SaintBobby

I'm relaxed. Best guess is that we will end up around 12th-14th. Staying up will be okay.

Good prices. Hope we re-spend it well though. V easy to waste £100m in football.

We will spend about £65m.

Game over. Relegation certain. Remember the last Dutch duo? This will be worse. (NB: Im actually delighted, but someone had to say it,right?)

Koeman to be appointed by Thursday.

Not really. Every player has a price. If you think, say, Lambert is worth £5m, then the club are better off having £6m in cash and losing Lambert. If I have a genuine van Gogh hanging on my wall in my flat, then obviously my flat is worth more with that painting than it would be with an empty wall. That doesn't mean I should keep the van Gogh though.

God. Student politics, basically. Spare me. I remember being at uni and the student union voting to write letters to various world leaders, print placards and march down various streets and sing chants. Pathetic, self-indulgent, "look at me" nonsense - but for 18-21 year olds, in all fairness. Anyone older than that has no excuse at all, though.

I'm looking for the "Supporters Relations Manager" job they advertised on the OS. It seems to be fulfilled.....or disappeared....anyone have a link?

Sleep well...

Not surprised that we lost Poch to Spurs. I am surprised that the new era of "reaching out to the fans"......"communicate honestly and directly" has been soooo badly managed. Ralph Krueger promised to be open and talk more to the "community" (whatever that is) The official club site is a joke. The board will look like a joke soon....

Hmmmm.... major story by the look of it (7 hours later). Seems not only to be in the Mirror and on its website, but now also across the entire mainstream media. A very impressive coup by that investigative journalist. Very, very impressive.

I have a modicum of sympathy for the Echo's complaints. We are reported to have received bids from both Manchester Utd and Liverpool for two of our star player, but the club doesn't even seem to have acknowledged or denied whetehr these bids have been received - let alone whether, when or on what basis they will be accepted,rejected or negotiated. Probably don't want the club providing a "running commentary" but the alternative to that isn't total silence.

It's mainly the collapse in away fans. Obviously the huge teams (like Man Utd on Sunday) take the whole gig. But the middling teams are selling, sway, 800 seats rather than 1,500. The way St Mary's has been set up (maybe wrongly...as others have said re: Northam) means this hits attendance. Falling away attendances have been covered a lot in the media...I think 5 Live did a big piece on it a few months back. Additionally, wider TV coverage, internet availability and a sluggish economy haven't helped attendances.

Rosler....

Expand the stadium? ;-)

Voted for Rank Xerox. Sadly, it's going to be mainly red (again).

Lambert will be in the 23. No doubt at all.

In reality - I don't think that's in the hands of the club. We discovered that with both Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and with Dean Richards. If the player tells the club "I want to leave. I'm no longer very happy here and would like to play elsewhere" and the club believes they can get £35m for them (whilst perhaps only valuing them at £15m), why not sell? You could just punish the player - e.g. insist Luke Shaw spends the next three years playing for and training with the U-21s - but I'm not sure that's often the smartest move.

After yesterday's match, Ralph Krueger came to say a few words in the Channon suite and took a few questions. I didn't take a contemporaneous note, so this is from memory about 16 hours later. Q: Will we keep hold of our best players this summer? A: That's our intention. We want to keep together - and improve - the "product" you saw out there on the field today and we are confident we can do so. Of course, you can't make absolute promises in sports. It would be easy for me to list our best players and promise you now that none of them will ever leave. I would get a big cheer and a round of applause. But I would rather come back here in six months time and look you in the eye, having achieved something rather than just promised something. You should all watch Les Reed's statement at the press conference. Les Reed has a great footballing brain and he set out our strategy very well. He works very closely with Mauricio on a day-to-day basis. Q: If we keep the manager, we will keep our best players - give him a new contract please, for 100 years if necessary. Oh, and we'd like our stripes back. A: That sounded more like a comment than a question. We're working hard on all of these things. (NB: it sounded rather more optimistic in person...RK was nodding his head when the questioner was praising MP). Q: When you came in, you said two key priorities were development of the academy and the stadium. How are things progressing there? A: The improvements in the training facilities should be completed this summer. Wherever I go, anywhere in the world and meet people from any sport, we get real respect for the academy. But we don't just want to have the best academy in England, we want to have the best academy in the world. I think we are in a great position to attract the very best young players to "Southampton Saints" - not just because of the reputation of the academy but because everyone knows we aren't scared of putting young players onto the field. As far as the stadium is concerned, we are quite happy with the way it is at the moment and the atmosphere etc but that's not to say we aren't looking at ways to improve things here. Q: Where do you see Southampton in the greater scheme of things? Consistently mid-table, top eight, to six, higher? A: I'm in sport to win things. I used to just hate losing, but now I love winning - and the feeling we all have today. I want to keep improving our position in the "standings", that's what we're all committed to doing. If you're not in sport to win things, what's the point? So, I want to see the Saints continue to rise up the standings. It needs patience, you can't necessarily achieve everything at once. But that's what we are determined to do. He also mentioned how much Katharina is enjoying now being at the centre of things, as her father was and that she sent her best wishes to all the fans, but that she preferred to take a behind the scenes role rather than being the centre of attention.

It does seem to me that this season is about as good as it gets without a major shift in the balance of power. Understandably, most people on a Saints forum focus on how much more we'd have to do to have a fair shout of top 4 or top 6 or whatever. But I don't rule out one of the teams above us having an existential collapse at some point (e.g. Chelsea are pretty screwed if Abramovich quits and/or has his financial assets frozen). Also, I'm not as worried about us selling players as some others. It doesn't seem there is going to be a firesale, so even if we sold the entire squad for, say, £200m, we could build a totally new team from scratch and get back to arguments about how long it should take them to "gel".

"Our biggest home win in the top flight since 1996."...sorry...major typing fail.

Ouiggest home win in the top flight since 1996. Sweet.

High priority: Centre-back to do same for Fonte; striker to replace Osvaldo. Nice to have but not as crucial: Pacey winger; cover (or replacement) for Shaw; goalkeeper to challenge Boruc in starting line-up. Some (not very original) suggestions: Steven Caulker, Lukaku (in my dreams), Hernandez, Ings, Rhodes, Zaha, Redmond. No real strong feeling on keeper.

Kind of agree that there should be a limit on starting threads. Maybe no more than 3 in a single day and no more than 6 or 7 in a single week. I'm not sure pleas to ignore certain posters really aid the site...if the forum starts to require people to skip vast swathes of irritating, banal material, it kind of loses something.

The last ten minutes were value for money. Norwich awful. I rate Snodgrass, but he was rubbish. J Rod was awesome. Seemed odd to me that we were getting pressed in our own third - nearly made a cock up a few times in the first half.