Lighthouse

I never said anything about his ability as a footballer, you brought that up. As a TV personality I find him smug and patronising, lecturing people about social issues he has no expertise in.

The quality of the players is absolutely relevant and our attacking players are terrible. When he was in the Championship, with decent Championship players, he clearly did have attacking intentions as we were the third top scorers with 87.

The problem (for want of a better word) with having a better world is that more people survive longer, so you get a population explosion, which just leads to more people in poverty. It’s a vicious circle of sorts, where the world perpetually supports a population which is just on the tipping point of poverty.

Sorry to hear about your loss. Stories like this reiterate that this should be a personal choice and isn’t necessarily for everyone.

We can easily recoup that on a young English CB with a season of PL football and an England call up. I wouldn’t sell for less than £25-30m, personally.

A few years ago a bunch of JSO protestors broke onto the track after the British GP whilst cars were still circling and Gary took to Twitter to praise their efforts. When Martin Brundle pointed out they were putting the lives of drivers and marshals at risk (not to mention themselves) Lineker doubled down by saying it was for the greater good and that the protesters would be remembered as heroes in years to come. Weirdly he’s never volunteered to remove himself and his own carbon footprint from the world.

It pleases me but I’d say I’m more in the ‘anti- smug, self satisfied w*nker’ brigade.

None of that is era specific. You like the music from when you were younger and the football from when Saints are better. If you said that to a 19 year old Brighton fan today, he’d reply that your music was "skibidi innit bruv," and that football is the best it’s ever been. Taking the p*ss out of Mohammed is hardly a modern faux pas either, try doing that in the 1970’s, you’d get the same response.

I don’t think most of the cultural stuff was better, people just have rose tinted glasses and tend to have a positive bias towards the things they remember. Music - everyone thinks the stuff their generation listened to as teenagers was the greatest era and that what came after it is ‘just terrible noise’. Nothing changes in that regard, people just look back fondly on what they remember. People who went to school in the early two thousands for example will talk about how awesome Green Day and Linkin’ Park were but tend not to mention Eamon and Frankie singing F.U.R.B. Football - Again, people are selection. If you mention the 1998/99 season to a Saints fan, they will probably go all misty eyed at the thought of Pahars’ double against Everton or Saints fans taking over Wimbledon. 90% of the season we spent getting spanked at home by teams like Ipswich and Coventry, people tend to forget. Censorship/being offended - if you think ‘everyone is offended these days’ is something new, I suggest you watch an interview with John Clease, Michael Palin and two very pious, religious types upon the release of Life of Brian. These days God and Jesus are recurring characters on loads of comedy shows but Python had to fight tooth and nail just to get LoB into cinemas. I don’t think life is generally more boring either. We used to have four TV channels, now there’s a near infinite selection of online and streamed content. Then there’s the big advancements in worldwide travel. Around the turn of the century, EasyJet and Ryanair changed the game in Europe. It went from being a privilege to go to Mallorca or Tenerife to suddenly every man and his dog being able to go to any city in Europe, cheaper than most train tickets. A weekend away in Scarborough is now a city break to Riga, Belgrade or Budapest.

By the metric most important to me, I.e. the health of myself and my family, life is better now. What people eat is their choice but ultimately if a doctor told me tomorrow that I had HIV or cancer, I’d have a much better chance of survival than I did in 1993. The main reason for the world being worse is overcrowding, which in turn drives up house prices as well as other living costs. That sucks, especially for the younger generations with more debt, trying to get a foothold in the real world, but overall life is better.

Yes, a ridiculously narrow three year window in which life was, in your view, better in the very late nineties. That’s ignoring all the stuff about healthcare and a whole bunch of other metrics by which life is better.

The Middle East has always been a tinderbox, it’s not specific to any particular decade. The likes of Gadaffi and Hussein ruled with an iron fist, Saudi Arabia was far behind where it is now and Afghanistan was basically a massive, extremist jihadi training camp. You’ve moved the goalposts a bit to fit the very narrow window between the Yugoslav wars and 9/11, plus we didn’t have the Good Friday agreement until 1998. My point RE: Food is that your own poor choices don’t constitute a worse world. The option is there for everyone on any budget to live and eat healthy. My point on healthcare in general, rather than any specific vaccine or treatment, is that it has improved massively over the last 30 years in a whole multitude of areas I can’t even spell. Cancer and dementia are basically the two main eggs we need to crack now but treatments are much better than they were in the nineties. 16th century pirates never died from cancer, it doesn’t mean they had a better healthcare plan.

Financially we may well be worse off, especially where housing and living costs are concerned. I don’t really agree with the rest though. We may have the Ukraine war but the nineties had the Gulf War and the breakup of Yugoslavia. I don’t think there’s more cancer either, people are just living longer because fewer of us are dying from most other stuff. Jobs are safer, cars are safer, we’ve got vaccines for most of the world’s deadliest diseases, HIV medication has progressed enormously etc. As for eating sh*t, well that’s a choice. I can make a decent meal from a freshly cooked piece of lean meat and 50p worth of fresh vegetables. That option was never taken away from us, some people just get into bad habits of easy, comfort food.

No, he's a space cadet. There's a difference.

Oh absolutely, there's no doubt in my mind that our summer recruitment was dreadful. Any sane Saints fan, "we need to use this summer to have a clear out of some of our mediocre, Championship players." SR, "hey, let's use this summer to really double down on mediocre, Championship players! We can collect like thirty of them and somehow have a squad which is both utterly dreadful AND really expensive to build and maintain!"

A pay rise, sure, but promotion seems to have triggered an entirely new contract with an extra year on what he had before. Seems completely unnecessary.

So why offer him that trigger clause in his original contract? Give him a deal with a decent pay rise from what he’s on at Swansea and a £2m bonus for getting us promoted, he’s hardly going to turn it down.

No idea if that’s anything close to the real figure but it’s always been absolute batsh*t that we gave him a new deal in summer. I’m prepared to give him more slack than many fans but it’s not as if he’d have quit and gone to Liverpool if we hadn’t given him the contract.

Slightly erroneous take on it as Manning did have two efforts, one just off target and the other disallowed because of VAR. I'm not saying we were good, not by any means, but we did have a couple of reasonable shots.

Just 8 points behind Man Utd in the title race.

Fine, I wont bother any more. Just don't start bleating about 'useless moderators' when you end up with a thread which is three pages of Gio or some other internet 'personality'.

It’s a Saints forum for discussing Southampton football issues. If you wish to discuss Gio, I suggest you PM him directly as very few other people want to read about him.

I doubt it will end in Putin's lifetime. It'll probably be some sort of military stalemate until that w*nker pops his clogs, after that who knows. It'll depend on who his replacement is and their appetite for what is a pretty senseless war. People have been saying it'll come to a negotiated settlement for two years now. What people haven't been saying is any kind of proposal which is in any way agreeable. Ten years ago people were saying the same about ISIS.

That doesn't make any sense. How can a plan that both Russia and Ukraine will flatly refuse be the likely outcome? Also you say we don't have the political will or resources to carry on supplying Ukraine, but your alternative, long term solution is sending British personel and equipment to indefinitely patrol an 800 mile long 'buffer zone' in East Ukraine. A solution far more costly financially and risky in terms of escalation.

So? What's your point? Trump can have all the plans he wants, what he has suggested is absolutely fantastic in that it's a proposal literally nobody will agree to. Kyiv, Moscow and the majority of European nations who Trump is apparently signing up to provide peace keeping forces would all reject something like that.