiment, and decided unilaterally that it consisted wholly of cannon fodder from the Septic Isle and decided it was the Pompey Pals in the hope that if they keep telling this lie enough, people will eventually believe it. My paternal grandmother lost her first husband in the WWI trenches and he served in the Hampshire Regiment and was from Southampton.

If you believe, they put a man on the moon.....

A Ex-Saints player I know, has never bet on football in his life, as he considers it a mug's game. But he is so convinced Saints are going to win the title, for the first time in his life he has staked money on it.

Nothing new here. All managers will say that you defend from the front, and most strikers will close down the opposition. Very few will not bother at all. Questions have been posed in the past about Lambert's fitness/weight, but nobody can heap enough priase on his attitude. When we were promoted and he knew he was going to be a Premier League striker, even under Adkins he upped his game. It's a testament to MoPo's motivational powers that Lambert has upped his game again, and like everyone else, has bought into the team ethic. Turn your original premise around. Rather than say the Brazilian wonder player will not be happy being asked to defend and do doggies, ask whether we would sign that sort of player in the first place. Besides, as the weekend showed emphatically, our pressing game is not about one striker running down the opposition back four. We press in groups, so if Lambert is the first contact, he goes knowing that two or three others will be on the scene pretty quickly. You could see Berbatov getting more and more brassed off as the game progressed. He is a lazy herbert, but his frustration was increased as he could see that when he went to close our defenders down, he was on his own and they were comfortably able to play it round him. There's a difference between a striker being the first defender of a group and the first defender while the rest of the team sit back 40 yards from him. And I would imagine the transfer committee have identified any number of players who fit the template. That's the simplistic beauty of it. Any striker coming in would have to fit into the system, we wouldn't suddenly start ripping up the plan by building a team around him.

Chanel Blue - a classic men's fragrance. In summer or the depths of winter when I feel I need a bit of sunshine in my life, Clinique Happy. A couple away from the usual suspects; 360degrees by Perry Ellis (An American cologne stocked by very few shops, but available online at cheapsmells.com) and Due by Laura Biagiotti. Still not sure about Spicebomb by Viktor & Rolf (the male equivalent of Flowerbomb).

These criticism were levelled at one D Beckham. He didn't turn out to be half bad. And he could deliver a good set piece.

So by admitting Wallace has a price and is likely to be sold, does this convert HNW hero McInnes into a villain for selling off the family jewels? Would goalscoring hero Wallace overnight become a villain for leaving, just when things are looking up and he is set to lead them in ripping up the division? In the same way that two negatives make a positive, if a villain sells another villain, does somebody somewhere become a hero? Rallyboy to the thread please, for mathematical villain/hero construct explanation.

According to one of their number who was there, their board meeting this week had two items for discussion - a) Sign a goalkeeper, b) Discuss Plan B in the event of relegation. They're now concerned that relegation might be a prospect, despite the fan/owners expected them to walk the league, and they are signing any player with a pulse to help them do just that. He also mentioned they got the last of the parachute payments this week. He said they were expecting £4m, but got £9m from the Premier League. He confirmed that nice bit of bunce would enable them to pay off the football creditors. Perhaps I'm being thick, but wasn't it already known their parachute payments would be increased, and the increase had been factored in to pay the Football Creditors? Also, he mentioned their income was only £6m a year. I've lost track of things, but how does that stack up?

Who was the first German-born, Wimbledon men's singles champion?

Geoff Hurst?

Some people need to disabuse themselves of the notion that we are not a selling club. Every club is a selling club if a) the price is right and/or b) they know the player wants to leave (tapped up) and they risk losing him for nothing at the end of his contract. Manchester United sold Ronaldo. Spurs sold Bale. You wouldn't describe either of them as a selling club - certainly not United - but they sold when it suited them. If Saints are confronted by a combination of a) & b) above, they will sell Shaw. When that time comes, it will be Cortese's task to do what those other 'non-selling' clubs did, and get the best possible deal.

No matter how badly you might suffer from vertigo, the Millau viaduct is preferable to the previous bloody nightmare, which was to drive through Millau itself. I have a soft spot for this and others like it, the Clapper Bridge at Postbridge on Dartmoor. https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=postbridge+clapper+bridge&rlz=1C1TEUA_enGB463GB463&es_sm=93&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=vpdIUonBIuWA7Qa2mIHABQ&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAQ&biw=1366&bih=663&dpr=1#facrc=_&imgdii=_&imgrc=HRj3Z3VlWMbG3M%3A%3BRmQBivNHVkrj4M%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fs0.geograph.org.uk%252Fphotos%252F22%252F46%252F224691_d2e701ca.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.geograph.org.uk%252Fphoto%252F224691%3B640%3B480 Given the technology available at the time, it was a considerable feat of engineering to manouver those great slabs of granite into place and drop them on the piles. It shows how man's ingenuity has advanced from this to some of the amazing feats of engineering we have today.

He's getting very well paid if he takes his holidays in Forte dei Marmi. It's where the rich, smart Italians take their holidays because Portofino is now clogged up by the yachts of Russian oligarchs.

Pochettino's impersonation of how the Argentine army would march into Las Malvinas struck fear into Southampton's English players.

Sabermetrics = Moneyball.

Ho-hum, yawn. Here we go again. "We know from bitter experience that we cannot rely on the competence or consistency of the game’s authorities when we get into difficulties. While I hope we never end up in such a conflict over governance or ownership of the club again, I am not prepared to rely on hope and optimism. I am a firm believer in putting our rights into writing, indeed I would go a lot further than the Trust’s rules and would like to see statutory action to clean up and regulate the game. We just can’t trust the FA, the Premier League, the Football League, or the PFA." It was the fault of the FA, the Football League, Fifa, the International Olympic Committee, the RSPCA, the Salvation Army and just about every organisation you can name who sat back and did nothing to prevent Pompey spending way beyond their means and buying trophies. Leopards, spots, etc.

The problem is that the vast majority of money coming in to fund the game to its current levels comes from TV. Of course, there have always been bigger fish, but in days of yore it was a more level playing field and clubs like Saints were able to compete with the bigger clubs by generating their own income and being resourceful. In the days when clubs relied on the size of their crowds, those with bigger grounds were able to generate more income than the likes of Saints at The Dell, but because the gaps were not so big, Saints were still able to tilt at the big boys. To an extent, clubs have become lazy and slapdash about raising their own income as they rely on TV income. Having said that, it would be be difficult for any club -even the likes of Man Utd - to raise enough money to meet the level of wage requirements for top players. It's all very well to say if the big clubs go off, the rest can start again, but those big clubs will take all the TV money with them, and the rest will be left with scraps, a bit like the Football League when the Premier League waltzed off to take Murdoch's millions.

If you can be a bit more bothered than I can to trawl through my previous posts, I've been saying for some time that this scenario is on the cards. The Champions League is the first step and the next logical one for the world's top clubs is to do what you say above. So the top four English/Spanish/German/Italian clubs, with a sprinkling of French, Portuguese and Russian clubs, all hive off with top clubs from South America, Asia (Japan/Saudi/Australia) and North America, and form a world league. These clubs will jump ship when Murdoch and other big cable/satellite TV companies dangle huge wads of cash in front of them. Fifa might try to stop them but they will effectively do what Kerry Packer did to the ICC years ago, flip them the middle digit and say; "Try and stop us, we've got the best players and people will watch our competition." This, of course, will effectively spell the end of the World Cup, but in one fell swoop will sate Murdoch's desire for revenge on Fifa who refuse to pimp out the World Cup to PPV tv, preferring to sell the rights to terrestrial TV companies to give the World Cup to the widest possible audience. Pie in the Sky? Nope. Execs at the BBC were getting worried about this happening two years ago when the first whispers of it were flying around.

As a nostalgic old fart, I still remember the 60s with fondness. It was the time I first started to go, taken along by my late dad. As I was so young, a lot of it was all fantastic mystery but the memories stay with you. A whiff of a certain tobacco (no, not pot) immediately transports me back to half-time at early season games. Everybody seemed to light up at half-time and I can still picture looking across to the West Stand and seeing a blue haze over the standing paddock underneath. When The Dell emptied out after the final whistle, the streets around seemed to be a solid heaving mass of people, especially as you looked up Wilton Avenue from the dip. I remember feet frozen to the point of numbness, and then the tingling hurt as the feeling returned to them on the walk up Milton Road to Bedford Place. We used to stand with a crowd of dockers under the East Stand, and although I didn't understand their jokes and some of the words they used, they were obviously funny as my dad and his mates would roar with laughter, and as it was infectious I would laugh too. I think my favourite era in terms of watching the team was the years after the FA Cup win, when we won promotion, and those early years back in the top flight. The football played by that team which included Boyer, MacDougall, Ball etc, was some of the best I have ever seen. Good times.

Jones looks as though her face caught fire and somebody put it out with a baseball bat.

Who are they? Ian Wright, Alan Brazil and the motor mouth type on Trash Talk sport radio? Just because they are brash and shout louder doesn't mean they know more.