melmacian_saint

The third one is a plain lie, but a Sunderland fan saying our city and area is **** is just out of order, pathetic, wrong and stupid altogether. Seriously, I thought they had mirrors up north...

Lallana wasn't our answer for today's game as it was. Whenever we've looked lethargic, we just never seem likely to wake up again. If our past time in the PL was criticised for being too based on dogfighters with no flair, we've now got the opposite. A lot of flairy, positive vibes on the team, which is great and I've been very pleased with the football played down at SMS, but not a lot going for the hard side of business. Someone capable of screaming at anyone and giving the squad a kick up the arse on the field, as well as showing them the way with a period of high pressure or something that could get the crowd going and be transmitted to the other 10. Today we needed that against a team which is more about spirit and getting muddy despite small patches of skill in Sessegnon, Fletcher and Johnson (Beattie, Fernandes and Svensson????). Also, we desperately need to find another solution to our attacking play than long passes to Lambert if anything else seems difficult to do/we need a goal to happen. It's wasting posession and too predictable and Rickie's aerial challenges are becoming too 50-50 as CBs start to know him better. I'd rather we passed the ball patiently in midfield trying to find a break.

He is clearly our best player, but like Lallana, needs to get his head down to what his feet should do rather than what he wants them to do. The successive dead end passes to Lambert are a good example of this. He is too distracted with what he wants to be doing and his constant search to be able to do something great technically hinders his awareness. This makes him take too long on the ball, or miss good opportunities to play the ball out wide or find a break in the defensive lines. Both of them always seem very eager to produce something worthy of showboat clips whenever they have the ball. We don't need that. Too often good first moves are cancelled out by an exaggeration (Lallana's slalom or Ramirez's constant low flicks of the ball). What I am very concerned however is his lack of pace. He seems to be slow, which is not a good thing. I hope that once he gets a decent run of PL fitness preparation he will improve this, as will his aggressiveness but it is a well-documented case that of South American players whose lack of pace and nerve lets their amazing technical ability horribly down.

I do not want us anywhere near a football player that currently wears the shirt of the Pompey of the North (financially speaking). They are the football version of "the walking dead".

Ok so can we just assume that it'll be Ramirez-Davis-Puncheon behind Lambert tomorrow?

Of course it's not the end of the world in NZ. They were already there anyway.

Ok, I'll come as a 19th century gent and tell the other fans in the stand that my name is Ebenezer. Is that ok Turkish?

The target should be at least 5-7 points.

"Literacy levels must be up in England, no-one seems to have trouble with Reading." Friend retweet. I laughed. It won't happen. With QPR's improvement under Arry, Reading will be the bottom club.

Apparently Stevie D played a reasonable amount of times for Rangers at LM. Expect him to start down there or maybe interchange with Ramirez?

Saints scarf in a pub in Albufeira Portugal.

I'm sure the Robinson issue was mentioned in here?? I remember it coming along with his dreaded SO home address that some of the phew were angry about...

What an absolutely pathetic topic.

Maybe the major problem is that the accountants can't hide the fact that the PKF fees have drained the club of much needed cash to keep going, ignoring alternative bids for ownership in the process, effectively meaning that liquidation is inevitable, and hence all the other legal troubles that this may bring to their firm and the individuals themselves? Seems that now even Brichy boy can't hide it any longer.

Dann not better than Fonte-Yoshida and would not come down to be a bench warmer.

Paul Robinson is horrifically overrated. Has always been.

I wonder how many of the brave 15 will jump ship when the phone beeps for contract renewals in a week or so.

Not better than what we have.

Very good performance. Looked assured and confident, and didn't let last year's game haunt us. Lambert's work rate outside the finishing zone was at full show today, Cork/Schneiderlin ran the show and apart from a couple of times where they were caught in possession they were perfect. Puncheon has got me into a love/hate relationship with him. I was really annoyed when in the first half he made a poor attempt of reaching a long ball, and sometimes his crop-circling skills from advantageous attacking positions get me on my nerves, but his partnership with Clyne is great and today that was another good move to create a good finish! Also he's one of the few in our team who has the guts to shoot from outside the area without feeling the need to walk the ball into the net. Thought Fonte kept them at bay, and made some very crucial tackles/clearances in the first half, preventing them from creating a chance altogether! Him and Yoshida look good enough for the rest of the season for me, any CB we want to bring should be for a back-up role. Certainly a more comfortable look at the table today, a win v. Sunderland still crucial!

I was quite surprised at how poor they are as a team. Apart from some neat dribbling here and there by Tabb, and some long free-kick mayhem, there is just nothing about them. Their fullbacks looked poor and they can't move the ball forward unless they hoof it. Jason Roberts got away with murder as far as the referee is concerned to be a threat to our defense and yet failed to even create a chance. In fact I can't understand how they didn't get at least 4 yellow cards. Some tackles out there would've been punished at Sunday league level. We ran the show and just proved that the defeat at the end of last season would never happen twice. As for their fans, singing "Champione" when you're drowning down in the Prem is just pathetic. If anything, their performance just shows how dodgy their bragging rights are. Unbelievable that they were top at the end of last season. It just shows you with how much teams can get away with in the FL. Having heard reports from other matches in their promotion run I believe they were very lucky. Since I believe QPR will improve their form, I expect them to be the bottom club. They really haven't had many injuries and have been playing their best pick every week and this is pretty much what they can produce. Also, McDermott needs to learn how to speak in public. His mumbling in the interviews is quite annoying.

True. But let's be honest, no matter the size of your town, a 20,500 stadium is not enough to sustain a team that is looking to cement a position in the top 10 of the PL without risking existence and our bankrupt neighbours are the best example of that. We've already got that extra capacity that Swansea are looking for and let's be honest, it's fine. In fact, if anything we should be looking at what would've happened if we had stayed in the old place down Archers Road. We would probably have one of the oldest grounds in the land, but my guess is we'd be just like Oldham or Preston. Football League classics that can't spend a day without looking at the photo album. Assuming past experience, and like it was mentioned, we needed a top 8 finish and a Christmas top 4 position to regularly sell out. This means that unless we can score Europa League qualification (so top 5-7), we will not sellout in a regular basis, hence we will not need a bigger stadium. Get the position right, then let's talk about this again.

Anyone know the official figure for season ticket sales? I'm thinking that this might be the main issue. I thought they were a bit overpriced, and that the rise of renewal prices wasn't very fair. Another thing I was looking at coming back from the Norwich game is the roulette in k.o. times that we have experienced this year, this could possibly put off some ST holders and who knows how many occasional match ticket buyers. If I'm not mistaken, in 8 (?) home games, we've had the traditional Saturday 15h, Sunday 16h, Sunday lunchtime, Wednesday night, Sunday 15h...and we're yet to have late Saturday, Monday night and Saturday brunch time (a killer for all of us nightowls)! In the FL, it was fairly standard: Saturday at 15h or Tuesday at 19h45. Yes, two or three times in 23 games you could get a Sunday lunchtime or a late Saturday, maybe a midweek fixture on another day than Tuesday, but it hardly changed that much. The matchday cost has also risen too and our city has not been watching the crisis pass by... Guess some people can't be fussed to build their free time around SFC's matches. It's not like our attendances have been bad and to be fair the fact that we only broke the attendance record on the promotion game last year says a lot about the size of our regular support.

The fact that in this forum some people still dread for Football League cult heroes shows how long it's been since we've been here. And yes, the difference is WAY bigger than it was in 2005.

Rhythm of Hey Jude... (all the nanana bits) ....Luke Shaw!

Looking at his goals he is really good. But I think again, like with Norwich, it's down to the attacking midfielders, not the marksmen. Shechter is not amazing but the work of Ki, Hernandez (today De Guzman) and Dyer (Routledge has been there too) well supported by Britton is top quality. You can see why Laudrup was such a genius in his playing days and where he was so prolific. Pace, technique, intelligence right in front of the penalty box, that's where the key move in their goals starts... Pablo Hernandez particularly, having followed him since his early days with Cádiz in the Spanish Championship, is a fantastic player. And you can all say about how Puncheon gets MOM twice every 10 games and how he's back, but I still feel he is mostly a "crop-circle" player who cannot make an early decision about what to do with the ball and for 5.3 million pounds I would gladly have left him in the siberia group of squad players and get Hernandez in. But obviously, the left-wing issue is panicky. I still do not understand how 30 million can be spent and still leave certain positions so poorly covered.