Lighthouse

Bad news for our title hopes

Robert Pires sticks out in my mind. Scored 5 against us in one season, including a hat trick at Highbury and the Cup final winner.

You wont get a crush as long as there are metal barrages along every three or four rows and you don't have fences. Fences were the problem at Hillsborough, without them that day would have just been a few hundred Scousers wandering around on the pitch. I've seen the footage of the Valley Parade fire and it sends a shiver down my spine when I think what could have happened if that stand had been fenced in. We would be looking at a death toll which would have dwarfed 9/11. It's easy to just say the Scousers will never allow safe standing but has anyone actually asked them. I would be interested to see a poll on a LFC forum. Obviously there will be a few people so blinded by grief that just refuse to hear any kind of discussion on the subject but perhaps the rest will be a bit more open to the idea.

Any other day of the year Man Utd probably would have sold out and usually does, unless I'm very much mistaken. However it was the last day if the season between the teams guaranteed to finish 7th and 8th regardless if the result. As a result nobody have a hoot about the result and fewer people were tempted to shell out £40 to watch what was basically a meaningless friendly. I basically agree with you in principal. We could sell out a 40,000 a few days a season with the right pricing. However those in the know with all the financial figures have clearly decided we wouldn't sell enough extra tickets to make it financially viable. It's an asset in the sense that if KL wanted rid of the club it would be worth more. Obviously nobody is going to buy the stadium separate from the club. That's why a billionaire businessman bought Saints and nobody wanted Pompey except a fake Sheikh and a dodgy Russian arms dealer. We had assets worth buying and investing in. They didn't.

It's an investment though. If you spend £30m on 10,000 seats the stadium is worth a whole lot more and generating more income in the process. FWIW I don't think the stadium will be or particularly needs to be expanded but there is some economic sense to it. It's basically the same money we've p*ssed up the wall on Osvaldo and Gaston, except those two are no longer assets, don't generate any income and are basically worth f**k all. Your missing (or pretending to miss I can never tell) the point on £15 safe standing tickets too. Without seats you can pretty much get double the number of people into a stand, minus a few rows of barraging to stop a crush from occurring. Twice as many people at half the price, that's the whole point of it.

I don't think it's a case of people who go and people who don't. Don't forget 55,000 Saints fans drove to London to watch a game against League 1 Carlise. The numbers are obviously there but people just don't make the effort to go to every game. Most likely because of the cost. I would quite happily see the club spend a couple of million less in the transfer window and use that money to give it a trial run for a season. Standing spaces in the Northam, £15 each all ages.

Bingo. If it was up to me, I'd stick the away fans in the Itchen/Northam Corner and make the whole Northam safe standing with cheaper tickets. Would get a bigger crowd into the same area, have a better atmosphere and make the same amount of money. I quite like the idea of the train station. It seems those being unwilling to walk to Central are being branded lazy by some on here but spare a thought for some of our older fans. My grand parents were ST holders until about 5 years ago but got put off by the 20+ minute walk to a suitable car park. A train station could also help to significantly ease traffic. If we had a park and ride by train scheme from SMS going out to places like Eastleigh, Airport, Hedge End and Winchester, it would be a lot quicker than parking in town. 15 minutes after the game you could be out of town and away from the traffic.

Away working in Sweden and I've just found this again. Obviously it's impossible to enforce such a law. I think it's a fundamental necessity that you should be able to pay for your child with no help from the state, before it is conceived. Benefits are for those who have fallen on harder times, not for people to plan their lives around using them.

All aboard the ROFLCOPTER

Unbelievable tekkers from Dejan for that throw in.

Oh dear Tw*tbeard.

I'm watching on Swedish TV and the bottom one would put me in A&E inside 10 minutes. As for the game, why is Champions League football regarded as a necessity to play for England by so many people? I don't remember seeing Saints play a team this sh*t when we were in League 1.

No in a word. We stopped when the numbers dropped off.

Needs to be introduced IMO. Katie Price has just dropped another sprog and named the f**kin thing 'Bunny'

Thoughts on this? They have obviously made a very strong start to the season and going by MOTD they outplayed Chelsea in their own back yard for the first half. Clearly will be a very tough test of our new team, possibly more so than Liverpool on the opening day. The good news is the physicality of Costa caused them a few problems and I'd like to think Pelle could be equally effective given decent service. Should we stuff the midfield with Morgan, Cork and Wanyama like we did second half yesterday or go with the more attacking formation and start with Long? Away to a tough side, I'd be tempted to go with the former.

Only if we can find someone better. The days when Fowler, Ian Wright, Andy Cole and MLT couldn't get near the team are long gone.

And here we see everything that is wrong with football. Chambers puts in a string of excellent performances for Southampton and is completely ignored. He plays two f**king games for Arsenal and boom! England squad. Still it's two more than Walcott when he got taken to the sodding world cup in 2006.

Whenever an England player touches the ball in the penalty area, Clive Tyldesley shouts his name like he's just scored the winning goal in the WC Final. Mildly irritating. On another note, f**k me this is dull.

Worth £60 not to listen to Adrian sodding Charles. Watching this game but mostly out of pure boredom. I think Rooney will score and be hailed in the media as an inspiration performance by our new captain (against the mighty Norway). I would probably rather Forster is left on the bench. He is never going to be first choice whilst Hart still has 2 arms and I don't want to risk a pointless injury in this non-event of a game.

To be honest there was very little by way of mixed messages from the club. Most of it was from random weirdos on here and twitter claiming to be ITK. I don't regard the club's PR as being particularly poor either. What do you really expect them to do when players are leaving like that? We could have had tweets from the club along the lines of "OMG Lovren's agent is such a greedy bastard," or we could have hired Tariq Aziz to come out and say, "Everything is fine, nobody is leaving." I wouldn't expect the club to say anything on transfers other than confirming their departures. They don't need to make the specifics public knowledge and if they do it will only fuel rumours.

I used to live there and I can't think of many countries on Earth with a more diverse culture. I know not all of it is good and a lot of their history centres around killing the natives but it's not as bland as places like Belgium.

Southampton Redsox, it's the future.

I would give more credibility to the things mental patients write on cell walls in their own feces than anything published by Fox.

FWIW Suarez is overpriced too but then the value of players seems to go up exponentially the better they get.

Useless Safri scored an absolute belter once. The rest of Shane Long's Premier League career would suggest he is anything but prolific. Everything he has done to date would suggest he is a 6 or 7 goals a season player and for £12m that seems pretty disappointing to me. Yes, we could have hot dogs instead of Forster but I think Forster was decent value for money.