Saint86

Yeah tbf i rate blackmore. I like DM as well over the years and listen to his oppinions, but i do find he can turn quite negative quite quickly. Hard to tell if thats because he's having a bit of an old man's grump at times, or whether its the old school football man in him calling it how it is. Loving a bit of Jo Tessem for the cup games though. Always liked him when he was at the club and its nice to have a few more of that generation of players around and about the club.

Ralph's got a good record vs Chelsea, and our style seemed to cause Tuchel problems last year. If we were going to play a big team then i'd pick chelsea over someone like city or Liverpool. Definitely winnable.

Bit of a cup tie broke out tonight, not pretty, but a tidy win and good to progress! Reminded me of our lower league days and the JPT vs Norwich.

You do realise that if you keep rising to those sorts of comments you'll only encourage more of them...

What a load of🐎.

That pass for JPW, totally over played.... Gah!! I hope to see Tella or Djenpo on soon!!!!

90% of this is redmond...

Redmond must actually take a huge chunk off our expected goals stats every game he plays.

Again, dangerous attack wasted by redmond who should have given armstrong a good shooting chance. Has to be dropped.

What the fuck is the point in playing Redmond. I will cheer the day he leaves.

On the bench for the Young Boyz tonight in their win over United (how bad is that for Ronaldo and co 😅). It would appear that Young Boyz were aware of his last outing vs United as they sensibly chose to leave him on the bench for the full game. The result, this time it was united getting the red card and humiliatingly losing the game 👌🏼

At this point, he should not be keeping players like Tella, Adams, Livramento/KWP etc out of the team. Even Djenpo should be above him. There are times where Redmond can be very effective, but his standard is consistently that of a bottom 3rd player - and we have better on the bench,

Brighton are not getting relegated!! Not unless Potter is poached pronto. Saints aren't getting relegated. We've not been involved in and end of season/final game scrap with Ralph so far - and having us clear before the final game of the season that first season was a miracle tbh - i thought we were done under Hughes. Regardless, its certainly not going to happen this year.

Prior to the defensive performance vs west ham game, i would have said this was a case of letting the molestation begin... but now I am not so sure. I could see this going two ways, one being where go full yolo and get hit for 5 (regardless of however many we score), or we try to follow the mould of the 1-0 win, take our chances and keep it tight whilst strangling their midfield. They don't really have a striker so i would say we can get a point if we setup right. Think we should definitely be playing livramento and KWP on the same side for this one! Their pace plus perraud and salisu will give us the ability to carry a threat going forward and mitigate the risk on the counter.

I read that as him just saying that as a criticism of other clubs that have the luxury to build their squads unsustainably / have owners that can put money in regardless, whereas we are building our team on a tighter budget. The alternative take that fits certain fans' narratives (but is not something the manager would do) is he is openly criticising the current owners.

Thank you Minsk!

Based on the photo the club have continued to use, I'd say they weren't keeping an eye on the scoreboard...

Think a lot of saints fans got into it when it was Anka and they were giving out silly offers. Now its Sheldon and the reality is that he isn't good enough for people to bother paying for it.

circa 3min 50seconds 👌🏼

I'm sure i remember being told it was Cortese that was spending money we didn't have as well. Yet it would seem financial ruin has only really been a threat after he was ousted and Les got his hands firmly on the wheel 🙄

Yeah i know what you mean. I don't want to be too harsh on the guy so give him the benefit of the doubt and assume its because he started out at the echo. But it could equally be the case that he's simply happy to print the easy stories he gets from the club and just doesn't really give that much of a toss re doing more in depth pieces/research. I suspect you could give quite a few people the press contacts he's got and you'd get at least the same level of output 🤷‍♂️.

Well, lets just be grateful we survived (barely) and hope that shit never happens again 😅

For reference: https://theathletic.com/1941621/2020/08/11/mohammed-salisu-southampton-transfer/ Its not so much the fault of The Athletic in general. Carl was tapped up to be the united journalist and poached accordingly - it was always his dream to cover the hallowed goings on at Old Trafford . But he's one of the best sports journalists out there imo and his articles and level ability to ingratiate himself with club figures when he was here really helped - as did the fact that he wasn't actually a saints fan jsut pumping out biased fan articles. Dan replaced him coming from the Daily Echo (i think?), so realistically he's got to work himself up to being at the same level to someone who is a very good journalist - not the easiest boots to fill. I also think he suffers from being too close to the club.

Nice breakdown, I'd group them as follows - looking at it from a general blur of value for money perspective / money lost etc perspective. Good value signings (total = £86m) PEH (12m), Bednarek (5m), Redmond (10m), McCarthy (5m), Armstrong (7m), Adams (15m), Ings (£20m), KWP (12m). Reasonable signings (or perhaps too early to tell - total 70.2m) Gabbi (14.5m), Djenpo (14m), Salisu (11m), Diallo (12.7m), Vestergard (18m - almost put him below as we could have spent this elsewhere with today's recruitment) Bad signings: (including carillo/hoedt/lemina below = 97.5m) Boufal (16m), , Ely (16m), Gunn (13.5m), Absolutely disgraceful signing: Carillo (19m), Hoedt (15), Lemina (18m) So of your £253.7, we outright wasted £97.5m in my opinion - thats 38% 🥳

Carl Anka (used to be the saints writer but was poached by United and is sorely missed) has contributed to a piece in the Athletic regarding terrible transfer windows by premier league clubs. He's put southampton forward for summer 2017 - and in fairness it does highlight some of (because sadly we all know it wasn't just that window) the absolute car crash that was presided over by our previous board, and how they hamstrung us at a time where we had a lot of potential, and instead almost ruined the club. I know i've made the point previously, and although Ralph and Gao are far from universally popular - at least with them and Semmens, Crocker and Co, the clearing of the deadwood, and the restructuring we've seen over recent windows. I do think we're starting to work our way back to, "the Southampton way", and developing a team with great potential for the future again. At the moment at least, i think we're in a position of relative stability, we have a plan, and the right people seem to be on board for the long haul whilst the owner isn't meddling. Ofc, that can all be upset by poor results, fan sentiment, or a change of ownership etc. Anyway, i think the piece adds an interesting layer of information and perspective to our most recent business - Of which i would say we've had a pretty reasonable window at the current time. Apologies if already posted. (Note - I'll post the relevant section from the article here and let the mods decide whether its okay to be up on the Saintsweb site.) Southampton in 2017: Ignoring the four Ts A good transfer window is all about the Ts: a club must recognise good playing Talent at the right Time, who make a good Tactical fit for their team, and then eventually make the deal for a reasonable Transfer fee. Every club in this feature is in it because they got their Ts mixed up in one too many deals. The truly dishonourable mentions often come from a club squandering a large amount of money after selling a star player. But there is something in Southampton’s summer at the start of the 2017-18 season which makes it stick out as a terrible transfer window as they managed to get the Ts wrong and squander an historic opportunity to solidify their position in the league and, to top it all, then saw their star player leave. To set the scene: Southampton had finished 2016-17 in eighth position in the Premier League and as unlucky losers to Manchester United in the League Cup final. Manager Claude Puel’s prosaic, yet pragmatic football inspired little love from the fanbase, and Virgil van Dijk had made noises that he saw his future at Liverpool rather than St Mary’s. In came Mauricio Pellegrino to steady the ship (and get confused with Manuel Pellegrini, and predecessor Mauricio Pochettino). He knew Van Dijk was probably going to leave in the near future and that he had to build some sort of spine for the side to compensate for the Dutch defender’s imminent departure. What he and the club endeavoured to purchase were: Jan Bednarek, Wesley Hoedt, Mario Lemina. That’s one centre-back (Hoedt) who was bought for £17 million, made 45 uninspiring appearances for the club before being shuffled off for a nominal fee this summer after two and a half seasons out on loan; a defensive midfielder (Lemina) who was bought for £15 million and once shared a player compilation video of himself on Twitter in an attempt to leave Southampton (also left for a nominal fee this summer); and one decent centre-back (Bednarek) who only came good in November 2019 under Ralph Hasenhuttl, who was the successor to Pellegrino’s successor. In the January window of that season — yes I’m cheating a little bit here by going over more than one window, but this story needs to be complete — Van Dijk departed for £75 million. Pellegrino asked Southampton to spend the better part of £20 million on striker Guido Carrillo, adding another slow player to what had become a turgid team. Southampton finished fourth-bottom in 2017-18, saved in part by a freak accident (a collision between goalkeeper Alex McCarthy and centre-back Jan Bednarek in a six-pointer at Swansea City forced the latter to go off concussed. Manolo Gabbiadini came on for Bednarek and within four minutes had scored the game’s only goal. Five days later, Swansea went down with three points fewer than Southampton.). Another bad transfer window the summer following saw the club lose their position in the Premier League middleweight positions to become relegation battlers until the arrival of Hasenhuttl in late 2018. It was a transfer window so bad Southampton now operate with a soft £15 million cap on future signings as they don’t feel they can be trusted with bigger deals. - Carl Anka, for the Athletic.