Crazy Diamond

To be honest, I think Blackmore is cashing in a little bit on his new found fame through Twitter. I don't think he would have written that blog otherwise. He's on Twitter now, found a lot of Saints fans are following him, clamouring for answers, he's now using that popularity. It's not done him any good with the club anyway, or at least so I'm told (how ironic, I might be ITK about something!) As for Simon, I've never really seen him flaunting it because he knows one or two things. Having worked in football, including at Saints, you hear things from time to time and I can't say I took any great pleasure in knowing about insider stuff. The shine is well and truly taken off when someone finds out you know something and you get hundreds of people asking you about it. It's even job threatening as clubs make employees sign confidentiality agreements. Even work experience kids have to do it. That seemed to me to be a quite obvious joke, but never mind. Very good point. Personally I'm not worried about what either of those two or any other pundit thinks. I doubt they'll have seen us play much and are just reading names on our Wikipedia squad list and going 'good enough' 'not good enough 'not good enough' etc.

Simon is not a 'WUM'. To be honest, if I were him, I'd be telling people to leave me alone. He must get hundreds of mentions every day along the lines of 'are we signing n e one lol'

What's wrong with waiting for a player signing to be officially announced? Some people are beyond farcical with their impatience. Contacting players through Facebook to ask them what's going on? It's pathetic.

Oh God, I thought it couldn't get any worse. I was wrong. We're in the 'announcement at...' stage. Can't people just wait?

Said it before, **** poor management. They're signing anyone that sounds vaguely good, mixed in with some non-league players that they reckon might cut it one day.

That's fine. He can get match fit, put himself in the shop window and they have to pay for it, sending them further and further towards another administration.

Puncheon's problem was that he thought he was a Premier League player. There's no way he'd let this opportunity go.

We've got a thing about Uruguayans. Marcelo Tejera anyone?

Maybe we could agree to pay off his gambling debts as a sweetener.

Ha ha. Almost perfect, but you correctly used capitals at the start of the sentence and for his name.

Well I don't know about anything, put it that way.

You could also draw that conclusion I suppose, but I think the main point that Redknapp is only successful when he spends large amounts of money still stands. You need only look at how Portsmouth got promoted.

Are you sure it wasn't Redknapp spending all that money on Bernard, Camara, Redknapp and Quashie in January 2005?

So you reckon Camara, Quashie, Bernard and Redknapp all cost us that dearly do you? The lot of them put together wouldn't even be half of what it cost Redknapp to get Adebayor in at Spurs. Let's not forget we got about £6 million for Beattie that same window. It's THAT kind of money that I'm talking about. We didn't give him anywhere near enough money to do the 'wonders' he talks about when looking back on his reigns at Portsmouth and Spurs. My point is that Redknapp is only good when he has good money to spend. This 'wheeler dealer' stuff is nonsense. How can signing Rafael van der Vaart for £8 million be 'wheeling and dealing'? The phrase implies he got him for a bag of f*cking chips! As for Dawson and Reid, they were never interested in us. Ever. Who did Redknapp buy when we were in the Championship? My memory of it isn't entirely clear, but I seem to remember players like Fuller, Hajto and Powell. We spent MEGA BUCKS on them didn't we? Yeah. Sure we did. Excuse me if you think it's ******** but I can accuse you of the exact same.

We're the ones who have been reported to the FA recently...

Lawrie McMenemy would never let you forget.

Indeed. Where did Buttner say "I want to sign for Southampton" followed by "Actually, Manchester United are in for me, I don't want to sign for Southampton" ? With regards to Ramirez I'm not excited, there's no point in getting worked up over it. If he signs, great, I look forward to watching him play for us. I don't know anything about the guy other than he's Uruguayan, a midfielder, played in the Olympics and is currently with Bologna. Nothing else. No amount of YouTube clips are going to force me into forming an opinion on him. If he doesn't sign, I'm honestly not bothered.

I've always put our relegation down to the fact that for two or three years we bought hardly anyone of better quality (the Mikael Nilssons etc) whilst all around us clubs were strengthening. I look back on that squad and shudder. Prutton, Higginbotham, Davenport... It's the stuff of nightmares. Then we sack Sturrock who I didn't think we would have prospered under anyway, and appointed Wigley was who little better than a gormless idiot. We appoint Redknapp who is only a good manager when he has money to spend, we don't give him enough cash and go down. It also occurs to me that Lowe never wanted to attract investment or sell the club. I was never in favour of getting rid of him but his position became untenable and then yes, I wanted him gone.

According to who?

It's plain ignorant to deny that Lowe had a part to play in the success of the academy. People would simply rather die than admit he did any good. Sad really.

If Branislav Ivanovic (a defender) can tear down the middle from the flank and keep his head to make it 1 - 0, I'm fairly sure one of our lads can.

I raised an eyebrow at the team selection but can't say I ever doubted the man. The performance told me I was right not to.

A bit rich even for my tastes. Don't think anyone had a particularly bad game today, certainly don't understand the inclusion of Guly putting us down to ten men...

The result is the last thing on my mind. What a performance. Can't remember too many times I was this proud of the team. Superb.

Shwan is a great bloke. He knew my friend was a Bournemouth fan so turned up to his birthday party at our halls of residence at uni. In terms of ability he was by a mile the best goalkeeper in League Two... And that's about it.