Wes Tender

Is it? I can't find anything about it on the club website at all. They had reduced prices for the QPR match, but then only for ST holders buying extra tickets. If they want the attendance of fans who are not ST holders to important games like the Charlton one, then perhaps they need to make some attractive offers to us. As I say, much as I love the Saints, I really can't be much inspired to cough up £48 for me and my son to watch the dross that has been served up to us this season at home, at the same time contributing to the prolonged stay of Lowe and the Quisling.

Thank God that we didn't have that attitude against Sheffield Utd last season...

What are the club offering us in return? Do they realise that there is some benefit to having a full stadium? I have watched so much sh*t this season at home, that I really don't know if I can be arsed to go, as I am currently still in boycott mode. I went with my son to the last home match, the dismal 0-0 draw against QPR, paying £48 for the privilege and came away thinking what a waste of money it had been. I would hate to think that Lowe and the Quisling anticipated that they could just rely on the supine loyalty of the fans to rally round and pay full price for this sub-standard fare. How about them not taking us for granted and making some sort of offer to us as an incentive?

Really? Did he say that we should fight for a point, or every point? With the stupid system whereby three draws is equivalent to one win and two defeats, a point a game is unlikely to keep us up unless others around us have at least two draws and a loss instead.

Going down without a fight is drawing or losing matches against those rivals who are also in the drop zone. Fighting for your existence in this division is beating them and other teams above you.

Well, we obviously have a different perspective as to what the likelihood is of our survival. You rate the situation as difficult, but when we can't beat teams around us like Blackpool and furthermore for large parts of the game they looked the better side, then my opinion on matters is not explained away by adjectives such as dificult. My current state of mind of our parlous position requires something a lot stronger.

Your very first sentence in your reply to my original post told me not to turn every argument to fit my agenda, so it suggests that any opinion I make will be scrutinised by you to see whether there is an agenda behind it which is something that I resent a little when I am discussing football related matters rather than responding to political ones. I agree that there have been players who have shown promise as youngsters and have not been given the chance to progress. The crux of the matter here with the scenario that unfolded this season was that although we were operating under severe financial restraints, it was not an imperative to play the inexperienced youngsters altogether. There was scope to have gone with a balanced blend of the youngsters with a spine of more experienced older pros and the benefit of that would obviously have been that they would have benefitted from the example of that experience. Those who forecast that the experiment of playing almost the entire team from youngsters would end in disaster have been vindicated, so they were at least wise before the event. As there was little or no precedent for such an experiment producing positive results at this level, it didn't take great prescience to have predicted it would most likely fail. I doubt that many who predicted failure draw much satisfaction from being proved right, as the resultant failure leaves us perilously close to the drop down to the third division, which nobody wants. I agree that certain of the youngsters have grown with experience and show promise. I like the commitment and terrier tenacity shown by Gillett. James is improving, but I still have doubts on him playing right back and personally would prefer him at right midfield. For me though, McGoldrick blows hot and cold. Of the experienced pros, Scacel, Euell and Saganowski all offer good things playing alongside the youngsters, which is what should have been since the beginning of the season and then perhaps we might have accrued sufficient extra points to have been mid-table instead of fighting for our survival in this division. Quite what the likes of Pulis, Smith, Pekhart, Robinson, etc add/ed, who knows?

I couldn't agree more. It is all about mentality. If we went to Blackpool hoping to gain just the one point, then the aim would have been achieved, but if we went there with that mentality, then we had probably spoiled our chances of winning, as our mind set was not attuned to it. On the other hand, if we had the correct mentality that we were going to win this match, then we have failed and it is certainly 2 points dropped. IMO, as it is only Blackpool and not Wolves, Reading or Birmingham, there is no way that we should have travelled expecting only a point and if we have adopted this mentality, then we are definitely doomed to 3rd division football.

Yes

Obviously just because I want the club rid of Lowe and the Quisling, means that I am apparently not entitled to have any sort of opinion on any of the players, or else Sid will immediately label it as part of my agenda. It is my opinion that although he had played the odd handfull of games in the previous season, the best way to integrate a striker into the squad is gradually and as we didn't do that, stating that he was thrown in at the deep end this season is fair comment, especially as you admit that having him play as a lone striker was a mistake. You might say that has only been proven in retrospect, but many on here forecasted just such an outcome. Those posters must all have been the ones with agendas too. As to whether McGoldrick develops into a good player remains to be seen, although as I said, his confidence must have taken a bad knock due to the incompetance of playing him too much, too early and as the sole striker for too long. I said that I didn't place the blame on his shoulders for the way that he has turned out, so apart from a difference of opinion about whether he should have been introduced more gradually when it was simply not an option when we had jettisoned our three main strikers, where elsedo you take issue with what i have said?

Ironic isn't it that you can make a statement like the one highlighted and then in the previous sentence infer that you are somebody who knows about football. McGoldrick has not yet made any case that he is in any way better than Euell and especially when you are comparing a footballer in the twilight of his career against one where the ink has hardly dried on his birth certificate, it is even more difficult to justify. Euell has achievements in his career that McGoldrick may or may not match, but he has certainly not made out any case for it yet. I was musing about a similar rising young star who I used to watch and admire in the reserves many years ago, who looked like a really good prospect, potentially the next Alan Shearer, a lad who played up front with Michael Owen in the England youth team. What exactly became of Shayne Bradley? I looked it up and it is very sad. He only had a few games in the first team, but at a time when we were in the Premiership and he had some serious competition up front. Like McGoldrick, he used to look the real deal in the youth team and reserves too. I supect that the problem with McGoldrick has been that scoring freely in a team that has contained the likes of Walcott and Bale, he has been told by the youth team management that he could be the next one to make the big time based on his scoring ability at that level. He really needed to be introduced gradually and allowed to grow and develop slowly, but instead, because of Lowe's masterplan of jettisoning any player who might be on a higher wage because of experience and expertise, he has been thrown in the deep end and ordered to sink or swim. The crazy Poortvliet formation placing him up front alone did not help either, so his confidence has probably taken a big knock. If we are relegated, then his development will probably take a further knock and he will either stay and play against a load of cloggers in the 3rd division, or be bought up by some other club in this division and have to start battling for a place in the team again and go from there. I place more of the burden of blame on those who have been responsible for poor decisions on when and how often he played at the wrong time, rather than on his shoulders. If club policy is to save money by developing and playing our own youngsters, selling on the really good ones and playing the others who can make the team on merit, then we ought to learn how to do it properly without ruining any decent prospects we have.

Sad that he was booed. I don't see any reason why it was warranted. He always seemed an honest lad, always gave his best, although he didn't really set the world on fire at the level we used to be. He'd have been a lot more effective if he was still with us now, such has been our decline.

I was just quoting along similar lines to Nick's post:- "post is meant to be bit of interest/fun to those who want to talk about it," Personally, I'm consoling myself with the optimistic thought that the probability is that Lowe, Wilde and all the other charlatans will be gone when we go down, so there is a silver lining to console me.

Thanks for taking the time to respond civilly to those few points that I raised and clarifying a couple of things. So having passed the 5 o'clock mark, are you feeling more depressed and have you given up hope that we may avoid the drop? I'm afraid that bar a miracle, I have, regrettably.

Nope. We'll be in the third division and the Skates will survive in the Premiership. Why not let's have a nice bit of fun predicting whether we can manage a higher position in the third than they can in the first, next season.

So we haven't managed to beat Blackpool this season and have one point out of the 6 available against them, whereas we have been generosity itself and gifted them 4 points. We have also failed to capitalise against the teams around us at the bottom of this division when we have played them. We are absolutely, completely and utterly crap and deserve to go down.

You might allude to it, in a round about sort of way

It is all hypothetical and it is just as likely that if the Skates are relegated, so will we be.

As I said, in its day, with altruistic board members, it was OK. It was only when there was undue haste in my opinion to get into bed with Lowe's small retirement home business, when it seems that there were other consortia wishing to make bids to take over the club that the problems began. It has never been justified to my satisfaction why the other bids were ruled out of time in this undue haste to sign up to the reverse takeover. We had better not hold the opinion though that the reverse takeover was incentivised, as that was obviously not the case.

Would that be on the panel of Dragons, or touting for money for the club? Could you imagine the ego massage that Lowe would have if he was wealthy enough to be a Dragon, having people licking his boots pleading for investment? But as we all know, as much as he loves to give the impression of it, he isn't anywhere near that level of wealth, or else he would have a bit more than 6% of the club.

Regarding the legalities of the reverse takeover, I had read something recently implying that there had been an element of insider trading involved and that this was additional to another incident that I had heard about previously. However, nothing apparently has been substantiated about this. As you say, the actual reverse takeover was immoral in the opinion of both of us due to the stuff that came out in the Share Game documentary about the George Bowyer shares and offers to give only the nominal £1 value for purchase of shares from either widows or those in bankruptcy when those shares were resold at a massive profit. They were then resold to Askham's toadies at £1 each, only to acquire their massive increase in value with the reverse takeover shortly after, which is reprehensible. The situation whereby the shareholdings were valued at a nominal £1 was fine when the board comprised gentlemen from the professions who sat on the board for little or no remumeration, mostly because they were not only fans of the Saints, but also felt it an honour and almost a civic duty to help their local club. In more modern times, such altruism has become an anachronism and has been replaced by a greedy self-interest and unfortunately we were burdened with people on our board not of the old school, but those more interested in swelling their own bank accounts. The road to our current predicament began at that time.

Do we? Or is it really more a case of us having a chance of making it what the club want it to be?

So to paraphrase the last paragraph, those who post on here more than when they are feeling particularly bored, are mostly not normal,have an axe to grind and are masochists. Thanks. You don't see this as being the internet equivalent of having a good old natter about the club down the boozer then?

Things seem to have strayed a long way off topic here. We've given up thinking objectively about whether the Parliament is a good idea or not and reverted to the usual topics of whether Lowe or somebody else should be chairman, or whether JP or Wotte or Pearson should be manager. I suspect that everything that could be said about this Parliament has already been said and as far as I can see, Frank is the only person making half an effort of defending the proposition. Nearly everybody else either thinks it is a ruse of the board's to pay lip service to our views, or else that it is a complete waste of time.

I wonder whether you missed the irony, Nick, in posting a thread about dishonest dealings by West Ham and praising our board for not indulging in such shenanigans. Either you had forgotten the dodgey dealings covered in the programme "The Share Game" and the immorality of the reverse takeover, or else you think that the way that the board behaved in that little episode was satisfactory. I reckon that Askham, Lowe and the other charlatans on our board at that time could give lessons on how to go as far as you could along the edge of legality, but crossing over the line of what one might call moral or decent behaviour.