SaintBobby

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

But Mr Fry (who I warm to by the hour) considers the sales "disappointing" so far... http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/articles/article.php?page_id=11629 I imagine a lot will hinge on the Wolves result. If we win, we'll shift a large number of last minute sales....If we're beached by 5 or 6 points by Monday, less likely....

I think 22,000 would be pretty good, actually. 3rd highest attendance of the season?

My real problem on this thread is I totally commend ooohTH and also love CB's comebacks. The problem for fans passing round "buckets" (even if these "buckets" raise £7m) is that the immediate future of the club hinges on 2 big things: 1. Renegotiating the mortgage on SMS downwards - and massively. 2. Wriggling away from a 10 point penalty either this this season or next. I'd like to think that as a relatively bright human being I could put a vaguely coherent case to Aviva on point 1 and a half-savvy argument to the Football League on point 2. But I'm not an expert on either matter and perhaps 80-90% of the club's finances hinge on delivering these two things. A few months ago, I argued strongly for the fans buying out the club. I set up a pledge on pledgebank. We needed about 1,000 people at £10,000 a person (or 10,000 people at £1,000 a person). I'm not saying that I marketed it very well or that I was the right person to lead it. But, wow, the silence was deafening. I think 6 people pledged the £10,000. There were - as far as I could see - no alternatives proposed from any fan group at all. The best we heard was a hope that Leon Crouch, Paul Allen or some other chap would leap to our aid. My impression was that Saints fans may have deep pockets, but they also have very short arms. SLH has now gone into administration with debts of around £30m. It is amazingly touching to see 79 year old's handing over £500 at the ticket office, but it is FAR FAR too late for that. Assuming we find a new board, their ability to negotiate the mortgage down by £10m, £12m or £15m - in a high-pressure 1 hour meeting with Norwich Union - totally dwarves any noble efforts to raise a few grand here or a few grand there. If the fans had really wanted to buy the club, SLH was on sale for a couple of million quid a few weeks ago. You should have acted then. If Saints fans are numerous, but largely impoverished, (and I suspect that's about the size of it) then the best thing they can now do is to pressurise the local council to act as a backstop for the new board. A few dozen letters to each Southampton City Councillor might achieve that. If the city council was willing to put pressure on Norwich Union (along the rough lines of "please write off the mortgage hand over the keys...I know it's unfair but if you do so, we will have a good working relationship with you on future projects in the city...if you don't, the city council will find it very difficult to work with you again") or possibly make an offer on the stadium of say, £1, with the possible threat of a compulsory purchase order and/or negotiate an alternative venue for the team to play at next season, this would be potentially helpful. Saints fans - in their hundreds - should lobby their local councillors along these lines (we're also helped by the fact that all three main parties are competitive in the city - it's not a "rotten borough") That would, in truth, achieve much more than well-intentioned imaginative fundraising efforts. However cute and imaginative they may be.

Post of the year. On the harsh side, but f-ing hilarious.