ant

There's reports that Villa and Newcastle have expressed interest in Bafetimbi Gomis. Wouldn't say no if we moved in - only one year left on his contract and Lyon are definitely looking to sell. Slightly older than some of the players we've been looking at, though with similar attributes to Lukaku.

I can't wait for the U-turns on Ramirez.

Great stuff. Are you on Twitter by any chance?

I've just moved out to Hedge End but spent the best part of 7 or 8 years drinking at The Hobbit, The Shooting Star (formerly Kolebka), The Dungeon, The Alex and more recently The Rockstone. Overall I have to say I was happy enough. Between The Talking Heads, The Brook, The Joiners and The Cellar, Southampton is really picking up for gigs. When I moved down here you generally had to go to Southsea, Brighton or London for decent bands, but most of them are getting booked here now. Looking at my calendar, there's at least half a dozen Southampton gigs I want to go to in the next couple of months. I don't think the city's quite as bad as has been made out - really it's just disconnected. Random bits and pieces strewn across the place with little thought, not least the hastily-built parts in the areas that were worst affected by the war. With a concerted, focused effort over a few years I genuinely believe it'd be easy to inject some soul into Southampton. Still, at least there's some rhinos dotted about the place now.

Top article. Had a pull through some more stats and it looks like Cork only got one yellow card last season. Pretty remarkable given that he retrieved the ball more times than any other PL player. Also found this site quite interesting: http://www.whoscored.com/Teams/18/Show/-Southampton You can click on each individual player and it gives a breakdown of their characteristics (strengths/weaknesses) and playing style. It's not 100% accurate but overall is surprisingly insightful.

It's safer than driving on the roads so I presume you're going to ask the club to return that new coach as well? From now on we'll only play home games and just take the hit of defaulting away matches.

I'd say we need all three anyway; strength in depth is so important in the PL. Cork, Schneiderlin and Wanyama will all get plenty of playing time. We were found desperately short when Jack was injured at the start of last season and very lucky Morgan lasted the distance.

According to Transfermarkt, our playing staff's value is approximately £84,000,000. Seems inflated to me, but I would say a valuation of roughly £80m for the club's assets combined (including stadium, training facilities, land owned and so on) sounds perfectly reasonable. Even given the money the Liebherr estate has ploughed in and the loans they essentially wrote off, that's one hell of a return for four years of ownership. Assuming we don't inflate our wage bill too far, the bottom doesn't fall out of the subscription TV market and we can stay in the Premier League for a few years, there's every chance the profit margin will continue to rise (albeit at a much slower rate). That's without considering Academy products and the rising stock of our best young first team players.

The pricing's different per section and I did say Wings/Goals. For me the renewal price was £604 - the equivalent cost of separate tickets is £688.

On my Wings/Goals season ticket I save £84, getting around 2.5 games 'free'. Sounds about right, plus there's no faffing with buying individual tickets then.

Sorry Steve, I definitely can't make this one now.

Bleurgh, only available at 1600x900. I asked the club for 1920x1080 versions on Twitter and got no response. Had a look around Google a few weeks ago and there's nothing decent about. I'm going to design my own if I get chance, will post them here if I do.

As I've already said in this thread, I really don't mind the new kit. However it doesn't seem right that season ticket discount apparently doesn't apply in the club stores until the start of August. 2013/14 STs should surely be valid for a 10% deduction on the 2013/14 kit from the day they're issued?

Hmm, I started a thread in the Buy/Sell section about some programmes my dad wants rid of - no interest in them from the members here it seems. Looks like I'll have to take them into this shop then.

It might just be a weird rendering effect but they don't look very round to me.

With 3 months off an athlete is likely to lose around 50% of their aerobic conditioning, so 5% per week sounds about right. If it's a linear loss, the most disciplined players should be reporting at approximately 70% of full fitness.

Sports science in action.

High defensive line, central midfield workhorses and pacey wingers doubling as strikers - Brazil had everything spot on to ensure Spain never got into their hypnotic passing rhythm. Neymar and Hulk caused all sorts of problems for Arbeloa and Alba; Pique and Ramos didn't exactly cover themselves in glory either. There's been a lot of chat about how the current iteration of Brazil is 'under par' (probably by people that take FIFA rankings seriously) but I think their play's been breathtaking at times and there's a great deal of promise for their generation. Strength in depth too. For me the standard of the Confeds has been a joy to watch, especially given the relatively low level of hype. Last night's final compared favourably with just about any World Cup of my lifetime.

Surprise surprise, it looks better worn than draped across a box in a warehouse. I'm fine with both. They're just kits at the end of the day. Stripey socks, stripes (in kind) on the shirt and shorts. I'm sure we can soldier through a season with that. £50 for a shirt is a bit rich mind, ST holder discount or not.

Which is probably what a large percentage of the fanbase will think, right before flocking to buy it. Initial outrage will just as predictably be followed by a mass of shirt sales. For the record I'm quite keen on it.

Ha, I quite like it. Would've worked better with Lotus F1 on the front but not going to throw a wobbly.

Not if you have a base level of savviness or common sense! Keep the OS up to date, don't download or respond to anything that sounds too good to be true. I run Lookout for the fact it can locate my phone - that it protects as an Antivirus is a bonus.

I do some data reviewing for Saints on FIFA - am able to put forward upgrades or downgrades per attribute for our players, although I can't directly update them myself. Many people seem to concentrate on players' overall ratings but that's just calculated from their other stats. If anybody has any suggestions (with statistical proof and/or links to back it up) I'm happy to put them forward to the editors. Was able to get Schneiderlin's stats significantly improved throughout last season because he performed so consistently well.

We even made £100k off his sale and he'd only been with us seven months! I would only have been 10 years old at the time but I'll never forget his brace against Forest.

Certainly seems to be the case. Still, it's gone viral so you can't fault them for implementation. Registered through: GoDaddy.com, LLC (http://www.godaddy.com) Domain Name: FIFA-BRAZIL-2014.COM Created on: 06-Jun-13 Expires on: 06-Jun-15 Last Updated on: 10-Jun-13 Registrant: Domains By Proxy, LLC DomainsByProxy.com 14747 N Northsight Blvd Suite 111, PMB 309 Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 United States Administrative Contact: Private, Registration FIFA-BRAZIL-2014.COM@domainsbyproxy.com Domains By Proxy, LLC DomainsByProxy.com 14747 N Northsight Blvd Suite 111, PMB 309 Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 United States (480) 624-2599 Fax -- (480) 624-2598 Technical Contact: Private, Registration FIFA-BRAZIL-2014.COM@domainsbyproxy.com Domains By Proxy, LLC DomainsByProxy.com 14747 N Northsight Blvd Suite 111, PMB 309 Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 United States (480) 624-2599 Fax -- (480) 624-2598 Domain servers in listed order: NS1.DNSIMPLE.COM NS2.DNSIMPLE.COM NS3.DNSIMPLE.COM NS4.DNSIMPLE.COM