Wes Tender

Brilliant marketing by Emirates. Hats off to them for all the free publicity they have gained both locally and nationally by this ploy of suggesting that the Spinnaker Tower will be painted in the colours of the Skate's rival football team. A very well conceived idea, well executed. Not only did it elicit the participation of the local community, but also that of the neighbouring areas and the local MPs as well. Having stirred the pot, they have played a blinder by their munificence in listening to local opinion and back-tracking on something they probably never intended to do in the first place.

Yes, you and St Lard. But the implication from being in such a minority that you are probably wrong, has to be tempered by the fact that you were a confidant of Cortese, therefore privy to information that none of the rest of us had.

So there we have it finally. Not the board's expectation that Adkins should ensure promotion from both divisions as champions, just little old yours. You know for a fact who was on the board's radar to be manager ahead of Adkins, but this main point that you are arguing is based on nothing concrete at all. The board were prepared to achieve promotion back to the Premier Division within 5 years and you think that Adkins failed because he managed to get us there well ahead of schedule. Well done for such an imaginative perspective.

As you are responding as if you know internal things for a fact, then you won't mind telling us who the other candidates were who were ahead of Adkins for Reed and for Cortese. If you can't, then I'm inclined to dismiss your statements as wind and p*ss. Ditto your assertion that despite Reed telling the media that we had exceeded expectations on both promotions and saying that the objective was not to get promotion as champions, but merely to get out of those divisions, it is too easy to dismiss it as just what the media would be told. Presumably the five year plan was a load of tosh, as you claim to know for a fact that we were expected to gain promotion from the Championship as champions. I think that you're talking a load of tosh. Hardly anybody believed that we would go up automatically that season, most thinking that we would have a season to consolidate our position before making the push the following season. Your analogy re Ronnie Moore is also pretty weak. A bit different comparing managers who have achieved back to back promotions (success)with one of a few who has never experienced relegation (avoiding failure), hardly a name that is on the lips of the majority of football fans,

As far as I'm aware, even Cortese wasn't expecting us to gain promotion in consecutive seasons, as we achieved his five year plan a year early, didn't we? Whether Cortese also stipulated that we not only had to achieve promotion that season as champions rather than automatically is something that I do not know, but you're obviously certain that it had to be as champions and so Adkins is one lucky guy for not getting the bullet at the end of that first season, isn't he? Les Reed: Reed only talks about "getting out of divisions", not winning them, but I'm sure that you will be able to explain what he really meant, having internal contacts. No, you're not the only one labelling Adkins a failure for not achieving promotion as champions. St Lard also thinks that too

Read what I posted a bit more carefully. I said that in the first season that he arrived, there was little to suggest that Adkins could not have got us one position higher too. Pochettino proved his worth the following season, but again there is nothing concrete to suggest that Adkins could not have raised us there too given the resources that Pochettino was given. It is all conjecture. Fate had Adkins go to Reading which was the wrong move and Pochettino went to Spurs, which he will find out soon enough is a poisoned chalice. If Adkins gets SU back to the PL and Pochettino gets sacked for not getting Spurs into the top 4, then we can revisit the "who is the better manager" debate. The argument that just because a manager is with a higher positioned team that he must be better than one managing a lower team isn't watertight, merely suggestive. I understand that Tim Sherwood achieved better results at Spurs than Pochettino and yet he is now much further down the PL at Villa. Rogers and Pochettino are both managing teams above Southampton, so are they better managers than Koeman? Is the former manager of Swansea who is now at Liverpool better than the current one several places below him?

My point stands. Pochettino was such a clear upgrade on Adkins that he managed to get us advanced one whole place higher than Adkins. I very much doubt that you had heard much about Pochettino before he came here, apart from him giving away that penalty to Owen in the World Cup. But even if you had, he was a totally unkown quantity when it came to the English PL. The vast majority of Saints fans were quite content with what Adkins had achieved, but Cortese rolled the dice and his gamble paid off, Pochettino did prove effective in his first full season. As for your second point, you have no idea whether he was overlooked, wanted more of a break, wasn't interested in some of the vacancies, or whether there were managers appointed to vacancies that had some connection to those clubs. But if the whole point of you arguing this is that you consider that he was somehow a failure for not getting us promoted as champions each of the two times, then you must really appreciate being in such a small minority of opinion. Why is that? Is everybody else wrong?

A manager's football background might command the respect of the players and Koeman's is right at the top, whereas I'm not convinced that Pochettino was that big a draw for incoming players. But I don't think that it plays as strong a part in the success of a manager as other abilities which have less to do with how they fared as a player. Obviously an ability to motivate them is important, as is the ability to employ strategy to get the most out of the players available and a good eye for the type of player who would be an effective addition to the squad. There are enough examples of players who were successful at the highest level of the game, but who were abject failures at management. There are also shining examples of top successful managers whose playing careers were well below that level; Mourinho for example was only a player in the Portuguese second division. When Adkins had managed the fantastic achievement of back to back promotions and some went over the top in worrying whether Liverpool might have come in for him, his managerial record wasn't that far removed from what Brendan Rogers had achieved. It doesn't seem too bizarre to speculate that Adkins might have achieved what Rogers did at Liverpool given the resources that he had. He made the wrong move to Reading (where Rogers also had not done that well) and I hope that he rekindles his career with Sheffield United.

He was doing quite nicely for us in the Premier League until Cortese replaced him. I presume that you would say that Pochettino is a good PL manager and yet he only had us one place higher in the League than when Adkins left. Nobody can be sure whether Adkins might not have done better than Pochettino had he stayed. I look back fondly at what we achieved when he was here and wish him well at Sheffield United.

The home results only add up to 14 games. What happened at the other two?

Usual arrogant leftie sneeering. Of course the views aren't testable before the event. Not even somebody who thinks they are as clever as you think you are knows for certain what the repercussions to our trade would be if we left the EU. And just to put you right, I've already explained that I would vote to leave only if we don't get the concessions the government are after. I believe that is the real world, the one that a substantial proportion of the electorate live in.

Advice ignored, because coming from you, I don't perceive it to be trustworthy or objective. You abide by your economics opinions expressed by those you respect and I'll abide by those that I do. As it's all opinions as to what may come to pass should we leave, there is no definitively correct answer, just conjecture.

They just can't hack it that we pretty well settled all of our debts, whereas charities and local small businesses all around the Portsmyth area suffered losses when they went down for the umpteenth time in their history. I wonder whether they are giving all this lip to the other South Coast teams who are all above them and to Aldershot and Eastleigh who are far closer to them than we, Bournemouth and Brighton are. Whilst we are talking attendances *yawn*, would I be right in thinking that we had more fans at Wembley for the JPT than they did for the FA Cup?

I agree with this. There is a lot of pessimism about how we will fare, based on what other clubs have achieved in the European League. In many ways, we are not typical of many of those clubs. I have faith in the board to identify the sort of additional signings we will need and the combination of Reed and Koeman's abilities to oversee our progress into Europe. Many believe that we might sink a few places because of the additional burden of games, but I am quietly confident that we could qualify next season too.

But talking about buying cups, I confess to having had twinges of conscience these past few years about how we bought the JPT Cup. After all, we had the wealthiest owner in the the division by some distance and were able to buy in players like Lambert and Fonte. The poor unfortunate Skates haven't been able to win the JPT because they do not have the money to buy the calibre of players who helped us win it and I'm surprised that if they are reduced to debates on historical ground attendances, that they are not accusing us of buying that cup.

Maybe this will provide an answer. It might not be the answer you want to hear, but I expect that the person making it cannot be dismissed as being a bit thick like all the others in the No camp. I'm quoting from a Guardian article. The free market thinktank, the Institute of Economics Affairs, makes this point in its paper The EU Jobs Myth. Author Ryan Bourne comments:

Didn't you realise, it's all rhetorical. And if you fall out with them, you'll be fighting the Chinese off when they're armed with sabres and you'll only be wielding a craft knife, apparently. Mind you, the Yanks might side with you and they'll have magnums.

Speaking of key stage 3 as you do later, it is "citing" not "siting" and presumably "though" not "tough." But you're certainly a step up on solentstars. Regarding who had made the right decision, you had not specified that it was the Government, so it was reasonable to infer from your comment that when you said "they", you meant those politicians and businessmen you talked about who had urged us to adopt the Euro or face dire consequences. How you conclude that I inferred that those individuals who lost the debate on the Euro had won anything is a bit bizarre when I clearly said that their credibility had been badly damaged. Amazing the parallels between the debates on the General Election and this one on our EU membership. There is a certain viewpoint that a group of individuals consider to be the one that they feel is so incontestably sound, that anybody who disagrees with them is ranting, a bit simple, a Daily Mail/Express reader, a little Englander, etc. It comes across as incredibly arrogant.

Oh dear. Was I supposed to have answered that I would have preferred the EU to negotiate with China on behalf of a British company? No, apparently I should have realised that it was a rhetorical question and therefore required no answer, especially not one which your opinions indicate isn't the one you wished to hear.

Who made the right decision? Not them, they wanted us in the Euro. The point is well made by Orange that on a matter deemed to be of massive importance by those top politicians and business leaders and amidst the forecasts of doom and gloom from them should we fail to join up to monetary union, they were proved by events to be totally wrong. Therefore, although it is not necessarily the case that they would be wrong on other EU policy matters, their credibility has been badly damaged.

The UK every time.

There's also a petition demanding he is sacked as president on Change.org. The clamour for his departure is becoming deafening.

The situation isn't about "what's on offer" from the EU. The situation is about what we are prepared to accept. The political Union was introduced through successive treaties and the UK electorate were never given the opportunity to vote on it. As has been argued before, Norway, Switzerland and Iceland are small fry compared to us, so our negotiating clout is much stronger. You say that in your opinion there are only two options available, the membership we already have (and you infer that there is nothing we can do to amend it), or the position as an associate member like Switzerland, Norway and Iceland. You say that there is no third option of picking and choosing the bits we like, but that is precisely what we are attempting to negotiate before the referendum. If we do not succeed in reaching a satisfactory conclusion to those negotiations, then we should leave the EU and let them sort it all out themselves. I suspect that if we did leave, we might well start a process of others following suit and joining us in the establishment of a separate trading block precipitating the break-up of the EU in its current form. The EU would be in the position of several of their member states needing to continue trading with us and not wanting tariffs imposed on us to their detriment. It doesn't exactly suggest that they will be capable of an intransigent take it or leave it attitude.

If these conditions were so detrimental to Norway, Switzerland and Iceland, perhaps you could kindly explain why they not become full members. As I said earlier, I'm certain that the EU would place them above all of the more recent countries who joined from the former Soviet Union in terms of desirability as members of their club, so there must be very good reasons why they have decided not to join. Can you throw any light on that for me?

I hope that you are enjoying your cruise. I bow to your superior knowledge regarding electronic goods. However, I presume that we meet the EU standards of production currently, so why would they cease to do trade with us for those electronic products we make here? A few minutes Googling shows that UL have seven sites here in the UK and we also have other similar testing laboratories in the UK, so wouldn't they keep us up to speed with the accreditation requirements that most countries might need? I accept that there might be bureaucratic advantages trading with the EU, but surely once trading links have been extablished elsewhere with other trading blocks, that would follow with them too, especially if the trade was reciprocal.