Wes Tender

Timothy Leary's dead. No,no,no,no, he's outside looking in.

Do you mean funny haha, or funny peculiar?

The trouble with a deal with a big Swiss cheese, is that there is a likelihood of discovering that there are holes in it.

Presumably, said delegated minion also has to dig through everything apposite that is stored on your computer notepad even as far back as 2006 on the previous forum to back up your arguments. It must be nice to be able to afford to pay the salaries of your staff to spend their time on something so inconsequential as posts you made on a football forum 3 years ago. The poor saps must be bored out of their skulls.

I'm 6 hours ahead of you lot here in the Far East and can inform you all that nothing happened by 8pm either.....

Still has another week of holiday in the Far East and sincerely hopes that everything is at last resolved by my return.

Cheers, Lancelot. Nothing to argue about there. Personally, I'm really quite impressed by the way that this lot go about things. It bodes well IMO

...is away in the Far East for the next three weeks, so apart from missing the conclusion of the takeover, which I hope will be seamless and uneventful, I look forward also to discussing the new manager and players.

Read what Norm said, attempt to try and comprehend it and act on it, realising at the same time, the irony of your post. It shouldn't be that difficult for somebody of either your towering intellect, or your ability to look up quotations on Google. While you are at it, reread what I said about those who have to insult other posters and take it from me that there are many on here who live in West End.

I will be away in the Far East for the next three weeks from tomorrow evening, so will have to try and keep up with events through frequent visits to internet cafes. It's going to be a very fraught time for me.

Now I begin to suspect that you are yet another new alias for the troll Nineteen Canteen/Sundance Beast/Flashman at the charge.

Not at all. You open your mouth and put your foot in it if you think that my referring to the preponderance of tattoos on Portsmouth's women folk amounts to name calling. Do you dispute it? It would only be name calling if you were one of them. Are you? A heavier weight intellectual than you might have made that differentiation and also have realised that it was a humorous remark too. It rather suggests that you are rather lacking in that department, perhaps. Of course I checked up on your post history before commenting and unless it is incomplete or wrong, it shows that your first post was in early April, at a time that coincided with us being placed in administration, a time of great turbulence in our history as I suggested. Having read all the posts that are recorded, I concluded that as there was nothing at all of any weight or significance except in arguing on behalf of Portsmouth, that you are a Skate on a wind-up.

Although of course there is an element of plastics who have deserted us because of our lowly status, I feel confident that most of those will have done so the season after our relegation from the top flight. I suspect that we are now down to a hardcore of support, which will not decline much further. However, as there was an element that undoubtedly stayed away because of Lowe and Wilde especially, but also because of the lack of value for money where Premiership prices were charged to watch the kids managed by incompetent lower league Dutch managers, there is actually potential for some increase in attendances this next season. This is especially true if we get an owner who treats us all with respect, charges a reasonable amount for tickets, appoints a decent manager, who in turn brings in some half-decent players capable of gaining us wins. Probably what is pertinent to wonder, is whether Lowe, Askham, Wilde and those other charlatans who profess to be fans of the club, will bother to continue attending when they have no shares, no power or influence and have to pay from their own pockets. Will they be bothering with a box called "Ex Directory" when they probably have no hope of ever getting their feet under the boardroom table again, thank God? What do you reckon, Nineteen?

I really can't be arsed to read back to the OP and check statistics. The idiom that there are lies, damned lies and statistics is well known, also that one can provide statistics to prove virtually anything. You might not have said which team you support, but as you arrived on this Saints site all of a sudden at a time of turbulence in this club's history and many of your posts are on the topics of which club or which city is better and you argue in favour of Portsmouth, then it is reasonable to conclude that you are a Skate on a wind-up. If I have got that wrong, then you will prove it by a post history in the future. In the meantime, I see no reason to change my opinion. And by the way, I always consider it to be the case that when somebody has to resort to name-calling, then they have lost the argument.

Agreed. The essence of this type of business is that it is essentially part of the entertainment industry. So somebody running this type of business either needs to have an understanding of the practicalities of that, or needs to employ others who have that experience.

The new owner isn't going to make anything unless we achieve promotion, which will require him to put some money into a decent manager and some players. Beyond that, yes, he could be speculating that he might profit from selling us on after a while, but then again, the price that he gets depends on where we are. Unless the new owner is one of the charlatans that has been associated with us before, I don't think that the fans will be too disappointed. Most will be relieved that his intervention intitially stopped us from going into liquidation. Let's wait and see who it is before making any judgements.

We only have the information supplied by MLT that our prospective new owner is a seriously wealthy individual. That is good enough for me until we know who it is. As I qualified my point, unless he either inherited his wealth or gained it by luck or chance, then it is not unreasonable to conclude that he is an astute businessman. I don't care if he doesn't "throw" money at the club, but there comes a point where it is necessary to speculate to accumulate and that will be a test, as Lowe was never capable of thinking along those lines, suffering the usual blinkered view of most people from a financial background. Which strikers should we be retaining? John? Rasiak? Saganowski? McGoldrick? The first three are all Premiership quality arguably, so it is not unreasonable that they do not wish to play in the third division. McGoldrick wants to move to Nottingham for family reasons and they are also a division above us now. When I made the point about our seeming inability to reason that it was better to retain players of a certain market value rather than replace them with three other mediocrities, I meant that they should be in the same division. There are not many, if indeed any Premiership players willing to step down two divisions regardless of whether they would be paid Premiership wages.

Also Nineteen suggests that because we were unfortunate to lose all three of our goalkeepers, we were almost saved single-handedly by a Premiership goallie. His memory is obviously very selective, in that one of our injured goalkeepers had also been a Premiership goallie too not that long before. Doesn't Nineteen reckon that Pearson is to be commended for having the savvy for getting in Wright and indeed two pretty good CBs too? That was something that Burley never managed to suss out while he was here.

Sometimes you utter the most inane twaddle. So much so, that one is forced to the conclusion that you have to be a troll on a wind-up. The fact of the matter is that Pearson came in late in the season to take over a team that was sinking fast, remotivated it, improved fitness levels, made some good loan signings and managed to save us from relegation by the skin of our teeth. Subsequently, Lowe made one of the biggest mistakes of his time here and dismissed him, replacing him with far less competent Dutchmen who oversaw our relegation, simultaneously to Pearson gaining promotion for Leicester. Most on here believe that Pearson would have kept us up last season even under the same circumstances inherited by the inept Dutch duo. Most would certainly have Pearson top of their list of candidates to take over as manager right now if he could be pursuaded to return. But of course, he has no reason to leave Leicester and could well gain them promotion back to the Premiership. He was treated badly by Lowe and could have the last laugh over us if he wanted. But he is a better man than that and has more dignity than to laugh at our predicament.

The only thing that points to the competance of the new owner is that he is a far wealthier man than the charlatans who ran this club previously. Unless he came upon his wealth through chance or inheritance, at least there is a suggestion that he knows how to make a business flourish. The sale of our so-called best players is rather dependent on several factors. A lot of the success of a player comes down to whether they have the right mental attitude and if they thought that they were too good for this division, or wanted to be elsewhere, then that is not condusive to them giving of their best. Best case scenario is that if we appoint a new manager, he sits down for a heart to heart with the players and has a frank disussion with them as to whether they would be prepared to put their all into a fight to gain promotion. If they are not prepared to do that, then they should go, provided that we get a decent sum for them. It could certainly be argued that some of our players might not be suited to playing in the third division and that they can readily be replaced by others who have attributes better suited. I hope that the new owner turns out to have a different mindset than Lowe; that if we have a player on our books who is valued at £2 million, that we keep him, rather than selling him and replacing him with 3 mediocre players.

As far as I can gauge it, there were to have been three partners in a consortium and then two of them dropped out, leaving just the one. now, if you believe that this guy is going to stand in front of a mirror and argue with himself, then you might be right. Apart from that, he will be the one financing the whole thing, it will be his club. He might appoint a chairman if he doesn't wish to be chairman himself, he could equally appoint executive directors to run the business for him and he will also probably appoint his own manager to run the team. But he will be the boss and the others will be under no illusions that if they don't work in the way he wants, or don't get on with him, then they will either be fired or can leave. Surely you can see the difference between this situation and the one that we have had for over a decade. A lot of those squabbles caused by rival shareholding individuals or groups has now gone, so it was a reasonable enough comment that also a lot of the cause of friction and internal wrangling has also gone.

I didn't respond to any of your points, because although I can easily shoot any of them down in flames, I really couldn't be arsed to waste my time arguing with people who ought to be on the Skate forum, but who are on a wind up on ours. Anyway, as I say, I've lived in both places and am perfectly content that Southampton is not only the more attractive city, but also has the better quality of life too. Therefore, I care not a jot what people from Portsmouth think, as I have made up my own mind about it.

And Corporate Ho has never lived in Southampton, so not really qualified to talk about the quality of life here...

LOL! Good point. And all that body hair and tattoos. And that's just the women.

You're not going to be able to provide any evidence from surveys to change my mind, so I'm fed up wasting time on people who ought to be on their own forums. End of posts on this subject.