ant

I'm still not entirely sure how, but I won the league in my first season with Saints. P38 W25 D10 L3 F94 A53 Leaked lots of goals (including a 6-3 loss at Chelsea) but generally scored more than enough (Lambert got 30 and golden boot!) Also JWP massively stepped up and is rapidly developing into my best attacking midfielder. Summer 2013 window IN: Michael Keane (loan) Simone Pepe (loan) January 2014 window IN: Danny Ings Will Hughes Tactics: 4-2-3-1, Attacking, Fluid, instructions to play possession football and high line 4-1-2-1-2, Standard (or Control), Balanced, instructions to play slightly more directly but still press (used the second formation when we were the underdog - less leaky but continued to score) Favoured lineup: Boruc Clyne - Fonte - Lovren - Shaw Wanyama - Schneiderlin Lallana - Ward-Prowse - Rodriguez Lambert The board was pretty receptive when it came to putting up funds for 2014-15 and I also got 25% of the fee from Oxlade-Chamberlain transferring to Liverpool. Hopefully won't have disrupted the balance too much as all I've really done is clear out some dead wood and bolster the defensive depth. Summer 2014 window IN: Asmir Begovic Eder Alvarez Balanta Kieran Gibbs (swap deal) Kyriakos Papadopoulos Curtis Davies Summer 2014 window OUT: Kelvin Davis Paulo Gazzaniga (swap deal) Cody Cropper Maya Yoshida Jordan Turnbull Danny Fox (pre-arranged) Jos Hooiveld Guly do Prado Lee Barnard Jonathan Forte Billy Sharp Sam Gallagher The Gazzaniga/Gibbs swap deal was my favourite bit of business. Arsenal came in with a bid of £550k for PG, so I countered asking for KG as well. Pretty surprised when they accepted and now have solid cover for Shaw. Having batted away Liverpool coming in for Lallana and Shaw, I let them have Gallagher for £5m-ish out of pity. Now just need to find a world class striker to lead the line as I fear RL is on his way out and Osvaldo hasn't impressed in pre-season against poor opposition. Most of the 'wonderkids' are already commanding silly fees so if anybody has any recommendations that'd be really helpful!

Woah, we'd best line up that Messi bid. Minted. £1m per mm of beard fluff.

Well if we get Koeman in, I'm sure he'd have some wisdom to impart - he was a penalty specialist.

I'd hope not - had a bottle of it last night and it was rank. Mind you I'm more into porters and stouts. Some mates cajoled me into signing up for Untappd - it's supposed to be a sort of beery social network but works well as a way of discovering new beers (via location search), seeing what friends are drinking or just keeping a log of your favourites. Decent mobile app too.

If, if, IF the Lambert transfer isn't the opening of the floodgates that many assumed it was, it puts a very different spin on recent matters.

A little tear in my eye watching that 'thanks and farewell' compilation on Youtube last night and another today when reading Rickie's letter. Truly comes across as a heartfelt outpouring from a humble, genuine guy. A Saints legend.

My open letter was pithier.

Believe me or don't, I have no reason to lie and am feeling pretty torn up about everything Saints-wise at the moment. Have it on decent authority that Dejan will be off to Spurs, to be finalised in the next couple of days

Pretty much the only sensible thing I've read all evening. Regardless of whether Cortese or 'dark forces' have had a hand in recent goings on, if NC could be bothered to read our fans' reactions he'd be ****ing himself.

Of course you can, Saint Charlie - but the wider point is that analysing everything in granular detail when armed with only a fraction of the facts becomes tedious very quickly. Akin to giving an answer to 10 decimal places when all through your maths the working out relied on approximations. The old counter to this is 'well, it wouldn't be much of a message board without speculation'. True to a point, but it's baffling that some let it get to the extent that they're bursting blood vessels over unknowns.

...Duplicate.

Alternatively: Stop spending 8 hours a day glued to Saints Web, Twitter, Sky Sports etc. etc. Turn off computer Spend some quality time with friends, family and loved ones Take the official announcements as they come, grieve as necessary Come back in August with the necessary ammunition to form pragmatic expectations for the new season More than one way to skin a Kat.

Oh no, are we playing in skins next season then? Don't know about you, but I don't support football clubs for the sponsor. If Veho are paying their way then so be it. We currently have a manager and I'm pretty sure we'll appoint another if he leaves. Not ideal but life goes on. Yet they're all still ours. Ah, top stuff. You know the whole story on that one? Do share.

As above - it's only a matter of whether I can afford it. Fortunately I still can. Ideally we'll keep our best squad but damn, we've had to watch some crap over the years. If that didn't dull my love of watching Saints play I doubt anything would.

Crazily somebody has written a whitepaper on the maths of sticker collecting: http://www.unige.ch/math/folks/velenik/Vulg/Paninimania.pdf Explains the myth of regional rarity and that after a certain point it's daft to keep buying packets. Details the best strategy too, although obviously that takes a bit of the magic away.

Very easy for him to say now that he has no responsibility over the club or its players. Veho is a step up from aap3. There is a kit. Plus the damage there was done by Adidas under Cortese's stewardship. Evidence that Dodd and Williams leaving will completely undo the setup? I fathom our youth structure is based on more than individuals. Evidence that the board had any choice in the matter? You could argue that they're passively allowing team cohesion to break, but I'm baffled as to how they're actively trying to initiate it. The above post is symptomatic of revisionist viewpoints held by some of our fanbase. Nobody's doubting Cortese did a fantastic job in enabling us to flourish on the pitch, but for how long were his methods sustainable? Making enemies left, right and centre, leaving the corporate boxes half-empty etc. etc. We'll eventually see how much of a mess he left the books in too. It's easy to hold up Cortese as some sort of messiah that held all of the answers. It's easy in a time of fears and unknowns to turn to him and say "you'd have held it together, wouldn't you?" and lap up his platitudes. We have no idea how many times NC was actually tested with respect to batting away transfer bids. He certainly never had to deal with a situation equivalent to our current one. He plays the no-nonsense hardman but we'll never know how well he'd have coped this Summer.

Having been in a similar position (twice) I'm certainly empathetic to your situation. Chin up - I hope you manage to maintain your seat.

Between this and the Lovren/hairdresser post for thread of the week. Says an awful lot about the human condition though.

Can only speak for myself, but I primarily support Saints rather than the individual players. You only need to go back five years to see why that may need to be the case. We all want to see players of the highest calibre playing sexy football but it's also important to stand tall through more fallow times. I can understand people's frustrations with regard to the 'issues' hanging over the club (without buying fully into the urgency and drama drummed up by the mainstream media) and certainly sympathise with those becoming disenfranchised. Despite the club's recent PR and relationship-mending exercises there is still alarming amount of contempt shown towards the fans by footballing authorities; not to mention the ever-rising costs. TL;DR - wouldn't be surprised to see a small drop-off in ST sales but I'm in.

Exactly that. First half wasn't spectacularly loud, but it was consistently half-decent. Personally I'd rather stop chanting anything to do with Portsmouth from next season. We've hammered the point home for long enough now - would surely hurt them more to be forgotten about.

So many will ignore this advice. Shame. Looking at the season as a whole it's been a magnificent 9 months. Slightly ran out of steam today but glad we got the point at least. United deserved nothing more.

Guly scored our only goals in matches against Yeovil, Bristol Rovers, Millwall and Crystal Palace; not to mention the majority of the goals in several others. He had just enough class on the ball for us to rely on him with the pretty-ish football we played in League One/NPC. It's revisionist and utterly disingenuous to suggest he was ****e at that level.

Even with Bournemouth's 25% sell-on clause?

It's gone up again, £125m or nothing now. Seriously though - if true this seems tantamount to tapping up