SaintBobby

I think he probably should have - or at least acted ratehr more quietly.

I really think he is making an idiot of himself. You don't save a club like Saints by passing round the buckets. It's all very well to applaud anything taht looks remotely well-meaning, but some of it is just idiotic.

Yes - if it was the only option. I'd still suport the "official" Southampton FC at St. Mary's if it existed, even if Lowe returned as Chairman.

I'm the author of the piece on the "On the Cross" website, which you can read in full here: http://www.southampton-mad.co.uk/news/loadnews.asp?cid=TMNW&id=445050 I actually don't hold Crouch anything like as responsible for our present plight as Lowe and Wilde. But I do hold him partly responsible. My key reason for this is - as argued by Tom28 - is that he failed to slash costs in the face of collapsing revenues. At the end of his tenure, we managed to stay up - but were nowhere close to being financially viable. We were spending more than we were bringing in. He was dealt a difficult hand, for sure. But, overall, he played that hand badly. I do think the bucket collection stuff is ridiculous and embarrassing. If the club believes there should be a serious drive to raise cash from fans, it would be far better to have it fronted by Le Tissier, Benali, Rodrigues etc. I don't doubt Leon Crouch's personal devotion to the club, by the way (his payment for the replacement Ted Bates statue was touching, but of course the first statue should never have been so embarrassing in the first place). I just think he shares a bit of the blame for where we are and is starting to make a fool of himself. Btw, I'm also not a "PR plant". The opinions in the article are my own, honest, heartfelt views. Disagree with them by all means. But can we all stop suggesting that anyone who puts forward opinions which don't 100% match one's own is definitionally motivated by some nefarious "agenda"?

Southampton Football Club continues to trade - otherwise you couldn't buy tickets for the Burnley game.

Im 99% sure this wont be our last game at St Marys

Alpine is wrong. It would not be illegal to sell season tickets. The problem is not knowing - even now for 100% certainty - what division we will be in combined - presumably with a desire to let the pricing policy be set by the new board.

do-able, definitely do-able. Heart says two wins will do it and we can pull it off. Head says the Charlton game was the real "must win" game

yes...that seems right to me, too. Our last three fixtures are pretty good, really.

I think the mere fact that we play Forest on the last day means one of us and Forest are likely to drop, but probably only one of us. One thing we do want to happen is for Burnley to have secured a play-off slot before they come to St. Mary's!

See...told you this was going to be easy...:-)

The way I'm looking at is that I'm sort of assuming we have to win at Notts Forest. I'm sort of factoring that in to my equations - so am sort of lookign at the league table with us having Pld 43 and having 47 points and Forest Pld 43 with 46 points. Cheating I know. But then I'm asking - what else do we need happen? What's the least we can do and survive?

Charlton are dead. It's two of Barnsley, Norwich, Forest and Saints, with us as the slight underdogs.

You'd have to be a bit mad to believe we could gain enough points to day to more than make up for the fact that Forest gained 3 points on us earlier this weekend

No, at the moment we gain 2 points on Forest and 3 on Barnsley. we just don't gain any on Norwich.

damn. Big win for Norwich.

True enough.

You were wrong whether we'd scored or not....

Now need some help from Watford

Yessssssssssssss!!!!!!!!!!!!

Put on saganowski now!!!!

Put on Saga FFS

The debt with Norwich Union/Aviva is massively toxic. They'd bite your arm off for £20m. They'd be lucky to stand up even half of that. A brilliant negotiating team might even be able to get them down to £5m or less. This is exactly why I don't want some half-arsed fans' consortium to buy the club. We'd have a bunch of red-and-white striped "believers" finishing a negotiation with Aviva, having cut the mortgage to £20m. Probably all patting themselves on the back for "saving" the club £4m. I'd be impressed if the representatives of the "fans" had got halfway down the corridor before the Aviva staff ****ed themselves laughing and all (rightly) awarded themselves £1m bonuses. Your "achievement" would have been to saddle the club with up to £15m of debt that we didn't have to pay. It's a f**k of a lot of well-intentioned charity gigs to pay that back.

yeah yeah yeah. To be clear, we DON'T want local MPs supporting this?

Romsey LibDem MP Sandra Gidley has joined the campaign to save the Saints. Please join one of the many groups on facebook - and also encourage your local councillors and MPs to do the same. http://www.facebook.com/inbox/?ref=mb#/group.php?gid=76035014328&ref=ts