Lighthouse

If by successful you mean ‘fortunate enough to play Bradford’ then you are correct.

This government? They’re doing the same as any other government, trying to resolve the situation as best they can, whilst trying to put a good public spin on their actions. I don’t know what people expect them to say? "Yeah, we’re a bit sh*t and we’ve made a dog’s dinner of the whole affair." Labour, the Libs or the Raving Loonies would all be doing the same thing, as is every government in Europe.

What, they were promoted and sold a couple of decent players? Apart from that I see very little in common. If anything I’d say we were a Primark West Ham.

Not fashionable, I think a lot of people were just fed up of the vulgar amounts of money being required to watch such joyless, substandard football. I miss good football certainly but there’s been precious little of that for four years now.

I’m torn between the first three years after Markus’ takeover and the Poch/Koeman seasons. Probably the latter as we absolutely mullered some of the best teams in England.

Why? The talent is still out there and they will be back playing before too long. What may well change is that clubs will stop offering utterly obscene amounts of money for mediocre players. It will probably transpire that nobody is willing or able to offer the likes of Charlie Austin £60kpw to waddle around the pitch, scoring five goals a season. Before all of this agent for players like Hojbjerg would be phoning up Spurs and Everton saying, "he’s Southamptons best player, give him £90kpw." I think if he tried that kind of thing right now, he’d get laughed out if town.

If that video is not of China then fair enough but the point still stands. There are markets in China very similar with dead snake, bat, owl, lizard, dog or whatever you want piled up on tables in the open air, spreading pathogens like wildfire. It’s not like comparing London to Libya at all. In distance maybe but in terms of hygiene it’s more like comparing Brixton to Croydon. I fully agree that we need to try and reduce habitat destruction and climate change, which is why many countries MUST get their population under control. China to be fair made a good go of that already with the one child policy. Now they’ve got the worlds second largest economy, there’s no excuse for these wet markets. This is a country with a space programme. They haven’t been to war since Vietnam and they’ve spent over $4bn on a new fighter jet programme. The money is there to build some chicken farms, inner city cold storage units and run a Chinese DEFRA if they wanted to. It’s not a case of pinning the blame on China and them holding some of the responsibility. They ARE responsible, they should take the blame and it is their fault. Like I said, I don’t call it the Chinese virus for the reasons you’ve just highlighted but neither will I pretend we’re all in this together and they were just the first, unfortunate victims. Aside from anything else, their attempts to keep everything quiet and arresting doctors for trying to warn them is nothing short of atrocious.

It really wasn’t all that great to a neutral. We beat Leicester and Wimbledon, who were hardly Galacticos, then just needed to match Charlton’s result in the last game.

Agree with a lot of the nominees so far. Slightly left field, I'll go with Jakobsson in the 3-2 home defeat to Villa. Simply because we were 2-0 up when he went off injured and completely collapsed thereafter.

I remember under Adkins I used to drive for two hours plus, just to go to games on my own - both home and away as I was living in Bristol at the time. These days I live in Southampton and I won’t go to a game unless my mates are all in the pub by noon at the latest and even then I don’t bother 75% of the time because of the hilarious ticket prices and appealing football. Of all the things I honestly feel I’m missing right now, watching Saints isn’t one of them.

I’m as guilty as anyone of buying stuff made in China but that’s not anything I have an input in. Perhaps from now on I’ll make more of an effort to buy ethically sourced produce but China needs to change or this will just keep on happening. Not denying the guy is a complete whack job with dementia and the lab conspiracy sounds like nonsense to me. Simply the term ‘Chinese virus’ is as legitimate as the ‘Soviet nuclear disaster’ IMO, should you wish to call it that. Personally I just used ‘Covid 19’.

Eh? That’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s ridiculous that this kind of thing is allowed in a developed country. In Britain you’d get closed down for having rats under the fridge, whilst the Chinese have their carcasses hanging by their tails in the open air. No sanitation No veterinary checks or treatment No quality control No refrigeration No proper cooking or temperature checks No sell by dates No hygiene control for either hands or food preparation areas No restriction on who is allowed into food preparation areas I’ve worked in kitchens and restaurants at college and there were manuals and regulations as thick as the yellow pages we had to comply with. We had different colour mops because even with a bucket of industrial bleach, you’re not allowed to use the same mops in the kitchen, dining area or toilet facilities. These wet markets have nothing, it’s complete bandit country.

Not that I support any violence or discrimination against Chinese individuals but as a country they have to take the flak for this. The conditions which lead to this situations are almost entirely of their making, from the appalling, insanitary conditions animals are kept in in urban areas to the government denials, cover ups and R.I.P. three thousand victims and definitely not 21 million. I dislike and disagree with Trump on pretty much every level but I don’t take issue with him or anyone else calling it the ‘Chinese virus’. As if this could have popped up in any random country and they were just the unlucky victims.

Fair enough, I’m no expert on bleach. I assumed that if it soaked down into the sand and away from the seawater, it might well stay there until disturbed by footsteps or children playing. Whatever ends up happening, it’s a daft idea.

We’re trying to contain a deadly pandemic. Wards and hospitals are ‘deserted’ because as many people as possible are being kept away, for two reasons; firstly to ease the load on NHS staff and secondly to keep at risk patients away from Covid-19 hotspots. All the old dears needing hip and knee replacements are being told to stay home and wait. Or this could all by a plot by evil, multinational corporations to... er.... cripple the evil, multinational corporations.

When football does restart next season, there probably will be a lot of testing involved but it will be part of a nationwide, general evolution of safety measures. It’s not going to happen any time soon, especially whilst the rest of the country is still in lockdown.

If they did try this, the rest of the non football watching population would be annoyed and it would lead to large scale civil disobedience. Everyone will be asking, "if the footballers are allowed to play, why can't I play a small music venue with 30-40 people? Why can't I get together in the park/beach/garden party/bbq with my friends? What about rugby/cricket? Why can't I go to the gym? Why are the shops still closed?" If you were asked why football gets priority over everything else and your answer was that the footballers, Sky and some Saudi billionaires really need a few more million, it wouldn't go down well either. That's what point 3 basically comes down to, it's only a financial upside for three groups of people I have the least sympathy for.

So they may have engineered a situation where the top layer of sand is free from bleach and coated in Covid 19, but there're 2-3 inches of damp sand underneath soaked in bleach. Sounds like the worst of both worlds to me.

Another one which I just remembered was the 3-1 win away at Plymouth in 2011 which got us promoted from League 1 (barring a 13-0 home defeat to relegation threatened Walsall). In itself that's a fairly remarkable game in our history but for me the day started with a 4am alarm clock for work, with the breaking news that Bin Laden had been killed. Put me in a positive mood for the day.

I struggle to see how anyone thought that was anything other than completely mental. Aside from not giving the tiniest f**k about the massive environmental impact, if that bleach is effective enough to kill the virus, it’s effective enough to make any beach goers seriously ill.

Whilst it’s understandable that many parties have a vested interest in finishing the season, it’s starting to stink of doing your homework at 0853 on the school bus. A reasonable pre-season, without the ludicrous, money spinning tours of Asia, is probably just about feasible for an on time start to next season. That may or may not be behind closed doors or using PPE, it remains to be seen where we are in three months.

I’ve put it all together because the stated proposal is for every team to meet up at St George’s and play each other, three times a day, every day. We don’t know how long the virus can survive on surfaces but if it can survive 24 hours then 6 clubs on day 1 will pass it on to 6 on day two. It’s 500 people gathering in the same place for no reason other than football. We will restart eventually but the OP is talking about mid May, that’s two weeks away. Beaches and garden centres will not be open as normal in two weeks I can promise you that and when they are it will be with social distancing and probably face protection as standard. What the OP is proposing/reporting is making a mockery of everything we’ve been through in the last couple of months.

All plausible in theory but by most reports there are plenty of people infected who are asymptomatic or are yet to develop symptoms. You can’t assume someone isn’t a risk because they don’t have a fever. Likewise the spray and UV will only clean the top layer of clothing. If you go in and take your coat off, you’re then exposing any microbes on your shirt, jumper or whatever that you picked up at home, on the train or in the pub. Then there’s the cost of having one at every turn style, which would be prohibitive to a lot of clubs, plus the monumental queueing times outside grounds. That will lead to large gatherings of people outside the stadium, which will include all those who are infected and will fail the supposed pod test. In short, I can’t see it.

20 clubs with let’s say 25 people each involved, all playing in the same facilities, every day. That’s being conservative, I’d wager with a match day 18, 3/4 extra players, managers, assistants, coaches, physios, nutritionists and a media team, we probably take nearer 30-35 on an average away day. Then there’s 4 officials, camera men, ball boys, on site security, catering, hospitality... It’s the absolute anti-Christ of self isolation.

This is why we didn’t buy another RB and CB in January. It’s also why I’m against giving Long another £60kpw+ contract because ‘he’s a good lad to have in the dressing room’. No idea what Covid19 will do to all of this.