stevegrant

Why? If Begovic is that lacking in ambition that he's happy to go and sit on Chelsea's bench and play 5 games a season, that's his choice.

It's crap, obviously, but it's scoreboard pressure requiring 11 an over from the off, which is why I was so surprised we put them in having won the toss. If we were batting first, and able to just put a score together in our own way, without the cluttered thinking of "oh ****, got to score 11 an over every over", we could have got to 180-200 ourselves and then all of a sudden the pressure's on Essex.

To be fair, it's Chelmsford. It's a tiny postage stamp of a ground where 180 is a below-par score. I was amazed that Vince chose to bowl first on that wicket considering the likely effect of scoreboard pressure. Chasing 11 an over was doable in theory but you're always up against it because you never think you've got time to assess the pitch as a batsman, despite only needing three scoring shots per over to be up with the rate.

Well this has gone well...

Worth noting on the Deloufeu deal, Barcelona have a buy-back clause, which is probably why the price is so low. If he's any good, they'll have him back in a couple of years time.

It's not quite "a Pompey", tbf

So from that, we'd get 30% of the 5% cut? If the fee's £8m, that's around £133k.

Are they? Who's paying that??

The sort of player who, if he has a good season, will have Liverpool blundering in with a £20m bid, and if he has a bad season, will have QPR doing the same for £10m. They can't really lose here, I suspect.

A bit hit and miss, I thought. Very good price, though. Bournemouth throwing down £8m for Tyrone Mings of Ipswich

What he said.

Ability is clearly there, he's just wildly inconsistent. If Koeman thinks he can get the sort of performance he put in at Newcastle out of him on a more regular basis, and we can get him for very little outlay, then it's probably a deal worth doing. I think the option fee with Werder Bremen was only around €4m anyway, so if we can knock that down again, that's a decent price for someone with his experience IMO.

It was never a rule. Clubs in the UK (whose grounds are pretty much the only ones built in such a way that the front rows of seats are so low down) just didn't have any option but to not sell tickets in those seats because the view would have been practically zero.

Gareth Berg has been the one consistent performer in the championship this season, good to see him getting another score and handful of wickets. The rest just don't seem quite up to it - perhaps the gap between D1 and D2 is bigger than it was when we were last up here...

Not true. The only reason some clubs have done this is because the advertising boards for UEFA competitions are taller than the ones we use domestically, and so the views from the front rows would be obscured. I don't know whether the fact we now use electronic advertising boards in this country means the front rows become usable again or not.

I thought I hid my role as the new Sir Harry Pearce quite well

**** all in the grand scheme of things. Probably around £20-30k.

If we get to the group stage of the Europa League, we'll have 6 of our first 7 away games rearranged, and three home games. Newcastle (A) Watford (A) Norwich (H) Man United (H) Chelsea (A) Liverpool (A) Sunderland (A) Man City (A) Aston Villa (H) The only away game between August and the start of December that would still be on a Saturday (unless, of course, it's picked for TV) would be West Brom. The next would be Palace on 12th December In terms of fixture oddity, Everton have been at home to Liverpool before the game at Anfield in 13 of the last 14 seasons. Now that is a weird statistical quirk!

Nope, guaranteed to be Sunday or Monday.

It's come from another website, which has presumably posted them at 9am GMT rather than BST.

Sort of. It was never particularly wanted, but it's become a useful filter for stuff that's completely unrelated to the main point of the site. Not sure which Saintsweb you're reading. There has literally been one single user banned on here in the last 12 months for something other than spamming (a load slipped through the net a few months ago when Tapatalk introduced the ability to register for the forum through the app and didn't automatically set it so the user had to be verified first) and having multiple logins.

My perspective is that this is a football forum first and foremost. Bearsy was amusing but his "sphere of influence" (for want of a less ****y description) only really extended as far as the Muppet Show, which quite frankly we've only kept because it's easier to do so rather than particularly wanting a part of the forum for the weird stuff that goes on there. He's not been banned, so as far as I'm concerned he's welcome back if he feels he wants to. On the flipside, I'm not going to lose any sleep if he decides not to. It's an internet forum, FFS. It's worth noting, by the way, that despite the fact the season ended three weeks ago, this site has had more visitors in the month since pap's ban than the month prior to it. Stats Websites and forums evolve over time, I'm sure there are some who still hark back to the old Network54 days of Saints Forever as some sort of utopia for Saints-based message boards, but times change, people's attitudes and approaches change. They've gone, I fully expect there will be a new mildly amusing recluse and a new lunatic crackpot with a copy of Photoshop who wind up here at some point down the line. No big deal.

Friday night football >>>>>>>> Monday night football

I think Bates is actually just the poster boy for the shambolic way our recruitment has been run over the last few years, rather than him being the biggest victim. As you rightly say, his batting wasn't good enough, and no other county has signed him even as a second-choice keeper (you'd think Somerset might be looking for a backup keeper now Kieswetter's been forced to retire). We had a load of young players in the side a few years ago, ably led by a handful of wily old pros (the likes of Cork, Mascarenhas and Pothas), whereas now we've got a load of old pros and only a handful of youngsters, the majority of whom were in that same side years ago anyway. Nobody's really forced their way through since then, Chris Wood's bowling isn't fast enough for the four-day game, Briggs has been messed about a hell of a lot, and other youngsters who have played a few games and seemingly done alright have been let go while we bring in older players on presumably big wages. Is there anyone coming through the academy who is likely to be good enough, or is the whole system just going through the motions in order to get the ECB funding attached to it?

148/3 in the morning session with a lunchtime lead of 13, I think that can probably be regarded as one of our more successful sessions this season Wheater and Berg showing that there perhaps aren't quite as many demons in the pitch as the last couple of games at Hove have suggested.