SaintBobby

so, that’s basically English, right?

Is that now 18 PL goals in a row by English players? Not sure of Obafemi’s national designation? English?

taking the ****? ???

How are the festive fixtures actually drawn/decided? Are we in some bracket with all the London clubs for the 2 or 3 games over the Xmas period? What are the other brackets?

He is an unfashionable A, B, C traditional centre forward/poacher. But he is damned good at it. £20m well spent. If we do stay up, he will be a big reason for it. Scoring that number of goals when playing for such an under-performing team is amazing.

Groan.

We were appalling today. The first half was as bad as the defeat to Leicester. Bertrand was a disgrace, but he wasn’t the only one who seemed not to give a sh1t. Only saving grace was Watford were even worse. It was basically a League One match. At best. Still, we might contrive a way out of this mess with 3 vital points, I guess.

Once again, Kane proves the point that it's very hard to score a penalty at St Mary's :-)

Didier Drogba..." a poor man's James Beattie"

I'm increasingly sceptical about VAR. I think I'd limit the use of technology to something that can communicate an almost immediate "objective" decision to the ref (eg goal line technology) A bit like the corner example above, at some point there could be a claim for a defensive handball in the penalty area, ref doesn't award a penalty and the defensive team break and score a "legitimate" goal a few seconds later. The original penalty decision is then reviewed and a penalty awarded and one team goes from 1-0 up to 0-0 and a penalty against them in a matter of about a minute. It might be the "right" decision but it really changes the game.

Loads of empty seats in the corporate section today. Couldn't apparently even sell them to Mancs. Basically though, they are going to price the seats to pretty much sell out the stadium. And they do pretty much sell out the stadium. Maybe need to drop ticket prices by a quid or two, but if you made it typically £15-£20 a ticket, you'd just get an emerging black market, I guess.

I thought he was pretty much okay on the ball. To my eye, his positioning was awful though, but maybe that's because I haven't got my head round 4-2-2-2 and it tends to leave the full backs pretty exposed.

Sure, but why? Bolton were allowed to play fixtures and Bury not. Surely, this wasn't just random? Problem now - although I do hope both clubs survive - is that it's skewing the season for other clubs. Maybe it isn't too late, but if team X has beaten Bolton 5-0 because they fielded a team of 14 year olds and team Y needs to face them in, say, December when they will field a proper team, that's problematic. Similarly, if Bury are now allowed to compete, they have caused fixture pile ups for the matches they've missed. Almost the fairest/nicest thing to do is to allow both clubs to continue but to treat all their 46 matches as "friendlies", with no points at stake and both of them automatically down to League 2 next season.

Best to focus on the league. Put out some youngsters and a few of the stiffs. Might be a blessing to get knocked out tbh.

I guess Bolton have at least made some sort of effort to meet their fixture obligations, something Bury have failed to do. All very sad though. Football seems riddled with a mix of financial incompetence & corruption still.

Thank fook. Made heavy weather of that. A lot of room for improvement, but obviously a great three points.

Appalling. Offer me 17th place now and I'd rip your arm off.

I've always wondered why the "bottom" 14 clubs - or maybe 20 or so if you include top of the Championship/yo-yo teams - don't form some sort of collective group or union of some sort. The top six seem to co-ordinate their plans, every other club acts independently.

I was being sarcastic.

Shout out to Cabbage Face for calling this one from the start. Not sure anyone else saw it coming. Good job.

Blimey. Might have signed a CB and DM in the form of one player?

OMG. He’d be perfect. So, I assume we aren’t interested! :-(

The example given in the Cambridge dictionary is “how do you reconcile your belief in science with your religious convictions?” The case for me (although not yet used in a dictionary!) is “how can you reconcile your belief that Saints need a new centre back as a high priority with your view that it wouldn’t be too bad a transfer window if we didn’t sign one?” HTH

More reconciled than resigned. I can see the case that we can’t improve the CB position without both outgoings and a ton of money. I dimly remember WGS saying after we got to the Cup final that to improve the squad would require huge expenditure in any given position. Implication was we were at 7/10 everywhere and it would cost a ton to get to an 8. Little bit similar now (although closer to 6/10), with the exception of no depth in centre midfield, which is a quick and relatively cheap fix.

Good news on Redmond, but does feel like a PR distraction on deadline day. Like one or two others, I’m more worried about a DM than a CB now. I’m reconciled to not getting in a £20m CB to bolster the defence. I guess we limp on with what we have. But in midfield, if say Romeu gets suspended and Hojbjerg injured, we have a huge hole, assuming Lemina is gone. I’ve lowered my sights to hoping for a c£5m DM just for cover.