Lighthouse

Barton has never been anything other than an absolute kn*bber, so I can't say I'm in any way interested in the crap he comes out with. TBH I don't really watch any punditry or analysis these days, it's all getting pretty inane and repetitive. On the point of gender, I think if we had a debate about for e.g. COVID, with female professor of infectious disease, then got a bloke on who'd done GCSE biology to disagree with her, there'd be quite a few complaints about it, regardless of what was being said.

A bright and prosperous new year for Japan.

More like three months after it closed.

Hardly any transfer, to any club, in any transfer window has ever been done when the window opens on the first of January or whenever the summer date is. Negotiations just don’t work that way and other clubs have no motivation to sell players as soon as possible in that way.

We primarily moderate the main board because it’s a Saints football forum and 95% of users only use that particular sub-forum to discuss Saints. As far as off topic forums go, unless it starts getting properly vitriolic, hateful we generally just let it play out. The Lounge is pretty much 95% of the trouble (there are currently 106 total reported posts) from 5% of the posters/content. To put it bluntly, we’ve all got lives and none of us can be bothered to spend them moderating this crap. The alternative is we just get rid of The Lounge, which by definition anyone reading this post doesn’t want. As for SOG, he is also like alpine in that he largely brings it on himself. A few weeks ago I did lock this thread because everyone needed a time out. He immediately went on the ‘small things which annoy you’ thread (which generally seems to self-maintain a light hearted humour) and posted: "People who assume that you lie and make things up on an anonymous forum just because they disagree with you. Not everybody is a liar or on the wind up" If you’re that desperate for an argument and a petulant reaction, don’t come crying to me when you get one.

I vaguely remember it being £1.2m but yes, ludicrous. We absolutely shat a brick after the Palace game and everyone quadrupled their prices. Thomas would have been a decent enough signing, six weeks earlier for £300k buy hey ho…

I refuse to believe Harry Redknapp was capable of or interested in anything other than Harry Redknapp. I genuinely believe he was always out for number one and ducking in and out of Pompey when it suited him was just a means to an end. John was a separate deal for a little over £1m, IIRC, plus a fairly hefty wage packet. He may well have scored a lot but ultimately he was a big part of the problem which sent the club into administration. Rasiak, Saga, BWP and DMG was a more than capable selection of forwards, far better than we have now. They should easily have scored enough goals for a vaguely competent manager (with even a basic understanding of defending) to finish top half and stay financially stable in the process.

A slight difference there in that we basically wasted our first season down with a disinterested Redk*pp going through the motions. The second we improved but still underperformed with a hugely talented squad, scraping into the playoffs. It could still all have been fine. We sold Bale, Baird and Pele for about £12m, which should have balanced the books but we went and squandered the lot on more old expensive journeymen like Euell, John, Thomas and Safari, whilst keeping all the top earners and still somehow not having a defence for the first game. A nanogram of common sense in the summer of 2007 and we’d never have gone bust like we did.

Those bicep curls are really starting to pay off, keep it up mate!

You know you're dealing with an authentic sauce when the 'E' is a '3' and there's a random stock photo of a football pitch as an avatar.

It's ironic really, that's actually the one thing that Hamas and the Israeli government can both agree on.

Knowing their owners, Megan Rapinoe's BC.

F**k me that’s an absolutely dreadful dive from Jota and VAR hasn’t overturned it.

Use feet and have thicker lines, lets say 6 inches. If there is any overlap between the lines, the player is onside. If there's even a slither of green grass - offside. It'll take three seconds to establish, not minutes of geometry and head scratching.

Bank holiday opening hours. I get that you might want to close early on NYE but why today? Nobody is going out tonight, everyone’s back at work tomorrow.

Happy New Year everyone. NYE always reminds me of one of the best episodes of any comedy ever made.

Norwich fans will wish they'd gone to the owl sanctuary instead.

He does no such thing, the Plymouth goal was the first goal of the season you can actually call a 'howler'. He's conceded about half a dosen he could have done better with, the same as any other keeper at this level and most in the league above.

The face you make when you realise you’re sat three meters from the emperor of the mind control lizard people.

Napalm.

That would depend entirely on whether they were really seeing the big picture of how we play or just want to clap like seals for Hollywood saves. I think some people would prefer to have a keeper who faced eight shots on target last night and threw himself heroically in front of six, rather than Baz.

There are clearly people who think Bazunu is not good enough and is a weakness in our team. His distribution is excellent, he’s calm and composed on the ball, he communicates well with the defence, he makes the routine saves comfortably and he makes some excellent saves which go beyond the ordinary from time to time. Tonight’s howler was the first such lapse in concentration he’s made this season, it happens. There have been goals he could have done better with, a handful where he didn’t get down quick enough, predominantly to his left. You say nobody wants a perfect keeper but a fair number of people want him out the team for what is his only real, relatively minor, weakness. He's a large part of the way we play, which at the moment has us conceding less than a goal a game and pretty much the best defence in the league. We aren’t going to get another keeper at this level, who plays this system as well as Baz does.

Thoroughly convincing performance in everything but the final third I thought. We rode our luck a bit with the offside but you make your own luck to an extent and we kept them comfortably at arms length for most of the rest of the match. Bar that and a brain fart at the end when Bazunu was probably thinking about his supper and a mug of coco, we never really looked troubled. I think if THB’s early header goes in, it’s a different game but it didn’t and it’ was a bit more of a slog. We do need a better striker than Adams though, he won’t get three good chances like that against better teams. It was a well taken goal when it did come but his shooting generally… good grief.

Some people seem to think he’s useless, should be nowhere near the team, is the worst keeper in the league or if they are being kind, ‘might be good enough in ten years’. There are more than enough people claiming his mistakes ‘cost us points’ as if that’s somehow unique to him and not every player, in every squad in the country. Kelvin was in the team of the season last time we got promoted. He was frequently beaten low at his near post, had the odd howler in his locker and his distribution was nowhere near as accurate and composed as Baz. The hyperbole is from people claiming he’s some sort of liability, holding this team back, when that’s very clearly not the case. Every player will make mistakes which will cost us points. If they didn’t we’d finish the season on 138 points.

These things happen, it’s not as if it’s a regular occurrence. He has been consistently on excellent with the ball at his feet and his calmness and composure are a large part of why we’ve had the joint best defence in the league over the last three months. Boruc was the best keeper we’ve had since Niemi and he was capable of plenty of howlers. Likewise Forster and Kelvin, let’s not pretend there are any perfect keepers out there who never have moments like this.