norwaysaint

Meaningless comment in this context. You don't reach Europe by having the team to win games, you do it by having the squad to maintain that winning habit over a season. We've got a great team, but not a top six squad.

I'll be happy if they keep faith with Gallagher.

Has anyone here mentioned Suits? Very good buddy legal drama thing. Very watchable, Mrs norwaysaint and I have been watching two or three in a go on netflix. Can't put my finger on what elevates it above a lot of other stuff, maybe just the strength of the lead actors/characters, but it certainly works. Have recently tried and disliked Fringe and Continuum, both dull and unoriginal.

It's been an exceptionally rubbish year for skiing so far with very little snow in the mountains, great year to buy a season ticket for the first time. Finally got out for the first time yesterday, about a month after the season was expected to start. Absolutely brilliant to be skiing again and will be trying to get out every weekend now. Annoyingly it looks as if my six year old will soon join my eight year old in being far better than me though.

My wife goes there on business a bit and took the kids last time. They did all the parks and stuff, but Apparently the best place by a long long way is Discovery Cove. Swimming with dolphins and stuff like that. They still talk about it all the time, not that I'm jealous or anything.

Does it make any difference? You both have the same personality and views even if you're not him. What does it matter? To us you're just a poster saying silly things on a forum, like he was. Dune or not Dune, you occupy the exact same space. Once we called you stanley, then mole, then dune, now we call you barry, call yourself what you like, you are who you are.

Lovely with a wood burning stove, I built a woodshed for our logs, but I put some in the shed to dry out more before rotating them next to the fire. Ours isn't that big, but it's capable of keeping the whole downstairs warm. We inherited a few square km of forest last year, so I treated myself to a chainsaw. Plenty of logs for the fire now.

What a petty bunch of cocks there are on SWF. It was pretty clear the point being made in the OP, our big money signings either haven't or won't be playing at the moment, pretty simple really, get over yourselves. Small minded ****s, hilarious that some of you squabble with MLG for exactly these kind of posts.

Can we at least get some decent rumours going about whom he was fighting with.

I don't think we'd sell him for that, meaning that to us at least his value is higher. What other clubs would actually pay for him is another matter, but his value to them is less relevant than his value to us.

Disappointing she specified that time period only, rather than just say that we won't be selling any first team players, like Cortese always did. They'll all be off in the summer and she can't be accused of lying to us.

just accept that we don't know yet and we'll have to wait and see. Pretending to to know just what's going to happen doesn't make you look smarter, it makes you look a tit.

http://www.bbc.com/sport/0/winter-olympics/25780083 Cross country skiing is like a way of life over here, this has caused a bit of a shock. Nice work! Funny that this guy has just beaten All the Norwegians at a sport they dominate internationally, but nobody has heard of him. This is a bit like some British bloke you've never heard of taking part in the Jamaican 100m championships and winning.

Oh dear. Has that article been widely circulated on the other threads? I'm surprised it hasn't been given a thread of it's own. I hadn't seen it before and that's not happy reading, but of course isn't a wide sample group of opinion. They make it sound like she's a bit clueless and ineffective there don't they?

She's seems to have had such a full and rich business career that almost her entire internet presence is related to her involvement with Saints. You would have thought if she'd had any impact on the world of business at all then it would've been mentioned here or there.

Have I missed a few details? has she been a business success in her own right as well as inheriting her dad's fortune? I wouldn't be any the wiser if she was hopeless financially and is slowly frittering away ML's fortune, or if she was carefully increasing her wealth with shrewd financial decisions. Out of interest what have you seen that makes you say "clearly"?

Although I'm pretty sure they will all wait around to see what happens and which way the club goes, those saying it's ridiculous to suggest a player is at all affected by the chairman aren't quite right either. I remember one of my first jobs, I was shown around by the boss and was really swept up by his ideas, plans and ambitions. He was a charismatic bloke who clearly knew exactly what he wanted to do. I had plenty of choices, but he was the one who swayed my decision. About four years later he left and his replacement was an utter wet blanket, trying to make decisions by committee and with no clear, strong vision at all. I saw that as the perfect time to move on and from what I heard later, I made the right decision. These things do make a difference. There is a certain belief among the players in the direction the club has been headed and we'll have to see if that momentum is maintained, or some may see it as a good time to move on while their stock is high.

I've really enjoyed the Cortese era and I expect we might be weaker without him. There's a lot of value in a strong leader with a clear vision of what they plan to do. Most people coming into the club, staff and players, have said that it was Cortese's vision that convinced them to come, which shouldn't be under-rated. However, I supported saints when we were mediocre and I supported saints when we were awful, when we were poor and when we were rich. The club isn't about to go out of business and it's currently in better shape than at any time in my saints watching history. Even if the loss of Cortese has a strongly negative effect on personal and on results, it'll be no worse than I've become used to over the years. I think that with Cortese goes the last of Markus' intentions for the club. There's no real evidence that KL will sell, or that she will ruin the club, but there's no evidence as far as I'm aware that she has any history of astute business decisions either. She could be an utter disaster area who is already squandering her inherited fortune, who knows? I don't believe she has any big dreams for the club and I don't think she'll bring in anybody with the determined vision of Cortese, I think she's probably indifferent and has no desire to spend too much of her time or money on us, so I see this as an end to our, perhaps unrealistic, aspirations. Fair enough, Saints aren't really a club big enough to hold down a regular top eight slot and never really have been, so maybe we'll just go back to our place of mid to lower table. I certainly think that it'll now be easier for other clubs to tempt our manager and our stars away, but it's all happened before and it's what most of us grew up with. For me the end of one of the most exciting eras of being a saints fan, now let's see what the next one will bring.

Have to love listening to Lowe. He's just repeatedly taken full credit for our success.

Apparently it would be easy to pick up a left back of Shaw's quality or a winger good enough for the top half of the PL for 10 million each. I wonder who the proven top level premier league full backs and wingers are who'll want to come to saints for that price, especially when we've just shown that we're happy to sell our best players, even when we don't need the money.

Left Romsey when I was 16, after time living in Solihull, Birmingham, Norwich and then Oslo, I settled down and built a house on a beautiful island just off the coast of Bergen. I've never been much of a fan of cities and got my share of them over the years, so it's nice to be out in the sticks, although I can be in the city in 20 minutes.

People thinking that just because we get get 30 million, the team will be improved to the value of 30 million are living in a dreamworld and have been completely oblivious to the value added by most saints signings over the last couple of years. 30 million pounds does not get you 30 million pounds worth of talent. Surely you've all learned that? It gets you the players other teams are willing to sell you for 30 million, even if they are worth less than half that. Add to that the fact that although a player has done a good job somewhere else and has a high price, it just might not work out for us, again. With Shaw we know we have a top player. We shouldn't lose that unless we have to. People saying we could get another player of the same ability and have money left over to strengthen don't seem to get that it just doesn't work like that. We will spend over the odds to get in a player we hope will work out, but maybe won't. Then we'll maybe have extra money for transfers, although it won't necessarily change the amount we spend on the transfer market at all. If we do spend, we may end up with another Gaston, a Billy Sharp or somebody else who just becomes an expensive substitute. If we keep Shaw, we possibly get more value than we could have got out of 30 million pounds of hit or miss spending.

A few people seem to be saying we should sell him because the money is so good. That only holds water if we needed the money, if he wanted to go and if we could be certain of getting as good or better with the money. We could get that money and end up with a couple of expensive signings who just didn't work out, like that's never happened before. Right now we have an excellent young left back who we know can produce the gods at this level. Taking the money would just be a gamble on the transfer market. I just haven't seen a single convincing argument why we should sell.

Pretty obvious we shouldn't sell him unless he wants to go. The fact is, by selling him, we would be weakening ourselves at left back. Why would we want to do that? There's been no sign from the club that we need the money. so I'd guess we wouldn't do it out of financial need. yes, we'd get money to spend on replacements, but as LS is among the best LBs in the country, we almost certainly wouldn't get anyone as good, so it'd weaken the team. A player we know is good and fits the team is invaluable to us. As we know, we can spend a huge amount on a player who is expected to be far better than what we have, only for it not to work out that way at all. 30 million pounds wouldn't necessarily end up being good business for us at all if our transfers in didn't work out. And there's always a chance of that.

Wanyama is a very good player, but there's definitely been a case of him getting built up in his absence. He had games where he was immense and games where he was poor. We could certainly use an on form Wanyama though. I don't think he's quite as key as Boruc and Lovren, but he probably just edges it over cork, who has done a solid job in his absence and has proved that he's a genuine pl player. More than hang anything it's going to be good to have choices again.being in a position of having to play fox, Gazzaniga or one of Jos or Yoshida has not been comfortable, it's our lack of squad depth that's made us drop, getting back to first choices is going to give us another chance to push on at least.