St Marco

Need a pacey striker, our other strikers all play the same way. As much as it pains be to say it. Someone like BWP or DMG would be ideal about now.

Very proud to be a Saints fan after that. Showed the world we are coming back from oblivion. The players gave it everything. The two benches are what made the difference. United brought on experienced quality while we brought on the unknown. And ultimatly that cost us. Which is a shame. But we have nothing to complain about, the supporters and the team made it a great day to remember! Now we have the league to concentrate on. If the lads play like that we have nothing to fear. My only worry is we need a fast paced striker. Rickie and Barney had to come back from the front to get the ball most the time. If we had a pacey striker we could of brought on it would of saved our legs a bit more.

But as mentioned before about that article. We always had talented youngsters at the club. One of them would go on to be one of the greatest strikers of all time and the current all time PL top scorer. Had nothing to do with Lowe or his vision. Same can be said of so many players. As someone mentioned above it is down to the players and the coaches. Happens at every club. The difference now is we will sell those players on our own terms. We don't need to sell them to keep the club going. Such was Lowe's way of doing it.

Didn't we do that in the season we went down to league one? Team for the last game that year had Lallana,Gobern,James,Lancashire,Gillett,Surman,Mcnish and DMG in it. All 8 of those i think have been in our youth teams? But to be fair to those players they were always doomed to fail that year, crap managers, crap coaching structure and a chairman wanting to throw them in at the deep end. Thank god we have a good manager, good coaches and a good chairman now hey!

Yeah thats a really good piece. It is nice to be seen like that. Beats all the doom and gloom we have had over recent years! The only thing i don't agree with is the Lowe stuff. We had great youngsters before him i.e Wallace brothers,Matty,Shearer and others. A lot of what he say's is true and i agree he deserves some praise. But a lot of our future 90s stars were already in the club before he was. Meaning somebody else had brought them in. It is the same now. A lot of the under 18s were not here when Lowe was here for the first time. He can't really claim any kind of credit for those players. He helped with some of the infrastructure development. But it has advanced since then. And is continuing to.

Wonder if he will say such nice things tomorrow "if" we win? I can see it now. Jaidi cripples Berbatov or Rooney (or maybe even both!) so they miss the champs league games and he will call us a bunch of hooligans no doubt!

The point i was trying to show is that he was using a small bracket of games to proove we are good and our results have been great. I was simply showing a different group of games put in a different bracket grouped up as months. That is why they are there to see how each team does in comparison with each other over the course of a month. You don't need to be 1st every month. You just need to be consistent with the games you have. If you have say 5 games a month and you win 3 of them each time and lose the other 2 i think that shows a level of inconsistency. But if those results still generate more points on average then others competing for the top spots then it doesn't matter. Naturally the end of each month is a time people normally compare stats. That is when they hand out the monthly awards. It will obviously be difficult to stay 1st, 2nd or 3rd every month, that is almost impossible. But you can tell how a club is doing based on them. Like you said not to include United. That is because we know they are winning the league and will probably win it. But if you look at the other leagues the same pattern is there. QPR are in the top 2 on 3 of the 5 full months. And Brighton are in the top 3 on 3 of the 5 months. And Chesterfield have been in the top 2 in 3 of the months. Which does go to show it has a connection to league standings as those teams are all winning their respective leagues.

I guess you didn't read what i said. I used last years good results to show that when we beat a team badly we then go on to lose. A great result followed by poor result. This was the pattern of last year. And it seems to be the same pattern again this year. Nothing has changed, the only consistent thing is the inconsistency.

Huddersfield 5-0 http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/page/MatchReport/0,,10280~47939,00.html Bristol rovers 1-5 http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/page/MatchReport/0,,10280~48977,00.html and the other team i couldn't remember was Wallsall - 5-1 http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/page/MatchReport/0,,10280~47431,00.html Don't you just love it when a guy tries to be smug and falls flat on their face?

But the problem is as'well as we have done over the past 8 games it still would not be good enough to get into the top 2 spots. http://stats.football365.com/dom/ENG/D2/oform.html Brighton and us are level based on ppg over the last 8. And Bounemouth are 0.12 ppg worse off then us based on that period. Which means if we stay at our current rate and so does everyone else Brighton and Bournemouth go up. Now i don't mean to put a downer on it as we have played well over that period. We have shown we can play well. But as good as it is, it needs to get better. We need top 2 form not 3rd. And because of that i don't think it is all that amazing. I think you spin it in a way that implies it is better then it really is. For example for the month of january we sit 7th in results http://stats.football365.com/dom/ENG/D2/january.html In fact if you go through each months results you see January = 7th December = 9th November = 5th October = 2nd September = 19th August = 14th As you can see looking at it like that it shows only one month we have been top 2 form over a whole month and that was October. Now as i said i don't mean to put a downer on it as we still have plenty of time to go. But for every win against someone like Oldham there seems to be a defeat against someone like Tranmere. We had those results last year. Remember last year we thumped some teams? Bristol Rovers 1-5 away when they were a good team. That is far more impressive then beating Oldham 6-0 imo. We also beat Huddersfield 5-0 and someone else 5-1 if i remember right. But as good as those results were again we would then draw or lose against someone like Tranmere. That is our problem. Over the course of this season it is the same thing as last season. We win the big game only to then lose the game we should win more comfortably. It is a stop start pattern and you won't go up with that, not in the top 2 anyway. So yes there are positives. But we need to improve, it is as simple as that.

If we don't start being more consistent we won't get 2nd let alone 1st. 3 months left to go pretty much and our last two dire results have opened the door for those below us. My concern is we have played a lot of home games this year due to the bad weather cancelling games. And those results overall have not been top 2 standard. We currently sit 6th on home games http://stats.football365.com/dom/ENG/D2/home.html Played 14 and won only 7. In contrast Bournemouth have played 13 and won 10. And Brighton have not lost any home games this year in the league. Our away form is even worse http://stats.football365.com/dom/ENG/D2/away.html having won 5 and lost 5. And we have only had 11 away games. We now go into the make or break period. 6 of the next 8 games are away. If we come out of those away games with our current points per game (1 point a game) ratio then we can forget the top 2. But this is why Adkins was brought into the club. To win those normally tricky games for us.

Exactly. Imagine if some guy from your girlfriends work basically told her to put her hand down his pants while at work. I imagine most people here or anywhere would not find it funny. Most would in fact want to go and deck the guy probably.

Gray always has a pop at the officials though regardless of their gender! Even when he is wrong after looking at a replay a thousand times he still won't admit he is wrong. I think his punishment should be to be a ref for a game. Then he might understand how difficult it can be to get things right without the luxuary of a replay. What a clown.

Great manager for us and deserves all the respect in the world for what he did for us. Our only real domestic piece of silverware. That said i think he has to understand that it is a new era. You should always remember your past but you should also always look to the future. I think he needs to respect what Markus and Cortese did for us. If it wasen't for them we probably wouldn't be playing at all this saturday let alone against Man Utd. Is walking into the stadium with the rest of us really so bad?

I wasen't refering to your remarks as such, more so to those who think we don't need players. At least you admit we do. Our problem in my view is not the tactics. Yes sometimes we go into games a bit predictable and when we get stuck in the mud we can't revert to another style. I 100% agree with that. Like for example when we drop Guly into midfield. Has that actually ever worked? But the reason we do that is not because we think he can do the job but because we have nobody on the bench who can come on and do a better job then him. Even if the guy on the bench is fresh! We can't play a different way because we don't have the players to play a different way. Like as i mentioned in my first post on the 2nd page. We have no pacey striker we can bring on. Last season we could do that with either Waigo or Antonio. We have AOC and can put him up there but he is just a kid. He is learning to be a winger, can't expect him to be our forward too. Especially if he is knackered from running up the wings all day. Add to that "some" of the players we have are really badly out of form for whatever reason. Players like Morgan. Don't get me wrong i like him, he does a good job a lot of the time and he has potential. It just seems whenever we really need the central midfield to step up and help out with their share of creativity he goes missing. The same i guess could be said of Hammond. If it was up to me i would bring in someone to take Morgans place. Someone who is an experienced central midfielder but not old and past it. Bringing Chaplow in was a good move by Adkins. But again the same thing applies. When we are not doing so well and we look at the bench who can come on for either him or Morgan? In the past few games the only midfielder has been Gobern. Now no offence to him but he is nowhere near as good as those two. That is why Adkins doesn't bring on all 3 subs as the people on the bench are simply not as good as those on the field. Even when they are knackered. I agree about the players missing. It is like Man Utd not having Rooney and Nani. They still have a squad of players who can jump in and do the role. Not as good but enough to still win or avoid defeat. Can we say the same? I don't think so. Our defence is ok, we have cover for that. But our midfield and attack is lacking experienced cover. Connolly is always injured as is Holmes. Hammond gets booked a lot so misses games through suspension or injury. Morgan is a player who can't change a game in my opinion. He plays well when the team plays well. Puncheon....well we can forget him! But other then Lallana and AOC who is there to run the wings? Nobody. Considering our strikers are big slow lumps we rely heavily on our wingers getting forward getting crosses in our getting forward enough to help out the strikers. I can go on and on but you see my point. When everyone is fit and not throwing the toys out the pram we are a good team. The problem is that doesn't happen too often. And when it doesn't happen we look to our bench for options. But there are none.

I have. And i think a lot of you are arguing for the sake of arguing. The arguments for why you don't think we need to sign players is pretty laughable in my book. I.e it was the tactics.

So because we beat a team who we were expected to beat (Oldham) we don't need any new players? By that logic because we didn't beat two teams who were 18th and 19th in our last two games wouldn't that mean we do need players? Or are we not expected to beat teams in 18th and 19th place now? A draw at home to Notts County and a loss to Tranmere is now a good result for us? I think some people need to stop arguing for the sake of arguing and look at the bigger picture. The club has a real chance to go up this year. Even when we have poor results we somehow are still there or there abouts. That is probably down to this years league being weaker but the point is the same. With a couple of decent players we could push on and maybe compete for the top 2 spots. I don't know about you guys but i am bored of this league now. If we have to buy our way out of the league by buying better players in the transfer window then personally i don't care! Because your only as good as your last game and based on our last two we are not good.

Or until we have a better players on the bench. The bench we have now is really weak. Other then Barnard nobody there who can come on and change a game. Which is a serious problem.

Every manager we have had has had some dire results. But you can't really compare the job Pardew had to do to the job Adkins has to do. Adkins has a top 6 trophy winning team with players wanted by Prem teams. He didn't build the team. I don't see results Adkins has had are any better then what Pardew got. And Pardew had to get them when we had a **** team and no coaching staff. If you look at both managers league records here Adkins has had 19 league games. 11 wins. 4 draws. 4 losses = 37 points. If you then look at Pardews last 19 games in charge where they had the same team his record looks like 12 wins. 3 draws. 4 losses = 40 points. Meaning we have actually got less points in Adkins 19 games in charge then we did in Pardews last 19 games in charge. Now that is not me saying i am against Adkins, far from it. He is the right man for the job. But the job he has to do is different to what Pardews was. He is supposed to be taking us to the next level. Make it so we are not inconsistent and can go on to get out of the league. Thus far i don't see any change from being that. Some results have been dire under Adkins as'well as they had been under Pardew.

Ah yeah your right my bad. The table i was looking at was wrong. On http://www.zerozerofootball.com/compet.php I trust our own table over theirs

Pardew left us 7th in the league, had only 3 games, 1 win, 1 draw and 1 loss in the league.

People can try and spin it all they want and quote stats until they are blue in the face but we should be getting more then 1 point from playing Notts County and Tranmere. Nobody deserves to win a game based off of the size of the club or the players they have. They deserve to win based on the performance on the pitch and our performances didn't deserve the wins. Simple as that. I think we need a creative central midfielder and a pacey striker badly.

You can bash him all you want but he is right. The squad we have now is not good enough. Our bench has no impact players. It is all well and good praising the team when we win against teams like Oldham etc but we are expected to win those games. It is like Man Utd playing Blackpool. You would expect Utd to win. If we want to get promoted we have to play better it is simple as that. I know people love using stats here so this one is a good indicator of where we are at. We have the 5th best home record in the league. And we have 5th best away record in the league (that was before this game). We will not get in the top 2 unless we start being consistent. Winning 6-0 somewhere means nothing if you then get 1 point from the following 6.

But we also lost to them away don't forget. As others have mentioned our problem is we are inconsistent. It has been our problem for many seasons now. I like Adkins but i honestly question if he has the ability to turn games around when we are up against it i.e a goal or two down. He tries to do something different and he deserves credit for that. But i wonder if the changes are guess work i.e making it up as we go along. Or something we have tried on the training pitch.