Wes Tender

This is England and we have a history of allowing immigrants to come here and then try and change the politics of the country into a model that they espouse. Some are pretty extreme and Marxism can certainly be bracketed in that category. But we're a pretty liberal lot and tolerate the right to freedom of speech from those who would seek to overthrow the establishment that they despise. And then they wonder why the British public tire of our liberal immigration stance and call for these extremists to be deported. So Milliband's dad served in the Royal Navy during the war, so he must actually be a patriot. Well, not necessarily. It could also be the case that his hate towards the Nazis was greater than his love of this country and our services were merely the vehicle for him to play a fairly minor part towards the defeat of Hitler. There is a great deal of naivety and hypocrisy on this issue. Naivety in believing that the Milliband boys will not have been influenced in any way by indoctrination by their father and that it is only the Daily Mail of British newspapers that is capable of this sort of mud-slinging to support a political agenda. Newspapers on the left are equally as capable. As for hypocrisy, there are several rich veins. Ralph Milliband despised the British establishment and yet was quite content to take measures to avoid paying his taxes in death duties. He also seems quite content that his children took advantage of the elitist education provided by the Oxbridge Universities. As has already been pointed out, the usual suspects from the left of the spectrum on here are incandescent with rage at the Mail attacking one of their heroes, but see nothing amiss with their infantile joy when Margaret Thatcher died. Further hypocrisy came in the form of Alistair Campbell on Newsnight attacking the editor of the Mail, calling him a bully. The irony was deliciously rich, as he proceeded to bully him, haranguing him mercilessly, not letting him get in a word edgeways. To his credit, the fellow remained calm and measured and made Campbell look like the jibbering idiot that he is. The reality is that this Mail article is a piece of propaganda attempting to blacken Milliband's name and as dispicable as it is, doing it via his dead father, I don't for one moment believe that it is a tactic that Campbell would have shied away from given the opportunity. After all, he was the arch spin-doctor apologist for Labour, turning media propaganda into an art form; an unprincipled opportunist. When the next election comes around, this episode will largely be forgotten, but what will remain in the back of peoples' minds is something about the Labour leader's dad being an extreme leftie and that there is the possibilty that he might have leanings in that direction too. That was entirely the object of the exercise and as distasteful as it has been, it is a blunt but effective weapon.

We could only manage to come second in the first division in 83/84 too. That's typical of bloody Saints; one dismal failure after another.

What a glaring omission. As you rightly say, he has been far and away our best defender and I doubt that we would be talking in terms of this record without his contribution.

Ah, I get you. Misguided says that he was pleased that I expressed myself in words, so presumably pictures are not favoured by him. But do you think that he would understand better if I did it in comic book style?

Little things please little minds.

How else am I to contribute to an internet forum rather than in writing? And you call me clueless. Then you respond "I think what you are suggesting...." and then you go on to ridicule it, not even being sure of what I was suggesting. Nice one, Misguided. One only has to click on your quote to see that your knowledge comes from extensive research on Wikipedia and a quick cut and paste job. Frankly I'm amazed that somebody with your encyclopaedic grasp of football knowledge couldn't respond without such aids. But just to clarify, because I really must have expressed myself badly for you to have misunderstood, when I called Pochettino a relative nobody, I meant that he was not well known in this country. Some with longer memories might have made the connection that he was the player that gave away a penalty to Owen before they realised that he managed Espanyol, unless they followed Spanish football and even then if you're going to knock Adkins' record since leaving, then also have a look at Pochettino's record before arriving. It wasn't exactly stellar towards the end, was it? As there have been only 6 games played so far, I think that it is a bit premature for you to be putting too much credence on the relative positions of both managers at this stage. After all, you were made to look a bit of an idiot when we only improved one position on where Adkins left us last season having taken a "punt" on Pochettino.

Feeling a bit sore having gloated at about what you said when Adkins was sacked and having it exposed as a load of tosh, Misguided? So we ended the season one whole place higher than the position which you considered to be underachievement on nearly a QPR scale. Big deal. Reading back through that last paragraph I wrote, I don't see anything in it that wasn't fair comment at the time. Perhaps you'll kindly point out the responses you made to it at the time where you argued against anything I said there. All I can find is some ridiculous table comparing the chalk and cheese records of other Saints managers in a vain effort to belittle Adkins' achievements and a brilliant assessment of Cortese's actions in replacing him summarised as "taking a punt :lol:" on Pochettino. Is my comprehension of that expression correct, that it was an action comprising a significant element of risk, a gamble? Isn't that what I had inferred in my post that you kindly reposted? Just for the record, I'm relatively content with where we are now, but not entirely convinced that we are anywhere yet that we wouldn't have been had Adkins remained and received the additional funds given to Pochettino. We have a tighter defence, but then again it was showing signs of improvement at that time. But I feel that we are playing less entertaining football currently. I'm still reasonably optimistic that with the additional expenditure this season and the development of our youngsters, we could still end the season as high as 6th. Clear?

And with 16 matches of the season remaining, his replacement began his mission to take us to the next level; a massive leap upwards of one whole place.

It was interesting to watch the match interviews of both him and Hollow Way, who are two peas out of the same pod in many ways. Big Fat Sam was apoplectic with rage at the injustice of it all, whereas Hollow Way's body language was fascinating, rubbing his face, smooting non-existent hair, etc. Both are under pressure early on in the season and both love a really good moan about how hard done by their teams have been and how they are unfairly treated by the referees. BFS's players are probably coached by him into trying to obtain any advantage they can by moaning at the refs, falling over easily to gain free kicks, time-wasting, etc. Hollow Ways players themselves are not as bad as West Ham's in that regard, although Chamakh’s dive was worthy of the utmost derision. Hollow Way should get him to spend time on the training ground perfecting his technique.

Why wouldn't Adkins have attracted the players that we have under Pochettino? What particularly would have attracted the Kenyan at Celtic or the Croat at Lyons to the Argentian who was previously managing in Spain? Ramirez came under Adkins. Excuse my naivety but I had thought that money was the primary consideration that attracted players.

Pack the Pork? A rasher statement would be hard to imagine, you swine.

Ah, but we did have protests when events much less serious in comparison to your dodgey ownership happened to us. When ownership of our club was obtained by Rupert Lowe via the reverse takeover by Secure Retirement, there was much dissent from the fans which led to us being featured on the Panorama TV programme "The Money Game." Much of the information about the devious dealings of our board was furnished by Saints fans and passed to our local media journalists, who had the guts to run with it. This is in sharp contrast to your News journos like factless Neil Allen who have had info given to them by the likes of Micah Hall and have done nothing about it. When Lowe was ousted before the EGM by Wilde and Co, we also investigated them and when the proposal was put forward that we be taken over by that Hedge Fund lot that eventually took over Coventry, we were against that too. When Lowe returned, there were protest marches and a boycott of matches by a sizeable section of our fans. So please don't come the line that if what happened to you happened to us, we would be acquiescent towards it and take it up the arse like your lot did.

We need to be a bit more careful in posting threads like this. Some lazy journo is probably at this very moment getting the wrong end of the stick and preparing his story blowing the whole thing out of proportion. I can see the headlines now with photo evidence taken way out of context; Manager's rift with future England star paves way for Man Utd/ Chelski / Arsenal/ Man City (name your favourite candidate) swoop.

Nice to see Stelling praising Southampton for the way that we champion young British talent, but a bit of a shame that he can't quite bring himself to credit Cortese for that instead of Pochettino. I can understand that the reason is that he can't praise Cortese because it would seem a slight towards his mate Matt, but any praise in our direction from him is to be welcomed. I don't think that there were many Saints fans who were not a bit miffed at the way that the Adkins episode was handled and in my opinion, the results at the end of last season and the beginning of this mean that any fans who hold the position that the jury is still out on Pochettino have a reasonable viewpoint at the moment. It would be nice to have media attention which was more even-handed about the events of the past few recent years, but it is understandable that personal loyalties and their attendant agendas will naturally mean that impartial objectivity is difficult to achieve. If Cortese is the bad guy for his stance that Club legends are expected to pay for their tickets and the way that Adkins was dismissed, then equally he should receive praise for the success that I hope we achieve under Pochettino, the way that we bring on our youngsters through the academy and our aim of playing a style of football which we aspire to be called "the Southampton way"

It does seem that all through our journey back from the third division and continuing to the present time, our squad appear to have retained excellent team spirit and a level-headed harmony towards each other. I believe that this began right from the beginning of our upwards push with the signing of several individuals who had been captains of their former sides. I suspect that at one time we had a squad comprising perhaps 6/7 players with captaincy experience. Generally a player who is made captain has qualities of leadership, a never say die determination and is capable of setting an example to his team. Perhaps that team spirit and the fact that we had that calibre of player meant that big time Charlie egos would not be tolerated. It seems that when we have brought in players since, we place as much importance on their characters as we do on their ability. The result has been that new recruits appear to settle in quickly and make friends with most of their colleagues without forming cliques. This is interesting, as it would be easy for there to be cliques of the older players and the younger players, the Latins and the British, but the outward appearance has been that this is not overtly so. Up until the signing of Osvaldo, it was evident that we had avoided signing any player with the remotest hint of a bad boy attitude, but his signing can perhaps be excused on the basis that Pochettino knew him well and how to handle him whilst certain that he could get the best from him. It was encouraging to read stories in the media about how new players had received such friendly assistance from their colleagues to help them find a place of their own and generally feel welcome, enabling them to settle in quickly. I have a suspicion that where players we are targeting know players who are here, they get a very positive report of what a friendly bunch of lads we have and that must be a factor in them coming here in the first place on the one hand, and remaining loyal to staying with us once they have been here a while on the other.

Let's hope that the front four manage to find their scoring boots, as it seems that this season they have left them in the changing rooms. You only have to go back just over a decade when we last had a rock solid back four. Niemi, Claus, Killer, Dodd and Bridge were arguably as good as the current four. I don't think that we have had as good a back four as we have now since then though.

Seems that we were lucky to win that, as they had at least 6 clear chances to score from telling balls across the goal that only required their strikers to be a second quicker, or to have 1" longer legs. It reminds me of the occasional game that we had in the lower divisions where we were all over a team but failed to put away a number of chances, so BC must be feeling a bit miffed that they aren't into the next round. If we come across more accomplished opposition in the next round, we would get hammered playing like that, so I hope we play a few more of our higher calibre players. However, it was good that we were able to give some more of our youngsters a bit of a run out and they at least looked promising.

I've had it with these TV streams for the same reasons cited by Art. They attempt to load up all sorts of virus-ridden spam like Delta toolbar and other rubbish and then you have to spend ages running your armoury of malware seekers to try and get rid of them. Radio Solent commentary for me from now on. I'm certainly not going to pay £18/£20 walk-up to watch our second team play Bristol City.

Oh, thanks. There was a Liverpool forum I posted on yesterday which claimed that amongst other reasons why they hadn't beaten us, the absence of Countinho and Suarez was a factor. Other Liverpool fans have suggested that Johnson would have caused us problems out wide. So I had pointed out that all of those players had been in the team beaten by us last time out and asked what was their excuse then? I think I read somewhere the suggestion by one of us that it was because Lucas wasn't playing that day, although I see that he came on for them at half-time for Allen. But as you say, you can only play what's in front of you and they have to consider themselves lucky that Fox was unavailable to torment them down their right flank.

Who's rewriting history? The 9 saying that we would have lost to them had Coutinho played is nonsense and I was merely pointing out that when we last beat them, Coutinho, Suarez, Sturridge and Johnson all played, so presumably they were stronger then with those players. Who knows, had he played, Coutinho might have scored an own goal, been sent off, anything is possible that might change the course of a match either way.

And you might as well add Suarez and Johnson to the list of players that had they been playing, would have beaten us hands down. But as all of them were playing against us when we were the last team to beat them, (admittedly when they played us away), there is absolutely no foundation to your claim that they would have beaten us had Coutinho played.

Gordleton Mill?

We share the honours with Man City for having three players in the team of the week. Needless to say, it was our goalkeeper Boruc, Clyne and Lovren that gained the honours. Clyne had made the most tackles in any match on Saturday (11), which is an incredible performance.

As I said, the possibility of future Labour governments here would be greatly reduced, but I accept that there will always be a rump of Labour support in various parts of the country. But get rid of those Scottish MPs and there will be much more scope for bringing in legislation that brings about reforms such as boundary changes to equalise the number of voters required to return a Labour MP in those constituencies, thus further weakening their position. And how much of the current legislation that encourages the growth of UKIP is supported by those Scottish Labour MPs? Perhaps without them it would be much easier to adopt Euro-sceptic policies that would take the wind out of UKIP's sails. I personally don't think we should stop at Independence for Scotland or even England. Let's declare UDI for Southern England, basically Wessex + London. We would have the Navy at Skatesmouth, the Army at Aldershot, major ports at Southampton and Bristol, Airports at Heathrow, Gatwick, Bournemouth, Bristol and Southampton, the financial brains of the City of London, permanent Conservative government at Westminster, the best sporting venues of Wembley, Lords, Twickers, Ascot, Cowes, education at Eton, Harrow, Winchester and Oxford University, Silicon Valley along the M4, the monarchy remaining at Windsor and Buck House, the list of positives goes on and on. This area would probably have the highest per-capita earnings in Europe, devoid of the major economic black spots apart from in the bigger cities like parts of Portsmouth.

What this simpleton fails to understand is that they can't have total independence of government, set their own taxes and government expenditure and keep the £. They can keep the monarchy if they wish, (as that is purely symbolic), provided that they pay their share towards the Civil List, but if they fail to run their own economy properly, then that will affect the £. And why should we accept them upsetting our currency when they don't want to contribute towards it with their taxation revenue? No, let the bleeders join the Euro and take their chances with the Greeks, Portugese, Spanish, Bulgarians and Romanians. Or if they don't like that, let them introduce their own currency, the Scottish Pound if they wish and have it float (or sink) against the other World currencies. Frankly, I'd love Scotland to depart and take their MPs out of the English Parliament whilst they're at it. I've never accepted that they and the Welsh should have their own Parliaments/Assemblies and yet be able to have representation in our Parliament voting on what are purely English matters, the infamous West Lothian question. And then that whole scenario is made worse by us being governed by a Scottish Mafia of Cabinet Ministers these past recent decades, particularly under Labour, which has a disproportionate number of MPs elected in Scotland compared to their population. The Scots rejoice that if they had total independence,they would almost certainly never be governed by the Conservatives, but equally getting rid of the Scottish vote for the English Parliament would greatly reduce the chance of Labour governing us. I'm all for it. Bring it on.