Wes Tender

I don't accept that. If it were so, then arrangements could be made on the sly that the sought after player deliberately makes statements like this to reduce his price and then splits the difference with the buying club, in terms of increased wages or whatever. Ultimately, we still have the whip-hand in that if we don't accept this reduced offer, we don't need to sell and then it still depends how much they want to buy. We can't allow this to become a precedent, first with Lallana spouting off his gob and now Lovren. If that costs us millions in reduced fees, do you really think that we would accept it? Pretty soon, all the big clubs who have players wanting to join them would tell the players to state publically that they wanted to go to that club to deliberately reduce the fee. I suspect that one answer would be to sell him to another club, if we wouldn't be prepared to let him rot in the reserves if he didn't want to play for us.

It hasn't started yet. How can the start to the season be ruined when it is still a few weeks away?

What's the matter? A bit miffed that I don't agree with your opinion?

Lovren is far easier to replace than Schneiderlin, especially for the money that we are likely to get for him. Schneiderlin is an exceptional player, much more in the rarified air. So we really ought to either say categorically that he isn't for sale, or set the price at a level that would make most rival managers' eyes water. Talk of Arsenal reckoning that he could be bought for 16 million is ridiculous. Tell Wenger £30 million and he's yours. Tell Pochettino to bugger off, we won't sell him to Spurs for any amount of money.

What one has always suspected, but it is interesting to have some confirmation. I wonder how much applies to us? Quite a bit, I would imagine. All of this playing one club against another to raise the price has benefited us, no doubt about it, but when we come to buy, we will see the other side of the coin. What I take with a giant pinch of salt, are the stories that are headlined "X" club has moved ahead of "Y" in the race to sign whichever player. How do they really know?

Fairly easily? Two parts to a player leaving, one the club wants to sell them and two, the player wants to leave. In the case of Liverpool, we were unfortunate that because we had several players good enough to be selected for the World Cup, there was an opportunity for Liverpool's captain to tap them up. I don't believe for one second that the club indicated that any of those players were available to buy. Thus when Gerrard did his bit, Lambert, Lallana and Shaw appeared on their radar as being amenable to the proposition that they could go to clubs like Liverpool and earn mega-wonga. Once Liverpool started to make it known to their media buddies that our star players wanted to leave, then the media circus began to operate, agents suggested that other top clubs were also interested and as a result Shaw went to Man Utd for a World record fee for a full back and Lallana also departed for a vastly inflated fee for somebody of his talent. Liverpool making an offer deemed to be derisory to us, coming back with a higher offer, us refusing again, them making an ultimatum to take it or leave it, doesn't exactly fit in with your analogy that it could be done fairly easily. And neither is the Lovren situation going fairly easily for them either. They might be making slow progress, but at a very high price financially.

There really is so much crap out there about Schneiderlin. Here is a classic example of some femail blogger getting it badly wrong http://hereisthecity.com/en-gb/2014/07/21/jl-which-is-the-better-arsenal-target-schneiderlin-or-carvalho/ I'm sorry dear, but Schneiderlin and Saints have completed 2 full seasons in the Premier League and Schneiderlin has been with Saints for 6 years. If people are going to write blog articles for national consumption, then the least they can do is ensure that they get such basic facts right.

Well I've replied and pointed out the parts that are arguable, but which you assume to be probabilities based on nothing much in particular.

We bought Lovren for £8 million. Therefore the likelihood is that there are other £8 million CBs out there as good as he was at that time, isn't that so? Our scouts identified him as a good prospect, so they can do it again, unless you believe that this find was something exceptional, a find not likely to be repeated easily. Teams like us rely on scouts to unearth hidden gems, teams at the top are lazier and identify those players in teams like ours, or have them thrust at them by greedy agents. The price now is inflated by quite a bit because we have the whip-hand in any negotiations for him. The same for Shaw. Then another stupid point you make, that CBs costing £20 million are unattainable for team like us. Plainly if we wanted to, we could spend the £20 million or whatever we receive for Lovren and buy another CB for the same money, so they are not unattainable to us. But it is sensible that we buy one as good for less money if we can, isn't it? This is hopefully what we have done with Lallana's money and will do with Shaw's fee too. Nobody is disagreeing that we are weak at CB, but until our business is done for that position, then it is premature to make any judgement. Certainly an opinion that it is unlikely that we will get in a player as good as Lovren is groundless. Whether we emerge stronger despite the departures remains to be seen. Of course we aren't stronger yet, but there is some horse-trading still to be done, isn't there? Your insistence that we porbably could not sign a player as good as Lovren is where you are negative. And it isn't as if that is the only area where you are overly negative either. Others have felt the need to point this out to you too.

So we sign a player whose career was going backwards at Lyon, find out that he wasn't half bad playing a particular system tactically and yet anybody we get in to replace him will probably not be as good as him? There really isn't any probability about it. The chances are that he could be better than Lovren, equally as good, or not as good. We could sign a player thought to be poorer on the face of it, but who might prove to be a revelation. We could sign one deemed to be vastly superior, but who turns out to be a dismal flop. Lovren could be that dismal flop at Liverpool, or wherever the greedy git ends up.We really do not know. I realise that you have absolutely no faith in our scouting network, or in Koeman's judgement, otherwise you would take a less jaundiced view of our situation. But carry on wallowing in your negativity if it makes you happy.

We're a provincial club. The provisional club is the lot along the other end of the M27

Ah, but we are told that these players are only leaving because Pochettino and Cortese left, as they loved them. Pochettino is almost certainly using Spurs as a stepping-stone to greater things, but he is going to fall on his arse with them and take two steps backwards in his career as a result. Yes, he probably had more chance of achieving CL football with Spurs than with us, but his career would have benefited more by staying another year with us and taking us to 6th than it will going to Spurs and failing to get above 4th once again.

In his first half season with us, he managed to get us one position higher than Adkins had us when he arrived and Adkins was already headed upwards too at that time. Last season he managed to get us up 6 places higher, which was a creditable achievement and but for a couple of key injuries, we might actually have finished a place or two higher. But the problem that Pochettino faces, is two-fold. Firstly he has inherited a squad of individuals, which he has to get to play as a team which is used to playing his style of football. Therein lies the second problem; those players will have to adapt to double training sessions in order to implement his high-pressing tactics. Even when he has managed to instill that work ethic into the team, every other manager in the division knows how Pochettino's teams play and will have a tactical strategy to counteract it. Pochettino's problem is that he arrogantly refused to change his tactics to counter any opposition team's style of play and as the season goes on, canny managers will learn the lessons from analysing those matches where Spurs are beaten to find them out. Not only that, but because there were several teams in the World Cup playing the high-pressing game, many of the Premier League clubs have taken note of its effectiveness and will adapt it for their teams. It is no longer as effective a weapon as it was. It's laudable for him to harbour the ambition to become champions of the Premiership, but then he doesn't put any time scale on it beyond "one day". What he apparently doesn't realise, is that the Spurs fans and Levy will already have put a time scale on it and if he doesn't get them into the top four this season, that will probably be the end of his tenure with this "big" club. The trouble with achieving his ambition with Spurs, is that there are at least four clubs bigger than them, all well-funded and with decent managers. If he did pull it off and make Spurs champions, then he could walk into any management job he wanted. But as it is far more likely that he will be sacked within a year, his next appointment will be with a lower placed club either here or back in Spain.

I really can't be arsed to answer any of the various points of supposition you make, because that it really what it all is. Supposition. Not facts. If you understand them to be facts, then kindly provide us with the evidence. Otherwise, your post is just the gospel according to Saint Richmond.

They think that they can get him for £15 million, but reckon that we want £18 million. We ought to tell them what we told Liverpool and Man Ure, that it is actually £30 million, also cash up front, hefty sell on percentage, take it or leave it. In my opinion, Schneiderlin is more valuable to us than Lallana and Shaw

City Chelsea Arsenal Man Utd Saints 7th Leicester Burnley WBA Derby Reading Wigan

On the one hand you're perfectly happy to make a judgement on how we will fare based on how many other players might yet leave, and then you say that when you know which players will replace them, you might revise your opinion. If you're going to make a judgement call on the situation at the moment, then have some consistency and do that, not on who might leave. So we lost Pochettino. You are quite happy to offer to revise your opinion if we make a few good signings of players, but apparently not able to quite get yourself to make up your mind whether Koeman was a worthy replacement. Osvaldo didn't exactly add much to the team, nor did Ramirez, so on the face of it, them going will not be such a great loss. So if we get shot of Osvaldo and Ramirez comes good, we are already in a better place. I'm with some others in believing that we have a better manager than Pochettino and quite possibly better players in Pelle and Tadic than Lambert and Lallana.

This /\ The precedents established over the past few years for academy players being introduced into the first team and proving themselves to be perfectly capable of not looking out of place, are there for everyone to see. Eyebrows were raised when we introduced Ward-Prowse into the cauldron of that opening match against Man City and he acquitted himself well. When Bale was first introduced into the first team, most people around me asked "who?". Both Shaw and Chambers elicited a similar response and of course we were privileged to witness Walcott and Oxlade-Chamberlain's blooding into the first team too comparatively recently. The old adage that if a player is good enough, he is old enough certainly applies to our players more than those from most other teams, because we have had the balls to have the courage of our convictions. I have the utmost confidence in the judgement of our coaching staff to decide when the moment has arrived that an academy product is ready to step up to the first team. By that time, they will have already have spent a lot of time playing together with them, so it isn't as if it will a new experience, although of course playing against the players of rival Premiership teams might be.

Yea! Decent ticket prices for once! It will be interesting to see whether the result will be a largish capacity crowd and that the club will benefit financially from the ancilliary sales of merchandise in the shop and sales in the concourse. If so, then it might be an incentive for them to think along similar lines for next season's cup matches.

I wouldn't call you a bed-wetter Charlie.

You'll never get anywhere playing kids, eh? We're doomed. We've lost Lallana, Shaw, Lambert, and will soon be losing Lovren, Schneiderlin, Fonte, Clyne, Chambers, Cork, Rodriguez, Ramirez. Have I missed anybody? Then of course, we will have to replace some players not deemed good enough, like Hooiveld, Yoshida, Mayuka. What's wrong with Wanyama and Davis? Doesn't anybody want them? I'm surprised that the top teams haven't anticipated the rise to prominence of the next batch of youngsters from the academy. Buy them now and they could save themselves £20 million + on their value within a couple of years. We're in meltdown/having a fire-sale, so every players is up for grabs. Quite why we brought in Koeman and then Pelle and Tadic is a complete mystery to me. Didn't anybody read the script?

By all means be underwhelmed if you're impatient for news of signings to replace players departed/yet to depart/those not good enough. It's not unnatural for fans to be impatient, to be nervous of the ambitions of the owner, unsure of the abilities of a new foreign manager to be successful in the Premier League, indeed, unsure of the ability of new players to play in this division when they previously played in what was deemed to be at an inferior level. I'm not content with things yet, or complacent, I doubt that many are. Those are the wrong words. The correct word is patient; happy to wait and see how it all pans out, optimistic that the club has everything in hand, that they will spend that money raised by the sale of those players on quality replacements. There is still time to buy those players before the start of the season and these things can't be rushed. Even if we had anticipated the departures of those players, there are other factors to take into consideration. We are urged to not sell players until we have in place replacement players, and yet presumably we don't expect the selling club to do the same. If they wait until they have replacements signed up before they sell, then logically it means delays, doesn't it? The World Cup has been a fly in the ointment. Some of the players from the latter stages aren't even back at their clubs yet. If we want the better players that you would wish us to sign, then we have to wait and see whether the glory clubs are after them too. If so, our chances of signing them are diminished. But they can only sign so many players for their squads and we are the next level down. As has been hinted, we have players on our radar that may have escaped the attention of other clubs. It is all in the lap of the Gods. But it is still far too early to make rash judgements about the board and their intentions or ambitions. Their actions in replacing Pochettino with Koeman and in turn the level of player he has brought in, is suggestive of ambition, of investment in quality to bring us success, a continuation of the upwards trajectory of our progress. If you can identify anything that you deem to be indicative of a lack of ambition so far, then tell us what it is.

Really? We only lost Lallana and have replaced him with Tadic. Unless we lose Schneiderlin, we have him, Cork, Wanyama, Davis, Ward-Prowse, Gaston and back up with the likes of Reed coming through. How many midfielders do we need? If we play wingers, then Rodriguez when he's fit, Isgrove, Mayuka are possibilities out wide, but then we are probably scouting fast wide players anyway to suit Koeman's style of play.

Trigger

I'm impressed with how well all of our youngsters come across in interviews. They speak clearly and fluently, present themselves well as young professionals and are a credit to themselves and our academy. It really does bode well for our future that we have the next batch of stars on the conveyor belt. James Ward-Prowse, Chambers and Shaw arrived on the scene not so long ago. Just how close is this next batch to stepping up?