Daft Kerplunk

I predict that neutrals will not turn on to endure this match

What is so perplexing about football is that the manager always gets the blame yet we quite clearly have a club situation where he has had to work with coaches and fitness coaches he didn’t bring in to help him implement his ideas (Black and Watson) - Poch and Koeman had control of these appointments - and a structure where he has little say in what players we sign. These two things are surely going to have a degree of impact on his ability to do the job to the best of his abilities.

100% Ralph needs to get his finger out of his butthole and tell us fans why we should be happy with the club right now! We are sleepwalking to a bottom half finish or worse (we fans know what it looks like FFS), two seemingly sh!t managers in a row. Really rubbish football under both our last managers who Les has said are absolutely what we needed. Squad not good enough or not mentally tough enough (so much for all the horse**** due diligence into character), academy going backwards. Total lack of bottle from the club’s leadership right now!

You cannot imagine a new Chinese owner will enjoy being embarrassed by his new purchase having been sold a club he was no doubt told was well on its way to being a force in the league and challenging regularly for European slots with the world’s best academy producing world class players. As the vice chairman for football, Les should have a lot of very serious questions to answer right now about the state of his football side of the business or does he just follow the modern leadership way and blame it one everyone else?

Exactly, but some fans are still head in sand. I admire their optimism

That seems like a direct quote from the manager saying he can’t control the market and it’s up to the owners whether a player is sold or not. That is as close to an admission that it ‘could’ happen as you can get. Surely.

In the latest training session video the boys are scoring plenty of goals. Only there are no defenders again. Maybe it could help if the attackers had sessions relevant to actual footbal when there are defenders trying to stop you scoring. Matbe Les could see how good our attackers (inc alleged creative midfielders) are if they did drills against our first team defensive players perhaps seeing as we seem relatively well stocked in that area. Fancy showing us some vids of these sessions media boys? If they actually take place of course. Can’t wait.

Maybe he is performing the way the boss wants. Just as Puel did.

Sign him up...again

Well hopefully it hasn’t gone totally wrong, but maybe a little less arrogance which can easily lead to complacency and a little more substance being added to the claims of developing world class players, marching on to years of continuous growth, saying we’ve got he best midfield options in the league etc.

Maybe you can write another letter of complaint...it’s too quiet now Saints. You did as we asked, but now we’ve changed our minds

You have to hope that somebody is at least asking Les what the hell is going on, and what it being done about it immediately. Players don’t look like they care, they don’t appear to be fit enough, we have signed a number of average players, the academy is not in great shape and so on. Les bangs on about his due dillience when it comes to signing players and managers but at the moment, all that looks like the absolute BS it is. The club has got complacent, believes its own hype and I doubt anyone ever can challenge Les. Maybe Chairman Gao might be asking some tough questions of the board.

The u16s are now the age where they would have been coached during Les’ version of the Southampton Way. I am sure that a few staff from the days when Southampton’s academy was really doing well and producing the players that the club still use for marketing and the current lot claim credit for left to go and work for England, turning that lot around from the it was before...

It’s a fair point about winning in the old days but one big difference was that it didn’t cost what it does to go these days. Me and my mates could make a decision to go based on having a few spare quid and it was comparable to going to the cinema. Very different to nowadays. This means the relationship between the team and the paying customer is very different.

It’s the Southampton Way. We make world class unadventurous players. It’s what we do.

Big blow this. Hope he’s back for the next match

Maybe the club will unleash a new batch of academy players that nobody knows about yet because Les has been keeping them ‘secret’ from England u-17 selectors etc.

If you know sound levels don’t work like that, you’ll know that an iPhone app won’t give you an accurate reading so is not the best method. I may sound flippant, but I like football to be loud, not quiet which is what it has become. Our fans just don’t sing or shout enough. The culture is rubbish at St. Mary’s and plenty of football stadiums in the UK. And this series of posts sums up the fact that the fun police will spoil the effort the club have been trying to make for the players and those who prefer an atmospheric event. Who knows, maybe our fan base will have a massive change of heart and arrive early, start singing most of the time during a match, make it intimidating for the opposition and make it a loud stadium each week...led by all you moaning folk of course

Where does it say that 86 decibels is too loud for an entertainment venue or innapropriate? Also, your monitoring is flawed because anyone talking near you will also add to the volume, a plane flying overhead will do the same. A phone in a noisy environment where people are talking and shouting is a throughly innacurate measure. Sorry to let you know this. A workplace has regulations to wear ear defenders because the noise would be continuous, not for 5 minutes. Different kettle of fish. Do you take your app out at music gigs or the cinema or a pub and tell them to be quiet when any noise exceed this level? As for comments that it drowns out any atmosphere, the email back from the club shows that we (you and I) weren’t making enough as fans. I would suggest that those moaning about the noise levels are among the quietest fans and have contributed to the decline in atmosphere. The atmosphere before matches was reaching all time rubbish levels. Anyway, seems like the club are going to bow down to the 10 people moaning over the 32,000 that don’t.

Keep it loud. Music is great too. Bet the players love it and have a say in it as well. They need an atmosphere that is loud. All about opinions and I suspect that the complainers are heavily outweighed by those people liking it loud and then there will be a group who don’t care either way. As you were Saints, it’s absolutely what needed to be done.

Nothing so far suggests top 8 and barely top half but it’s still early days. Fixtures from now on will be extremely influential on the final outcome of the season.

Sh1te, but still our sh1te. #welimpon

At least he tried to do something different today and thank goodness we scored at home from open play again. 3 wins in 17. The rot goes back further than the current boss but maybe today can act as some sort of indication that the formation needs to be stuck with and give players confidence that they can score if they play the ball forward

Les is 100% unsackable so no point saying he should go.

Love how our academy success still comes across. Only problem is that all the players the club celebrates were products of the system before Les and Martin Hunter joined the club so the systems or additions they have put in place has nothing to do with them. It is really now where we see if the celebrated Southampton Way when it comes to youth players actually works.