CHAPEL END CHARLIE

He played in our cup match against Birmingham which I think was our third game of the season.

 

He played well.

 

He got injured shortly after didn't he?

 

If you can explain why a footballer would pretend to be injured I am all ears. Clearly if he fell into the Stern John / Rasiak / Saga category of "players we want to get rid of at all costs" and was fit he would've been loaned to someone by now. You can't say there aren't any Championship teams who wouldn't take him.

Please explain when and where I claimed Wayne Thomas is pretending to be injured ? If your going to criticise me then it's only fair you base that criticism on what I've actually said rather than imply I've made a very serious allegation when I clearly have not ! :mad:

Yes right, he's hobbling about on crutches with knee ligament damage just to make it look good for the public. He sneaks home, takes off the cast and goes rumba dancing I suppose.

The above proves beyond all doubt that sarcasm truly is the lowest form of wit .

Wayne Thomas was fit and available pre-season was he not and still infrequently selected in spite of the teams obvious need for experienced defenders , so I remain suspicious that there may be more to the matter than just an injury .

If you prefer to take the club's official stance as gospel and the whole truth then so be it - I find you need to read between the lines sometimes to arrive at a real answer when it comes to SFC matters . Perhaps you should try cleaning your windows more often and then you might see more .

The mystery of the dog that didn't bark..........

Allegedly out injured but some suspect there's more to it than that .

Would we be better off with Leon Crouch rather than Lowe & Wilde ?

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Not really the hardest question that's ever been asked on here .

There was universal agreement at the Football Club Chairman's Annual Awards when only one name was put forward in the

'Upper Class Prat of the Year' category .

You would have thought by now JP really should have cottoned on to just how difficult it is to get any type of win in the CCC - perhaps he's a slow learner .

With the notable exception of Adam Lallana our so-called 'strikeforce' is now reduced to BWP , DMG and a couple of cheap loan players who are by definition not good enough to get anywhere near their club's first team . I ask you who in their right mind is going to predict that lot are about to put 4 or 5 goals past any decent side in this division ?

What planet is Jan Poortvliet living on ? - is he so divorced from the real world that's he's now operating in some alternate reality where he's a top manager running a talented well financed team on the brink of promotion ?

Good luck to the lad but more teenagers are really the very last thing we need ATM , especially in crucial defensive positions . Sometimes I think we're actually trying to get relegated , if not we're doing a pretty passable impression . I truly despair for this club tonight .

Michael Wilde's fortune is based on property development and that's obviously not a good business to be in at the moment , couple that with probable substantial losses on the stock market and he may well be 'feeling the pinch' as they say .

But deeper than that it can't be a very pleasant experience for a Saints fan (and he is) to be jointly responsible for our clubs ruin , no one actually wants to be hated after all . In the unlikely event that you're reading this MW there's still one way you can partially redeem your reputation with Saints fans - it involves a long , painful phone call to Leon Crouch .

Michael Wilde's fortune is based on property development and that's obviously not a good business to be in at the moment , couple that with probable substantial losses on the stock market and he may well be 'feeling the pinch' as they say .

But deeper than that it can't be a very pleasant experience for a Saints fan (and he is) to be jointly responsible for our clubs ruin , no one actually wants to be hated after all . In the unlikely event that you're reading this MW there's still one way you can partially redeem your reputation with Saints fans - it involves a long , painful phone call to Leon Crouch .

Bare in mind the club will need to sell season tickets from March so this may cause them to hold back on some player disposals until the summer in the hope that they can persuade/con us into renewing our STs .

You win, maybe. I dunno if they always count the ST holders. Otherwise the Opening poster wins.

It seems the club does count ST holders as being present whether they actually go or not - at least they do if we believe the Echo .

http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/sport/saints/news/3802206.Another_new_low_for_St__Mary_s_crowd/

I recon there could well have been less than 12k fans at SMS last night . SFC is hemorrhaging support as fans vote with their feet and this situation can't continue for much longer .

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Manage your Finances the HBOS way !

If any Saintsweb members have spare copies of these hard-to-find books I'm interested .

Why don't we just call him 'Q' - like that smug pain in the arse from Star Trek .

Signed .

 

The same Leon Crouch who allowed the wage expenditure to increase whilst income was dwindling? What a superb idea that would be! We can carry on signing players on decent money, call back the loanees, stick our fingers in our ear when the bank calls and hope everything will be alright!

So let me get this straight .

Your argument is that Leon Crouch acted in error when he sanctioned the emergency loan of Richard Wright when all 3 senior SFC keepers were simultaneously injured ?

When Andrew Davies fractured his cheek bone and Wayne Thomas was also out injured we should not have agreed the short term loans of Chris Lucketti or Chris Perry as we clearly had no need for experienced defenders at that time .

Can I take it that you consider these loans played no significant part in our survival last season and thus the relatively minor expense involved was largely unjustified ? Perhaps you would have preferred we were relegated last season - I can't say I agree but that does seem the logic of your argument . :confused:

I also think JP is a top bloke. I think he cares, and his comments are refreshing and are not the banal straight-out-of-100 Greatest Football Platitudes that used to twitch subconsciously and slurringly out of Burleys mouth.

 

But he's either not up to the job due to lack of experience or wrong mindset, or he simply didnt know what he was letting himself in for.

 

I think we will get hammered over the next 5 games and he will be gone by the end of that period.

 

Lowe's actions in all this are utterly incredible. He is almost exactly repeating the events of the relegation season (appointing an inexperienced yes man who is desperate to make it work but is unable to see it isnt to subsequently cut his losses and quit, finally succumbs as Lowe's scapegoat). And guess what ? By the time a change happens it will be too late again and we will be relegated.

Yep , couldn't agree more .

You can grunt and squeal about it all you like, it will make no difference. If you are doing it to bring about change, it isn't going to happen. If you're doing it just because you don't fancy it any more, fair enough.

Aside from a super rich sugar daddy (which is looking less and less likely, if it were ever likely at all) what is the alternative to Lowe? What exactly do people want doing differently at the club at the minute?

I realise there are some people out there so deluded they believe Lowe is spending his time lining his pockets with the massive profits from a Championship side, but he is doing what needs to be done. We are massively in debt. It is alright saying that spending a little on Stern's wages (etc. etc.) will help us out, it is very good saying that by sticking the kids out and flogging anything with value we move closer to relegation. But what is the alternative? Is there some uber-business mind out there who can cut our debts without cutting costs?

I hate to play the super fan card (but I am a ****ing super fan) I will continue to go and watch the Saints as long as I am able, ******** to the rest of it.

This 'there is no alternative - you will be assimilated' talk sounds a tad too much like Maggie Thatcher speak for my taste .

There are always alternatives - the trick is picking the right option . RL has consistently failed to pick the right option throughout his stewardship of SFC - his ill advised elevation to Director of Football status or the idiotic disposal of Nigel Pearson for no good reason being only the latest examples .

In any other walk of life (the Civil Service excepted) this level of failure would earn you the order of the boot , why should football be any different ? Lowe and Wilde should resign immediately allowing Leon Crouch resume day-to-day control of the club before it's too late , at least then our perilous financial situation would not be made any worse by a Chairman who's ego exceeds his talent .

Rule Number One for getting yourself out of a hole - stop digging .

I just can't shake this feeling that abandoning The Dell for SMS was where the rot started to set in.

Don't get me wrong, SMS is a beautiful stadium, but it lacks the character, the ambiance, the "soul" that was ever present in The Dell. SMS will never instill the kind of awe and fear in visiting teams that The Dell did.

But more importantly, SMS put us in a world of debt with a huge mortgage, and money is exactly what caused our demise. We will never know what would have happened if we had stayed at The Dell, but without the debt that we incurred by building SMS it is conceivable that we would now be (much) better off.

 

This is perfectly true .

In the long run we had to move on from the Dell that's obvious , the real problem is that the new stadium and relegation came within a few years of each other . A 10 year gap between the two events and we'd had been OK . Timing is everything as they say .

I predict there will be one more empty seat in block 19 as I really can't be arsed to go on a expensive 60 mile round trip to watch a bunch of kids fail again . Rupert won't care though - he's already has my money .

I do believe we are going to offer Coventry a 'Score one goal , Get one free offer' - no change there then .

we are fubar'ed

(fuc*ed up beyond all recognition) for any non military types on here . A perfectly fair summary of our current situation IMO .

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. It is easy to predict failure and too often on here people spend their time saying "oh this is ****, that is ****" etc. without offering alternatives. i.e. Lowe out, then what.

 

Say what you like about Lowe and Wilde and whether they want what's best for them or the club. The fact is that we are in such a dire position that what is good for the club is good for them as well. It suits no one to go down, it suits no one to be in administration.

 

The difference between Lowe and everyone else is he has to make the decisions and be judged by them. If we had kept Pearson and results had been broadly the same, there would be an equal number on here criticising Lowe for not taking decisive action in the summer. The chairman is damned either way.

 

The sooner the fans quit concentrating on boardroom and support whoever is there then the quicker Saints will heal.

If you really want the club to 'heal' then a good place to start would be to remove the cankerous sore eating away at the fanbase .

Until last summer I was not especially interested in the composition of the Boardroom , I just came to SMS to watch a football match . But you have to accept that rightly or wrongly a great many Saints fans just can't tolerate Rupert Lowe and this is playing a significant part in the clubs all to obvious decline . Yes we have no money but RL's mismanagement of the club this year has multiplying our problems to a serious degree . Rupert Lowe is in charge and it is he who must accept the lions share of the responsibility for SFC's current perilous state .

As for your 'decisive action' I just don't agree that this at all necessary in Nigel Pearson's case - we had a good manager , we should have kept him instead of embarking on this ill-advised experiment with 'total football' .

What makes you say that ???? ..... That would mean Lowe sacking him ..... and if he did that, it would mean that HIS Brainchild had gone Pear Shaped .....

 

Can you forsee Lowe admitting he was wrong ....... now THAT would be a first !!!!!!!!!

Well he has got 'form' for sacking managers when results force him into it - reference that other genius appointment of his Steve Wigley , but it will probably be too late .

BTW there are some on here who owe you an apology when you so accurately predicted the clubs current sorry state of affairs last summer and received nothing but abuse in return - but I shouldn't hold me breath waiting for it if I were you .

Could it be that the dismissal/mutual parting of NP was purely down to money. If he had really wanted the job, he would have accepted the reduced salary of 2 men...IMHO (conjecture, no source!) :cool:

I don't think you'll find many on here who do think NP's departure was purely down to money .

We are long on opinions and short on facts when it comes to Boardroom matters but from what we do know Rupert Lowe certainly first contacted Jan Poortvliet years ago - some say George Burley's appointment in 2005 was forced on RL when he really wanted JP at that time . It seems quite clear to me that RL never had the slightest intention of retaining Nigel Pearson's services as manager this season as Poortvliet was always his intended appointment . This of course rode roughshod over the expressed opinion of the vast majority of Saints fans or indeed any decent judge of British football . The sheer folly of this Double Dutch total football experiment becomes ever more apparent with every passing match - I regard this as self evident .

IMO the alleged wages issue was a smokescreen intended to justify the current management arrangements . I do not accept then or now that Nigel Pearson did not want the job . I do not accept that a reasonable wage package could not have been negotiated had Lowe offered one . I do consider it unlikely that Nigel Pearson would have tolerated the level of interference with the squad that JP has had to endure so maybe NP's better off out of it . Jan Poortvleit on the other hand will be back in Holland before very long and Southampton Football Club need a footballing miracle to avoid both relegation and administration in 2009 .

Well I agree entirely with this thread and am looking forward to seeing Elvis Presley riding Shergar around St Marys in front of a full house on Tuesday !

In this eventuality I'm going to request The King sings 'Crying in the Chapel' - after all he won't be the only one .