St Marco

My view is simple. Is Wotte a good manager? Is he the best manager we can get? Is he a guy who will choose players to sign wisely? The clear answer is no. He has yet to get a team promoted anywhere in the proffesional game. I fail to get how he has handled himself as well as people say, where else was he going to go? How many times did he mention other jobs he was offered in the news? The guy was hear from the start of last season, he knew the players. He was manager for half the season and finished further from safety then what Jan left us. The performances overall were pretty dredful, the Weds game will go down as one of the worst i have seen, at such a pivitol time in the season it was hard to stomach. Wotte had his chance and failed, i did not see anything from his tenure to make me believe he has the ability to get this team promoted. I do not think the players respect him in a way thay would another manager etc. He is a poor manager and his record shows it. His offers were from the Egyption league, hardly a good level of football, League one is probably x10 higher level then that. The club needs a FRESH new start, no sentiments no gimmicks, we need to be realistic. If the club is to go forwards and go forwards right now then it needs to employ a manager with proven qualities in english football. It needs to employ the best manager it can and anyone who thinks Wotte is that man must be on something. You know what will happen, he will get some money to spend and buy players he thinks are "world class". Then about 12-15 games into the season while were still bottom people will begin to get angry and do the whole "i told you so" **** that we have seen so much recently. HOWEVER If he is kept on and is given the ability to manage then we must get behind him regardless of our views. We owe it to the new owner.

Guess you missed the bit where he explained why he did that, normally you bang on about the staff so would of thought he did the right thing in your book? He said he took the Pinnacle money so he could pay the staff their wages. The other bidders were not fourthcoming with the funds needed, at the end of the day how long can you wait for someone? That is what Fry did by the looks of it. In our current climate selling a club with the debts it had while starting in league one with a -10 start was never going to be easy, but i think it could of been easier. There were always interested parties and will always be interested parties but what i question is the period before the exclusivity agreement. It is clear the Swiss deal could/should have gone through a lot sooner but it no longer matters. We got a billionaire as an owner now. You must be happy now?

Have to say that makes me feel so much more happier with what he is saying. He is basically saying what we all wanted to hear, the management will be strong at every level (bye bye Wotte then) and he is here for the long term and planning for the long term. As he also says he cannot succed without the fans backing, he aims to do right by them (us). The future looks good and i feel as confident as ever that it will be. Anyone who harps on back to the old days or does not join in the celebrations should get an auto- ban

Thank god it is all now finally over. All hail our new owner He has a great name too (mine is spelt different)! Onwards and upwards for the mighty Saints, really look forward to hearing his plans for the club! Thank you Mr Liebherr, we got our club back!

Im going to say 5pm today, just as the working day is about to end they will rush it through then announce a press conference for tomorrow. As far as i can tell all that needs to be done is money transfered and the official contract to be signed. While in principle you would not think that would take to long but when buying a business even the smallest of things can hold it back. If Fry says they are now sorted as believed then i imagine it is now just a case of organising how the funds are distributed. He is working on behalf of a few companies who all expect something, it is not an easy job to do. If the fee is £15m as reported then that will naturally most of be going to the person we owe the most to. Then it boils down to how much the others will get if they get any at all. Some shareholders might also think they are entitled to something (they mentioned 3rd parties holding it up a day or so ago) which obviously they are not such as how shares work. So if those guys had been working on it all over the weekend and were close then i think it will be announced today but press conference and finishing off tomorrow.

Unlike the guy who says "the fans are to blame for everything, the fans bankrupted us blah blah" the truth is the fans are this club. Without us there would be no club, there would be no football community. Each and everyone of us chose to follow this team for their own reasons, some were born here, some admired the spirit the team showed, some saw us as the underdogs etc etc. We all support the club and we all want to see the club back where it belongs which is the premier league. We don't expect much but we expect better then what we have had to endure for the past 6 years. We have all been let down by those who ran the club, the club did not and does not deserve what has happened to it. What i want most from this takeover is not pot loads of money to buy the best players in the world, not going to champions league games, hell not even CCC games. What i want is the identity of the club to return, the players to show the pride and passion of wearing the historic red and white kit. The fans arguing over football things like players we have, players we had and players we want, talking about the games we played and looking forward to the future games. No more politics, no more agendas of people arguing cases of why their man would be better in the board room then the current ones, it really is like a voting campaign sometimes.... I don't see how anyone can not be positive about today, even people like nickh somewhere inside them must be happy that at long ****ing last we can start a fresh and start knowing that we simply do not have to make do with what we have anymore, we expect better. The players,manager and everyone else must now show the ambition to match the fans. We can finally get back to talking about the football and talking about the future without the shadowy scythe of the grim reaper above our heads waiting to fall.

Yeah looks as though our dear Nick has once again talked total ********, as NickG said above the funds are yet to be transfered and the deal has yet to be signed, that should in theory be done before the end of the day. But that is what they said yesterday so who knows when it will be signed.

Not watched Meridian news for years, it is just like their old building just over the bridge, a pile of ****.

As i said on the other thread. Who has lost out with us being in admin exactly? The fans? The players? The staff behind the scenes? The media? The truth is the players were **** last season, some being **** for two seasons now, they are on thousands a week,do they deserve it? Very few if any do. When players were asked to refer their money for a few weeks to help pay the staff how many actually agreed to that? zero. So i don't feel sorry for their losses at all, should we feel sorry for them?. But they have all been paid and went about a week without being paid so i guess was not really a loss. I'm sure lots of people here have had to wait longer for their pay cheques. The real people who have lost out are the shareholders. The majority of holders of which are at somepoint to blame for what has happened, that is including Crouch. So sorry i do not feel sorry for them one bit that they have lost out. I am glad Crouch has put his own money in since then, shows he is a honourable man. But other then that im glad they are all gone and will no longer get a single penny from this club. The fans have lost nothing from the club being in admin, we were destined for league one football with our squad and coaching staff long beforewe went into admin. Im sure most fans are happy the club went into admin to get rid of the old regime and emerge from it without any of them.

What people don't quite get or want to accept is that the club was always going to go into admin. It was innevitable the momment Lowe walked away from the investor meetings and played the "i will save you without investment card". Some people bought it, even reading some of those peoples comments today they still believe it. It must be so difficult for them to admit they were wrong. Like they would rather we did not get a buyer just to proove they were right, to them that is what is more important. It is just a simple case of income vs outcome, if your outcome is higher then your income it is just a matter of time before the balance hits zero and then into the minus. We had been in the minus a long long time and without any financial injection the loss would continue and continue untill the banks put a stop to it. Lowe and the board tried all they could to prevent that by cutting the costs of running the club, they fired a lot of people, some my friends, they shut parts of the stadium, sold players and loaned out the higher earners, brought in a cheap team staff to run the team and so on. As i said before the club was already in admin in everything but name, the difference being the fans were being asked to help the club by paying high ticket prices which in turn helped to pay Lowe and his regimes pay packets, while others were losing their's his was still being paid. So of course people would say going into admin was bad but bad for whom? The people who have been removed or the fans? We were a team with a poor squad and a poor coaching set-up, the performances were truely awful and we deserved to be relegated. At no point last season did i think we deserved to remain in the CCC. Imagine we had not gone into admin and we were relegated with Lowe and his people still in charge for life in League One. Would you feel confident that we would start to go up the table and back into the CCC? Would the people who love the club return to watch the games or continue to stay away? Would the squad of remained the same or more and more sold and people fired to pay the bills? They are questions that will never be answered. The reality is the club needed a big change/event to stop the innevitable from happening. Mismanagement throughout the years had finally brought the club to it's knee's. Was the club almost out of buisness as some on here suggest? The answer is a clear no. At no point was there nobody interested in buying the club. At all times there were people negotiating with Fry. What almost killed the club was not going into admin but going into exclusivity with Pinnacle. They got in 1st. Now a lot of questions would of needed to be answered such as why did Fry agree to it? Who paid the money? Was the bid real? and so on. But they no longer matter. What matters is they did not get in and the group who were serious about buying the club were not put off by it. They were supposedly there from the start. SO if/when the deal goes through we will not have to sell players to pay the bills as we have had to do so many times in the past. We will be able to pay the staff and give them the security of knowing they have a job and will be paid. The fans will have a team to go watch and potentially at the level of which we deserve. The whole darkness that has effected everyone surrounding our club can at long last be extinguished and we can for the first time since 2003 actually go forwards with hope that things will get better, because they cannot and never will get any worse. So it matters not who was wrong or right, who said what. What matters is that we all get behind the new owners and whoever they choose to lead us. The past is the past and will never hurt this club again.

trid-3nt is mine Like the others mostly on the call of duites,killzone 2, streetfighter 4 or Fifa, got resistance 2 but yet to try the multi-player side of that

Have a read of it http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/xbox-360-vs-ps3-face-off-round-20 Pretty damning stuff, especially as one runs at 518,400 pixels and another at 921,600 pixels. The way they make it sound it is like comparing a Playstation 2 era game to a next gen game. Anyone who has actually played it knows this not to be true, the game is great just like i said. But guess you only read the parts that interest you right TDD

Those saying Wotte should be given a chance etc.. Was being in charge for half our games last year not a chance then? Even though he was free to play the players Jan was not including a champions league striker? And he brought in many loan players? What would be different this time? Where ever the guy has gone he has done poor, in fact he has got nearly 70% of his teams relegated. If we are giving out jobs to those who have remained loyal then we all should be given the job, we would do just as good a job.

He is a very honourable guy as you say and would not walk out on any team, at least that is our impression. However as i mentioned above maybe he could see us as unfinished business in the same way Ince has with MK Dons. Maybe he would see our club as his best chance of getting to the prem league if we have people with millions to spend on players. Obviously as i said there are a lot of "IF's" involved with appointing a guy already in a job, it would depend fully on the ambition of the new owners. My view is that if they are ambitious and want to be here for the long haul then i can't see them keeping Wotte on, his record as a football manager is awful, if you had millions to invest would you feel confident handing it to him? Honestly?

Yeah but sometimes people don't think that way do they. Look at Paul Ince, went back to MK Dons, could easily have got a job in CCC. Maybe Pearson would see it as unfinished buisness. Plus as i said "IF" we have money and all this does indeed go through then would that not make us a better prospect then Leicester? Maybe he would see being at a club on a sound financial footing a better prospect? Maybe he does not like Mandric? Point being "IF" we had cash and were seriously wanting to be ambitious then i do not think appointing Pearson would be too difficult. In comparison to say appointing someone like Fergie? When i spoke to Pearson after he had just taken the Leicester job i know he cared about the club as he told me he will look for the teams results and hope they push on the following season. If he still thinks the same who knows, but when he did the Sky Sports Big Weekend show he said he is really fond of the club and area. Considering he is employed by an ex-Portsmouth chairman saying nice things about us surely could be tempting a rollicking?

Sorry but i fail to see how that is not realistic? The guy had been here before, wanted to stay but couldn't. He was in League One so obviously not on Premiership style wages etc. If Pearson does well this year then other teams will look at maybe try and hire him, why can't we if we have money available? How is that unrealistic?

Well if the guys/girls coming in have a bit of cash to spend then you would think they would view the manager as an important position. If they have ambition then chances are they might have to get one who is already employed. Pearson has been at Leicester a year, he is obviously still under contract. But if the Swiss people have some money and they offered some to Mandric that was at a high enough level i think he would accept, such is how he probably thinks

No disrespect to Wotte, his hanging on attitude while the ship was sinking is to be commended. But in reality he is a big factor along with many who got us relegated and would probably earn more money managing here then elsewhere, so he was not going to walk (even though he said he would). Sooo say that they decide to get rid of him or maybe put him back to the youth set up, who would you like to see as manager if we were free to choose? If we have lot's of money other then myself i would like to see Pearson coming back. He would be a great choice. He knows the club, the fans love him, the football people respect him, he is seen as one of the bright up and coming english managers. Plus he knows what it takes to get out of League One. So who would you like to see be given the job if it became available?Obviously a bit of realism should be applied

So then hopefully by this time tomorrow we will have new owners, be out of admin and can in theory actually buy some players that are maybe better quality then Ryan Smith,Molyneux,Liptak etc.. But even with all that i wonder what will be the first thing people will moan about?

What get's me is this. I can understand that some people take a shine to certain personalities at the club, that is called supporting someone. But how on earth can those people justify why they still support Lowe or still think he would do some good after everything that has happened? I mean he returned, stopped talking to investors, kicked out a popular manager who had saved the club from relegation etc, brought in a whole new set-up with a bunch of guys who failed in their own home leagues, then took us into admin a day or so after the admin deadline, we get relegated, denied we will get a minus points deduction as the two companies are seperate, we get a minus points deduction and so on. I just fail to understand how someone could defend someone with that record just in the past 12 months alone, forget what had happened before. If he had put millions and millions from his own pocket into the club then i could sort of see it, but he never did, he never put a penny in but took many out. So if someone say he is good for the club or sticks up for him then you have to expect the response people will have with those kind of statements, that would be normal. So if you do say those type of things then you have to expect people will confront you on it.

After a bit more digging is the Keith Harris they are talking about the Keith Harris who is chairman of the football league? If so he has a company called Radio First. The company who set up our radio station. So that means the guy does have/had connections to the club.

Keith Harris is doing the Newcastle takeover and is a known guy to get deals done for very rich people. So if it is true he is involved then i think it is good news.

hopefully as a good jesture they will give us a free truck with every season ticket

Complete speculation and probably not true; but i have a feeling that what they planned to do was to try and hold off the bid or maybe get in with the money just. Then once in thy could sell to this group for more money making a profit etc. Maybe the Swiss called their bluff (as they really didn't have the money) and that could of been why they pulled out. Would also fit in with what the FL said. Or that could be just thinking a bit too much