CHAPEL END CHARLIE

I generally try to swim against the tide, but this time it just has to be Sir Rickie. Schneiderlin, Hooiveld, and Lallana not that far behind the big man I'd say

What a bunch of girlymen you sad sacks are ! The only decent ways left to us now to get promoted would be either winning our last home game on Saturday, or a grand day out at Wembley again. If we can't manage either of that then we don't deserve to go up. What we may want makes no bloody difference anyway, as the manager would no doubt say - West Ham v Leicester is just not one of our 'controllables'.

My condolences for having to live next door to a Skate. Keep the windows shut and plant a impenetrable wall of Leylandi trees is my advice.

What will be, will be. I really rather we did it at St Marys however - now what a day it would be !

Calm down dear. Both Jos and Fonte are normally quite good in the air and the record shows we have lost one league game this season (yesterdays as it happens) from a leading position. Now you might think that's not good enough for some odd reason, but to this fan it seems a pretty good return. I would say however that stats aren't always the full truth of the matter and we often don't look as defensibly sound as that stat suggests we are. In my view our collective defence would certainly require strengthening in order to withstand the rigors of a Premier League season - when and if we do actually get that far.

I was more commentating on how a fan feels inside seeing his team get beaten, rather than the appropriateness of expressing that emotion publicly. But you're right, what we used to call a 'stiff upper lip' is probably the best approach to adopt. As for the most fitting place for us to get promoted, I'm forced to agree yet again. I was there in 2005 watching bloody Darren Fletcher and R van N send us down, and I'll be there next Saturday watching Billy Sharp or Adam Lallana send us up again. With the greatest possible respect to all our 3000 FANTASTIC fans who made a 600 mile round trip yesterday, the truth is I wouldn't want it any other way.

Every true Saints fan is bound to feel at least a bit down about yesterdays result - this is afterall the natural reaction of any real football fan to seeing his team get beat in a (very) important match. Some however prefer to adopt a superior attitude and claim those who feel this way are 'wet fannies' while they of course are double hard bastards who suffer from no such human frailty. I don't believe a word of it myself.

You're so right, and with not very much hindsight achieving promotion without some final game heroics was never likely I suppose. Knowing us I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Coventry score the first goal next Saturday either, but if we can't win that game then we don't deserve promotion anyway I reckon. Keep this under your hat, but I secretly wanted us to get there at St Marys anyway.

The key is that the running costs of the 38,000 seat St Marys would be little different from todays 32,000 stadium. Thus (provided you can regularity fill them) each individual seat is significantly cheaper to fund, much more profitable, and a decent return on the investment required to expand the stadium is surely just a matter of time. On your airline analogy, the cheapest airliner (per seat/mile) to operate is not some little Turboprop, such as we see flying over St Marys every game, but the huge Airbus A380 - the so called 'Economy of Scale' argument. It seems to me very possible that investing in a larger St Marys could prove to be a decent business idea in the long term as long as you are prepared to accept the inherent gamble that we can maintain our Premier League status. However, there are deep structural problems relating to the profitability of the whole English game that also need to be addressed as a matter of some urgency. But that's another heated debate.

All right then forget Henry Ford, open your eyes and take look at the modern world all around you. We are almost literally surrounded by examples of businesses expanding on the basis of selling their product cheaper than their competitors can, indeed this is the very foundation of capitalism. I live in Poole and its old high street is now infested with charity shops because most of the traditional traders we used to see have gone out of business because of the likes of ASDA and Tesco can bulk buy (and thus sell) stuff a hell of a lot cheaper than they possibly can. The rapidly growing success of internet business such as Amazon or EBay is yet another example of this. Say for arguments sake in the future a 38,000 seat St Marys had seats to see Premier League fixtures on sell for the equivalent of around £20 in todays money. On that basis it seems to me quite possible - even likely perhaps - that we'd often sell out because I see no evidence that the demand for the national game is about to disappear for some reason. There must be tens of thousands of (often younger) football fans in our region who seldom, if ever, attend PL matches now because they just can't afford to come. If they can come to see bloody Man Utd or Liverpool then sooner or later some of them with catch the habit of going to football games regularly and this old club might finally fulfill the business potential Cortese and Markus Liebherr saw in it when they bought it. I'll repeat that none of the above is nearly as important as investing in the first team - the bedrock upon which all else must stand, or fall.

But it's not as simple as that. Henry Ford didn't turn his small company into the vast monolith it now is by building expensive cars in small numbers. He found a way of building lots of cars very cheaply and then selling them at a price that helped to created a new level of demand for his product. The analogy between the Model T and St Marys is of course a very rough and simplistic one, but it seems to me arguable that more - perhaps marginally cheaper seats - could indeed help create more demand in the both medium and long term. This would all depend on the club becoming a established and successful PL club of course. This ambition (not stadium expansion) should be our top priority for now.

After seeing it being recommended on here by fellow history enthusiasts I've just finished 'The Time Travelers Guide to Medieval England' by Ian Mortimer, and I much enjoyed it. This is a highly unconventional history book that answers all kinds of questions that you had never even thought to ask, such as the evolving design of 14th century underpants, and how much booze the King would order every year - rather a lot it turns out. Packed with the fascinating detail of every day life, I can honestly say I have never read anything quite like it. I think perhaps the author saves the best for last when he comes to the subject of medieval literature, in particular a old poem called 'Pearl' written so very long ago that even the authors name has become lost in time : So round, so radiant in each array So small, so smooth her sides were, Wheresoever I judged gems so gay I saw her singly above them all Alas I lost her in a garden Through grass to ground she fell away Wounded by love, by love forsaken I mourn that pearl without a flaw Only later do we learn that the 'pearl' in question is no pretty gemstone lost in the long garden grass, but the authors beloved two year old daughter, who like countless other medieval children destined for a tragically short life, will sleep under that same lush grass forever.

I'm struggling to understand the level of hostility directed at the OP, its almost as if some are afraid of change and they'd like us to remain the middling club we now are in perpetuity. We can have a deadly dull accountants argument about how long it will take to see a return on the investment required to enlarge St Marys, but fundamentally expanding the business in both the short and the long term seems to fit in perfectly well with everything we know about the strategy Cortese has been pursuing. Now if you want to say this expansionist strategy is wrong in principle for what is after all only a regional football club, and that the Chairmans display of hubris will lead us to financial disaster .... well that would indeed be a interesting debate to have one day. But to come on here and confidently predict that there is no way the stadium will ever be expanded seems to me more than a tad rash. For what its worth, I just don't see Cortese being happy as the Chairman of a lower league, or eternally struggling PL club. He may, or may not, succeed in all his grand ambitions, and 'Men make plans and the Gods laugh' of course, but I reckon the next few years could be a interesting time for this lovely old club. Just saying.

Note to the Don: Please when you're building your super new Uber St Marys, spare a thought for us poor fans a construct a better footbridge while you're at it. Gwad knows it's hard enough getting in and out of the place with 'only' 32,000 in it !

I thought we were (very) fortunate to scrape a point when we went to their place, and none will need reminding of what happened last Friday. So both the league table and the head-to-head record does suggest that they are the best team in this division - but only just. However they have benefited from the significant advantage of being a established Championship club, while we on the other hand have only just got here. As we're accelerating faster than they are, next season we might well finish above them - just as we have outperformed Brighton this season. Time will tell of course.

To be fair he did also say that Rickie Lambert might well be good enough to play for England.

I'll freely admit I was as down as any other Saints fan after last Friday's defeat, if I'm honest the (probable) loss of the title to Reading still irks me more than it probably should logically. But I'd like to put on the record now just how impressed I am by the teams reaction last night. I called for a display of real fighting spirit from them and they delivered exactly that - and more! The table proves we're right on the verge of automatic promotion, and I wouldn't give West Ham a cats chance of catching us now in all honesty. Although the importance of 'Don' Cortese and the Liebherr money can hardly be overstated, Nigel Adkins surely deserves the Lions share of the credit for what we have achieved this season. He must have had a job on his hands keeping the players focused all season and negating any sense of loss after the Reading game, but we came out against the Posh and outplayed them as if it was just another ordinary game with nothing crucial at stake - what a absolutely superb collective effort from each and every one of them. I can't wait for the Coventry game - where rest assured no one unfortunate enough to sit anywhere near me in block 19 will be left in any doubt of just how extremely delighted I am with this smashing team and its manager.

Two days on and I'm feeling almost as down about this result now as I was back on Friday night. I see many on here resorting to the old 'we were robbed' style responses, and while I certainly know where they are coming from, on reflection I can't really agree. For all our possession Reading were always dangerous and most of the chances we made weren't all that clear cut really, even Lambert's equalizer was itself a deflection was it not ? The fact that we defended very poorly should be painfully obvious to all. Reading will (very likely) win this division now and if they do who on here can honestly say they would not deserve to ? The cruel truth behind this result is that some of us now may not live long enough to ever see our beloved old club finish a season as champions of anything significant, this is a particularly bitter pill to swallow after having come this far. I feel there has been something lacking in the fighting spirit of this club for many years now, the reason for which are hard to explain. I seen us relegated (twice) in the last 10 years and I don't think we put up a proper fight on either occasion. We've all but surrendered the title against Reading when I feel a proper gutsy team is going to score a last minute equalizer, instead of conceding yet again. Even that utter shambles of a club down the road showed us yet again yesterday what it means to fight to the bitter end. The Brighton away game triumph almost exactly 12 months ago proved that we can do it on occasion, so we all collectively (players, management, and fans) need to rediscover the kind of fighting spirit we showed that day pretty damn quick, or this season is heading for the play-offs (and the crapper) in all probability.

Although I must admit I find pigeonholing players into their true level to be a difficult business, let's just say I'm far from convinced that any of our first choice defenders are really of PL standard. For my money Hooiveld and Richardson look the most likely at the moment, with Fox, Fonte, and Davis showing all the signs of being little more than PL 'squad' players maybe. It should go without saying that we're not promoted as yet of course. In a perfect world I'd like to see our defence bolstered by (at least) one quality CB and a better LB this summer, with Rahdi Jaidi, Seaborne and Dan Harding being released.

For whats it's worth I don't happen to think that Guly do Prado can reasonably be blamed for yesterdays bitter disappointment, indeed his introduction didn't seem to make very much difference one way or the other. Mind you, all our players are paid to make a difference aren't they ?

The Olympic/Titanic swap conspiracy is a old yarn that has been comprehensibly rubbished by proper historians who (unlike the author of this tall tale) do actually know what they are talking about. To believe in this nonsense, first both ships would have had to be significantly altered (the two sister ships were similar but not identical if you know what you are looking for) and you'd then have to believe that the many hundreds, if not thousands, of both H & W shipyard workers, White Star Line employees, & their family's involved in this conspiracy could keep this massive fraud secret for many decades. Even if we were to accept that gloriously unlikely scenario, there is (immovable) physical evidence observable on the wreck that the hull is indeed that of the RMS Titanic. But just to confuse the issue however, the two ships are often misidentified. To this very day a great many photographs portioning to show the Titanic, are actually images of the Olympic.

But he has done badly, and some on here just willfully refuse to admit the obvious truth of that despite the evidence of their own eyes. You and your like minded soulmates should understand just how annoying that pigheadedness is to those who prefer a more honest approach to debate. I'll take it you are engaging in hyperbole and not seriously trying to compare Guly do Prado with MLT because that really would be risible. But even if you did hold that ridiculous view then (I say) you'd be perfectly entitled to express it on here - just as everyone else would be equally free to ignore you. As it happens the record shows I too have praised Guly's efforts this season on more than one occasion - but only when I considered he had done something praiseworthy enough to really merit it. The trouble is that all happened before Xmas, and this utter lack of anything approaching decent form this player, this whole calendar year, is the heart of the matter is it not ? Nevertheless should Guly score/make the goal that finally secures us promotion then I'll be back on here praising him again for that - but only because he would deserve it.

This is just another tired old variation on what I call the 'Mother Knows Best' argument - only paid professionals are entitled to express their opinions regarding the game because they (unlike the rest of us) are best placed to know. Of course the bloody manager should pick the team you utter 'cement headed' berk - but why you think that should stop ordinary footy fans from having their say about their club is quite beyond me. I don't know about you but I pay my fiver on here every year so that I can express what I think about SFC related matters and debate that with other like minded fans. Perhaps you'd benefit from consulting a dictionary and obtaining a better grip on the meaning of the word 'Forum' before lecturing me again on what I can, and cannot, say on here. Right or wrong I have always called it as I see it, and I intend to continue with that policy for the foreseeable future. You can take that, leave that, or go stick your head in a bucket for all I care - but I'm not going to change.

What you fail to understand is that while to many of us mere football fans he appears to be uninterested and has been doing next to nothing for us for months on end, I have it on very good authority (because I read it on here) that the true card carrying GDL connoisseur of the finer points of the game can see all kinds of subtle influences he's having on team performance make the team 'tick' in a mysterious and not fully explained way. Oh and he scored some goals and made some assists before Xmas you know ....... I may be the first person to point that out.

I'm so monumentality p1ssed off this evening. Ricky Lambert fails to score a hat trick yet again, Guly doesn't start, and we are only 3 points clear at the top of the league. If things don't start improving pretty damn quick I'll have to consider withdrawing my support from this terrible football club.