pfc123

Nick: That's it. Out you two pixies go - through the door, or out the window.... [rings the cash register repeatedly] Hey, get me. I'm givin' out wings! They don't write them like that anymore......

I don't think you can ever talk about 'attendance figures' again after selling a paltry 1500 for the 'save the saints' game. Sorry, but that said it all about how many of you really, really care what happens to your club. Also, you very rarely sold out 'the skip' with a capacity of what, 15k? So you were no better than us on that score when you had a similar fleapit of a ground. As for 'dozens of aging players on massive wages and long contracts', 19 of them are out of contract in June, a lot will go and probably some of the England players will also go, but when they do, the debt will be significantly reduced to a more comfortable level. We'll probably go back to a squad like you had in the Prem- one that bumps along in the bottom third year after year, but usually gets out of trouble at some point. We might well go down, but for the moment we're a Premiership team for at least another year and as such we're a far more attractive investment opportunity for someone wanting to get into the bright lights of the best league in the world. Look, we're never going to agree on this- I just wonder how many of you would turn down the chance to swap places with us right now?

Yeah, fair comment. Not sure there are too many more around like him though...

I think the 'mystery foreign bid' is a red herring designed to smoke out bids from domestic parties. Why would a foreign bidder be interested in you? There's nothing but debt, debt and more debt, and precious little income. If you were still in the Premiership I could see the possibility, but out of it? No chance. It'll be a local fans consortium or a UK based chancer at best.....

I can remember several Pompey fans back in the 70's who had season tickets for the Dell and Fratton. Don't recall hearing of it from the late seventies onwards though.....

Hmmmm...... 'Brewsters millions' starring Rupert Lowe as a down and out hockey player who inherits 60 million and has to blow the lot! 'The Great Escape'. Includes the immortal line: 'For you ze championship is over...' 'Titanic'- Lowe again stars. This time he's an iceberg..... Sorry, I'll get me Halliwells film guide......

Touble is, every time Kanu tries to help a poor african kid, Madonna beats him to it and adopts!

Hmmm, 4000 for a nothing charity game after shelling out hundreds for semi & final appearances at Wembley, versus a miserable 1500 for a game trumpeted as a 'Save the saints' event with an all star cast. Great support in your hour of need, and a great advert for a potential buyer. Don't tell me: no-one bothered to buy tickets because you all knew that the club had been saved as triumphantly announced at yesterdays glittering press conference. Or is it just that when push comes to shove not enough of you are bothered, full stop?

Ok, I agree that maybe 3m would be the max for Distin, but having said that he's a very fit 31 yr old and is pure class. Perhaps 3m IS a realistic figure. Hughes- well yes he is Mr Average, but he can cut in the premier league and on that standing alone he must be worth at least the £2m? Basinas- fair play he's older than I realised- 500k-1.5m max.... James- nope, you're wrong on that one- England keeper, fit as ****- makes the odd **** up but they ALL do from time to time... Asdown- agree, on reflection.....

Hmmm, ok lets have a look. Two prices for each player- Cheap price for a player who might want to leave/summer price/the credit crunch. More expensive price for those who are happy to stay/January window/there's still money swilling around at the top of the game....... 1 Goalkeeper David James £2-4M 2 Defender Linvoy Primus Out of contract 3 Defender Younes Kaboul £3-5M 4 Defender Lauren Out of contract 5 Defender Glen Johnson £7-12M 6 Midfielder Hayden Mullins £1-2M 7 Defender Hermann Hreiðarsson Out of contract 8 Midfielder Papa Bouba Diop £2-4M 9 Forward Peter Crouch £8-12M 10 Forward David Nugent £3-4M 11 Midfielder Jerome Thomas Out of contract 14 Midfielder Jermaine Pennant LOAN 15 Defender Sylvain Distin (vice-captain)£3-5M 16 Defender Noé Pamarot Out of contract 17 Forward John Utaka £3-4M 18 Midfielder Arnold Mvuemba £1-2M 19 Midfielder Niko Kranjcar £5-8M 20 Defender Martin Cranie £1-2M 21 Goalkeeper Jamie Ashdown £1-2M 22 Midfielder Richard Hughes £2-3M 23 Defender Sol Campbell (captain) Out of contract 26 Midfielder Pelé LOAN 27 Forward N****wo Kanu Out of contract 28 Midfielder Sean Davis Out of contract 29 Forward Theofanis Gekas LOAN 30 Defender Armand Traoré LOAN 31 Goalkeeper Asmir Begović £500K-1M 32 Defender Djimi Traore LOAN 33 Midfielder Angelos Basinas £2-3M 35 Defender Marc Wilson £500K-1M 39 Defender Nadir Belhadj £5-8M Cheap price total: £50m (by happy coincidence!) More expensive price total: £84m And I think that those prices really are fair for Premiership players, and doesn't include the few that will re-sign and add yet more value to the squad..... INCOMING!!!

Do you know what, all you've got left are wild statements about the future, be it about us going tits up next week, or about how you're somehow going to rise phoenix-like from the flames of the fire sale to dominate the world within the next six months. It reminds me of the bloke interviewed on BBC tv as he was walking out of Wembley after the 2003 final defeat- asked what was next for southampton he said: "We'll recover from this and we will go on to conquer europe next season". It was one of the blindest, most ludicrous statements I've ever heard, and it brought the house down in the pub I was in. And don't try telling me that the skip was sold out week after week in the all seater era of the Premiership because we all know that it wasn't. The 'We've got more supporters than you' argument is never going to be resolved until we both have similar stadiums in the same division, something that's unlikely to happen in the next few years at least. What we can say is that we've won four major trophies to your one, the last one only a year ago. Ask anyone actually IN football which of us is the 'bigger' club. You won't like the answer. Look, to be fair this is your board, and for that reason I'm only a guest, so I very rarely raise the blue flag, but just occasionally I'll do so because some of the utter rubbish written about Pompey on here just can't be ignored...

Ok, line by line: The debt is £45 million, not 90. A largish debt admittedly, but not large in Premier league terms as the Sky money and prize money depending on where you finish is worth over £35 million a year alone. Bigger Premiership crowds than you ever achieved at The Skip. Yes, a craphole of a stadium, but one with genuine atmosphere and crucially, NO DEBT. Son of a gunrunner? Who cares? It's not a Mother Teresa foundation. A manager and coach with vast experience who have guided us to safety after the wreckage of Tony Adams. Good luck? Well lets put it this way, if you had the old ground back I reckon you'd probably still be a Premiership club. How many of you would swap places with us right now, i.e. we take the shiny newish stadium and play in league 1, and you have the atmospheric 'craphole' but play in the bright lights of the Premiership and win the F.A. cup? Most of you would bite my hand off. You were never a big enough club to be able to sustain a 30k+ stadium in the top flight or even the Championship. Sorry, but the harsh reality is that you tried to punch above your weight and you blew it.......

Hmmm, not so sure. Huge debt + small and getting smaller income + relegation = meltdown. Can only see two types of bid: A fire sale opportunist who will probably strip it clean, or a group of fans/local businessmen with a few bob. The first type is obviously not good news for you, and the only problem with the second scenario is that whilst they're intentions are laudable, fans/local businessmen consortiums NEVER have enough money to do anything other than prolong the stagnation even further....... The overriding problem is that none of the numbers add up. As soon as a bidder enters the due dilligence stage and gets their hands on the books, it seems to go quiet. Not difficult to see why. It's not an attractive business proposition for anyone with no affinity to SFC. You need a saints fan with about £30 million in spare change burning a hole in his pocket.......

Bloody hell mate, do that and you might end up going through all this again in 12 months

Hmmm, I think they're hoping you go down of your own accord to buy them time to work out what to do. Trouble is your accounts will presumably show a very thin relationship with the other SLH offshoots, and a great big fat one with SFC. Even the SLH official website according SLH's London Stock Exchange listing is: saintsfc.co.uk, which doesn't look too good if you're trying to say there's little or no connection between the two entities.....

Crucial point, but St Mary's was probably the very last place you wanted to hold an administration press conference at if you're trying to show that SLH is nothing to do with the football club- bit of a giveaway isn't it? A quick google of SLH shows that it's address (not registered address- they're nearly always somewhere else) is listed as: Friends Provident St. Marys Stadium, Britannia Road, Southampton, SO14 5FP, United Kingdom. Surely it would have been better to have the company address listed somewhere else even if it's just a box room above a newsagents in Bitterne for example. And surely you hold the press conference at a hotel in say Winchester, or Eastliegh- anything to detract attention away from the football club.....

We are not £90m in debt. We're in debt, but I understand that it's less than half that. Still a millstone round our necks admittedly, but serviceable (just) all the time the sky money rolls in, although I think the urgency to raise more finance is cranking up a bit with the South African bank loan story now doing the rounds. To be honest you'd be better off sharing with Eastleigh and upgrading their ground. You don't want to come to FP, we wouldn't want you there and the joint ground in Fareham idea dies quickly every time it's raised......

I don't see what any of this has to do with the price of fish....

This stadium- does it come apart easily? I mean would it be ok on the back of flat bed for say, 17 miles? Incoming !!!

Very true which is why it has to be done before the deadline kicks in otherwise as you say you're saddled with a dig deduction for the following season. I suppose the difficulty is to have the courage to go for it midseason without knowing for sure that you were going down anyway.....

No I'm not really surprised because people are frightened of the very word 'Administration'. It conjures up images of death, meltdown and an end to all you've known before. The reality is different, at least it was in our case. It was also the same for Boro, when they went under in '86. Once the debt is wiped out, you start afresh. Admittedly, in the current climate money is tight from new suitors, or at the very least they're looking for maximum value before they'll invest, but if the price is right, new money IS still out there, as was the case when Mandaric came in for us. At the end of the day you have a new stadium that's good enough for the top flight. What are they gonna do, bulldoze it? Nah, not going to happen is it?

Hmmm, what does Adrian Chiles regularly say?: "It's the hope that kills you". In your case, staving off administration in the hope that you stay up and accordingly attract new investment/finance? I know a lot of people on here won't even read a post from a Pompey fan, but we do have experience of administration and it was quite honestly the best thing that ever happened to us. We got rid of the Gregory family who were hated in the same way that Lowe is, and brought in Mandaric who had enough money, luck and Redknapp waiting in the wings to eventually get us up. Make no bones about it, before administration we were absolutely dead as a club, and had been for decades if I'm being honest. Administration cleared out all the dead wood and within a few years we were absolutely flying, and have been ever since compared to the previous 40 years. Trying to avoid it is only making matters worse for you as a club in the long term. So then, if you agree with this scenario as fans, the solution is easy. You go into administration, you probably go down. It's painful, but you start again with a clean slate, and you rebuild. After all, you have the clubs best interest at heart, don't you? As crazy as it sounds at the moment, the board of nearly every club in the country also have that ideal- including the directors of your club, but most of them have the added attraction/burden/curse of having money ploughed in. THEIR money- and much of it hard earned over a lifetime, or even several lifetimes.... So then, put yourselves in their shoes just for a moment, and think about administration, money, responsibility to the community, the family silver, and that absolute killer called 'hope'. Then try to make the right choice. Not easy is it.......?

In many ways administration would be your best bet as a short cut back to some sort of stability and at least a chance of doing well again. If you continue as a club to try to wade through a quicksand of debt, debt and more debt, you'll continue to sink. For Pompey, administration was the best thing that ever happened to us. Without it, we'd have probably been wound up eventually, and we gained Milan who despite some funny quirks got us back up. The only real losers are the little people who the club owe money to. Mainly they're locally based self employed small businessmen who supply services to the club in a minor way. At pfc I think they only got something like sixpence in the pound on what they were owed. Once the debt has been effectively written off you've got a chance with new people and an almost clean slate. If you're going down anyway it seems like a no-brainer to me. IF it becomes a mathematical certainty, then that's the time to do it. In fact I think there was a club that were going down on the last day of one season who went into admin halfway through the second half? It saved them from the ten points deduction at the start of the next season....

You're gonna hate this but from a different viewpoint a lot of your arguments about support are down to the fact that most of you have been spoilt for the last 30 odd years. How many of you on here remember 10+ seasons of lower league football before you got back up after the cup win? Not many I would guess. So most of you only remember top flight football. The lower leagues are a bit of a shock aren't they? After the initial optimism of a swift return to the premiership fades, the harsh reality begins to sink in. You don't get anywhere near the same amount of quality football, you don't get the same publicity, glamour, income or attendances. You DO get loads more misplaced passes, poor tackling, shooting, goalkeeping, defending, and overall I can see that it must feel pretty **** after 27 years in the top flight? So people start to complain. At first it's a poor team, a lack of investment. Then it's the players attitude, the stewarding, the expensive programme. As it gets worse you find more and more reasons to complain: You can't sit in one of the corners anymore, the replica kit is too expensive, and that bird with the big tits in the snack bar in the Northam has left to get a proper job somewhere else. So how do you motivate yourself to really support the team with all this going on? Not easy. The flip side is us. I started watching Pompey in 1974. We were **** then, and went onto become really **** and deeply **** in rapid succession. From 1974 onwards I endured 24 years of **** and just 5 where we were actually promoted or nearly promoted. So when the good times did come along we went ****ing mad. It was fantastic, something to be really treasured and appreciated. We were getting crowds of 23-25k in the old div 4 when the agony of the 70's decline was finally turned around. A lot of you on here almost NEED to go through a lot more agony than the last three years before you'll be ready to really appreciate and grab hold of the upturn whenever it comes. If it takes you as long as us, god help you because it's a miserable existance. The only consolation is that it will feel so, so sweet when it finally happens.......

Hmmm, an interesting point. This 'spirit' is generic, and common to all cities with football clubs, even mine: 8622 utterly miserable souls are watching a wretched Pompey attempt to beat a less than mighty Stockport. It's Tuesday 17th February 1998. It's a ****poor game. For a change we're actually winning 1-0, but are now really under the cosh and it doesn't look like we can hold out for a vital win. A single person in the newly rebuilt Fratton end, starts singing 'Alan Balls Blue and White army'. He's on his own for the first couple of chants. A few more join in more out of misplaced optiminsm than any sense that it might actually make a difference to those out on the pitch. It's dire out there, and in desperation more people start joining in. The chant continues when the ball goes out play. Still more join in. People start looking round as they're singing and suddenly, we're all thinking, 'Hang on, somethings happening here.' By now it's been going for about five minutes and the whole of the Fratton end is belting out the same chant. The North stand start joining in. The part timers in the Milton end become interested, and then even the crusties and guests of directors in the South stand can't resist, and the whole ground is jumping.... That chant went on for about 25-28 minutes. Someone eventually belted out the chimes to end it, but when it did end my hands were numb from constant clapping and my vocal chords were shredded. The effect on the team was genuinely amazing. An incredible 'They WILL not pass' attitude had transmitted itself from the fans to the players, and how they'd responded. Having weathered the storm the game eventually petered out for a precious, precious win. Atmosphere had returned to Fratton Park. The point of all this is that EVERY city has that 'Spirit'. You just need to be very, very lucky to be able to say you were there on the rare, never-say-die occasions when it comes out.......