Lighthouse

City have scored two or more against everyone they've played, in every competition this season, except for Newcastle and Inter Milan, so there's merit in keeping it tight and not letting the GD get out of hand. A fair few of our rivals will go to City and let in four or five, so relative to that it's not the worst result in the world.

Three players completely unproven in this league and one whose legs are well past it. There's potential in TD, FD and MF but it's far too early to say they're decent.

I can see the logic in going for a more attacking option if we're playing a back five and need the FBs to get forward. That said Manning is hopelessly out of his depth against anyone in this league, let alone Man City.

We could've afforded him if we really wanted him but from what I remember he had no interest in a second season of League 1 football, which he was clearly too good for. Either way, I can't really see how he fulfills the criteria of the OP.

https://x.com/SouthamptonFC/status/1850156674830545091 roughly what I expected, although slightly surprised to see Lallana ahead of Aribo.

His long throws were sh*t. He clearly refined his technique at Stoke but for us they were almost always is to clear. The best one I remember was for Tessem to score a winner against Sunderland.

I’d say it was a very high percentage, personally, including the majority of our current squad.

Tadic is probably the third best player I've seen play for Saints, after Virgil and Tiss, he was also a key player in the best two seasons I can remember. It'd say we definitely got the best out of him, at least under Koeman, Ajax just gave him the chance to play CL football and a domestic league which Steve De Ridder tore to shreds. Lemina... well he's miraculously below us in the table, let's see if he has another tantrum and downs tools for Wolves too. Hojbjerg is Hojbjerg. Mr 7/10, an industrious ball recycler in any shirt. My personal answer to this question would be Gabbiadini. I know he's not uprooted any trees anywhere else but there were times when he looked like a hell of a player for us. I can't help but wonder how he might have done in a Koeman team, if we'd had him on the bench instead of Long.

Having someone strong leading the line is completely different from playing a ‘knock it long for the big man’ style of football. Pelle was surrounded by excellent ball players, who played it in and off him. All of last season we were notably weaker without Adams leading the line.

It’d help if we didn’t keep signing it. Despite being terrible, we have this weird habit of signing players who can’t even make our match day squad.

For the price of travel and a match ticket at the Etihad, you could fly to actual Poznan and have a much, much nicer weekend.

That's not how we played with Pelle.

Who is selling reliable, clinical PL standard #9s for anywhere close to our budget? TP, Archer, Stewart and BBD can all lead the front line with varying degrees of success but better than them gets expensive.

Muslims ≠ Arabs

Feels like yesterday I was getting called an idiot by quite a few people for suggesting maybe we shouldn’t ’just pay whatever it takes’ to get him in. There have been more than enough precautionary tales across various clubs in January to know to keep our powder dry. Andy Carroll has to be the most hilarious. £35m in 2011 is probably £90m in todays prices.

Shhh, we don’t mention that bit. The slave trade was every white person capturing and selling Africans, end of discussion. Also Arabs have never been involved at all.

Another case of people choosing the exact interpretation of the exact moment in history which they feel they’re the victim of. As has been pointed out we can reasonably demand reparations from many European nations, not to mention the Catholic Church, so where does it all end? If we can trace homosapiens back to east Africa, are they ultimately responsible for the whole worlds colonialism?

Can’t really see us spending anything, January is notoriously poor value and we’re not going to sign anyone who’s going to make any difference in terms of staying up. I don’t think we’ll need to do much in summer either, we already have a massive squad of Championship players. Me might sell a couple, possibly TP, KWP or ABK.

Knock it up to the big man and get runners to feed off the knock downs doesn’t really cut it in the PL in 2024.

No system is flawlessly fair and equal but you get a red card for a challenge like that nineteen times out of twenty, with VAR.

That’s not our only hope though, is it. People get carried away predicting double figures when we play anyone in the top six and it’s never happened. Most recently it was Arsenal and we were leading after an hour or so.

Utterly astonishing that anyone in the, "traumatised black community," would choose this as a hill to die on. The total denial of the fact that Kaba was quite clearly a dreadful person and the reason he was shot had nothing to do with skin colour is just amazing.

We’ve tried that.

🤷‍♂️

I disagree. The handful of cases you’ve highlighted (going purely by media articles and without having the information or expertise to give them an accurate medical assessment) do not negate the right of thousands of people every year do have their pain and suffering ended quickly and with dignity. Even that is assuming all your fears about mission creep are realised and dubious cases start to creep through the net, which at the moment there is no suggestion will happen.