Lallana's Left Peg

8 games in and finally a game where we pass the ball properly! Lets hope a lot of confidence has returned now.

I don't believe the club willingly sold any of the players that left, and we certainly gained great transfer fees for them all. The argument against the board at the moment is whether or not they have diligently spent the money required on replacements. One thing that ****es me off is that we sell a player for £25m and buy a replacement for £8m and then also cover that replacements wages from the transfer fee received for the player sold. It's going to create a team of far less quality.

Ah ok - for a moment I thought you said as a fan! I think the club has ambition but it can't make it happen based on how football works, which is a shame.

Have you really just said that!?!

Our Chairman said we wouldn't conduct any of our business in public * * apart from when we have to respond to the media circus and make statements about keeping players who are then sold a few weeks later and when we brief the media ourselves.

I think the vast majority of fans understand this. It's the how much worse we'll be that some fans are worried about. We can go back to being average but over a course of a number of seasons would feel more normal - right now a dramatic fall from grace is not out of the question - from 7th to 15th or so would be shocking.

Unfortunately this is the sort of thing that struggling teams fighting relegation spout when they make a bad start to the season and / or pick up a win and then all of a sudden think they can go on a run. Lets hope Saints themselves aren't thinking this way as a faux reset doesn't do anything to address the insane number of issues our team has at the moment.

You don't continually sell your best players and get better when it happens over the course of several years. It's impossible.

Why are we all of a sudden going to start signing better players? This summer we signed lots of players in the bargain bin range because we thought we'd have more games but it turns out we won't have more games as those players aren't that good (or good enough yet). We have an ok team but the number of players who are going to interest better teams dwindles by the year and that was always going to happen.

Christ he didn't wait long to get involved. Wonder if he is still sucking off Cortese?

Tepid applause when they venture out for warm-ups to show the disappointment from tonight and a big roar before kick-off and get behind the team. Then it's down to the players but the fans will be quick to turn unless some effort and application is shown.

Why was he on the bench then?

No fan cares about how good Saints are this season as long as we had six games in the Europe League. We haven't got that now because we look crap and the booster to this is that looking crap means this league season will in all likelihood be poor (lower half) after yet another summer where the harsh reality of the game has come home and we have lost our best players. Great.

I would have given anything to be there or at Vitesse. I won't get an opportunity again in well over a decade unless we win a cup.

Sheffield United away last season was one.

None of that means we play in the Europa League though. No fan cares about players to come back, it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't change the shower of **** that was served up by two legs by those who played. It's quite frankly remarkable that Saints even had an opportunity to play in Europe this season after what happened last summer and we've somehow conspired to mess it up.

It'll never happen unless we win a cup.

It's going to suffer anyway - look at the state of the team right now. The regression is akin to Ipswich the season after they finished 5th.

Who no-one will want to sign

That is the worry though. I don't know that we are better than that. If it was a one off performance like Sheffield United away last season then the annoyance is at freezing in such a big game for the fans. But the undertone to being gutted at the result is that it is yet another terrible result and performance this season and the concern is can we get better? A worse team than last season, the money has been spent padding out the squad with inferior players who can't even carry us past a bunch of Danish part-timers and now we're saddled with a bloated squad and poor quality in the team. As gutting as it is to see our players go for big money at least we get to have those couple of seasons where they play well and the team do well. The more this goes on the more we're just slowly going back to being a lower-midtable team with nothing interesting going on.

Regardless of who we had out, it was a poor team selection - and, remarkably, an even worse performance. I said we would have to get better or we were out and it turns out we managed to get even worse and we were duly dumped out of a competition that was my only interest in this season. Now the prospect of a worse season than last beckons with a worse team. Not the clubs fault, but the very least we should have expected was Europa League group stages. Unacceptable.

He was not the only one to blame for tonight. The trouble is that he needs to find something he is very good at very soon as otherwise he is going to struggle to get the games he needs. He cannot find a way to get involved in a game and it is a real problem for him.

It reminded me of League 1 when we had better players than the opposition yet somehow got dragged down to their level and would lose the game. That happened loads too.

Passing will help all of those things. It means you have to tackle and close down less, and it means you create more chances and score more goals. It is the most important thing in football and appears to be the thing we've forgotten to do in the space of two months.

Regardless of who we had out, it was a poor team selection - and, remarkably, an even worse performance. I said we would have to get better or we were out and it turns out we managed to get even worse and we were duly dumped out of a competition that was my only interest in this season. Now the prospect of a worse season than last beckons with a worse team. Not the clubs fault, but the very least we should have expected was Europa League group stages. Unacceptable.