stevegrant

Seems to suggest it doesn't even come equipped with a mouse. A wired one can be bought for the bargain price of £34, with wireless at £55

There was certainly a waiting list at some point. I was on it for two years before being able to get one in 1995. Considering The Dell was pretty much always sold out from then onwards, it seems reasonable to conclude that there was a waiting list from then until 2001 when we moved to St Mary's.

Definitely. Not good enough to get in the squad now, but those two goals alone mean he's been money well spent. It was the turnaround in that game that gave the team the belief that we could keep up with and overtake Huddersfield last season.

Probably was anyway. I can't see Rio being fit long enough for him to get his place back in the England side.

Looks like Lee Barnard's in the squad

Do we know for sure that Fonte was taken off on Saturday because of an injury or just because he'd been a bit ****? My guess is that we'll have the big guns on the bench just in case we need something in the last 20 minutes or so. Lambert, Fonte, Guly and perhaps even Lallana there, it might even be beneficial for Lallana to get a 20-minute runout to ease him back into the side after his injury.

Par for the course for new stadia unfortunately, and only serves to emphasise how lucky we were to be offered the SMS site as an alternative to Stoneham.

The absolute ****fest over the Amex makes me laugh, it only holds 22k, cost £100m, and really isn't any different to 99% of the other new stadia that have been built in the last 15 years.

I think he's got some sort of role with their academy

I would love to see the stats for the amount of ground covered by players over the 90 minutes - I'd bet serious money that Guly is right at the top.

Without wishing to divert too far from the main topic of the thread, it's certainly my belief that that was the original plan. Whether that was re-evaluated once ML got into the emotional side of things or not, I've no idea. The obvious spanner in the works is the extended family - we don't know how much of an active interest they're taking in the club (from a high level, obviously, as they'll happily leave NC to run things on a day-to-day basis) or whether they even want to keep the club under the family's ownership. NC says they're supportive, which is all well and good, but that could change at any moment. Having been a fairly secretive and secluded family through all the time they've been making their fortune, it would seem to fly in the face of that for them to want to hang around in the Premier League with the additional exposure that status brings.

The Hooi Life

Cortese has also spoken of a 5-year plan, which we are now nearly halfway through. It was always an investment with a view to a medium-term return (hence Liebherr calling the deal "Schnäppchen" [German for "bargain"]), and if we were to get promoted this season (the bookies now have us odds-on to go up ) it wouldn't be completely mental to suggest that the value of the club would be worth at least double the money that has been put in to date. Many building developments get sent to architects without actually having a brick laid, it's not an odd situation at all. A company that has already planned for such a development (and received planning permission from the local authority) will be more valuable. It demonstrates to potential buyers that the company has been run by people with a bit of foresight and they went to the trouble of putting the foresight onto paper.

No, "nothing has changed" to me means that the club is still expected to run itself and not be reliant on the handouts which were obviously necessary in the first year after administration. Has building work started yet?

Had. We have no idea if there is any investment still being put into the club by the Liebherr estate. With the £12m received from the sale of Chamberlain, it's entirely possible that they won't have to put another penny in to balance the books, especially if we continue to get crowds of 25k+.

You're seriously suggesting that if we were in the PL, Theo Walcott, Gareth Bale and Alex Chamberlain wouldn't have still ****ed off at the first opportunity to join a big club on much more money with the prospect/promise of European football? :lol: :lol:

Most of whom won't have youth systems anymore, so those who would have signed YTS equivalent at the likes of Rochdale and Oldham will either get hoovered up by Man City and then just drift away from the game wasting any talent they had because there's a saturation of players of the same age at the club, or they just won't get picked up at all. Late developers (look at Rickie Lambert as a prime example) wouldn't stand a chance. He'd have been dismissed as not being good enough to even get into an academy at 12 years old. There are two purposes of our academy - one is to produce players good enough for our first team, the other is to produce players who we can sell to make the club self-sufficient. Even if we are a Cat 1 academy, there's nothing that will stop Man City, Chelsea, Arsenal, Man United, etc coming in and hand-picking whichever of our prospects look half-decent at 14, 15 or 16 and taking them away for less than £200k. Therefore, the academy no longer serves its second purpose as the money generated from sales of £200k per player will not keep any ambitious football club on an even keel. Of course the knock-on effect there is that, if we are an ambitious Premier League club and we're losing our youth prospects to the top clubs, we're no longer in a position to produce players good enough for our first team, so the academy ceases to serve its primary purpose. You're looking down at the "have nots" when you should really be looking up at the much more important danger.

Except Saints won't, because Man United, Man City, etc will bribe players (and, probably more importantly, their parents) into joining them, which we won't be able to afford to do. It's all well and good having a reputable academy, but that's been based on having the pick of a fairly large geographical area. That won't be the case anymore because the bigger clubs will now be able to scout in those areas as well.

As far as I'm aware, the money isn't distributed evenly, it's all put into a central pool and is given as a grant on a case-by-case basis. Some clubs don't apply for any, some apply for much more than the £120k stated - obviously each one has to justify the spending.

While the new Academy proposals would appear to be an advantage to us, as we've already got most (if not all) of the infrastructure and funding in place, one of the reasons we are in such a strong position right now is that there is very little competition locally. The 90-minute rule means that the likes of Man United, Liverpool, etc can't touch the talent that's in our area. There's a slight overlap with Chelsea, but their academy has produced only one player who's even close to the current first team in the last decade or so (Josh McEachren). As long as the 90-minute radius rule applies, we have a massive competitive advantage. As soon as that rule disappears, we'll have Man United, Man City, Liverpool, Arsenal, etc encroaching on our "turf", and they can (and will) offer incentives far greater than we would be willing to, and they'd be able to poach players directly out of the academy once it became clear that particular player was likely to be a special talent, and they'd be able to do so for absolute peanuts, as the tribunal system would be scrapped with fixed fees payable depending on the age of the player.

It's the Alan "we don't really know much about Hatem Ben Arfa" Shearer disease

Is it the current West Ham player who bottled it at St Mary's for the second season running?

Bizarrely, with the usual 2100 allocation down there, I'd have agreed with you, as a lot of people simply can't be arsed with a ballot. However, with 3200, those who would have been thinking about going but weren't sure about the ballot will have been persuaded by the 50% increase in the likelihood of getting a ticket.

Confirmed on the Pompey OS that they've given us 3200 tickets for the game at Fratton, can only assume they're not confident of selling the tickets to home fans

And the originally-announced figure wouldn't have been a record, which they'd also announced at the time. Nothing suspicious there then...