S-Clarke

This is where I feel football has changed so much, even in the last 2-3 years. In the past you could get promoted with the core of a good side, enjoy that team in the PL and evolve with them (Brentford, Brighton, ourselves, you guys, Leeds etc). Some good players may get sold after season 1 in the prem, but you've survived at that point and can reinvest from a stronger position. These days it seems like an impossible cycle. As soon as teams get promoted, they're already struggling to keep their best players. Burnley lost some of their best players last time they came up, so did Sheffield United. Burnley will probably repeat the same feat here, and thus the inevitable will happen. It would be nice for these promoted sides to get a chance to get a foot in the league. If their best players are sold before they've even started, it's an uphill battle really.

I thought he was a dick in the way he left, I think everyone does really. But your vendetta against him feels very personal at this point. I just say - let it go, move on? It's a very, very large chip on your shoulder to be walking around with otherwise.

It's a difficult one for Rusk really, I think anyone stepping in last season was on a hiding to nothing. Their rep was always going to go through the floor on the back of it. He did get quite snipey towards the press at times, I think the pressure got to him a bit. Definitely the right time to part, not sure what he'd have added with the baggage of last year. We need as little of that around as we can get.

Only £4-5m too. Weird summer for them. Mbuemo to Man Utd still strong too. Some loose interest in Wissa from Newcastle, and Damsgaard from Bayern I read. Could be a pivotal summer for them, a real cross-roads moment and I think their manager choice has kinda dictated what direction they're off to.

That's the last remaining remnants of the Martin era are gone (Thornton and Parker).

We have to remember we're kind of reliant on Southampton City Council here as well, they're a key driver in the wider picture. This is the same Council who still haven't developed Mayflower Park, the pier, Toys 'R' Us or the Leisure World site. For those reasons alone, I wouldn't hold out much hope for anything happening this side of 2040.

One of my favourite players during this period of crapness, since he came here in 2020 he's been excellent for us. Always shows up, always present, hardly ever injured, plays anywhere you ask without moaning. The one thing that always shocked me is how we kept him in the Championship, a player of his ability sticking with us was ridiculous. He'd have had takers, no doubts, and other players would have kicked up a fuss saying they want out - but he didn't, he stuck to it and gave 110% that entire season. His last season won't be remembered by many, as it was miserable for everyone really, but I'll always appreciate his efforts in the good times as well as the bad. I hope he gets a good move and gets some further England caps to his name. He deserves everything given to him.

This is a bit of a left field one - but Danny Guthrie. We had him on loan in the 2nd half of that Play off season, he was pretty classy I thought. Lots of games in that 2nd half of the season went through him, and he actually made a decent-ish PL career for himself at Bolton and Newcastle after that year. A tidy player.

Yeah that's a good shout, he was fun. Brought some hope into a pretty poor season, although compared to our recent relegated efforts, we were world beaters in 05. That Norwich game is still one of my favs.

In terms of Dusan, there's a lot of romance in wanting that to happen - but I don't think it's worth exploring from a pure footballing point of view. We need to move on from looking to the past, and start building a new squad full of players for the future. We went all romantic by re-signing Theo and Lallana and they were just pointless wage hoggers. I'm glad we dodged the AOC move as well, another one who should be left in the past.

Euklund was a bit before my footballing memories to be honest, I feel like I missed a lot in the early 90's and prior. Never mind. In recent years though, in this order of pure impact at the time - 1 - Saganowski. Ridiculous period on loan, that 6 months got us into the playoffs. He carried us there. Shame it never happened after that. Wasn't it true that Leon Crouch actually coughed up the £750k needed to sign him permanently? 2 - Toby. Class act, elite level CB whom we could enjoy for a year. Never kicked up a fuss and was a proper good pro around the place too. Luckily we didn't feel his departure too greatly as we moved onto VVD shortly after, who was even more epic, but we still got our value out of that Toby deal. 3 - Bertrand. He was, in a lot of peoples minds, quite an underwhelming addition to replace the £35m we'd just got for Luke Shaw. But he was excellent on loan, a no brainer permanent addition and one of my favourite players of our PL era. 4 - KWP has to feature. He didn't start like a house on fire during his loan period, but once he got going he was well worth that £11m outlay. We've lost him on a free now, but we (notably during Ralph's time) extracted every ounce of ability from him. I reckon we saw his best years in the PL.

They actually built a really strong top end Championship team upon promotion to the PL. The likes of Clarke, Szmodics, Palmer, Phiologene, Johnson, Ogbene, Greaves etc are all proven top end Champ players. Even without Delap, with Szmodics, Hirst as '9's and Phiolgene, Broadhead and Clarke linking in from wide, I'd say there are stacks and stacks of goals there. Decent defence too at that level with Greaves, Wolfenden, Johnson, Davis and Dara O'Shea who are all still there. Central Midfield I'm not too sure about, as their best CM last year was Cajuste, but he returned back to his parent club. Luongo and Morsy are a couple of years older now and may not be the same.

It is a very odd move, like you say there would have been tons of higher level managers up for that job. They should have taken this as an opportunity to move forward, a bit like Brighton did when they lost Potter (they got Di Zerbi), but this seems destined to fail from the outset to me. After becoming an established PL club and pushing for European football, it feels like they've just tried to be extra clever here when they had the opportunity to sustain what they had, or even further it. They'll be relegated within the next 2 years.

Unfortunately it's not Spors handling the outgoings, Dragan confirmed that Rasmus is dealing with all outgoing transfers. So I think we can safely say on that one, that no, Rasmus doesn't know what he's doing.

Carvalho is an interesting one, he's been on our radar for a number of years. We were interested when he was at Fulham, then again after he'd gone to Liverpool. Not sure why he hasn't got into the team at Brentford, depends what their new manager feels about him I guess, these sorts of openings will prob happen later in August. It could be a loan option though, as playing first team football in the Championship is undeniably a better option than chilling on the bench for Brentford.

We did this for years with the likes of Boufal and Hoedt, not selling for cheap etc. What happened in the end? We had to give them away for freebies, or pay them off. Sometimes the club just need to accept the reality, and the reality is that £14-15m euro deal for Sulemena is as good as it's going to get.

The club are off their heads if they think they're getting a better offer than that. That will be our chance of selling him over if we've actually rejected that.

Keep in mind that Amazon are developing their own Bespoke OS for Fire TV/FireSticks with a closed App Store (Vega OS, based on Linux I think), no one knows for sure but I'd say it's pretty likely you won't be able to sideload apps anymore. Nvidia Shields are another option, full Android OS based. Bit more expensive, but you can do loads with them.

That's almost certainly as good as we're going to get, a surprising bonus income if we get that over the line. I expected a loan for him, so that's good news.

I honestly remember hotter weeks/summers in the 90's. Power in the park, the swimming pool down the common, mayflower park and all that stuff. There were some really warm days back then. We didn't need to be told about a heat health alert then. Everyone just got on with it and used their noggins. Weather will be weather, it might be cold, it might be warm, but it's not worth worrying about the fear that they try to put into us for any extreme. Just enjoy it, at least it's not raining.

I take issue with that bit, it went wrong long before Wilcox was involved. Remember the summer window of 2022, and the winter Window of 2023? They were amongst the worst we'd ever had, set us back years, and that was primarily on Rasmus. Wilcox wasn't even a glint in peoples eyes back then. The issue with not replacing Wilcox last summer was a genuine one, but let's not ignore the fact that things were pretty horrific long before Wilcox was involved. People like Rasmus will rightfully cop the stick when he releases books that are titled ''If it's not broken, break it', and then subsequently gets his hands involved in us and breaks our club.

Potentially looking to make back around £15-20m on two players who set us back £40m 2 years ago. At this point just get what we can, move on, and forget it ever happened.

As long as the investment in the facilities doesn't distract from us building a competitive team, then I'm all for it. If it's one or the other, then we need a competitive team before anything else.

I don't have any animosity towards Dragan, I never have. His intentions have always been right, there's never been any reason to doubt that as he's put his money where his mouth is. The problem came from the guys put in place to execute his intentions, and they got it fundamentally wrong on so many levels. It's clear he's recognised that. I don't think he wanted to take such an active role, it certainly doesn't sound like his intention, but he needs to claw back some control as the guys he put in charge were utterly destroying his investment. Admitting the mistakes of going into the PL under prepared are correct, I don't put that all onto Dragan as there were many other parties who should have been a lot more savvy than they were. His opinion of Martin made me laugh - 'a bit too cocky' - that's an understatement, but he is absolutely right in what he says. I don't buy the VAR robbed us of points though, and I don't think that would have saved Martin. Those 8 points would have given us 20 in total, hold the champers for that acoldade. Anyway, this has always been a crucial summer and arguably their last chance to get it right. I think there is a structure in place of the right people, but we just have to hope that certain meddlers are a bit further away than they have been. I'm intrigued to see where we stand in September.

The 'the only thing holding up his transfer' is the same thing that's been holding it up for what feels like many transfer windows. They won't give us what we want, they'll haggle, refuse to budge, we'll refuse to budge, then they'll take him on loan at the 11th hour. Certainly the dullest transfer saga in many years.