Lighthouse

Simple poll. Assuming you were to pick a back four and with Edwards having left, who would your CB pairing be? I’d have said THB and Quarshie, even before today’s match, as I think they are the best combination of cultured ball player and physical pace and power. They will need time and patience but, like children and garlic bread, I think it’s the future.

It’s alright, I’ve just put the kettle on.

You’d have to wonder if we’re going to cancel his contract by mutual agreement. He’s been here over two months now, has looked nowhere near capable and hasn’t even made the squad for a cup game against lower league opponents. Its sad but this doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

Need to sign a few more Camerons in January.

Goalage!

That looks dangerously close to a 4-2-3-1 to me. I think I’ve come over a bit funny.

I do. It's because he's not a particularly good player. I've no doubt at all that fans of the club which finished 15th last season thought he was one of their better players but that's not really where we're hoping to be. He's 23 in March, so not a kid any more, he needs to be out there playing first team football for someone and it's not going to be us.

My phone is whichever iphone came out in 2019, the 11 I think. I used to upgrade maybe every three years, when smartphones were evolving rapidly but now there's really not much of note to be excited about, apart from marginal gains in the cameras. I fork out a fair bit on a TV/sports package because I do watch a lot of football, F1, cricket and a bit of NFL. TNT I got free with my phone deal, so that's decent.

And yet nobody else was banging down the door to offer us more.

Best of luck to him. Can’t really use this as a stick to beat SR with. We signed a promising player for a low fee, he didn’t look like he was going to make the grade, so we sold him for a small profit.

I’m sure we’re looking at options. Whether anyone decent is available in this window, for a decent price or on loan, is a different matter.

I’d happily see him move on for a decent fee. He’d need to make a step up to fit into our mid-table Championship team, if we have ambitions of a PL return in the next couple of years, he’s a world away from that.

I'm not actually making it up though, am I.

I have no doubt at all that there are plenty of people back at Staplewood analysing our recent performances as I type this and looking at what can be improved and where we can exploit our next two or three opponents. I have no doubt either that the players who will be travelling up to Doncaster have been properly briefed and we may well know the starting XI already. This is not a key part of the season, that's why we've given them a break now. We have two weeks between league games, with no international games and only a cup tie up at Donny in the middle. It's about as good a time as you can get for a break, right in the middle of the season. Every club spends millions every year on sports science and the vast majority of them, going by many players social media, accommodate a short break mid-season. I'm sure if telling players, "don't be fatigued, you went to Ayia Napa in June," was a viable alternative that yielded better results, everyone would be doing that instead.

You tell me

I'm not sure how some of you know how people actually work. They've just had an absolutely gruelling match schedule and moral is probably quite low after all the results. They need a break, both mentally and physically and a few days in the sun with their friends or families will do them some good. The attitudes of some people on here are just a witch hunt, whereby the solution to our recent struggles must be to cancel the break and make everyone do extra tough training sessions until it makes them winners. They're human beings. If you cancelling people's time away with their wives and kids (and they really don't get much mid-season) then players are going to properly down tools. As for following players wives on Instagram, then being upset when they post pictures of their lives; good lord get over yourself.

It's mid-season and they've just played four games in ten days? Why on Earth would you NOT let them have a break and why does that depend on results? Breaks aren't a reward for winning, they're a necessity.

Yeah, in like 2001. He was about half a million off being our record signing back then, probably about £20-25m in today’s fees.

We’ve spent way more on players who’ve been equally useless. £7m isn’t much of a transfer fee these days and we’ll probably get a reasonable chunk of it back eventually. Carrillo, Sully, Osvaldo and Delgado were all more expensive and did f**k all. Let’s not even get started on the cheaper players who were worse.

I'm afraid your wages are a bit high for the Championship, we're working on a loan deal to KUMB or possibly the UK squash forum. We're going for the hipster option, street food in Elephant and Castle.

You’re dangerously close to agreeing with each other.

He did a lot right and a lot wrong, however I will always love him for seeing the Sun take out a two page spread telling the nation how they’re now ignoring us.

He’s not funding the site. In fact he’s embezzling the earnings in a secret bank account in the BVIs.

Gao's rudderless, penniless tenure here was the segue from the Leibherr years to where we are now. His era was massively flattered by two people; Ralph and Ings. Without them we'd have gone down years earlier and there's no way we'd have come back up under his so-called leadership, i.e. a PR photo of him holding a Saints scarf in some office in Shanghai.

No. There are countless other owners we could have, like those of Blackburn, Huddersfield, Cardiff, Bolton, Wigan, Pompey or Blackpool. Saints blitzing their way back to the PL, with swashbuckling football from Lallana and Lambert is very much the exception to the norm.