Wes Tender

That depends on whether you base your assessment as to which is the top club purely on league position or on historical prowess. In recent history, i.e. the past thirty or forty years, none of them, including the Skates, had a record of success at the top level to match ours. And don't Swindon count as a Southern Club? They even have a stint in the Premiership for a very short while.

The land might well have been sold had Southampton not been bought out of administration by Markus Liebherr and we had no further need of it and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that it might have had an application for housing to be built on it. Bearing in mind the pressure from Central Government for more housing development in the South East, that planning application might have been granted. The pertinent question that should be answered by the objector, is whether she would prefer to have the land used as a training facility for a few players mostly and occasionally for a reserve team fixture every fortnight or so, or whether she would prefer the possibility of high density new housing units to be built on it.

Agreed. Conference league class.

I wrote a letter to the Echo about it, but don't know whether they will take it up. Anybody want to cover the other fans' websites like the Ugly? Another possibility that crosses my mind is to buy some of those giant cards from the Card Factory at 99p each and collect hundreds of signatures on them from fans outside the stadium before the next match.

I'm sure that there are many out there who still have plenty of time to buy a card and a stamp and send it to Markus Liebherr, so I'll continue bumping this thread unless it is made a sticky...

That's a question that only he can answer. But I'll have a stab at it, purely through conjecture. Yes, he has built a solid reputation as a banker and is well respected in that sphere. But he has a strong personal relationship as a trusty friend and Lieutenant to Markus Liebherr, one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Nicola was apparently intrumental in putting forward this project of ownership of Saints before Markus and Markus has invited Nicola to take on the position as Chairman because he trusts him implicitly to run the club. So what is in it for both of them? Well, of course there is the possibility of them restoring the club to its former position as a Premiership club and then selling it at some point for a good profit. But I believe that both of them will derive some considerable enjoyment in applying their business skills to that end. It could be an exciting journey, fraught with risk and different to anything that they have both been involved in previously. But the sheer pleasure that they could both derive from managing to turn a club in the third division back into one of the elite clubs in the top division of the World's most prestigious league is a challenge they probably both relish. Markus is probably paying him what he would have earned as a top banker. Nicola's reputation will be much higher profile as the Chairman of a Premiership Club, especially if he has managed to get us there from the third division. Maybe it is a career change for him that has arrived at just the right time for him and his family. They are obviously a consideration and might also welcome living in England for a few years. Although not anywhere in the same league as Cortese in the Banking World, a similar question could have been asked about the previous Chairman. Regrettably for him and us, he only succeeded in tarnishing his reputation by getting us relegated twice to our current lowly position, but there was a point originally where he gained a great deal of kudos as one of the youngest Chairman of a Premiership club.

What was published by Wilde, was what he described as a manifesto. There is a difference between the two things, believe it or not. You also need to take into account the varying circumstances prevailing at that time and compare them against those in-situ now. At the time of Wilde's manifesto, the ownership of the club was split into factions through those who controlled it by their shares . The purpose of that manifesto was not to curry favour with the ordinary fans, but to attract the support of the shareholders at an EGM, so it was pretty much the same as a manifesto put out by a political party preceding an election. Liebherr owns the club outright. He does not need to have a Supporters Charter at all if he couldn't be bothered to. But he and Cortese recognise that it is good business practise to keep the customers of a business happy and apart from the odd cynic like you, most people will welcome this initiative. And in case you hadn't realised, the campaign to send a Christmas card thanking Markus Liebherr for rescuing our club had already been set in motion before this Charter had been sent out. It could well be that people feel more inclined to do that because of this Charter, but it is not a compulsory action and if any feel as you do and can't be bothered to make this small gesture, then you can save yourself a few bob and feel like Scrooge come Christmas, if that's what makes you happy.

Well, it's the first that I've heard that they had one. What really is the point in having a Supporters' Charter though, if none of the supporters, apart from perhaps a few like you, knew of it?

A very interesting brochure just dropped onto my doormat, entitled the "Southampton Football Club Supporters' Charter". I don't recall ever receiving one of these before and it appears to be an initiative of Nicola Cortese's. Apparently from reading the attached letter from David Luker that accompanied it, Cortese has had a meeting with Malwhinney about it and he stated that it summed up a lot of the good things that are happening here. Certainly it is an initiative that is to be welcomed, especially as the previous incumbents either did not seem to know about good customer relations, or else they didn't care either way. Especially good are Cortese's concluding paragraphs on the back page of the booklet. "As custodians of your club, we have defined and clear plans to take it forward. It is our intention to take the club back to the Premier League and ensure that at the same time it is competitive within the league in which it sits. We want to engage with business partners at all levels and be seen as a responsible corporate organisation adding value to the Community with the projects we undertake. Within the next few months we will be delivering news of our Supporter Engagement Policy whereby our supporters, specifically our Season Ticket holders, can actively play a part in dialogue with their club in an effort to shape its destiny, such as pricing policies for ticketing and retail products. We intend this strategy to be ground-breaking in football by enabling supporters to build a unique relationship with the Club" How refreshing and professional these people are.

well, if the Mods won't make this a sticky, i'll just have to keep on bumping it...

Letter sent to the Echo.

Thanks St Joan for refreshing everybody's memory on this great idea. I'm doing my Christmas card list now and Markus Liebherr is on it. Come on, Mods; it's the season of goodwill to all men (even Lowe deserves our goodwill for facilitating ML's arrival and also for helping rid us of all those other leeches). Surely this deserves to be a Sticky, as there is probably no man around who deserves the gratitude of so many people associated with this Club more than Markus.

Yes, I feel it too and thanks for digging up that post. Things looked pretty bleak at that time, although we could at least be thankful that all of those who been instrumental in our demise were no longer part of the hierarchy and could never again darken our future now that their shares had no further value. At that time, having people like Markus Liebherr and Nicola Cortese owning and running the club, with Alan Pardew as manager, seemed so remote a possibility that it was almost laughable. But as you say, it is much more fun watching a team full of players committed to the shirt, playing at a level where their values and ambitions are honest and the overpaid mercenaries have left. It is much better on here now that the divisive elements are gone from control of the club and there is absolutely nothing to divide the fan base. Any Premiership plastic fans that followed us before have gone and we are down to the hardcore of fans, but look at how the numbers are growing steadily now that we have regained the winning habit. Why, even the number of plastics that deserted us to the blue side has diminished again and the prospect is there for the pendulum to swing once more towards being the number one football club on the south coast. In April, we were the laughing stock and Pompey were the lucky bastards finding yet another wealthy Arab to bail them out. Now they must secretly envy us, as they are the laughing stock, having now attracted the only two Arab's with hardly two pennies to rub together. Amidst one of the dullest, dreariest, wettest autumns on record, there is a ray of sunshine and a feeling of warmth emanating from St Mary's Stadium. The prevailing feeling is firmly one of optimism, hope and rising expectations for better things ahead.

Hopefully we would arrive at the play-offs having reached a position within striking position of them by the time of the January transfer window. We will then have invested in a few extra players to strengthen the squad and add depth to protect against injuries and suspensions. Arriving at the play-offs in that state, it will not be a foregone conclusion that we will prevail and be the best of the four teams with us, but certainly the impetus and confidence we will have accumulated will be telling factors in our favour.

It is too easy to make a sweeping generalisation like this. On our current form, we have either beaten or drawn against most of the teams above us in the table. Equally, they will be playing each other too and taking points off each other. Additionally, there are lower down teams that will also beat the teams above them, just as Brighton did to us. There are teams like us that are creating a head of steam and rising up the table, just as there will almost certainly be other teams who have got off to a flying start, but who will hit the buffers, possibly because of lack of depth in their squads, injuries to key players and suspensions. It is like a marathon and we started in last position, but are moving strongly up the field towards the halfway mark.

Murty is a great player for us. I'm frankly amazed that he has returned fit enough to play a full 90 minutes after such a long lay off. It has become very apparent that we have tightened up the right flank with his return and he is the consumate professional in his application and spirit. I'm pleased to read that he was vocal with instructing and encouraging those around him. We have several former captains in the team, but in terms of the length of experience and the prowess of the teams that they captained, Murty has to have the best credentials and it shows.

You contradict yourself in this post. The original premise, is based on your assertion that many of the fans along the M27 corridor will go to watch both teams. Therefore it follows logically by your reasoning that if the Skates were to go out of business, many of those fans, especially to the West side of Portsmouth would start going to watch us instead. So it is actually in our interests to have the Skates cease to exist, although it would be a dull World without their rivalry. Anyway, as several others have already pointed out, the concept might work if the two football teams are housed within the same city, but I don't exactly see a comparable list of clubs from separate cities, although no doubt you would see us as ground-breaking innovators. However, there are several good reasons why this has not seriously been taken up by other clubs in neighbouring cities, historical rivalries, transportation problems and local pride being some of them.

Can't say that I'm particularly impressed with your list. You've pretty well named most of the examples available and the list was already getting a bit thin when you got to Fayed and Mandaric. I stand by the qualification that I started my post with; that was that unless proven otherwise, Liebherr and Cortese seem on the face of it different to the majority of Chairmen of other clubs and IMO better.

Is this World cup for England being staged next month? Did i miss something? I hadn't even heard that we had put in a bid for it yet? Oh....2018? Christ! How last minute are we? We should have made our intentions clear at least five years ago. That bloody Rupert Lowe!

I think that your train of thought is too much rooted in our past history, in particular the history of the past decade. When Lowe spouted forth on such matters, it was easy to dismiss it all as empty rhetoric, a bluff to try and force up the price, to inflate the player's prowess as a commodity to ensure the best price towards upping the dividend to the shareholders when we actually made a profit and a source of income to keep our head above water when we were in dire financial straits. Everybody quickly came to realise that Wilde's utterances were also all p*ss and wind. Had ML been our owner at the time of the Bridge move, it was feasible that if we wanted to keep him, we were in the Premiership and could afford to pay him the wages that would have satisfied him, if we wanted to. What was obvious, was that we were totally incapable of that option under the Lowe board. At the moment, it is not possible, except from a position of cynicism, to form any judgement about the probity of what Cortese says, as there is no precedent. I personally accept Cortese's position that we are not a selling club anymore. We certainly don't need to sell any player we don't want to just to balance the books. That is not the same as having a player who wishes to be with another club, either because he wants to earn more money, or because he is not getting games. If a player wants to leave, it is better that he goes, but that does not mean that we cannot inflate the purchase price to the highest level if we want to keep him. We would do that because it is good business practise, not because we have to. Unless proven otherwise, I will take exception to Cortese and Liebherr being lumped together with all the other Chairmen and owners in British football, as on the face of it so far, we have been exceptionally lucky to have people in charge of our club who are head and shoulders better than probably 95% of the owners of other clubs.

I worded it badly. What I meant to say was that their Council were not very helpful towards plans for the Skates to relocate their flea pit away from Fratton. There were plans proposed for the stadium to be relocated to next to Gunwharf and then to Horsea Island, both of which were deemed to be impractical for one reason or another. I agree that at present it looks as if their current second Arab with little money cannot afford to entertain anything other than the redevelopment of the existing site and the Council would have little objection to that as it is already sited there and any improvements to it would be an improvement to what is really one of the ugliest pieces of land in Portsmouth. I agree with you also that building a much bigger stadium would be commercial suicide, especially if they are relegated. It seems that the redevelopment work would add debt to the club, which is already racking up debt currently. Without the debt we had pre-ML, we can sustain our running costs with the levels of attendance we have, but the Skates probably could not achieve their required attendance levels in the fizzy pop division to cover their running costs and debts. I reckon that that is something that many of their fans are still in denial about.

Well, good luck to the Posh fans trying to get a chant made for him. They have a couple of potential tunes for themselves, but God knows what words would scan to either the Bob Marley song or the Film title tune.

On the other hand, we run an annual showcase boat show on our waterfront which is renowned and respected throughout the Yachting world. It show that we can do these things. The key to Portsmouth's waterfront developments is precisely that the run down docks area needed development, as the port is in decline as the Royal Navy declines. There are now more Admirals than ships. Gunwharf was formerly HMS Vernon and the shops are just a collection of Factory Shop outlets. Granted that the Restaurant and cinema complex is good and we ought to do something similar with Ocean Village regarding the restaurants. But our docks are thriving, with so much capacity coming into the port with the passenger liners, that it is being contemplated that we should feed Portsmouth some of the crumbs and scraps from our surplus. But as we are talking about what the respective Councils may or not do, Portsmouth's have been good when considering the redevopment of Gunwharf, the Spinnaker Tower, etc, but rather negative when it comes to the redevopment of their delapidated old football stadium. Our Council on the other hand, were very proactive when it came to accommodating our football club when Lowe lost us Stoneham.

Let's look at it from the glass half full aspect. Not many teams in the top ten have beaten us. Only Swindon, Huddersfield and Bristol Rovers have managed it and Huddersfield and Swindon caught us early on when we weren't up to full strength and confidence was lower because we were fighting to shake off the ten point penalty. We have since beaten Bristol Rovers in the Cup. We have drawn and beaten the second team, Charlton, one of those matches being a cup game. The teams in third and fourth position couldn't beat us. Before Davis' injury, I would have said that we would also beat Leeds, but since his injury, I'll wait and see how Bialkowski fares before making a judgement. I don't think that we should fear anybody in this division. I suspect that most of the teams fear us.

Listening to Radio Solent, it seemed that the awful blustery wind made it a bit of a lottery and Merrington lambasted the players for not being able to make enough allowance for the strength of the wind and hitting the ball too hard. However, it seems that when Hartlepool were playing with the wind behind them, they found it even more difficult than we did, making it our efforts excusable. Beyond that and contrary to some on here who have blamed Davis for poor keeping in the last few days posts, he made two cracking saves which otherwise might have changed the course of the match. Merrington was asserting that Davis was worth an extra 10 points or so a season. It will be interesting to see how we fare with Bialkowski in his place until the New Year. And what was that melee about towards the end? Bad tackle on Lallana, apparently and then all the players piled in. Stupid of Trotman to get involved when he is facing a ban now for the booking he received. What is the position with that, when his next match is the Cup match that his club don't want him to play anyway? I feel vindicated now for asserting earlier that we are a better team than Hartlepool. See, just because we would have been equal with them if it hadn't been for the ten point deduction, doesn't mean that they are as good as us. As I said earlier, their matches have been kinder to them opposition wise and we have done better than them against the top teams in the division.