Wes Tender

As you are so keen to cite Norwich as the shining example of what decent fan support comprises, I suggest that it might be instructive for you to have a glimpse of what they expect their fans to pay for their STs. http://www.canaries.co.uk/page/SeasonTickets/ Pay particular attention please, to the prices for the youngsters under 21, the under 12s and those over 60 and 75 and speculate how many of their fans in that total are comprised of people in those groups. Then contrast that with our prices, which have not really been reduced since we were in the Premiership, even though last season they wanted that money for watching the youth team for much of the season.

Complete and utter tosh. This is a business in the entertainment industry. If the customers refuse to buy into the product because they perceive it not to be good value for their expenditure, then it is the fault of the management. A customer is never at fault for the collapse of a business and has no responsibility for keeping it afloat. I know that some do not like this customer analogy, preferring to think of themselves as uber fans, but that is a hardcore which in itself is not large enough to keep us viable.

So who killed off the club? Lowe or some fans? There are the two sides of the coin. We have a decent manager, decent players, fair pricing and the stadium is full because with those things in place, we win games and people want to be there to witness the great entertainment on offer. The other side of the coin is that we have a succession of managers, some who are half decent, but others who are crap. We have some decent players, but they leave. We charge too much for watching kids lose each week. So I ask again. Who is to blame; the chairman and board, or the fans?

And five of those irrelevant posts came from you. How ironic, eh?

Is it a nailed on certainty that we would have been insolvent earlier? Or could a reasonable case be argued that without Lowe, but with Pearson as manager this season that he would have achieved better results, therefore the crowds would have been greater, with the resultant extra revenue that would have generated? Another factor to aid that theory, was that there was undoubtedly an element who stayed away to boycott Lowe and those people would probably have added extra income too. I agree though that even under those circumstances we would also have seriously have been looking for investment and had we managed to have achieved mid-table security, we would have been a much more attractive package. Under the current situation, it was not clear to most that we were for sale until the announcement of our administration.

Don't be such an arse without any concrete evidence to support your assertion. The Liberals desperately wanted the stadium as part of a sporting complex to rival those at Crystal Palace and Gateshead with the football stadium as its centre piece. But they wouldn't allow Lowe to dictate to them that we should have a cinema and a huge shopping development to help us finance it all. It was the Conservatives of HCC who were against it. Granted that Labour on Southampton City Council bailed Lowe out, but to blame the Liberals on EBC and try and tie that in to the forthcoming election is stupid. What are you suggesting? That we vote for the party who has made such a pig's ear of the current economic situation because of what they did nearly a decade ago for the club? And just for the record, in case you think that I have any love for the Lib Dems, I'm a Conservative.

But with luck, we will never ever have to endure him or Wilde having anything to so with us again.

I only posted that slant on it to gain some perspective, Kingsland. I did also put across the other side of the coin in the interest of balance. Put yourself in the players' shoes and try and see things from their point of view. Ultimately when it is viewed in its simplest form, it boils down to supply and demand, basically. Should the players be blamed for having a physical skill and ability that determines that they are able through public demand to command an earning level that is the envy of most of us? What would you do with part of your life if you were capable of being a top sportsman and could earn loads of money for a few years? But the career-ending injury is a real possibility to all of them, Ronaldo, Torres or McGoldrick. So they develop a mentality of trying to earn as much as they can while they can. Do you blame them for that? As others have reasoned, it is us the public who determine how much they earn, by being prepared to support the whole structure by paying to watch them, or by paying Sky Sports, or buying merchandise.

I'll try to be as even-handed on this as I can. Looking at it from the perspective of the players, they are in an industry where they have a short shelf life. For all they know, they could suffer a career ending injury in their next match and many of them have few skills in other directions that would tide them over. Because of the nature of the modern game, they earn considerably more at their age than most of their contemporaries and at that age, not many are wise enough to keep money back for a rainy day. Most are probably up to their necks in expenditure on large houses, fast cars and fast women, so that they might feel that they cannot spare a week's wages. Most probably have been assured by their agents that they will find a job elsewhere with another club in the event that they can no longer work here for the same wages. And as Stu has admitted, he wouldn't give up a weeks wages if his employers were in trouble, so how can he expect the players to be any different? On the other hand and playing devil's advocate, these players are supposed to be professional sportsmen and ought to have it instilled in them that because they are rewarded handsomely for their prowess in kicking a football about, they owe it to the paying customers to give their everything, every time they play. They ought to be made to understand the sacrifices that have been made by so many ordinary fans earning a pittance by comparision, just to be able to watch them play. To achieve that understanding, it is necessary that they compulsarily spend some of their time doing community liason work and hospital visits to Saints fans. Ultimately, they should have an element of pride in themselves as professionals. If they don't possess that pride instinctively, then we need a manager to instill it in them and other more experienced players can help to lead by example. Otherwise, I am totally in agreement that during the past couple of seasons, hardly any of the players covered themselves in glory by giving 100% and showing the pride and commitment that we are entitled to expect every time we pay to watch them play. On that basis, I hope that we have a mass clearout of all those players who are not prepared to give their blood and sweat for the shirt, the badge, the club, us.

I couldn't agree more with CL's sentiments. With luck, this chapter of the club's history is now closed, all of the divisive elements have lost their shareholdings and hopefully will not return. Therefore, unless they are replaced with another bunch of egotists, we can unite and provide the boost of positivity and optimism that will propel us upwards from our lowest ebb in decades. I don't care if the new people need to make hard decisions, provided that they explain why those decisions need to be made, but otherwise most will be quite happy that they can keep a low profile and just get on with it. I understand that they are in it to make a profit, but I hope that it is on the basis that if the club becomes profitable, it will be on the back of our success. Provided that they treat us with the respect and humility that we deserve as probably their main source of revenue until we get back to the top division, they will find that we will continue to feel total commitment to the cause in return. If we can assemble a team of players and a manager who can instill pride and a never say die attitude into the team, then at this level it will be more important than skill and quality. If we are lucky, however, we might be able either to keep some of our youngsters who have those qualities, or metaphorically entice one or two experienced violinists at the end of their careers to accompany the road sweepers who more usually play in the third division.

Personally, I couldn't feel sorry for him under any circumstances that I could imagine and I have an extremely vivid imagination, with all sorts of potential sticky ends for him going through my mind. Unfortunately, not a flicker of pity or sympathy enters my head for one second.

So Lowe's £800,000 investment in W H Ireland has halved in value recently; so it's not altogether a day devoid of good news so far after all.

McDonalds?

Well, it just goes to illustrate how divisive our former chairman and his cronies were. As Alain Perrin states in his last line, "Anyway, here's to moving on and forgetting this sorry state of affairs." That ought to be a possibility now, providing that none of those disruptive elements have nothing further to do with the club and nobody starts threads about them mischievously to antagonise the various factions.

Credit goes to Lowe for f*cking up Stoneham. Credit for St Mary's goes mainly to Southampton City Council, who had an available site earmarked for social housing and realising that its local football club did not have a home once Lowe f*cked up Stoneham, they had the imagination to offer that land for the stadium. Had they not done so, there was little or no alternative land available, so we would have had to try and shoehorn another few thousand into the Dell. Seemingly, some who believe that the Dell was instrumental in the spirit of Southampton would have liked that eventuality. Nobody had taken the initiative to sort out a new stadium before partly because it had only become an imperative after the law forced all top flight stadia to become all seater.

And there weren't any concerns from the locals near the current stadium? Of course there were. And for crissakes, I wish that it would sink into some posters heads that there was never going to be a big retail development at Stoneham. Lowe might have wanted one, but EBC would never have allowed it and that was what sank Stoneham, Lowe's intransigence. He tried to play poker with them thinking that he had a strong hand. He didn't.

Well, it might have been nice to have had additional revenue streams like the ones I had mentioned, instead of having to resort to Insurance companies and radio stations which actually proved to be a drain on resources. Boo hoo.

The strategic gap is a total red herring and was never an issue that reared its head when the Stoneham project was being considered apart from some local objections from NIMBYs. Funny that the Rose Bowl was allowed to be built in the strategic gap between West End and Hedge End, eh? I strongly suspect that many of the very same NIMBYs at Stoneham enjoy going to watch bloody Cricket in my back yard. What killed it stone dead was Lowe's intransigence over what he wanted to go with it.

The two things that I mentioned had nothing much to do with facilities for the fans to drink at. There were other facilities that would have been allowed that would have catered for that admirably. For example, there could have been a Planet Hollywood / Hard Rock Cafe type eatery, together with a nightclub. Also mentioned were a bowling alley, ice rink, a 4 star hotel, a Sports megastore, etc. The idea was that the family would make more of a day out of it, eating there before the match, some of the family bowling or ice skating while Dad watched the match and perhaps some of the family going to the night club in the evening after having their dinner at one of those restaurants. Of course, those same facilites would have been available to another set of sports fans attending international sporting events at the accompanying running and athletics stadium next door to the football stadium and the other tennis courts, practice pitches etc that were to be part of the complex and also for big concerts. It was hoped that the complex would rival Crystal Palace and Gateshead as a Southern version. That was the vision that EBC had for Stoneham, with the football stadium as the centrepiece. I disagree that the infrastucture there would be inferior to one close to the city centre. Apart from the railway station close by, there was the M27 motorway and an international airport on its doorstep. IMO it really couldn't have been much better. Under our current circumstances, I supect that we would also be a much better prospect for investment as part of that complex than the one we currently have with just a stadium and nothing else.

Frank, I honestly believe that had Lowe kept on Pearson, we would both have had larger crowds, because Pearson would have got a better performance out of the squad than Poortvliet, because he would have employed better tactics, a better balance between age and experience and better motivation and fitness levels of the squad. That would naturally have led to more home wins, resulting in higher attendances. Mind you, the crowds would have been even bigger with Lowe out of the picture altogether. Naturally all of the above is pure speculation, but I bet you that there would be far more on here prepared to back up the probability of the above scenario being more successful than the one that unfolded under the bizarre experiment implemented by Lowe.

Yes, it was definitely Lowe's fault that we didn't get Stoneham. He was too greedy about wanting other things to go with it as an additional revenue souce. The two things that he wanted were the two things that Eastleigh Borough Council could never grant. They were a shopping complex the size of Asda at Chandlers Ford and a Cinema complex. It would have been lunacy allowing an out of town shopping development 1 mile from the town centre and the cinema complex was already planned for the Swan Centre as an attraction to bring people into the town of an evening. EBC would have allowed many other things to have been built to aid investment, but Lowe stuck to those two things like the stubborn sod he is and the whole scheme floundered on the back of his obstinacy.

Those little pearls of historic wisdom I mentioned applied to Lowe throughout his time here, not just during the last season. They are the basic reason we are where we are now. He has never learned from his mistakes, repeating them again and again. In the paragraph of yours above, the weighing scale in the lower divisions IMO is more heavily weighted towards the importance of the manager and the right players he might be able to get in rather than an ability for somebody to juggle figures on a balance sheet. This was proven with the appointment of the inept Dutch duo who were paid peanuts, whereas a bit more money paid on somebody who knew what they were doing and knew their way about this division and the right players to do a decent job, might have steadied the ship financially through improved results on the pitch. It isn't rocket science, but those who make a living purely based on finance, often cannot see the bigger picture.

Look, Frank, without going into discussions as the intricacies of whether one strategy was attributable to one Chairman and another to the other, I'll attempt to encapsulate Lowe's failings into a couple of well known sayings that I believe sum up his failings in a nutshell and which I have used before about him. Just tell me whether you agree or not. He knew the price of everything, but the value of nothing. If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

I would expect that the qualities that we might seek in our next manager would be a bit more than the ability to look people in the eye and tell it how it is. I'd be looking for somebody who commands the respect of his players, a strict disciplinarian who expects his players to be super fit and professional in their approach to their job. I'd also favour somebody who has heaps of experience in British football at this level, either as a player making the stepup into management and showing promise, or else as somebody who has succeeded in getting teams out of this division. They'd also have a decent network of contacts and know who those players were who would give their all to the cause. Frankly, from the evidence that I've seen of Wotte, he's not ticking many of those boxes with me and I wouldn't lose any sleep if he returned to Holland.