norwaysaint

Yeah, everything I've ever said that was wrong, I was just winding people up too. I've never actually been wrong.

I think the point is that they saw the faults, just like you did, but they had also witnessed that Adkins was an intelligent manager and would learn and improve, which we still hope he is doing. what many people found wrong was the knee-jerk reaction that "the manager's getting it wrong-sack him!" It was a knee-jerk reaction and we should learn better after the amount of managers we've had over the years, but at least it's a knee-jerk reaction born of passion, even if it's a bit misguided.

Well either that or Turkish was wrong and I find that to be very hard to believe after he was so indignant.

Either way, I guess his contract will be annulled or we'll be forced to honour it properly very soon.

No NDA will be binding if the contract has been breached.

No, you're wrong, Turkish told us repeatedly that this contract clause exists and got quite upset when people shouted him down/sneered at him. I think we can expect either Guly to sue the club or to read about the change in employment contract law soon.

Seems an odd sort of contract stipulation if you can opt out of it just by saying you don't want to follow it any more. This is going to be quite the legal precedent. In fact I'd expect to read about this in the newspapers soon if this ground-breaking challenge in employment law has gone through so easily. we're lucky to have your reliable insider knowledge so that we know about this stuff before it's made public knowledge. It's also a bit worrying for everybody else with a contract though as it may not be worth the paper its printed on if your line manager can just tell the boss to "butt out" and ignore the contract.

For me the star of the show was the interplay between Ramirez, Lallana and Puncheon, but if you pick out one of them, it has to be Ramirez. Clyne was very good going forward AND in defence today.

Can't believe that even now, with saints in the middle of winning such an important match, there are people who'd prefer to talk about portsmouth. That really is being obsessive.

At times when most players would only manage a reaction shot that'd probably miss, Ramirez controls and creates a pass nobody else would've seen to give somebody else a fantastic chance. It's happened quite a few times today. He really is very good.

I mentioned this being a possibility a while back, but was shouted down/sneered at by everybody on here.

I've been quite surprised. I didn't see a lot of our games last year, but from reports, people seemed to rate him below Jos and believe that he would be a player who wasn't good enough for the prem. He'd excelled in league one, but championship was his level. From what I've seen of him on telly, he seems to be doing okay and, considering the players making errors around him, has been reasonably reliable. Of course, you only see so much of his game on TV and I haven't seen every match, but from what I have seen, I wouldn't be too concerned if we kept him as a starter in the team for a while.

Disgraceful, about as un-PC as you can get I'd say.

Yes, Norway probably has even more of a winter than Sweden. the good side is that the roads are regularly ploughed and salted so there's not much disruption, although if you're planning to go across the mountains, the road might be closed or even more exciting, you have to do convoy driving. this means you all wait in a line for the plough to come, then you have to drive close enough to the car in front that you can see their lights through the snow, you have to drive fast enough to keep up or the road will disappear into a sheet of white in front of you and you'll be stuck. You also have to change over to winter tyres during the autumn and back to summer tyres in the spring and unless you're an idiot, you'll keep tyre chains in your car because there's a good chance you'll need them if you go anywhere off the beaten track, which most Norwegians do as most families have a cabin/cottage in the mountains somewhere. winter also means skiing where you get to choose to either pay a fortune to go downhill skiing, or you can cross country ski absolutely free, which is far more fun, although you get a bit fed up with both 5 year olds and 90 year olds zooming past you every so often. Norwegian schools never close because of the weather and children never stay inside at playtime no matter what the weather is like. Every child from the age of about 3 or 4 has full skiing equipment too. It's the autumns that drive me mad because it's just endless rain.

I don't think many people think Gazza is that good, but people have noticed that all of our decent performances have coincided with him being in goal, while our absolute worst performances have come with Boruc in goal. Now maybe that's coincidence or maybe it has something to do with how they affect the defence, but whatever it is, people cringe a bit at going back to how it was with Boruc in goal. For what it's worth, I think Davis is probably best at organising the defence and that he might have just been having a shaky patch and could have come good, but if we played well with Gazza, I don't want to change too much.

It's because of all the crisp eating.

I'm very happy to be English, although I prefer to be an Englishman who lives in Norway.

Living in inner city Birmingham and Oslo I was robbed a few times. Now I live among the rich folks, I've never heard of or seen any kind of crime in about ten years. Like I said, we don't even lock anything.

When I lived in a flat in Oslo our basement storage area was burgled all the time and I ended up carrying my bike up three flights and into my lounge every day instead of using it. When the frame broke on an old bike I had, I wasn't looking forward to somehow getting it to a rubbish dump. Then i tried leaving it out the front with a weak lock on it and in the morning it was gone. In England I had three or four bikes and a car stolen. Once, when I lived in a ground floor bedsit in Moseley, I woke up in the night to a noise and looked out of the window. outside a big bloke was jamming a sharpened screwdriver into the door of my car. I leapt out of bed and ran straight out of the front door to confront him at which point he legged it. Looking back I don't know why a big guy with a weapon would run from a bloke half his size running at him in just his pants, but there you go. Nowadays I live in a quiet area. I rarely lock the front door or my car and the shed with our bikes and stuff in usually has the key sitting in the door. Maybe one day we'll be robbed, but it's been seven years now and I've never heard of a burglary round here.

At the start of the season everyone, absolutely everyone, was saying he would be our best player this year. I stood alone as the voice of reason pointing out we hadn't seen enough of him to make a statement like that, but I was shouted down by everyone.

Check again.

This is definitely a topic worth talking about. Not paying what's owed to local businesses is very bad for the club and the extra details around this one are pretty uncomfortable. there was a story on it last week and this is a comment piece. most of us would like to know why this something like this was allowed to happen. it's not about a disagreement, the ruling's already been made against saints and the club have no excuse for not paying. I don't expect to be told the reason, but I still want to know and as it's not just a rumour and the club aren't commenting, people are going to be free to say all sorts of stuff.

There were a few who said building would go ahead, but they were shouted down on here.

David Mitchell's Soapbox Only four minutes long, but easily the best podcasts ever made.

Yes, it's going to be all about how we deal with the teams we really should get points off now and we were convincing today. Stars of the day were the fans, Adkins, Cork and Puncheon in that order for me. Puncheon obviously did a lot of damage, but it's the steadiness in midfield that's going to make the difference this season.