Lighthouse

We have six. The only Cardiff fixture I’d swap given choice is their Fulham for our Newcastle. I’d much rather be playing Watford, West Ham and Bournemouth, who are already on the beach, than Burnley, Brighton, Liverpool and Utd who are all in a critical battle for something. Supposing we just give them Palace and Fulham as guaranteed, we’d still just need 1 extra point from our 6 winnable games than their 4 tough games.

That's a shame, I reckon $12 trillion would have bought us a decent RB to replace Cedric.

TBH Verbs I only volunteered to moderate this place to try and keep the tedious sh*te off the main board, so we could all discuss Saints without having to read about how we should be aiming for 17th every season and why we're an embarrassment of a club because West Ham just signed somebody on June 1st and we haven't. If any of you find something genuinely racist, i.e. not just naive and ignorant like some of the stuff on the Rose thread, then PM me. I wouldn't want to lose Bexy as he seems informed and articulate, whether I agree with him on an issue or not. However I've got better things to do that sit refreshing the Brexit thread every 5 minutes. If the posters on there irritate you, then don't click on that thread. It's like clicking on an alpine thread, or watching literally anything staring Miranda - you can't say you weren't warned.

I agree with docking points if it was a widespread problem and something endemic within a certain fan base but I don't think it is. Most of the stories on the Rose thread were about 'this bloke I saw at Game X last year' etc. If it was a large block of 50 or so people, stood together, Nazi flags, salutes etc. then I'd say yes but in England I've never seen anything like that. It was in the news a couple of days ago that someone had been arrested for sending a racist tweet to a Wigan player. If events that small scale and isolated are making national headlines, it suggests to me that it's not a common occurrence. P.S. I worked for a company with one of the 'worst' reported gender pay gaps in Britain. Can't speak for every company but in that instance it was blatantly bullsh*t. Anyway, that's a different thread.

Making all the necessary preparations with my fantasy team. Patricio and Jimenez in, Hojbjerg as 3rd choice, unused sub (worked a treat the last 2 weeks).

If anyone mentions Carroll on this thread, they get an automatic lifetime ban.

It did happen when we beat Sheff Utd to stay up in '08. Not my video so sorry for the poor quality and editing but interspersed with the highlights is MLT commenting on GSS. I'd imagine there were a fair few complaints from Leicester and Blades fans and I can't say I blame them.

Weirdly, both of those photos can only be taken in a 20 second window, about a minute before kick off.

My thoughts precisely. I wonder if it’s too much to hope for a ‘6-1 at Highbury’ performance from Watford B in a few weeks.

There will always be bigotry and hatred in society, it’s part of human nature. Pharaoh Rameses II treated the Israelites as second class humans 3,000 years ago, it’s nothing new and won’t go away any time soon. What we can do, and have done very well in Britain, is minimise that level of intolerance and at least contain it. To that extent, we have changed massively from the 70s, when ‘Love Thy Neighbour’ was considered acceptable television and fans were kept in cages to stop them kicking the sh*te out of each other. The problem is 32,000 is a lot of people and there are bound to be a few racists in there. Statistically speaking, a couple of people at the game on Friday went home and looked at indecent images of children on their computer and somebody in their will (or already has) murder somebody. All it takes is one idiot to have a few too many white wine spritzers before the game and lose his inhibitions and there you go...

I think we’ve reached the sell by date on this thread.

Wow. MOTD just literally didn’t even bother to mention us in their post match analysis. Not even a reference to our goal, any of our chances or how it will affect the relegation fight. Just 5 minutes of masturbation over Salah and Henderson and how passionate they all are.

Verbs, I'll add this to the obscure list of reasons why I'm a racist. Apparently questioning a black man's assertion that his career is unbearable, makes me 'an unpleasant racist, trashing the uppity black man'. I do wonder how some people would deal with incidents like the Clattenberg/Mikel incident a few years ago.

I'm a bit 'meh' about that one. If anything I think we can catch Bournemouth, in fact I'd say it was more likely than falling behind Cardiff. Anything up to about 12th is still achievable.

Whitesplaining? Ah yes, just like mansplaning, you can pretty much say anything and be automatically right because you're the victim of discrimination. I've been going to Saints matches since I was 15 and I've only ever seen one instance of racist abuse. The Pompey cup game we won and Oakley scored that belter, some guy made a monkey noise when Primus was on the ball. You're never going to get a Utopian society where there are crowds of 20, 40 or 50,000 people and literally none of them are a racist kn*bber. Fact of life, it will never be completely wiped out. We just need to catch the (very small) minority who do it and ban them.

The buzzword before the game was this being a 'free swing'. In the end it was a swing and a miss.

I'm not saying it wasn't a foul or that the goal should have stood. Just pointing out that that the lino not spotting a marginal offside, on first viewing, isn't match fixing.

But he isn't like them. He probably travels to an East European away game once every two years or so. It's hardly like he's getting bananas chucked at him every week. It's wrong what they faced in Montenegro and shouldn't be accepted but making out his whole career is some insufferable hell because of racism is being over dramatic.

Salah's offside was very marginal, so why you believe they deliberately ignored it I'm not sure. It was hardly like the farce at Cardiff last weekend. Yes, if you analyse it, the goal shouldn't have been given but we had plenty of opportunity to clear our lines after that. Bednarek should have done better.

We’ve already signed him and if we don’t pay we will be punished accordingly. The Toby situation was different, we had an option to buy, which they could buy us out of for a couple of million. The fact that he didn’t actually want to sign for us once Spurs became interested was also a problem.

That’s not a nice mix of attributes, they would be a terrible collection of strikers. Redmond is decent but not a striker. That basically leaves us with Carrillo and two cripples, one of whom us only made a handful of senior appearance anyway. If that’s what we end up with next season, I’ll be p*ssed off. We need to buy two decent strikers, not zero.

People used a similar logic to defend Carrillo's scoring record in France. If he isn't scoring because he keeps getting dropped and subbed off early, that's a poor reflection on him and not an excuse. Having the most succesful dribbles per game and only getting 5 goals/assists out of it really is Boufal in a nutshell. All show, no end product; like entering a dressage pony in the Grand National. I know many are saying he will be like a new player when he comes back and Ralph will get the best out of him etc. but really, this is the 4th manager in succession he has failed to perform for.

Because race and colour has been used for centuries as a means of inciting hatred and intolerance. Gingers have never been rounded up and taken to America to be sold as slaves. Lanky gits have never beaten to death in their own homes by the KKK.

I think FIFA/UEFA/FA or whoever would have to take each individual case on it's own merits. One drunk idiot making monkey noises is something you just have to take on the chin and deal with him afterwards by way of a fine and a ban. On the other hand if it's quite blatantly a large section of the crowd and heard by numerous sources, I think they have the right to walk off. Personally I think Rose is being a bit of a tit. He's already made many times more money than I will ever see in my life, if it's that bad quit now and go and play golf. If on the other hand he'd rather have a couple of new Bentleys and some more jewellery then it can't be all that bad.