SaintBobby

I'm bothered about it. Wouldn't mind losing. But, I'm taking some JCLs to the game. May convert them. Win. Win.

I have - on relatively good authority - the view that Saints will NOT be signing any "marquee" players in this window. I still hate the term "marquee" (it's just French for "tent", right?). I understand that 3 quite substantial offers have been made - including to Crystal Palace and to Doncaster Rovers - but these are unlikely to lead to signings because either the club has not accepted the bid, or the player could not agree terms/was not interested. Saints also seem to be operating an "informal" pay ceiling of £10K per week. It's possible - but I'm not sure of this - that we have a few players tied to "top pay" contracts on this basis. So, for example, signing a new player on £12K a week, would possibly also involve giving a pay increase to c. 4 present players from £10K to £12k -meaning the real cost of signing such a player would actually be £20K a week. The salary issue is speculation. The substantial (and thus far rebuffed) NA bids are, I think, fact.

mathematically, you may as well go for this saturday - it's about a 15% chance. No other saturday has such a high % just yet.

GdP: The Saints Web Forum have a taxi waiting for me???? Do I have to leave right now?

I'd be okay with that outcome. Will have really shored up the base and have prevented some real possible downsides (losing Lallana or AOC) Would be happier with a top quality CB and a back-up CF. Total cost? Maybe £1m - £1.5m.

Love the sash so much I want to keep it. Makes us unique. Attached to red and white stripes but very generic. No one else has the sash (except Peru, and I don't mind that)

How likely is it? Well, if we assume probabilities can be derived on bookies odds.... Brighton would have to lose to Peterborough. A Posh win is at 7/2 in most places. This implies a 22% probability. Additionally, Saints would have to win against Notts County. That's 1/2 in most bookies. This implies a probability of 67%. The chance of both happening is 22% x 67% = 14.8% (the Bournemouth result is irrelevant btw) Btw, in a major shift on the betting markets, you can now barely get evens on Saints winning the League come May. It's averaging 5/4. Saints to be promoted is running at about 2/5. Alpine and others may be tempted by the 500/1 you can get at bet365 on Saints being relegated ! :-) See oddschecker for more.... http://www.oddschecker.com/football/english/league-one/winner

Def prefer NPC to L1 (not to say I enjoyed our stay in NPC more than our stay in L1). Prem or NPC? Hmmm.....

You managed to average more than 70 mph? Good job.

I voted No. Sounds like a very mean-spirited thing to do, but I think a lasting tribute should be decided in talks with the family, not the fans. From what I've read, Markus was a very private, modest and quiet man. I'd really like the decision to be taken by Cortese and the Liebherrs. It would be rather awkward if the fans were loudly demanding a particular tribute that wasn't considered appropriate by the family. Although his time with us was tragically limited, it was much more than a footnote!

I assume for Saints. But - only counting league games - may be first time ever in English football ? (Obviously there are a few extreme c. 14-0 cup results). Can anyone find a counter example?

On the bus, but keeping our feet on the floow

It's very annoying. Especially as traffic doesn't seem to be enormously high. I don't begrudge my fiver, I get more than £5 value from the site a year, easily. But it is amazing that a paid for site would crash like this.

Who from the youth team? I don't think we have enough strikers if Connolly is permanently crocked. Doubly true if Puncheon goes, as he can play as a makeshift striker. I don't think it would disrupt team balance to bring in a 4th choice centre forward.

A pity if he is moving on. But maybe an unavoidable one. If he does go, I think we do need to sign another winner. One thing that annoys me - although I don't know how Saints can easily stop this - is that players who want to go not only leave, but also tend to lower the asking price. If I throw a strop at my place of work, it makes my life more difficult - it doesn't make it easier for me to get what I want. I wonder if the solution for football is similar to that in other high-level, personnel-dependent industries - namely, that gardening leave becomes a standard element of contracts. If there was a gardening leave clause for three months (or six months in the off-season), this would make it much harder for whingeing players to get their way. All that said, if he goes, good luck to him I guess. He hasn't been as bad at Saints as some seem to think, but he has been frustrating and has never really settled.

Well done for getting on at 4/1 I think 15/8 is still a good bet. Id say we're about 50-50 to win the division.

Good question on Solent...when did we last have 6 different goalscorers? Have we ever?

Fair play to Alpine. He called it bang on the money ;-) Just goes to show how well informed your predictions can be without ever watching the team ;-) We're absolutely motoring now....

I'm full of confidence about L1 games now - go into every match genuinely expecting us to win. But this is one of the trickier ties. I think we probably need 2 points a game to get promoted automatically, maybe a shade more to be champions. So, that's something like W 14 D 6 L 4 for the rest of the season. Would be great to keep this one out of the "L" pile.

It is a fact that: 1. Informed opinions are much more likely to be accurate than uninformed opinions. This is true of all subjects at all times. It is also a fact that: 2. Your opinions on the merits/demerits of Southampton's team are relatively uninformed given that you don't attend many (any?) matches. Do you deny that either of these statements are facts?

The point is that being informed makes it far more likely that you will get to the right conclusion. Your views aren't very informed. You don't see very many matches at all. Your opinions are therefore very uninformed and very little credence whould be attached to them. It doesn't prove your wrong, just makes it much more likely that you are. Informed people might be wrong. Uninformed people might be right. But that would be statistically unusual. It's a very good starting point to assume that informed people have a far, far better chance of being right on any given subject than uniformed people. As an aside, most remotely normal people who express an opinion they know to be poorly informed usually recognise this in the way they express their views. E.g. "I've never actually been to Australia, but I gather it's a very pleasant place to live" or "I've never actually seen The Godfather, but I hear it's a very good film". Not e.g. "I've never left Grimsby, but I can tell you for sure that it's a much nicer place than Sydney" or "I've never actually seen any of the Star Wars movies, but the Empire Strikes Back is definitely the worst of the original three movies" As I say, everyone is equally entitled to an opinion. But not all opinions are equal. I mean no offence at all when I say that the mere fact that you attend virtually no games means that your views are far less likely to be accurate than the opinions of someone who regularly does go to matches. The only rational thing to do is to accord your views much less weight than those of most of the posters on here.

Hmmm. Not convincing at all, really. Of course, people who actually attend games will often have very different - even contradictory - views. But actually being at a game will mean you have something of an informed opinion. It might be wrong, but it's informed. By way of analogy, a jury of 12 may well disagree about the guilt or innocence of the defendant. They may even all get the verdict wrong. But their views demand a greater level of respect - and command more veracity - than someone who sees a photo of the accused in a newspaper and decides he's guilty or innocent based on this alone. Now, I readily concede that your knowledge of Saints' players and performances is greater than merely looking at a still photo in a newspaper. But it is massively, truly enormously, less than the knowledge base of people who regularly attend matches. This doesn't automatically mean you're wrong. On occasions, someone might get a decision right by flipping a coin and someone who has spent hours of intense study might get the same decision wrong. But it does mean your view is not very well informed. And is certainly much less informed than the views of the vast majority of posters on this forum. Your entitled to your opinion, of course. Everybody is. But it would be strange indeed for you - or others- to attach very much weight to these opinions. There's the world of difference between having a right to an opinion and having an expectation that this opinion should be taken remotely seriously.

If I remember rightly, in the Branfoot era c.1992, we drew 2-2 at Old Trafford and went on to win on penalties. Shearer scored at least one of the two Saints goals. I think Tim Flowers saved the critical penalty (from Ryan Giggs?)

Bang on the money. Alpine?

I don't wholly disagree with you, but I don't think it is the same at every club in the world. Far from it. Finding comparable cover for Messi or Ronaldo is simply impossible. Finding good cover for, say, Dean Hammond or Danny Seaborne is eminently possible. And quite cheap. We're very different from Barca or Chelsea or Arsenal. We are actually fishing in a far bigger pool. There are only a tiny handful of players good enough to play for Barcelona etc. Whereas there are very many hundreds, maybe thousands, good enough to play for Southampton. We're also very different to most League One teams. We're mega-rich compared to most of our divisional opponents. So, I can well understand Dagenham or Leyton Orient saying "hell, we're just going to have to risk it. We're struggling to meet our bills as it is. If our best players get injured, we're just going to have to put the under-16s on the pitch." Southampton don't need to be as risky. obviously, it's absurd to try and believe we can buy an exact replica of Lallana just to sit on the bench. But I'd expect our squad to be far, far deeper than the smaller L1 teams. I'd expect us to have a fair number of fringe/squad/substitute players who could easily walk into the starting XI of many other third division sides. At the moment, although I think we have a playing staff that must be the envy of many of our opponents, we could still do with - and afford - a little bit more depth.