Lighthouse

We put in 3 decent performances at home; Palace, Burnley and Leicester. Palace have been relegation candidates all season, Burnley are useless away from home, Leicester (when we played them under CR) were useless full stop. Putting aside those 3 games against substandard opposition we scored 8 goals in 16 home games: Watford - Corner Sunderland - GK error West Brom - Corner Boro - Long range effort from Boufal, overall build up play generally poor. Spurs - Set Piece So across 85% of our home games we've scored 3 goals from effective build up play. Swansea, Everton, West Ham. Out of them, Swansea were dreadful, Everton were caught napping in the first minute. That's appalling.

We scored from a corner against West Brom. It was another blank from open play, they were the better team.

We had a decent first half against Arsenal but that's about as good as you can say. We didn't score and lost all impetus in the second half, then ended up losing without any goals - again. There has absolutely been a lack of attacking intent on many occasions. Be'er Sheva, West Brom, West Ham, Man Utd, Bournemouth, Stoke, Boro, Sunderland, Man City, Chelsea and Hull at home were just awful, a complete lack of tempo to any of our play.

WTF?! On what planet are Tony Pulis and possession football the same thing? Pulis is a dinosaur. A good old fasioned, play it out wide to Jermaine Pennant and stick it in the mixer with the big men, kind of manager. Of course we have lots of possession. We're a team who, from our own corner, somehow ends up passing it back to Forster. It's the most uninspiring, risk adverse, dull possession football you could hope to imagine. When Redmond gets the ball on the edge of their third, plays it square to Romeu, then back to Bertrand, then back across to Yoshida, then back to the keeper, you're always going to get loads of possession.

I would say the main problem is that we don't look like we're 'giving it a go' as Merse would say on GSS. We're reactive, never proactive. We sit back, wait, keep possession, let the other team do their thing and wait for them to attack us. It works alright away, as shown by our results; Sunderland, Boscombe, Watford, West Ham, Man City, Liverpool, Boro, West Brom. 6 away wins is very good for a midtable team, would have won about 4-1 at the Emirates if Long had buried some of those 'harder to miss' chances. At home it's just poor. All we do is invite pressure from the big teams, when we should be on the front foot. Against the lesser teams it's just awful.

What is the club going to gain from this? What advantage is there to publishing a story saying, 'we are probably going to sack him when we've lined up a replacement'? He may well have good links to the club but it doesn't mean we want this story out there.

I'd go along with this. There has been nothing from the club directly undermining Puel's credibility and most of the stories have just come from trashy, red top journalists. We may well be looking to offload him but we haven't exactly put him in the stocks in the town square. If people are taking gossip the see on the internet as gospel, it's hardly the clubs fault.

McQ is decent backup. Targett I don't think is good enough at this level and I'd give him a loan out somewhere, if not sell him.

You'd effectively pay £10m just to spite Liverpool? That really is narrow minded and petty. We're a business, not a kindergarten.

I shudder to think of people judging all Saints fans by the tripe posted on here. If there are any Scousers still reading this, we're not all like ALWAYS, Dalek, alpine, Heisenberg, Batman, pluto, 9-3, Dusic, Charlie Wayman, ART, Matthew Le God... I could go on.

How do you know it was all of a sudden? Where's your evidence that the club haven't carefully considered their position since the contact was reported?

We're a mid table team and someone is offering to pay the highest fees ever paid for a defender. I don't care if it's Liverpool, Chelsea or Port flippin' Vale, that's a ludicrous amount of money for a club our size. With £60m, we could break our own transfer record on 3 different players. It's like having a choice between Virgil or Lovren, Pelle, Mané and Tadic.

We're going to be replacing Fonte anyway. Not saying it will be these two specifically but we've got the room on the wage bill.

Hold tight lad and think of Lancashire hot pot.

£20m each on Ihenacho and a decent replacement. Assuming Celtic get 20%, that about covers it.

Fair enough. My apologies, I read it differently.

Wasn't he the baddie in Live and Let Die?

We don't just sell things. We also play football. Hope this helps.

You've literally just made that up.

Ridiculous isn't it. Why can't we hang on to him like they did with Sterling, or Everton did with Stones, or West Ham with Payet.

Aren't we all missing the major positive here, Lovren's going to get dropped.

The going rate with him is usually 25% off, so £45m I guess.

Why? It's not like we're selling players at knock down prices.

Most outlets saying £60m and that's a decent price. Don't really care where he goes, they're all as a bad as each other these days.

I don't see how making a large number of people think your marriage is on the rocks is at anyone's expense but hers and her families TBH. I don't really care what goes on in our players private lives, so long as it doesn't affect what happens on the pitch. The fact that she deleted it, then put something up about Monopoly seems more like an awkward cover up to me. I'd assume they'd be playing it on a iPad, in which case how would he be cheating anyway. All in all a daft thing to post, whatever her motivation.