SaintBobby

I renewed 3 x season tickets on Monday and they arrived (in London) today. V impressed with the quick turn around. Will be close to a sell out for Ajax? I imagine so if we have an exciting managerial announcement before Saturday....

Presume he's gone because he's unwanted by the new owners, am sure we could have matched Plymouth's offer. This just goes to underscore our problem with strikers at the moment - John, Rasiak and Saga all good at L1 level, but are they up for it?

This is the rumour that is doing the rounds at the moment - hard to work out if it's the truth coming form many different sources, or just a Chinese whisper though...

Ferguson would be more than acceptable to me, but am still holding a torch for Strachan. I imagine the attraction for DF might be money - i assume we'd offer much, much more than he's on at Posh.

Fingers and toes crossed...

I have no idea what the Tigers' Parade has to do with Southampton FC. They may well be a great bunch of folk. But this has nothing to do with Saints really, does it?

WTF? We now have a sticky on British foreign policy on this site??????? Please no. We seem to let national politics invade ever area of our lives. Not on here please. We may as well put a "Have you seen Maddy?" thread online. Very sad.

I will personally finance a JR of the DD process. It's a scam. I am instructing lawyers to draft a letter to the PL and FA.

You were clearly as surprised as me. I'm so grateful for this forum, it allows me to keep up-to-date on all the latest news. Don't know where I'd be without it.

Amended in the interests of accuracy.

How fast can you turn them round?

Bloody hell - didn't know that Rasiak insisted on collecting his weekly wage in cash....

This seems the best place I can find online for buying a Swiss flag http://www.aacflags.com/index.php

:lol::lol::lol: Any chance you can post a copy of the memo you've had sight of? Replace the word "understand" with the words "sometimes fantasise" and I agree with you 100%.

That's probably true. But do you get the impression that he's doing this as an investment? I think he's doing it for fun.

No one thinks he's going to spend all his £2.5bn. (just so I get this right, that £2,500,000,000, yes?). BUT: 1. He will spend some of it. I'm hoping and expecting that we will be the biggest spenders in League One by some margin. If he spends £10m on new players and associated salaries this year, that amounts to 0.4% of his personal fortune. That's barely worth even acknowledging in his book-keeping given that his exposure in stocks and shares, currencies, property etc must be 100s of millions per annum. 2. It seems unlikely to me that we will ever be within days of liquidation while he is in charge. Or that the staff will go unpaid. Or that we will have to sell players in order to appease Barclays Bank.

All very historical, as others have said. But here's my 2p... I was very supportive of Lowe until the 2003-2004 season and moderately supportive of him until about November last year. I've reached the conclusion that he's like Gordon Brown - he preaches prudence rather than practices it. The "unforgiveables" for me are: 1. Botching going into admin so we start next season on -10 rather than taking the hit last season (even if Lowe believed there would be no penalty, he should have pre-empted things and gone into admin 48 hours earlier) 2. Greater prudence should have been practiced to avoid administration. I would have swallowed a viscous austerity package if this had succeeded in fending off administration, but it didn't. This is just incompetent business practice. 3. I'm sceptical about how serious and proficient the SLH board were in attempting to sell the club. Although the 98-day nightmare was protracted, it does seem that there were several parties willing to buy the club. Why were SLH's efforts so pitiful for so long? Even if their aim was to try and maximise their own share values in their own narrow financial interest, they did this very incompetently. 4. Presiding over two relegations and a -10 starting point is a pitiful performance - even if others have contributed to our demise. I know a lot of people are saying that any mention of Lowe should be banned and we should all look to the future. But I'm beginning to take a different view. Now that Lowe is out for good, I find it easier to talk about him rationally. I even find it pleasingly cathartic.

Well, that wasn't the only reason. Just because the fans "blocked" Hoddle, didn't mean we had to endure the Sturrock and Wigley fiasco. And even having done so, relegation was not inevitable.

True enough - the polls aren't a vigorous mathematical analysis of opinion, but I'd have thought twenty minutes on this forum would lead the reader to the following (broadly accurate) analysis of the views of the fanbase. Namely; Very popular: Strachan Popular: Pearson, Keegan, Coppell Some honourable mentions: Boothroyd, Tisdale, Gross Some measurable resistance: Hoddle, Wotte (RIP) Monumentally unpopular: Tony Adams Of course, there are literally dozens of possible candidates not on this limited list of ten. But these are the ten who - at present - are "testable" in this curious court of public opinion.

If I was Mark Fry and some loony phoned up to ask whether St. Mary's could get planning permission for a rollercoaster, an ice rink and a petting zoo, I'd probably hang up too.....

No, the fans shouldn't pick the manager. But yes, fan opinion is important. A manager who has "lost" the crowd is nearly as screwed as one who has lost the dressing room (e.g. Branfoot). And there can be less black and white consequences too. if we get a popular choice - such as WGS or Pearson - they are likely to be forgiven more easily than, say, Tony Adams who will be labelled as a useless skate b*stard unless he wins game after game. One area where i think a forum like this might have some influence is in managerial appointments. I find it laughable that some argued that negative comments on here could somehow derail a multi-million pound takeover. But it seems to me that this is as good a measure of "fan opinion" as you can find. The latest "next manager" poll has nearly 1,000 votes cast. If the appointments panel can't decide between, say, WGS and Adams, the statistical evidence on here might just help tip the balance.

He's not on the shortlist, he won't be the next manager of Saints. End of story.

WGS, Coppell, Pearson, Keegan, Hoddle, Tisdale

According to a representative at Skybet, people were trying to put four figure sums on Strachan. That's a lot of wishful thinking - or some inside knowledge. It may be that people misinterpretted WGS's visit to Staplewood I guess. You're right though - it doesn't take much money to shift the odds. Maybe a grand on Adams would have been enough to put him to evens.

This is the key point. It's not NP's performance at Saints that is totally decisive, it's that he has shown he can do it in League One with Leicester. If Leicester had finished 8th or 9th, I wouldn't be as keen. But they stormed the league. If one of the interview questions is "What evidence is there that you are able to help a medium-sized club that is at its lowest ebb fight its way successfully out of the third tier?" .....then it's hard to imagine that there is anyone who can provide as compelling a reply as Nigel Pearson...