glengarryleads

Since we're all at the "hashing out YT videos" stage, i thought I would share a bit of digging into this > Interviewed in Danish after a match, very emotional. They've just won a home euro2016 qualifier over Serbia, 2-0, at that point, looking quite like they were safely qualified with a win on the road a couple days later in Armenia. (the Danish national side don't travel well to FSRs and the Balkans, though, and drew 0-0 (crap game!) and then an 0-1 away to Portugal kept them out. I thought both results were hard on Denmark, though I will confess I was only watching online as best i could at work and not giving my full attention. Certainly wasn't watching for Hojbjerg in particular in any of the DBU games i saw. Anyhow, Even in Danish, the interview is worth watching, he seems supremely committed. I dug up this translation. REP: Are we ready? Pierre, you have to briefly explain the tears down your face PEH: Yeah, it's delightful.. We deserve it, we've worked extremely hard, and I'm clapped-out. REP: Regarding today's performance, what are you most proud of? PEH: We are real men. We stand united, we have the Danish culture in our blood.. We fight, we have teamspirit spirit, and we have the entire stadium cheering for us. REP: So why exactly are you being this emotional? PEH: I'm beyond my own limits, the fact that we win on this stage.. REP: Second half looked 45 minutes of survival, was it the same palying on the pitch? PEH: Yeah, it was rough, man. They are organized, and they play well, and.. They made the game hard for us, and they have some great individual players, but so do we.. Holy **** REP: What does it mean to you that one of your long time friends Yussuf Poulsen (scoring the first goal) has such a major impact on the outcome of the game? PEH: Yeah, it's just very touching.. Yeah.. Yeah.. Anyhow, to watch, you'd think they'd just lost a gut-wrencher. I like to see his pride in the national side, for sure. He also seems to have acquitted himself extremely well at Augsberg and the Schalke move seems to have been not the smartest landing spot for him. But the fact that he closed out their season more on the pitch than not -- as they solidified their Europa League spot -- is a plus. Have a feeling he's going to be a great player for Saints. Denmark are my #1 national side (family always hosted Danish exchange students when I was growing up) so I am of course just unbelievably psyched.

geez, i am going to have to take Lana del Rey more seriously now too. good every-touch video, particularly given the big occasion. Wonder if we had to give Bayern a buyback clause? I wouldn't be surprised -- very "continental." I would not mind handing out buybacks to the like of Bayern / Barca / Real. Hopefully a straight-into-the-team talent and bad news for Oriol, more than anyone else.

god that article really was a dumpster fire. normally I can leave idiots alone, but i really did have to fire off a couple angry tweets, one American to another. I think we actually have a mutual friend, too, or at least, Twitter thinks we do. Fansided is one of those "anyone can post content!" sites basically, it's close to the bottom of the barrel as far as American sports web presences. He might get $2.50 to $10 an article if he's fortunate, but lots of their content is freebies for people who think they are working toward a real job in the press, god bless them each and every one.

or, the story was ‘leaked’ so that other clubs don’t think they have us over a barrel when we go shopping for a lead-the-line striker? possibly you lot could give the board some credit instead of all the sourness… i think they’ve been quite thoughtful and measured and successful in recruitment, especially compared with other teams at our financial level.

Very happy with Puel's appointment. Liked what I saw of Nice circa 2014/15 and people here trashing the level of Ligue 1 play are crazy. Good players, good tactics, the only thing missing is stupid salaries and roster stability. Understand the trepidation for those who haven't watched much Ligue 1, but give the club the benefit of the doubt, please! I was a Pellegrini guy from day one but the idea that he would offer us some sort of magical "top club" legitimacy is wishful thinking at best.

Sadio's not exactly going to thrive up there, i fear. Miserable fans, miserable city. They're going to **** all over him, frankly. A pity. He needs to be on a team where he won't get dropped and forgotten with the first bad run of form. I don't think he's that strong, mentally, and has probably peaked. Liverpool to sell at a marginal loss in 1.5 years to somewhere like PSG.

Sometimes the lines move in response to betting, sometimes the bookies are just trying to juice the action. It is known. I am agnostic on whether FdB still might come (seems plausible) but the bookies are now desperate to take money in on anybody other than Puel, so odds come down.

considering that the most eye-catching inexpensive talents to arrive in England over the last few years were kicking it in France (Mahrez, Kante, Payet...), I would at least have fingers crossed that Puel would have a strong say in assessing talent from Ligue 1, and do well by us. a couple francophone players would come in handy in welcoming Morgan back after MU crash out of Europe next year, too.

it's hardly top of my list of qualifications, but i was curious about his command of English and managed to find this on google. (fielding questions and replying in English on an AS Roma preseason tour, in Toronto.)

anyone who wouldn't be excited for us to get Pellegrini didn't see much of Malaga or Villareal back in the day. Great teams. (you get to watch a lot of random spanish soccer in the states) as far as i'm concerned, the things that hurt him at MCFC were 120k-per-week egos (no problem there) and fans with stupid expectations (we can hope.)

this, exactly. Also he has fine English, which is of value. My order: deBoer, Pellegrini, Emery, Moyes, Howe, nope, AVB.

what are our trolls saying on their boards? legit question.

Any destinations mooted yet? I have vacation time cached away to travel if feasible. I guess i heard Baltimore speculation...

gif of our boy Gaston's injury is currently the #1 post on all of reddit, somehow. too late to bring him back? haha. http://i.imgur.com/s3YILwJ.gifv

is America thought to be not happening, then?

I do think it's possible. But my feeling is, not until we both make the CL and stop selling first-team players to other English clubs. The latter, preferablt starting now and for multiple years. Moving abroad, they can go wherever they please. I know we will get more money, much more, from your Tottenhams and Liverpools, as they are paying a premium on English players and paying a premium on "hurting us" (theoretically, at least, and **** off both of them). Whatever lesser amount we'd get from having allowed Dejan and Adam in particular to move, but not within England, would have been worth it in terms of our reputation. The fact of the matter is we are entering into a fantasyland era with regard to the TV money, and a reputation for NOT being a "selling club" would be worth at least a few tens of million pounds. In the long run, we would be paid back in terms of not being put over a barrel on transfers / player holdouts etc. TLDR its not selling players that keeps us from being a top club, it's selling players *in England*

this, exactly. I'll just paste what i was writing myself before i saw Charlie here... The gist of it, i think, is that we'll loan out the ones we think have no path to the first team, and keep the ones that do. Ward-Prowse, Targett, Calum Chambers, Harrison Reed -- none of them were ever loaned out. You might offer an exception for Stephens/Turnbull/McCarthy but i suspect their loans are more of a case of 'aren't expected to make its' also. Europa league reqs change everything, of course.

I think you could argue that the big grounds frankly exacerbated the poisonous environment at Newcastle and Villa in particular, when the lean times came. I can't see expansion being worth the money. Besides, i think the TV money is clearly mostly going to a combination of making KL 'right' and nudging our salary structure up, as the new contracts for VVD and FF would indicate.

I am sort of assuming that all three of the CA signing, and FF and VVD's willingness to sign new long-term contracts, are evidence that we have "broken" our traditional wage structure, and that this is at the heart of "the new way" at the club; ie that the increased TV money is going to wages, not transfer fees. I suppose it goes without saying that wages are going to rise somewhat at the sub-elite clubs that have long outspent us in wages, but I suspect that for many of them, the new TV money is going to be seen as the "payoff" to their decade-plus of overspending, and not turned back around into the wage bill immediately. In other words, I think the only player who would really dramatically increase his wages with a move, versus re-signing with us, is Sadio. Mane is going to play some day for one of the five or so biggest clubs in the world; I just don't think any of them are going to meet our valuation of him this year based on the evidence of his form over the last eight games or so. And I think they would be right to hesitate. I am optimistic that he's going to come into the new season, at St. Mary's, realizing that he can't just turn it on over the last two months and make the jump to a club like Bayern, and have a superb, blue-chip season for us, especially in Europa. I hope he's smart enough to realize that sulking his way out over this offseason to move to a club like, say, West Ham or, oh, Lyon and then signing a new four- or five-year contract to do so, could trap him just as much in the long run. I feel like even though he may have a sulky tendency at times, in general he has made smart decisions about his career, and might be able to see that with the chance of a deep Europa run in the cards, he really is better off staying here. He'd be nuts to sign an extension though. I wish i could see Tadic's late-season resurgence as anything other than evidence of the same 'play up to get the big boys interested' mentality. But it probably was. Anyone looking at his situation with us should keep in mind that he played two seasons at both Groningen and Twente before moving up to SFC; I also think the row with the Serbian FA does not speak well of his ability to get along behind the scenes. Though I am sure he believes he would, I don't imagine Tadic getting a much better payday than what we would offer him on an extension similar to VVD's; if we haven't done so, that's down to his back-room attitude, as he's surely he's earned it on the pitch. But if you look at where he's played, you have to suspect he hasn't earned enough over his career to feel like he's "set up" and at 27, his next contract has to be the big one. Like Sadio, I hope that being in the third year of a four-year deal would really put him in the right mind to turn in an amazing season, but I fear his mentality could make things much worse for us, if another club comes in with a serious offer. (I hate fearing the worst here, as he's probably my favorite player at the club right now. I should know better than to love a player who seems so likely to hurt me on the way out, but that's just the way it goes.) As to Graziano, for him, much is riding on his performance this summer; he could make himself irresistible to one of the six or so Italian clubs that are clearly a step up from us. You cannot begrudge him taking the move home this year, or agitating for one; IMO we would be chumps to take anything less than 10M, even at his age, i think he's worth at least that much to us; I don't believe he is ever going to be a first-name-in-the-squad guy again for us, but he's proven he can be effective off the bench and play well "with the chip on his shoulder." (The amount of trash he comes in for on the board here, btw, infuriates me.) I think he stays, unless we do something stupid and part with RK over him not extending. Wanyama seems a special case; I think he just really wants out of the south coast, no matter where; I don't think we're going to get a large offer but i feel like he isn't moving for a payday so much as a change of everything. The robbery sticks out in my memory, but there are probably a host of other things. It's going to hurt to see him in a once-every-three-games role at a club like Tottenham, but I truly think he's not extending and would likely decline next year even if he does. I doubt we would or should offer him a long deal in the same pay range as we've just given to VVD and Fraser; he probably does make more money elsewhere and I won't be angry at him leaving this offseason, just sad. People will remember the red cards, but only one of the three was really merited, for me; i think he has been unlucky in some ways but it does seem like he's reached the limits of how he is going to grow as a player and I don't think there's a premium on keeping him just because of his age; has he really gotten any better at reading the game or picking out a pass over the last three years? Modestly, if that. Juanmi could and should go, we are better off with the roster space devoted to giving one of the academy attack players a chance to appear on the bench from time to time. A pity for him (and the black box) but he needs to be a full-time starter somewhere. Maybe we're better off loaning him out with a good chunk of the wages covered, than just selling him on?

well that all worked out great, Puncheon got a goal, de Gea got kicked in the face and we don't have to cope with the playoffs again. Last year i was actually pleased about the prospect of free football, my mistake there.

Yeah i actually work for the New York Times, an editor, but nowhere near the sports department (or New York, for that matter ... they moved about 40 jobs to Gainesville, Florida about 5 years ago, to stop paying Manhattan wages)... I can probably manage to get a press pass, though, if the team heads over here. Expenses-paid is a pipe dream, these days. We ran a by-and-large decent article about Southampton about 18 months ago, my only contributions were the corrections appended below, haha. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/29/sports/soccer/a-rebuilt-southampton-excels-with-a-10th-place-budget.html

primordially, because I grew up with an underdog complex, based on family allegiance to Vanderbilt University, the perpetual runt of college football's vaunted Southeastern Conference. I was all in on the World Cups, but beyond that, back in the 90s, it was pretty hard to follow European club soccer until some channel started repackaging MOTD — it was the end of the Le Tissier era, basically, and his creativity, and personal story of loyalty and the perpetual struggle against relegation just resonated with me personally. I can’t recall any of the big clubs being remotely, remotely likable back then by comparison, anyhow. About the same time, following soccer on the internet became much more of a thing and i’ve been 100% all in on the Saints since. I almost never post, though I’m on here daily, along with reading the Echo and of course the Guardian, religiously, as all newspaper people do. In the U.S., working in the newspaper business sort of turns you into an inveterate lurker because you’re never supposed to leave any sort of paper trail about political affiliations or just about anything controversial. So you get used to clamming up, which is why i almost never post anything. But Saints are my #1 club in any sport, it’s not even close, and hasn’t been for well over a decade. I remember being intensely worried about whether Yoann Folly would ever come good because he’d done all right by me in Champ Man. And screaming at Harry Redknapp for getting his subs wrong when we shipped two late goals to Boro in the middle of the relegation season. I could give you a million examples. Oh, i managed to say hi to Leandre Griffit once at an MLS game, haha. Too broke raising a family to ever once make it over there for a game, so I’m desperately hoping they do the preseason tour in the US, as rumored. My earlier post was *****ing about the kiddos -- i think Saints are generally pretty well-respected by American fans of the "EPL" -- ha -- but very few people's "first team." Anyhow, that’s my deal.

Yank here, and taking the comment way too seriously to boot. I grant you that there are a shocking number of youth Christian soccer leagues in well-to-do suburbs of southern cities... unfortunately, these sorts of kids (and their parents) tend to be the biggest sort of frontrunner fans imaginable, and will pick their team purely based on "teh biggest" -- the ones i see are invariably in MUFC or Liverpool or Arsenal gear. For whatever reason, in the US, Chelsea seems to be exclusively the domain of wealthy foreign or first-gen immigrant kids (lots of Indian-American and Asian-American fans... some Arsenal crossover there too.) City don't get a much love; Spurs might as well be as invisible as SFC. Much as it pains me to say it, the only way Saints are going to break into the wider consciousness over here is to pull a Leicester or sign one of the rising American prospects (overpay much?) and then play them every week.

What most impresses me about his game is the speed with which he passes the ball when pressed. Yes, its often sideways, but they have generally been really crisp and well-placed. It really speaks to his awareness of his own limitations (and the nature of English referees). Anyhow, he's very, very adept at the quick pass. I think with a few months together with Mane/Pelle/Tadic/Davis etc, we are going to see some absolutely killer longer through balls from Clasie; just needs time for them to be on the same page.

Barnsley, Ky... I am actually from that part of western Kentucky, where, yes, some of the most benighted souls in America live in towns with fancy foreign names, all mispronounced. I was raised in Cadiz (pr: KAY-dees), then there's a Versailles (VERR-sails) and a Moscow etc etc. I wear my Cadiz FC shirt whenever i go home to see relatives, but they are so intellectually uncurious, nobody asks about it. Sigh.