Lighthouse

2nd May 2011 - Saints got promoted from League 1, the same day Bin Laden was killed.

He’d have done well to concede against Preston, they were the worst side to come to St Mary’s this season. I think they’re joint bottom of the form table with Rotherham at the moment.

That’s just a bog standard, new manager press release. I don’t get your point.

30 years since we lost Ayrton Senna.

We’re not ‘wrong’ as such, 23 out of the 24 teams in this league aren’t Ipswich and 22 of them wish they were. The fact that Ipswich is the first team since us 12 years ago to do this, shows just how much of a rarity it is.

The video is equally conclusive I assure you. That game was spared a huge injustice thanks to VAR, however you try and spin it. Congratulations to Ipswich, nice to have someone different in the top flight, even though I do think they’ll be next season’s Blades. Pleased for Marcus Stewart getting some decent news, in particular.

I don’t think a person who has predicted nothing but a crushing defeat before every game this season can talk much about being realistic. I'd much rather he had his attitude than half the fans on here who think we may as well not even bother with the playoffs. As for sacking him…. Well if there’s a very clear strategy to bring in someone specific with a view to a different game plan next season, then okay. If we’re just doing it for the sake of change, we did that with with Ralph last season and look what happened.

Well, you could argue he got A ball but not THE ball.

Vergini’s was better.

If we could swap Mara and Adams for any two of Rasiak, Jones or Saganowski, we'd have won the league comfortably this year.

That's a complete guess, he's 75 and been promoted once in the last 13 years.

Another regional mannerism you may wish to acquaint yourself with for next season (let's face it, we're both going to be here) - if some bloke sticks his todger through a hole in the cubical divider, it means, "I'll have an Old Speckled Hen and a bag of McCoy's please." Anyway, well done on yesterday and staying up. Enjoy the off season.

We're three goals away from being the league's top scorers, despite Adams missing an absolute boatload of chances and Mara being useless. I don't think there are any strikers in the league who get more of the ball in the box than ours do, a better player than Adams would have 25 goals by now, from the chances he's had.

I don't know why you keep banging these drums. It's a completely different team with Bazunu in it, he probably wouldn't have needed to have made those saves (most of which were straight at McC, at a comfortable height). Puel - give it up already. We were on a completely negative trajectory at the end of that season, the Stoke game was just the final chapter of Saints 0-? The oponent at St Mary's. Yesterday was the first home game we've failed to score in (all comps) since September and only the second one all season.

Just to be clear, you're saying that wasn't a penalty for Spurs?

Been looking forward to this fixture for a month. One way or another it was always going to be a nightmare afternoon for my Spurs or Arsenal mates.

He’ll probably end up like Valery or Boufal; someone in France will take him for a pittance of a fee, just to get him off the books. To think we supposedly got him at a knock down price because Bordeaux had a cash flow problem makes me wonder what we actually thought he was worth, full price.

Manning came on at Leicester and was responsible for three goals in twenty minutes.

Sadly for us, just that pass against Leeds on its own would disqualify Mara from being our worst player. By virtue of scoring at least one goal, he’s not even in our top ten.

This is a weird argument, I've no idea why people are pretending not to understand it. It's very obvious why we hired Martin; Wilcox thought that his methods, coupled with our better players and higher budget than Swansea, would deliver promotion. Clubs hire managers based on what they think they could potentially achieve with the resources they have, not what they achieved in the past with another clubs players. We didn't hire Adkins so we could sack him after two years, 15th in the Championship, neither did we expect Poch to hover around 14th in the PL because that's what he did at Espanyol, nor did we expect Ralph to take us to the Champions League.

All of that is still beside the point - we hired Adkins to take us to the PL. So what if L1 promotion was the first step, we clearly hired him to do much more than languish in 15-17th in the Champ once he got there. We correctly deduced, from the way his teams played, that he’d be able to achieve far higher with better players at his disposal. Pretty much every other club out there has made a similar choice at some point, with varying degrees of success.

No we didn’t, we hired him to get to the Premier League and stay there, getting out of League 1 was just the first step. We clearly hired him to do something well beyond what he’d ever achieved before at Scunthorpe and we were right. I don’t mind the principle of trying to do the same with Martin but clearly the execution is some way lacking. It wasn’t unreasonable to expect him to achieve higher with our squad than Swansea’s.

He started the game today and showed exactly why he should be nowhere near the pitch. He’s awful, I’ve no idea what anyone sees in him other than moderately good technique with zero end product.

And yet somehow we’ve looked utterly pathetic in three of the four games since he’s been injured. None of McC’s saves today were anything special, a couple just smacked at him, waist height, another near post at a tight angle that was straight at his shins. As for the rest of our performances today. Pathetic and gutless. Edozie and KWP sort of looked alright but I can’t quite bring myself to compliment them as such. A total lack of composure all over the pitch, right from the first minute. The end of this season feels like the end of Puel’s season - on paper fourth is a decent result but watching the way things are heading on the pitch… guuueehhhhh.

ESL, it's coming back.