Beckenham Saint

As much as I dislike him, this isn't true... The players say he is a lot more vocal than he appears and he was always in the ref ear's with decisions. He still does it now at Liverpool, during the Madrid game he was always on at the ref when decisions went against them and off the ball, so he is a noisy little bloke. Shame he's not got much between the ears otherwise he might actually say something sensible to the refs! He was a good example (at the time) of a player who had come from the academy and through the dark days so the younger players could aspire to that, too.

I think Koeman will have the lads right up for this. If we win this one, then when we play City - even if we lose they couldn't go above us, so that will give the team an added incentive not to slip up here. Villa haven't been playing well, and IIRC Benteke will still be suspended by the time we go to them, which is a nice little bonus. They will be at home, so expected to come out and attack us, which should leave some space in and around their less than in form defence. Pelle said after Millwall that he never likes going three games without scoring, and he didn't bag against Hull or Leicester so I fancy him to get one here and us to bag a 1-0 win.

As good as Bertrand is, and I think he has been amazing, if we could only have one of the two permanently, I'd go with Toby. He is pure class, makes everything he does lppkeasy and is comfortable at CB, RB and CDM. I think signing both would be realistic, and it would be fantastic to have both tied down.

Article is from Wednesday 30 Apr 2014 10:53 am....

Can't believe he's already made 83 apps for us! I don't remember him having a bad game in that time, is amazing for the team, and I am always surprised by how good his skills are (Shouldn't be surprised after 80+ games, but every time he pulls off a little flick or neat turn or something I find myself thinking "Oh, I forgot he could do that!". Love having him in the team. 6 goals for us so far according to Wiki, I thought he'd gotten more than that. Think it was City away and then home, a couple at Barnsley, one at home to Hull - who was the other one against?

Glory hunter

I was all ready to hate this purely due to your use of "y'all" in the OP, but enjoyed the read! Cheers

Better range of passing than Cork...

I asked Sky about this and they came up with similar stats to the OP: http://www1.skysports.com/football/news/12038/9549586/martin-tylers-stats-and-facts-manchester-derby-omens

http://www.tuttosport.com/calcio/calciomercato/2014/11/05-311473/%C2%ABIl+Southampton+vuole+Dybala+del+Palermo%C2%BB

The9 won't be happy that you've started a kit thread before he's had the chance! I predict that next season, we will definitely have a kit. I am thoroughly ITK on this matter.

Was a good post, wasn't it! Tough crowd, though. If Alpine comes out and says we will lose, then I will think we will win!

Not all of us were worried...I know a few Saints fans, myself included, who weren't worried when everything was happening. We appointed a manager who had a better CV than any other manager we've had before coming to the club. We were making huge profit on the players we were selling, all to clubs bigger than us. We were expanding our club off the pitch, various appointments behind the scenes that don't have too much of an impact on the pitch but help the clubs profile grow. We were in the middle of building the new state of the art training facilities, unveiled today. We signed the third highest goalscorer in Europe, the best midfielder in the Eredivise, a Champions League winner and various other great players (Alderwireld is a big name, and I don't just mean it has a lot of letters!) Krueger and Reed were both very positive through the whole thing, and let us know not to worry - there was no firesale, there were no plans to sell the club and there were players coming in. For all the put downs of them, all the people that said they were just easy PR wins, keeping the fans quiet? Well they weren't lying in the end, were they? All the evidence that we were going to be fine was in front of us. Some just decided to ignore it and believe anything the Daily Mail spouted. I repeated the above sentiments quite a bit through the summer, I believed whole heartedly we were going to be fine. Ralph Krueger and Les Reed were both very confident that we were going to be fine, and we were. The reaction on here was mental.

He stands at over 6 foot 3, Toby, Toby! We signed him from the Spanish League, Toby, Toby! He gets the ball, and knocks it clear Can't say his name but we love his hair! Toby Alderwireld, southamptons 17!

Can't wait for this one, will be my 7th game of the season and we've won all the other 6 I've been to so am hoping not to start losing here! It is a potential banana skin, but they're horribly out of form and we are in a rich vein so realistically we should be winning this one at home. If they come to attack us then we should benefit from that as we are good now at creating space and pulling teams out of position anyway. Their fans aren't too optimistic, are they? Bunch of Alpines!

Yeah - thinking about it, I think it's about £6.8m? Something like that. Would be an absolute steal if we got him to stay!

I think he should time his suspension for when Jay Rod comes back so Koeman doesn't have to think too much about who he replaces in the team

No, but we'd have circa £15m. £10m for Bertrand and around £6m for Toby already agreed. That's just the money that we bought in, and we would of obviously already had a bit to spend, so £30m isn't an unreasonable figure to suggest...

I usually sit in the Northam so the atmosphere usually sounds amazing. At the QPR game some of the chants had the hairs on the back of my neck standing up. At the Sunderland game I sat down the other end up in the back rows and it was clear from there that only a few pockets make any noise. Our away fans always sounds outstanding though. The West Ham fans put on a great rendition of Forever Blowing Bubbles when I was there but were largely quiet after that *****il they scored that is...) I haven't been to too many other Premier League grounds, my away trips this year coming mainly in the cup. Arsenal were silent for most of the match, but that's hardly surprising, they have a bit of a reputation for not making much noise. Surprised we are ranked so low, though. Would be interested to see a similar article about away support...

I feel like a real glory hunter at the minute...

Vic made that look so easy!

Looks better than the send off United gave to Fergie!

Soon hopefully, reading that line is getting so dull now. Considering that we have played over 10 games in all comps now and won so many of them, it's hardly a secret or a surprise anymore that we're pretty good! I think we will lose this as an into to all the articles about us at some point after christmas, but at the end of the season in all the "season reviews" and similar - it will be back!

Probably the former, he's been restricted mainly to coming off the bench to replace Hernandez after about 60/65 minutes...

Hull this season have held Liverpool and Arsenal to draws recently and Steve Bruce has them playing some good football this year. Watched them against West Ham a few weeks back and for a lot of the game they were the better team. Diame will be a tough player to come up against, so I'd hope we play Wanyama to try and negate his presense to some extent. Alderwireld seems to be first choice in the league, which is good as I think he and Fonte have enough about them to keep Hernandez quiet. They are a good team and I can see them holding us to a draw. 2-2, my prediction!