SaintBobby

What a ridiculous headline from the OP. Three things Hitler got right: 1. The trains ran on time 2. Sales of Cyclon B were enhanced. 3. He got his name in the history books. This discussion is the logical (although, monumentally trivial) equivalent of Germans in 1946 arguing who should have been executed in what order at Nuremberg.

I think there may be a strong case for Wilde, Lowe et al to be "struck off" by Companies House. This would disbar them from any and all company directorships. I am trying to seek some legal advice on how such a complaint can be lodged and prosecuted, but am told the case is powerful prima facie (which i think is Latin for "on the bare face of it" :-) ) It would obviously hit these b*stards more than a legal bar on talking sh*t in the Echo.

Sorry to hear this dreadful news. RIP to a Saints fan. Thoughts, condolences and best wishes to his family. God bless you.

Surely, please to God, time to move on. Crouch comes out of this whole thing with a bit more credit than either Lowe or Wilde. But FFS, no German in 1946 spent too much time arguing that Albert Spier was better than Hitler or Goebels. Ok, none of Crouch, Lowe and Wilde are murderous Nazis. But all of them are culpable - through malice, arroagance or incompetence - of overseeing the downfall of Saints. Clear the f*cking decks.

Great coding system :-) No reason why any suppsoed ITK can't use it! Top job!

It strikes me it's actually a business decision, rather than a legal one. If Saints can sell tickets for the All-Star game on May 17th and make explicit that these are being kept in a separate bank account with refundability (which they are), I don't see any serious legal reason why this couldn't be done for season tickets. My guess is that the position is so precarious and unpredictable - and the intentions of any new putative owners so impossible to second guess - that a serious business plan is needed before pricing up tickets. To take three extreme examples: 1. Trillionaire buys the club and wants to reward loyal fans.... 'early bird' renewal is £50. 2. Club is just kept afloat at St. Mary's, Chapel and Kingsland stands closed to cut cost. Cash desperately needed in reduced capacity ground of 15,000...renewal price is £200. 3. New owners hand over the keys to St. Mary's stadium back to Aviva and relocate to Eastleigh's Silverlake Stadium (capacity 3,000)....limited tickets available at £450 each. Not saying, btw, that any of these things will come close to happening, but the variance is enormous even within a range of more plausible outcomes.

To hypo...for posting this...I hate you! I have just pulled myself off the floor with two broken ribs and a hernia due to p*ssing myself laughing so much. The reporter doing the interview deserves a BAFTA for apparently keeping a straight face. Hardly needed to do a Paxman did he? Just stick a microphone in the bloke's face and watch him humiliate himself for the viewers' pleasure. Amongst the true highlights of a wonderful few minutes of television: "There's a press conference tomorrow. Everything at that stage will - to an extent - be revealed." "I was trained by Xerox, many years ago. I'm a business strategist." Mr Jackson then goes on to claim that he has a considerable list of contacts in football. Although the only one he actually names was - many years ago, he thinks - a scout for West Ham. And is now dead. Tantasingly, almost seductively, he opines that "ALL will be revealed". When immediately then asked who is in the constortium he says that "will never be answered". In one of the most horrific misunderstandings of the word "advertising" I have ever seen by any human being, he makes the extraordinary assertion: "Xerox is getting wonderful advertising here..." He then clarifies his skills and expertise - from his humble beginnings - for the grateful audience: "Truth is I've sold photocopiers...but network specialist is more my line. And, you know, business strategist, business development." Finally, to underscore his great knowledge of football - and to show his instinctive understanding of every clubs fanbase, he makes the very valid point: "Doesn't matter if you support Man Utd, you'd rather sit and watch Arsenal" Based on this insight alone, it is hard to understand why the Glazer brothers have not snapped him up on an eight figure salary. PURE COMEDY GOLD!

If the worst came to the worst, I'm sure that Eastleigh would be delighted to groundshare the Silverlake with a phoenix Saints team. Clubs like Eastleigh aren't going to turn down such a spectacularly huge income stream. However, I gather that the highest league that a new Sainst team could enter next season is the Wessex League. This is the equivalent of division nine in the pyramid and is the same level that AFc Wimbledon entered at (they re-staretd in the Combined Counties League). My source for this is a second-hand report of a radio interview with nick Illingsworth.

Oh my God. Pressional footballers are very well paid. Geees..... Amazing....

I think Barclays actually pulled the plug before relegation was certain! There is some sense to Alpine's case - if by spending, say, £500,000 on a striker's wages, you fend off relegationa dn boost crowds, then the new striker's costs are outweighed by the benefits. However, the problem is that at some point you have to cease speculating to accumulate. The £6m debt, and the high % of turnover dedicated to player salaries, indicated we had basically reached that limit. You can't forever keep adding "one more key player" to the squad. I doubt Braclays foreclosing on us was as big a bolt from the blue as Lowe would ahev us believe. We had been given tiem to get our house in order and failed lamentably.

There's a big difference between an occasional intemperate and ill thought-out post and an ongoing spewing forth of delusional nonsense. Jackson fits squarely intot he latter category.

I'll be hitting refresh every twenty seconds to look for your reliable updates on the unfolding situation. Moron.

Gotcha. Thanks.

Does this still refer to LLS/Jackson. If so (or even if not), it behoves me to explain that the bloke is a complete Walter Mitty character. Seriouslydelusional. Although based on rather hazy recollection, his crime sheet includes - but is by no means limited to - the following: He (in)famously appeared on national television claiming to be the owner of AFC Bournemouth. This was a total fiction. He was hastily denounced by those he claimed to be representing. He appeared to invent for himself - in some sort of lunatic Kim Jong-Il fashion - a past history and association with Soutahmpton Football Club which bore no relation to the facts. I can't remember the exact details but they seemed to range from having "discovered" Adam Lallana or Theo Walcott whilst working as a scout for Saints to having actually been a coaching assistant for the club. Not only did he credulously believe that Paul Allen was on the verge of buying the club, he claimed to know this as an absolute stonewall fact. He maintained this position even in the face of a complete, categorical and unequivocal public statement from Paul Allen's representatives that Allen had no interest - and had never had any interest - in purchasing Saints and that there was absolutely no truth whatsoever, in any way, in the rumours that were circulating. His "manifesto" for Southampton involved - amongst other similarly insane ideas - getting David Beckham to forsake Real Madrid and come to the south coast. He expressed supreme confidence that this was easily achievable and chided those expressing any doubts as lacking ambition or imagination. I believe in real life, that he is a relatively unsuccessful salesman of photocopiers and photocopying equipment. I honestly don't know whether he is truly committed to the club or not (the whole AFC Bournemouth thing suggests at least some 'promiscuity'), but in light of the information above, you may wish to reconsider your statement that "If he wants to run the club, I'm in..."

So, is there any difference between SLH being in administration and it being liquidated?

He's already Saints' new chief scout? Impressive! :-)

If - laughably - Jackson is involved in any way at all, then the good ship Southampton has long since departed the port of tragedy and is now grounded on the beach of total farce.

No chance of this happening. Thank God. I'd love MLT to play a major, unifying role though. He would help to rally fans and bring unity to the club at our time of dire need. Could he become Honorary President following Ted Bates' sad passing?

Readily accept I'm rather out of my depth and no expert, here. However, my (limited) understanding is that the administrator's role/duty involves attempting to keep the company assets together as a sort of job lot and to find a buyer who can make the company a going concern. A liquidator or asset stripper would just chop up the assets into bits and sell the flagpole to Mr. X and the Ted Bates statue to Mr. Y. Am pretty sure we are still in a phase whereby there's a legal/fiduciary duty on Mark Fry to save SLH "as is" rather than to sell it off in bits, even if the latter would be in the interests of the creditors. I think this is the difference between administration and bankruptcy/liquidation.

Without wishing to sound too harsh, any bid involving Jackson can safely be written off as a fantasy. If he has any involvement in bid#1 then I favour bid#2, even if this is a consortium of Lowe, Hitler, Davros and Osama bin Laden.

This is fair enough from Badvoc IMHO. The key test for me on whether someone is actually ITK is the specificity/non-specificity of the information they provide. For example, I can imagine someone meeting a mate, who works at St. Mary's, down the pub and the Saints employee saying something like "I bumped into Mark Fry today, he's looking much more chipper than last week. I asked him if we had a buyer and he said "Can't say much, but fingers crossed, they'll be some good news by the end of the week". Such an anecdote has a ring of, if not truth, then at least plausibility about it. Someone who says "I have been told there is a press conference scheduled for 2.00pm" is almost certainly talking total tosh. It's highly unlikely that anyone working at SMS would know this before the press office did and the info is just too specific. What's even more annoying is the "don't shoot the messenger" argument when very specific pieces of information are concerned. Even if you are willing to suspend disbelief and assume that the poster has been told this and accepted it in good faith, why on Earth would the Saints staff member make it up???? It's just not plausible. None of the ITK posters ever seem to go back to their "sources" and ask them why their information was so completely wrong. So, I think those posting very specific supposedly ITK info which turns out to be false should be banned from the forum, unless they can find an utterly convincing explanation for how they got it so wrong.

What we know for sure is that there isn't and wasn't a press conference scheduled for 2pm. The original poster was talking b*ll****. If it turns out there is still a press conference today, it would be a luky guess, but there is no way it wouldn't be public knowledge by now if there was a 2pm start. As someone who works with press and media, you need to give AT least two hours notice just to get cameras set up etc., and probably much more if (a) the press conference is in Southampton rather than London and (b) you actually want to get some coverage for it. I do tend to agree there should be infractions/bans for those who post stuff which turns out to be total nonsense.

If there really is a press conference, then I'm a bit more optimistic than Ken. If Mark Fry merely wanted to issue a non-conclusive statement, he could do this without a press conference - especially if he is unable to answer any questions that go beyond the statement.

Not in League One we haven't. My point is that he may very well have the wrong attitude for the state the club is in. As others have pointed out though, this really is a totally hypothetical discussion. You may as well ask something like "If we could get in a TARDIS and bring a 32-year old Matt Le Tissier forward in time to 2009, would you pay him £10,000 a week to play for us even if you knew he was only going to be fit to play 8 full games and make 6 sub appearances?" It's just not going to happen.

Really tricky one this. You're right that the fans are always the innocent victims. But there does need to be some penalty in place to stop financial mismanagement. And it's hard for the football authorities to go after the money men. I would, however, like to have an FA rule that any and all board members of a club that goes into admin are all automatically barred for life from further football involvement at board level - for life - on a "fit and proper person" test.