sadoldgit

Indeed, but our manager spent £1m less and made the play offs. The view is that if you spend a lot of money success naturally follows. I don't think it is an absolute as we can see by Ipswich's plight and the fact that Chelsea are still not Eurpean champions.

Perhaps you would like to scroll up to the top of this thread and read it mate.

I'd like to think not but it won't be easy and it doesn't help that threads were started about Pardew's job prospects a short while ago while he is obviosuly still rebuilding. I don't know what is is about some faction of Saints fans (many on this thread). They actually seem to revel in it when things are not going right. In management terms Pardew has only been here 5 minutes but some are already pulling him apart and seem to be waiting for him to fail so they can pull him apart some more. Same thing happened with Steve Brue when he was at the top with Birmingham and George Burley when he took us into the top 6 (cue with that spend we should have gone up automatically - tell that to the Ipswich fans who have seen the great Roy Keane spend £8m only to be rooted to the bottom). Nowdays if you don't have instant sucess you are instantly branded a failure. Even if you do have success and then things go wrong, the good stuff is forgotten immediately. There is no balance. Short-termism rules as do short memories. The knee jerk reactionaries on here get away with abusing people with a different viewpoint. Constructive criticism tends to be limited to get them out if they don't make me happy immediately. The past is coloured all black and the people who worked for the club were total failures. The saddest thing for me is that I believe tht most of the lurkers who come here to read are probably people who would take the middle, balance ground too, but are afraid to write as they don't fancy the abuse that the likes of Alpine and his Stormtroopers dish out if you dare say anthing postive about certain people who have worked for us in the past, or even now. If Pardew had not one the last three matches this list would be in meltdown and you can bet in a relatively short time frame the new owners would be berated too for spending so little cash. Yes, football is a results driven game, but what some of our fans forget is that is th same for every club and no one, but, no one is going to roll over and lets us tickle their tummys. Every club has the same pressure from the fan's expectations and only a few each season will deliver. That has nothing to do with cash spend but everything to do with getting the best out of everyone involved in the club. If by slagging people off and being negative we could achieve that aim, SFC would be at the top of the Premiership by now!

Are you Alpine in disguise? You have his lack of charm and delivery off to a tee.

You do love a generalisation don't you? Isn't it funny how the people who followed Lowe had exactly the same problems in trying to get investment from exactly the same people? Perhaps they were arrogant too, or just perhaps there are not many people who want to chuck their money away on a football club? Of course you were there on every occasion and know exactly what happened. Just perhaps people were waiting to pick us up for a song after adminsistration? Nothing to do with Lowe? Yes of course we were in the Premiership before he arrived. And we stayed there with crowds of 15K. You are quite happy to lump all the blame for everything that went wrong on his head but not to give him any credit for the things that went right? It is like deabting in the schoolyard. Yes of course things went downhill very quickly after relegation as they did for lots of clubs that Lowe had no involvement in whatsoever.God knows whre the stupid reference to King Canute comes into it. Was he managing Charlton, Norwich or Leeds? Irrespective of the reason we stayed up for so long with so little revune, the simple fact it we DID stay up. And a lot longer than perhaps we shoul have, just maybe due to the prudent handling of what little cash we had. You seem to conveniently forget that we still managed to put out a team with some class players Niemi and Killer could have played in any of the teams above us. And we did it on a tight budget. Many of the players we had then are still playing in the Premiership by the way. Still, I trust that both yourself and Duncan will be pulling the new people to bits in a few years time if we are still graceing the third divsion? Or will it be time to point the King Canute tag at you too? By the way, were you at Cardiff with your Lowe Out banner a few years ago Alpine and Duncan?

Perhaps they have all moved to Austria? Really Alpine, whjat planet do you live on? If they were there you would be slagging tem off for having the nerve to show their faces.

I didn't back any horse. If you ever bothered to read any of my posts you will see that I back SFC. Oh and I see you fallen back on the old chestnut that if you don't go to many games then your opinion does not count. And lastly, I am not crying. Still it is nice to see that informed debate is alive and well on here.

Maybe you are right, or maybe we would have not moved from The Dell and been relgated earlier. Both conjecture. We can only deal in what happened not what ifs. No it wasn't ideal, but we did stay up and compete with crwods of 15k and we did have a relative amount of success. I would argue that if we had replaced McMenemy with an experienced "name" instead of Chris Nichol we would have been in a better position for sometime thereafter but that is just my opinion. LOwe made mistakes. The new people will make mistakes too. It is inevitable. We just expect our people to be perfect.

At the same time we are a different proposition now than the first few weeks of the season. Hopefully we have progressed and are a stronger team. Pardew have been dealing with the problems as you would expect of any manger worth his salt to do and his reward is three wins in a week. Yes we still have a long way to go but I would rather look at our current form as an indictor of our future than our early season form.

Sorry Duncan, should have read the whole thing before I responded. Praise? I think I have just tried to give Lowe credit for things he did right. People reading this forum who know nothing of Saints would think that everything he ever did was wrong. I also can see that he had a very difficult job. Trying to manage the fans expectations with a relatively small budget is a hard enough job for anyone. It has been said before but bares repeating. Clubs like Charlton and Norwich and yes, even the mighty Leeds have struggled to comepete. When the heat turns up it forces people into postions that often bring out what is perceived to be the worst in many people. I think anyone having to deal with what our Board dealt with when we were relegated and after would be affected by the stress and would not cover theselves in glory. I have been involved in a union and I have been a manager. I know that noth sides play games and both sides seek to get the upper hand. What I also know is that the management have a tougher job because they do not have an infinite resouces and the unions expect to have their needs met even if it is not financially viable (for unions read fans). You know yourself that Lowe once said that he didn't know where the next pound was coming from, yet the fans expected him to fund a promotion push. Of course there is more of a feelgood factor now. But don't you think that if funds had been secured and debts paid off under either Lowe, Wilde or Crouch and we had just won three matches in a week, people wouod be feeling better about the club? The bottom line is this (and forget this forum we are talking about the whole fan base now) - If Lowe was here and went up as Champions the vast majoirty of Sanits fans would be very, very happy. If, with the current regime, we get relegated again, the vast majority of fans will be very very unhappy. Where we differ 100% in what we want from the club is that I want us to be successful with no conditions and you want us to be successful so long as certain people are not here. You like every other fan thinks he knows what is best for SFC. You have quite rightly pointed out that Pearson had a difficult job to do. Don't you think that Lowe, Wilde, Crouch etc also have a difficlut job to do? And yes, judging by the fact that only a small percentage of clubs acheive any measure of success each season, doesn't that mean by default that most people running their clubs actually "fail". For us I would argue that remaining the in the Premiership was "success" and, if you take his record season by season, Lowe had more successes than failures. THis is not praise, it is just accepting what was for what it was. The fact that he called you a name and you didn't like him is neither here nor there. The new owner will either turn out to get us promoted or to an FA Cup Final and will be a success, or we will stay where we are, o rwe could go down again. He will achieve what he will achieve and will be judged either favourably by fans or not. Either way, he will need 10 years in the premiership and an F A Cup final to mirror our achievements under Lowe. This is not praise, itis simply a fact.

There are now strong characters in politics any more. The Torries will probably win by default. Not because they are the best party but because Middle England are lazy and will vote for that nice Mr Cameron because he deserves a chance and because he is not Labour. The Lib Dems have been squeezed out because for many years now both Labour and the Tories have fighting over the middle ground. New Labour/Tories/Lib Dems...what is the difference? It probbaly comes down to who has the nicest smile and haircut nowdays.

And your point is?

No I haven't been this season yet but hope to do so soon. To be honest I have never been to a home game (and I have been going since 1966) when the atmoshere has not been good. But then I have only ever seen one home defeat. I have been to plenty of away games when the atmosphere has not been good, mainly because we have been beaten. Of course Lowe made mistakes, as has every person who has ever lived. But ther were also a lot of good things that went on during his time here and they do not evaporate just because we, like many clubs like us, got relegated. I am not going to apologise for enjoying seasons where we are competitive and win football matches, as we did during Burley's only full season for us. I have never said he was the best manager we ever had but at least under him, as under McMenemy, I felt that, home and away, we always had a chance of getting a result. Frankly I don't give a stuff who the Chairman or the CEO is so long as we compete and try and play decent football. I'd give anything to see us back in the Premiership, even if it was with Lowe at the helm, because I want to see my team play against the best. When I saw my first match in 1966 the only thing that stays with me from that day was the players. I couldn't have told you who the manager was, who owned the club, what the internal politics were like... Now days it seems that we are totally obsessed with the suits. I bet there have been far more threads on here about the people who run the club from the manager upwards rather than about the players.

I agree that there is plenty to be positive about at the moment, but that will all evaporate if we do not get out of this league quickly. It was only a few days ago that the knives were already being sharpened and a target being drawn on Pardew's back. Running a football club and managing fans expectations is never easy, as the Wilde Bunch found to their cost very quickly. I hope the current regime will be very successful but you can bet your last Rollo that if we are still in this division in a couple of seasons time they will get the same hammering that previous regimes have.

But we still won and we came back from 2 goals down. 3 wins on the trot does no make a summer, but at least we have something to feel positive about and maybe it will stop some of those pointless threads musing about at which point we should sack Pardew for a while.

Yep with 20 minutes to spare. Yay. I am not defending what went wrong with the club. I query the mentality of those who slag off a manager who managed to get 1.54 point a game - a win every other game - but who raise to hero status someone who only managed to win 3 games out of 13. The same people who seem happier for us to be in the third tier of football than when we were making the play offs. Surely the club was in a better position that season? But you wouldn't think so judging by many of the comments on here.

Still wearing very thin Alpine????

Obvioulsy F A Cup finals, Premiership football, making the play offs, beating decent teams 6 -0 away from home, winning every other game etc are not things to aspire to. So much better to be sitting at the bottom of the 3rd tier of football than to have nasty men who your don't like (but have never met) have a modicom of success. You need to get over this personality fixation mate. What matters is where we are and what we achieve, not the people who make that possible. Don't you get it? I just don't get this "I'd rather be in the 3rd division with anybody but Lowe than be playing Mancheser United with Lowe mentality." Funny but Cardiff seemed to be full of people who didn't give a stuff about Lowe a few years ago. Did you go out to the movies Alpime because you couldn't bare us to have some sucess under evil pantomime villian Count Lowe? Very sad.

If you can accept 3rd tier football at any price good for you. As for being insane, if the best premier league position, an FA Cup final and European football (all achieved in the last 10 years) wasn't good enough for you I despair if you think that 3rd tier football is an adequate replacement and equates to "being on the rails."

And never has a poster had such an appropriate avarter. I see from another thread that you are already anticipating the next defeat and the response. No doubt Alpine you have already drafted your posts for that occasion?

I answer to your question, I would rather be in the CCC than in the 3rd Divison of English football under anybody solely in that we could potentially be one season closer to promotion to the Premiership. Still, personalitities mean more to you than the league position of the team Let's see how you vote if we are still in the same league in a few years time eh? ps, I assume that Pardew has now reached hero status in the Alpine household now that Pardew has managed to do in three games what Pearson took 13 to achieve???

Your choice of course. Lets see if you and your friends are still saying that in two years time if we are still in Division 3. Interesting stance though. Of course I knew all along that Alpine would rather us be in the third tier of English football with any manager than conrenders for the play offs with Burely, but each to his own. I just find it very sad that people put the position of the club before personalities. Still, on the bright side at least three wins on the trot should shut up some of the people who were calling to sack the manager for a while.

Here we go again. Same old same old. Three wins on the trot but all you can think about is what happens when we lose again, which we will at some point. Every silver lining has a cloud.

I'd say the play offs were progress wouldn't you? I'd say being well away from relegation problems was a plus wouldn't you? We are constantly told that we were plummeting down the league when he left yet his stats show a win every other game, does not stack up does it? Would that money have been "frittered" if we had made the play offs and been successful??? We so nearly did - not his fault by the way - some individual players errors. Yes I expect there was malaise. Hone's incredible statement did not help not did getting shot of Jones, Baird and Bale, but lets just blame someone who won football matches for us quite regularly eh? Remember that feeling? Still Dunc, you have got your way. I remember very clearly you saying you would rather we were relegated than have Lowe at the helm so at least one Saints fan is happy!!!

Head in the sand mate!!! Don't you read the threads here? As for Britain's greatest Saints fan, what the f*** are you talking about???