Lighthouse

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.

There’s only one ‘war hawk’ in this game, that’s the man who wants the whole of Ukraine, the country he passionately declared had no right to exist when he launched his three day operation, in his empire. For a negotiated settlement there has to be something both sides will agree to AND more importantly, some way of forcing Russia to comply with it. Any written agreement, in itself, isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. They’ve been there before with the 2015 Minsk agreements look at the peace that lead to. As for Trump being the catalyst for ‘serious’ conversation, this is the man who told people that injecting bleach would cure COVID.

Your proposal is basically just that everything carries on as it is, but Ukraine signs a piece of paper which says that certain bits of it are legal, in effect rewarding Russia for their aggression. It’s straight out of the Neville Chamberlain playbook, one side believes they’ve negotiated a compromise and are working towards a peaceful solution, the other side thinks they’ve just signed a random piece of paper.

Gone for the hair/teeth routine, innit.

Trump can’t force Ukraine to settle anything, those bits are not ‘basically Russian’ and the general public would not be pleased with a brutal tyrant being rewarded for a war of cruelty against innocent civilians.

A far cry from having Terry, Ferdinand, Campbell and Carra to choose from. Pleased for him but this is far more about how underwhelming our CBs are right now IMO.

I’m not asking you to ignore anything. You’ve given one erroneous example against Arsenal, which nobody would be trying to attribute to, "dicking around with it," if it were conceded by a team managed by anyone else. It was a failed counter attack when the team was trying to break forward at pace, we both know it. The only legitimate example you’ve given was on the opening day of the season, committed by a goalkeeper no longer in the team. We’ve only scored seven goals because our attacking players are sh*t. Hope that clears that issue up for you. Armstrong, Archer and BBD are all matching the best top flight scoring rates they’ve ever managed in the rest of their careers. Our creative players, well people were up in arms because rested a teenager who made his debut two months ago, that’s how good that situation is. I’m not the one who’s genuinely convinced that Russ would rather lose and get noshed off by Pep, than actually win a game of football. Nor am I the one posting, "Yes!!! 74% possession, get in!!!" every 5 minutes when we’re losing a match.

So your best example, since the first game of the season, is a misplaced pass out wide near the halfway line, when we were trying to break against Arsenal at pace. Every team is going to give away chances and goals, especially one with players as poor as ours. I’m not claiming we are defensively solid but this idea that we’re shipping goals passing it around our own penalty box trying to keep 80% possession is just a fantasy.

Just because a pass was misplaced, I wouldn’t count that as, "dicking around with it." The whole team was trying to break forward at speed, exactly how you’d want us to play at Arsenal. Downes was trying to play a ball to a wide player, near the halfway line, as the rest of the team was running forward. Hardly a daisy cutter across our own 6 yard box.

When you say ‘often’ which was the last goal you would class as, "dicking about with it"?

We either pass to the opposition quite a lot or we’re obsessed with having 80% possession. We can’t be both.

Plenty of caveats to that though, namely how many troops Kim is prepared to sacrifice for his somewhat tenuous friendship with Mad Vlad. Obviously Kim doesn't give a crap about the men themselves but his dynasty does depend on a cast iron projection of absolute power back home. He wont want to see that corroded by a messy and expensive conflict, thousands of miles from his own borders. The other main issue is that his military could be something of a paper tiger. DPRK haven't had a proper war in living memory (unless you're one of the few citizens to make it into their eighties, despite chronic malnutrition and inadequate healthcare). Despite all their missile tests, their conventional army is likely to be severely malnourished, poorly equipped, very poorly motivated, ravaged by rampant corruption and organised by terrified yes-men. How much of a fight they put up against Ukrainians fighting for their own existence remains to be seen.