ScepticalStan

Teams with players who cost £30Mn+ don't get relegated. The likes of Everton and Chelsea are incomparable with Saints no matter how badly they're underachieving. The reality is that we aren't a big enough club to be able to discount the possibility that relegation could be a season or two away. Taking our position for granted and naively thinking that 'it could never happen to us' is precisely what resulted in our seven year exodus.

I'd be surprised if Spurs were able to usurp United in the long term. The money and status that United have will always enable them to swoop in for big, big players in the various transfer windows and I'm afraid that they'll probably get it right eventually. Having said that, the presence of Chelsea and City at the top table of English football will make the next decade or so very interesting indeed. Chelsea were able to survive a few wilderness years outside the top four and eventually their spray-and-pray strategy of spending yielded Willian, Hazard (this season notwithstanding), Oscar, Costa (both starting to come good again) Azpilicueta and Matic (again, this season not withstanding) as much as it did Torres, Mikel and David Luiz. They'll invariably head straight back into the transfer market in the summer and replace what they need to before giving their failing players (Hazard) another season to improve. If they fail to do so, then they'll simply replace those as well. City did exactly the same thing. Remember Robinho, Roque Santa Cruz, Adebayor, Shaun Wright-Phillips, Jo, Kolo Toure, Bellamy, Elano? It wasn't just the spending that was shocking, it was their ability to not only spend, but barely make any sort of real effort to persevere with players that they had invested upwards of £20Mn on rather than just toss them aside and simply try again with another round of £100Mn-per-transfer-window spending when those players hadn't instantly come good. And sure enough, eventually they got themselves squads including the likes of Aguero, De Bruyne, Dzeko and Yaya Toure - with the likes of failures such as Balotelli and Bony being totally affordable even when costing upwards of £50Mn total. That kind of spending power just can't be matched. Likewise, United will always be able to throw their weight around in the transfer market more so than Tottenham and Liverpool, so I'd be very surprised if they don't regain their footing in the top four sooner or later, regardless of where they end up this season.

I've often felt like there's a book's worth of writing on this: - deep down everyone knows that a penalty for an innocuous foul in the box is a disproportionately harsh punishment, but those are the rules of football, and psychologically the supposed injustice of it all clearly plays a part when referees make decisions. One of my most memorable moments in my (very humble) playing days was when I was tripped inside the box as I spun away from a defender up my arse. I was genuinely tripped and the ref had a good look at it, but struggled to give a penalty. I quickly shouted "ref, REF! anywhere else on the pitch! c'mon ANYWHERE ELSE ON THE PITCH!" and after about 2-3 seconds of thought, he did give the penalty (I maintain to this day it was the correct decision, but I like to think (and I'm not sure I'm wrong!) that my spur-of-the-moment comment made the difference). Anyway, the point is that there's clearly and unwritten, unspoken knowledge in football: - that a foul inside the box (if the attacking player isn't in a threatening position) just doesn't quite deserve to be punished with a penalty. Sometimes you even hear pundits almost outright coming out and saying it without realising they're doing so. I'm not sure I haven't heard someone like Niall Quinn or Michael Owen saying something like "ahh...not sure I'd be givin' tat in ta box"

In all seriousness...HAS he had a save to make since getting back?

Any videos taken by the fans at our end?

This. Elated to **** over those entitled bunch of cnts

You're entitled to your opinion but it is all subjective. The only independent metric is the league table and points-per-game.

Not impossible in the slightest. Quite likely even. He's contracted to us for the next two seasons until the summer of 2018, and a single-year contract extension to work in a back-up player/coaching role will see him over the ten season line.

He'll doubtless be invited to Fonte's testemonial when he retires. We'll get our chance

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jan/14/beckett-report-labour-lost-2015-election-economy-immigrants-benefits Turns out that (no ****), Labour lost the election over the economy, immigration and welfare. Wasn't Jeremy a great choice! I tell you what, the Tories have done very well keeping their powder dry in terms of holding off from attacking Corbyn in order to make sure he remains leader for as long as possible. If the Corbynites are unhappy with how he's being portrayed in the media now then they'll be in for a hell of shock if and when Corbyn is still Labour leader in the run-up to 2020.

Sunderland available to lay (bet against their relegation) at 1.43 on Betfair last I checked, so you'd more than triple your money if they did stay up. Definitely tempting.

They really didn't show up at all. Had a feeling we'd be a lot more up for it than them much like Villa vs Palace yesterday. Centre-backs still outstanding though. Deeney and Igahlo weren't given a sniff.

I think Bournemouth are in greater danger than people might realise. They've wasted a lot of their winnable home games (they've already played all of the bottom three at home - and only picked up three points from them) Plus, they still have to play those three teams away from home, and whilst its perfectly possible they'll kick on and effortlessly glide up to mid-table, they'll find themselves donating points to precisely the wrong opponents if it does all go horribly wrong. Oh, and they have a pretty grim finish to the season: 19 Mar Tottenham Bournemouth 2 Apr Bournemouth Manchester C. 9 Apr Aston Villa Bournemouth 16 Apr Bournemouth Liverpool 23 Apr Bournemouth Chelsea 30 Apr Everton Bournemouth 7 May Bournemouth West Bromwich 15 May Manchester U. Bournemouth They're available at 9/2 if anyone fancies a punt.

Bertrand has remained pretty consistent throughout the season and deserves it IMO. People expect him to go the extra mile, get to the byeline and whip in crosses like he did last season - but you need a midfield that can actually win and keep the ball before you even think of the luxury of getting overlapping full-backs seriously involved from an attacking point of view. In terms of his bread and butter, which is keeping the opposing right-winger quiet, he's done his job well.

I'd still be very, very surprised if we actually did get relegated.

With respect Adrian you said nothing of the sort when I posted this thread. Incidentally, I do agree with what you're saying (and indeed, particularly the bolded), but in answer to your question: I do think its worth raising the issue of the extent to which people overestimated the ability of our players, yes.

Since the Autumn I was trying to gently temper people's expectations about where we'd end up this season as I knew full well that top half of the table or challenging for a cup was well beyond our very, very average squad. Having said that, the squad is good enough to hover comfortably in the 10th-13th sort of range and shouldn't really be in any danger of going down. One win and one draw out of ten matches is consistent under-performance even by that standard and this is the first time I've seriously started to wonder about Koeman's position.

Might have been worth listening to me eh?

You'd be surprised. Most Spurs fans I know only completely gave up their last vestiges of hope about half way through his second season. Besides, players do come good now and again. Ozil was considered a disappointment in his first season, an outright flop in his second and now in his third has probably been the best player in the league. I think the thing with Gaston though the outright double standards when compared to other players. JWP has been utterly ineffective yet has played over 100 times for the club and people still demand he be 'given time'. Shane Long cost the same as Ramirez and chipped in with precisely the same number of goals in his first season as Ramirez did in his, yet his supporters seem to get angry at the suggestion that a striker ought to be able to chip in 10 goals in a season and act as if its some kind of unreachable target. Ramirez has obviously been a costly failure of a signing (I personally would like to see him be given more time here and there - although I'll readily defer to the superior knowledge of MP and RK), but the obsession with him is boring. The money's been paid/budgeted for. It's done. Offload and move on. Since Ramirez we took a chance on another up-and-coming creative forward who got into double figures of goals in his first season, will have given us two very solid years of performances and will likely make us a £15Mn-30Mn profit at the end of it all. You win some you lose some.

Depends what you consider by 'proven'. Pelle and Tadic were proven in Holland, Mane in Austria and Van Dijk in Scotland, but no-one would consider those leagues to be anything above the standard of the Championship. All four (understandably I might add) had their fair share of doubters and whilst none have been world-beaters, those four signings have all worked out well enough in terms of value for money. You can arguably add Wanyama and Forster to that list as well. In addition, Clyne had only played in the Championship before we signed him and Bertrand's Premiership career had largely consisted of a series of fairly unimpressive loans out here and there. So that's eight first-team players that were all originally unproven, but have all been really quite successful, bought for a total value of just under £80Mn. Proven quality in the Premiership is expensive. Extremely expensive. United had to pay £25Mn for what they knew would amount to one-and-a-bit season's worth of Robin Van Persie at the peak of his abilities. Everton have shelled out £28Mn for Lukaku and most would agree that he's actually proved to be a bargain. Berahino only scored 14 Premiership goals last season (including penalties) and only has three in this, yet he'll likely command £20Mn or so as he's quite clearly capable of some level of the consistency that all Premier League managers crave. Maybe I'm getting too hung up on strikers, but examples can be found closer to home. Hell, look at our own Ryan Bertrand; a series of unimpressive loans, didn't look good at Villa and wasn't wanted by Chelsea. In the summer of 2014 it looked like he'd have to drop down a league until we signed him. Then, bang; after only five or six month's of proving himself as a reliable regular in a very solid Premiership team (to be honest, for the first time in his career) he set us back a fairly hefty £10Mn. That's a lot for a not-particularly-young defender who had only just come good, but come good he had - and it was clear that he was a player one could rely upon for consistency rather than flashes of brilliance here and there. That causes your value to skyrocket. Look at Lovren; £20Mn for a defender who had one (very good, in fairness, but still just one) season under his belt. Football is football but with the melting pot of foreign players, managers and external influences along with the far more diverse range of tactics across Europe's major and minor leagues, its becoming harder and harder to predict whether a player will be a success or an almighty flop. That's part of the reason Shane Long cost £12 million. He's nothing special but you know exactly what he gives you; if you're a manager with Shane Long on the bench you know the precise nature of one of the weapons in your arsenal. That in itself is worth decent money these days. Simple truth is that Southampton are almost never going to be in a position where we can sign seriously 100% proven quality. There will always be a large element of risk and calculated estimating going on. These thread's remind me of the one's about the kind of striker we need to sign when Pelle isn't firing, Rodriguez is still injured and Shane Long can't control the ball. People describe a striker with pace, who can hold up the ball, shoot from distance with both feet and dominate in the air, yet lose track of the fact that with every descriptive sentence, they've added another £10-12 million to this fantasy striker's value.

Bolded is patently not true. We finished 5 points and better GD clear of Wigan in 18th. Subtract Gaston's goals, assists and the odd game-winning performance (Villa and Newcastle at home) and we'd have certainly been in greater danger. Having said that, I must admit that when you only just avoid relegation, you could easily say the same about most of your players. Subtract Lambert, Fonte, Schneiderlin, Clyne, Rodriguez, Lallana or Puncheon from our 2012/2013 squad and obviously that would have jeapordised our position further and in the case of the first four, probably condemned us to relegation beyond any doubt. Gaston didn't 'keep us up', but he certainly did make a positive contribution.

I'm with you mate, and whilst I salute your efforts, I've long resigned myself to the impossibility of trying to persuade people. If Ramirez isn't sold or loaned-to-be-sold in January he'll doubtless eventually get his 'chance' when he's brought on with 5 minutes to go to play out of position whilst we're defending a 1-0 lead away from home with 10 men. He'll then be blamed for not creating anything.

When I'm in a more reasonable mood this is more-or-less the argument that I've tried to make. JWP just doesn't have the pace, power, trickery or athleticism to handle the one-on-one winger vs full-back battles of playing out wide in the modern game. He obviously doesn't have the physique to play at centre-back or as a box-to-box midfielder and he isn't a striker, so what's left? Well, as you say, the one role he could potentially occupy is the 'quarterback' role in defensive-midfield. The kind exemplified by Pirlo and Xavi. The trouble is that to be effective in such a 'privileged' role (one where the team can actually afford to accommodate a non-defending player at the base of the spine of the team), such a player has to be technically outstanding, and capable of the kind of range of passing that the likes of Pirlo were capable of, to make their inclusion worthwhile.

Not remotely impressive. England are a mid-tier-ish international side who's senior team and under-21s have bowed out at the group stage of their last two respective tournaments. We're the equivalent of a Sweden, USA or a Uruguay or so.

I will never forget that game. Took my neutral-supporting mate to the match and despite being surrounded by Saints fans, he couldn't help but laugh his ******** off at every goal we conceded. I don't think anyone could really blame him. The third was the funniest; big punt from the keeper, ball bounces ahead of Bennett about 30 yards from goal, Bennett jumps into the air as the ball is rising off the bounce and it goes straight over his head and almost over Bialkowski (who being far too far forward, and on the edge of his penalty area) has to leap up and stretch to prevent the ball bouncing over him as well and going into the net. He got a hand to it, clawed it downwards, and ended up inadvertently bouncing the ball in off the face of the onrushing Jamie Scowcroft (who then dived forwards in a 'heading motion' about two seconds later in order to try and make it look like his goal wasn't scored completely by accident). Funniest goal we've conceded for sure. Although later that season there was a hilarious bungle-up between Jermaine Wright and Kelvin Davis against QPR which led to Patrick Agyemang literally walking the ball into the net.