SaintBobby

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.

Just a note on press conferences - if they are called they are not secret. A calling notice will be issued by the club's press office. Even Saints don't hold press conferences in secret! 99% of the ITK stuff on here turns out to be bullsh*t, but with regard to a press conference, you don't need to be ITK. Just ask the club's press office if it's true. Not saying it isn't true, by the way, just that it's easily verifiable one way or another.

I don't think my statement is in the least bit odd. Neither do I remotely agree that he's "the one player you can categorically say has performed for us". Being "up for it" in League One is going to be (a) very important and (b) very different to being "up for it" in a push for the CCC play-offs. I doubt Rasiak clears this hurdle. At least, I'm not confident enough that he does to support spending £10K a week on his salary, even if we had the cash to do so.

Rasiak would theoretically be excellent in League One, but a worry would be is he "up for it". It isn't a question of whether players are good on paper, but whether they can perform on grass. What I wouldn't want, even if we had the money, would be a bunch of thirty-somethings enjoying being on a £500K year sinecure and lapping up a couple of years' retirement on the south coast. My fear is - whatever his natural talents and stats on Championship Manager - that Rasiak would fit into squarely into this "I can't be arsed" category.

I think it's good news that most of the players want to stay, although we'd certainly need to rationalise Euell's and BW-P's wages. I'm not as down as some on the qualities of our playing staff. I think the raw skill is there, although there have been some exampels of serious attitude problems. With the right preparation, motivation and management, a team that got 45 points in the CCC, should manage 80+ points in League One. I think Euell might be a good centre-forward at L1 level. I'd also say that he never seemed to lack commitment. A line-up of: Davis James Saeijs Perry Surman Lallana Gillett Wotton Holmes McGoldrick Euell subs: Forecast, Mills, Paterson, Lancashire, White looks bloody good for a third tier team IMHO

Reading Jeremy Wilson's Telegraph piece and listenign to Mark Fry, I do have some confidence that we might be able to rescind the 10-point penalty. Another question for knowledgeable forum members, though: Aren't there some practical (even contractual) barriers to Saints seeking legal redress through the law courts? I seem to recall that many sports have arrangements set up to prevent/penalise/deter recourse to the law. If we appeal to the stuffed suits of the FL, I give us a snowball's chance in hell. If we get in front of a court, our chances must be measurably enhanced.

This was an idea I sent to David Luker, and got a fairly positive reply: Dear David, I wanted to drop you a short note about next season’s ticket prices. I know the whole future of the club remains very uncertain and my thanks go to you and our other staff for continuing to do such an excellent job in such trying circumstances. My thinking for League One, runs something like this: There’s a loyal base of maybe 10,000 fans and if the prices are relatively high, they will be rattling around in a largely empty stadium. Cutting ticket prices to, say, £10 a game might mean high attendances but would mean the “hard core” are spending much LESS on tickets than they are otherwise willing to (I’m probably willing to pay £500 for a season ticket even in League One – but obviously wouldn’t just hand over extra money for the sake of it if the listed price is, say, £250) Because of the club’s diminished league status and the wider prevailing economic environment, the corporate suites are likely to have considerable spare capacity next season. My solution would be to issue “gold season tickets” in addition to standard season tickets. These would retail at about twice the price – say c.£500 rather than c. £250. The principal benefit of “gold membership” would be that for a certain number of games per-season (say, four or five), you could upgrade to the Mike Channon - or one of the other - hospitality suites. The marginal cost to the club of using this spare capacity must be pretty minimal (I’m assuming an average spare capacity of about 200 seats in corporate per game). If, say, 1,000 fans were willing to take out gold membership, this would increase revenues by £250,000 next season. There could be other possible benefits of gold membership too – for example: Advance booking of away tickets (this might be very valuable in League One, given the very limited capacity of many of the stadia – but again costs the club nothing). List of gold members printed in the first programme of the season Special access to other benefits – a “meet the players evening”, chances to win a signed ball/shirt etc. I know you have more immediate worries to concentrate on, but would appreciate any thoughts you may have. With all best wishes,