Wes Tender

He said it in a vain effort to provide an excuse for his disgraceful behaviour and as a reason for him wanting to leave. It really must be bad when the fans of the club he wishes to join condemn it as unacceptable. But as anybody with any sense believes, he wants to move purely for greed. All of this guff about the club lacking ambition and he doesn't even have the decency to sit down with Reed and Koeman and discuss what the club's ambitions are. He appears not to have noticed that apart from upgrading our manager, we also have bids in for players who are at least the equal of, or better than those who have left. And if we get Armero to replace him, (or either of the Costa Rica CBs) then that would suit me fine. If we don't want to let him rot in the reserves, then we should make a deliberate ploy of selling him to a European club, definitely not Liverpool. Perhaps he would be better off going back to Croatia.

Why would Lovren be upset if Liverpool offered only £18 million, when the release clause is triggered allegedly by a £20 million bid? And I'm totally with you that we ought to refuse to do business with Liverpool. By the way, did we insert a clause in the sale agreements with Liverpool that Lallana and Lambert were not to play against us next season? That would have been an astute move.

Lovren is moaning that he wasn't told about Liverpool's offers. Of course, he wasn't. Didn't they go straight into the bin?

Exactly. It really isn't credible that they were devastated enough to think that the dream they had been sold left with Cortese, when weighed up against the likelihood that they are just after the move purely because of naked greed and egostistical ambition.

You're not a realist, you're a pessimist. It wasn't a rant, but an analogy. I'll accept what I consider to be reasonable, not what you tell me. Shaw is probably going to be the best LB for the next decade, but isn't irreplaceable at this current time. From what I've read, Tajit is better than powder-puff shot Lallana. Morgan, granted would be more difficult to replace; if he leaves. You haven't mentioned Lambert. Next you'll be telling me that we won't get a striker as good as him. And you seem to think that we will only just replace those players that have left and totally ignore the other signings that we needed to make anyway before those players left, you know, the additional signings that will strengthen the team. Or are Fox, Sharpe and Guly irreplaceable with better players too? As I said, if you want to make up your mind with still some time to go, then fine. It might not be the intelligent appoach, but then it is yours.

Why? Because you said so? I think that you should accept that the team we will have at the start of the season will be better. We'll just have to wait and see, won't we? That is what I'm going to do, but if you want to make up your mind now, then good for you.

Why? By the same reasoning, it is just as unlikely that last season's team will not do as well this season, isn't it? Where it is reasonable to say that some players deemed not good enough to play at this level need to be replaced by better players, your reasoning would say that it is unlikely that we could find better replacements than them, is it? In the same way, if we spend the equivalent amount of money accrued by the sale of these three players, why should their replacements not be at least as good? In the case of the players we sold, we have achieved vastly inflated prices for them, so there is the possibility that we could buy players as good for less money. If the spare change was invested in other players as additional cover where we were short of it last season, then surely the squad would be strengthened.

This is the root of the problem. If usually intelligent fans believe this, then what hope do the footballers have? They apparently are prone to swallow any guff a sharp chairman sells them about how they can stay with us and be playing CL football within a year or two, so if in the absence of those assurances because that chairman leaves, they are full of disillusionment about our prospects, then what can be done? It seems simple enough to me. Somebody else needs to assure the poor little darlings that the dream still exists untarnished. I had hoped that Krueger was the one to sell the dream, noted as he is supposed to be for his motivational speaking, but it seems that although he actually had a background in competitive sport, albeit not football, they would rather believe the Italian banker with none. Belief in the ongoing project can be achieved by words if those words were Cortese's but the old adage that actions speak louder than words is the most powerful ammunition the board have in their armoury. Lose players like Lallana, Shaw and Lambert and you need to replace them with better players. Signings of the like of Tadic and Pelle would begin to address that well, and of course there is the parallel situation with the manager, where most would say that Koeman is a step up from Pochettino. I don't know how the situation with Lovren will pan out, but at least we are showing a hard stance by rejecting these offers for him and with luck, that will frighten those clubs away, because they will see him as being too expensive for what he is. But both he and Lovren need to be spoken to by Koeman before they are allowed to do anything, as that is the least they owe the club. If they still want to go, then we screw the club that wants them and reinvest the proceeds wisely on players who will improve the team. If we do that, we will be beter than last year.

A top club.....or even Spurs. i.e. Spurs not a top club.

I reckon that we should be a team that shows no fear of any opposition, regardless of how illustrious they are - by wearing brown shorts.

And an interesting little snippet that the great man learned something tactically from our manager.

It did not 'irk' Liverpool and Man Utd that Saints had players in the England squad. That is an incredibly egotistical way to view it. They wanted our players because they are good and our lads couldn't wait to get out of here. It's a harsh reminder that Saints will NEVER be able to achieve something better than we did last season in the modern game. Player behaviour will not allow it. Can you tell me how many clubs have done this with their best players and top earners? Has it ever worked? If they haven't had the decency or desire to speak to the new Manager then that suggests to me their mind was made up the moment Cortese and Pochettino left. And as I pointed our previously, it was reported that our new Board did not communicate with the players at the start of the summer and so this ****storm was always coming. Lets just hope the Board have learnt a few lessons about this so if we are ever on the verge of something special again they don't give the players ANY reason to agitate for a move. I agree to a certain extent. But how much is the board saying with good reason, that they should wait until they speak to the new manager about his hopes and aspirations and the plans he has for individual players and how much was players being tapped up by the likes of Gerrard about how rich and famous they could be just by warming the bench there? I think that it is far too easy to shed tears about how our team has been decimated by these nasty big clubs and far more difficult to accept that we might well come out of this even stronger, if we spend the bulk of the monies received wisely on stronger replacments. On the face of it, one step backwards to go forward two steps.

Will they? So conversely you don't see the players leaving as being a massive incentive for players to come here? The academy is surely seen as being a fantastic route for youngsters with the likes of Bale, Walcott, Oxlade-Chamberlain and now Lallana and Shaw going to top clubs. Our academy will have received a huge boost in its ability to recruit the very best youngsters. But even players bought in will see that the likes of Lovren who was in the doldrums when he came here, has enhanced his reputation here to the extent that he is now coveted by the top clubs in England and Europe. If Lallana can be bought by Liverpool, why shouldn't Tadic be pursuaded that he is a better player and that if he proves it here, then we are a stepping-stone to Barcelona, Real Madrid or Bayern Munich? Surely Pelle has the opportunity to prove that he can be a top striker in the Premiership with us before returning to a top Italian club with his reputation considerably enhanced. By the category of player that we are approaching will we be judged as to whether we are relegation fodder or not. Ambitious signings will reflect our ambition to succeed, in the same way that players coming in really have to be impressed with the calibre of manager we chose to replace Pochettino (who also used us as a stepping-stone to better things; even if deluded that he will succeed at Spurs)

Let us just concentrate on your statement which I resent, that a player who we signed is "too good for us" shall we? Lovren signed for us, so patently it is absurd to suggest that he is too good for us. If you fail to realise that, then it is you who need to deal with it. Undoubtedly players develop and become the targets of the bigger clubs, but the fact that we are able to either develop them in-house via our academy, or buy them in from other clubs means that at that time, they are not too good for us. Keegan wasn't too good for us when he came here, even though he was European Player of the Year when he arrived. He didn't think that he was too good for us, or else why would he have signed for us? Any player who signs for us is not too good for us, although they might feel further down the line that they can do better than to play for us. The board, (or Gareth Rogers) were at fault for issuing that naive statement about the difficult financial statement they had inherited upon Cortese's departure, which produced the media feeding frenzy, with stupid headlines claiming that were a club in meltdown and open to a firesale of our best players. The board retaliated with a statement that no player would be for sale that the incoming manager wished to keep. The fly in the ointment has been the World Cup, where several of our players have featured, putting them in the spotlight of all the World's top football Clubs. It irked clubs like Liverpool and Manchester United that little ole Southampton had as many players in the England squad as they did and their egos dictated that if they were good enough for England, they really ought to be their players. If they bought them before the tournament started, they could even bask in the glory of saying that here was another Liverpool or Manchester United player in the England team to impress their plastic fans from Tunbridge Wells to China. No doubt there are several players that we now covet from some of those teams like Costa Rica, Algeria and Mexico and we have the money to buy them. Needless to say, if we do buy them, then they are not players who will be too good for us. The idea that we could make an example of Lovren is not laughable at all, but it requires a club to make a stand, at some financial cost on a matter of principle. That cost has to be weighed up against the cost of other players in the squad taking the blackmail route to leave themselves if it succeeds. As I said in another thread, I don't know what the implications for us are if there is a release clause in Lovren's contract of say £20 million that has been triggered, but presumably even if there was, we are not then obliged to sell to a club of Lovren's choice. If we have to sell, then let's p*ss him off by selling him out of the Premiership if we can. Liverpool or Spurs definitely ought to be out of the reckoning. I also think that it is a bit naive to expect us to believe that these professional footballers came here because they were pursuaded by Cortese that they would be playing CL football with us. The players who have left, (with the exception of Ricky Lambert) didn't leave because they felt upset that Cortese or Pochettino were gone and the new board did not share his ambitions, they left for reasons of pure naked greed when a bigger club feted them and massaged their egos. As I already pointed out, how can they claim otherwise when they have not even had the common decency to see what the new manager's plans and ambitions are, in the indecent haste to leave before he even had a chance to speak to them?

It's hard to take you as seriously somehow, now that the player you have named yourself after has proven to be a greedy, egotistical git, threatening to never play for us again to gain his move to Liverpool. And bingo, if reports are to be believed, here is another player threatening the same action to gain a move to where? Ah, yes, Liverpool. Lallana thought that he was too good for us and here you are saying that Lovren is far too good for us too. He might be capable of not looking out of place in the top club team, but frankly I resent the implication that he is too good for us. Citing other teams that were allegedly after him when we were making overtures holds little water; after all, he chose us. One would have thought that any player would have gone to Barcelona over us, wouldn't they? It is rather suggestive of his agent trying to inflate his purchase price by mentioning other interested parties, is it not? The truth is, his career was a bit in the doldrums at Lyon and he resurrected it with us and now wants to jump ship for a glory team. Whereas I don't blame him or Lallana, or Shaw for wanting to improve their lot at a bigger club, the way that he appears to think that he can achieve that, stinks as much as Lallana's actions did. So we lose our manager, and a couple of players comprising a ageing striker returning to his roots, a young academy product prodigy and Lallana, and Lovren somehow without discussing the club's ambitions with Reed or the new manager, believes that the pie in the sky ambitions that persuaded him to join us, are no longer in existence. What needs to happen, is that he has a week or two before he returns to us from the World Cup and and when he does, he hopefully finds that as well as hiring a better manager than Pochettino, we will have also signed up a better striker than Lambert and a better midfielder than Lallana. Then he can sit down with Reed and Koeman, who should be able to persuade him that our ambitions are undiminished. If the truth of the matter is that like Lallana he wishes to leave because he has had his head turned by excessive wage offers from Glory clubs, then the club should play hardball with him, point out that he had signed a lengthy contract and hold him to it. If he wishes to stain his career by gaining a reputation as a maverick, prepared to renege on his contract by blackmailing his club, then I would be delighted if we were prepared to make an example of him.

Agreed, Tadic shouldn't overlook both playing in the Premier League, or indeed playing for us. At the worst, he can use us as a stepping stone. If he excels like Lovren or Pochettino did, he could soon be on his way to a top club after a year or two - or even Spurs.

I reiterate what I said earlier. You have absolutely no idea at all what KL's aspirations are and claiming to know it once again is making you look idiotic. By all means add "in my opinion" "probably" or some such get-out clause, but please do not state it as a fact, because it probably isn't. Also I expect that you'll find that most of the less wet behind the ears posters will share the view that Cortese threw a strop because she wanted to have some say in how her money was spent and that Pochettino and those players left purely for reasons of ego and greed.

Regrettably with Lowe in charge, we just didn't have the money to play hardball with him. And although Kenwyne -Jones is not the only player to have tried it, it is still comparatively rare. But we could potentially be the first club if I'm not mistaken to have two players or more attemtpting this strategy within a short time frame.

same thought a Adrian.... TOTAL crap

No, not good enough for Saints. His mental attitude stank. He didn't ever really want to be here. He was bad for team morale. He admitted that he found it tough playing in the English PL because the poor dear thought that the tackling was a tad uncompromising and the pace of play too fast. If he's wanted by Inter, they obviously think that he's good enough for them, yet he wasn't good enough for Juventus to sign him. Want me to list all the historical achievements for Juve? One would have thought that he might have made a bit more effort to excel there, considering that he was back in his beloved Italy, playing at a level that he considered he was worthy of, but no, not good enough for us, not good enough for them either. The Italian national team obviously made a mental note about how he had failed here and at Juve, but Inter reckon that they can rehabilitate him. Let's got shot of the liability and chalk it down to poor judgement by Pochettino.

Well reasoned. I believe that you are right to expect that professional players at the top level ought to be able to slot into a new team, but that there are some mitigating factors that might make that transition easier or harder. If a player comes in from a different country, there are potential differences to the style of play and possible language problems. If a player is played out of position, again it would take time to adapt. The new team might play a totally different style of football to his previous club. Some managers are better at getting maximum effort from some players than others. His colleagues have to be easy to integrate with. Lastly, the player's mental attitude plays a large part in it. In our particular case, team sprit was a major factor in our success; we played as a unit and for each other. To an extent, some of that unity has been lost, so it depends on the players being brought in having a sociable nature. A player like Osvaldo plainly did not. Luckily Koeman likes to have his teams play fast attacking football. In that respect, the style of play under Pochettino is not that different, as indeed it wasn't when Pochettino took over from Adkins. With luck, factors like these suggest that the transition for players coming to us from abroad are not too daunting, especially if the manager knows them well and therefore has formed an opinion on how well he thinks they will adapt here.

We're probably the best club to initiate such a policy. Apparently Lallana had threatened never to play for us again and now it is rumoured that Lovren might follow suit. If we buckle under this blackmail, could Schneiderlin be the next? Already with Lallana and potentially Lovren, we will have had more of this than any other club within my memory, so that it seems that we try really hard to keep our star players and this is their weapon of last resort. But we more than most are able to implement this strategy because of wealthy ownership and it might be cost-effective in the long term. If we were to take the path of letting the player rot in the reserves, it ought to bring matters to a head with the football authorities. What if the club were forced to accept a lower fee for the player because he had forced the sale at a lower level? Why should the club lose out? Although it has been pointed out that if a club took this stance, other players would be put off going to that club in the future, but the other side of that coin is that the player would seriously affect his chances of going elswhere in the future, as he would gain pariah status as a disruptive force who might pursuade his new team mates to take similar action. If we allowed another player to get away with it, there is no saying where it might end, not only with us, but with other clubs.

I just love the way that some of our fans know precisely what goes on in KL's mind, so that they can say with certainty what her ambitions are and how she will seek to fulfil them. How dare she require her CEO to allow her some input into how he spent her money, thus causing him to leave in a huff. As for the manager and the players, did they leave because they sensed that KL had moved the goalposts regarding the club's ambitions to play in Europe, or did they move for more money and prestige that came from managing or playing for a bigger club? And as for some players stating that they wanted to leave because they thought that the club lacked ambitions to play in Europe, don't you think that they should have met Ronald Koeman to see what his plans were first? Their indecent haste to depart is rather suggestive that money was their prime motivator. But go on naively deluding yourself that it is all the fault of KL's lack of ambition, regardless of the statement of intent that the appointment of somebody of RK's calibre presents. You say that the answer to your questions is simple. Yes, they suggest themselves to somebody who is a bit simple in their reasoning, especially when you admit yourself that the reasons don't make sense.

If there is any truth in this rumour at all, it is long overdue that a club makes a stand on a matter of principle, otherwise it will become endemic. I do not know whether there is a clause in his contract that stipulates that an offer of £20 million or more could trigger his release if he desired it and what the legal implications are regarding our choice to refuse it, or to choose the club we sell to. If we are compelled to sell him for £20 million, can we then p*ss on him by selling him to a club of our choice rather than his? What are the legal implications then? If we have to sell him and we have a say in where he goes, it ought not to be to either Liverpool or Spurs, although there would be some schadenfreude in him being reunited with Pochettino, as I suspect that he will be unable to get them into CL football and will be gone before the season ends. If no clause exists regarding the trigger fee, then we should do as we have with Lallana and Shaw, set an exorbitant fee and hope that the price will put off his suitors. If we get an ultimatum from him that he will go on strike, we should let him rot in the reserves. He might engineer a move at some stage, but it would be nice to think that other potential buyers in the future will avoid him as a troublemaker. If it is at all practical, we should also refuse to do business with his agent in future, as I suspect that he will have been the one responsible for putting the idea into Lovren's head. If he does indeed intend to strike to force his departure, then it will be a disappointment from the point of view that his career at Lyon was a bit in the doldrums and he was not popular with his colleagues as I understand it. We have played a significant part in his rehabilitation and it would be a bit of a kick in the balls to have him pay us back in this way.

If you think it's bad now, just wait until the World Cup is over and the school holidays start.