Worst decisions ever made at Saints

Not sacking Pellegrino after Leicester at the latest, allowing him to stay until the transfer transfer window and then allowing him waste £20m on a Sunday League player. I said to Eric B after the Huddersfield away game that such a cowardly, defensive manager would see us in big trouble. Now if a not right bright football fan can see it how the fu_ck didn't those running the club? Their hubris has had directly to the point we find ourselves today.

Not bringing in quality CBs to replace both Fonte and VVD. That, on the pitch, has been the obvious downfall.

Selling both Pelle & Mane in the same window and not replacing their goals. I appreciate we couldn't hold on to them but to them try and tell us Redmond was the new Henry? Really?

Sacking Puel before you have a replacement sorted. Clearly none of the serious names fancied the set up and they've been proven correct.

Personally I don't care what division we are in. It's about the day out with my son and friends although no priced capped tickets is cr_ap. I'll have plenty of Northern and Midlands games to go to taking in a few new grounds for me and plenty for my son. We will still sing and shout ourselves hoarse and still be Saints fans.

Not sacking Pellegrino after Leicester at the latest, allowing him to stay until the transfer transfer window and then allowing him waste £20m on a Sunday League player. I said to Eric B after the Huddersfield away game that such a cowardly, defensive manager would see us in big trouble. Now if a not right bright football fan can see it how the fu_ck didn't those running the club? Their hubris has had directly to the point we find ourselves today.

 

Not bringing in quality CBs to replace both Fonte and VVD. That, on the pitch, has been the obvious downfall.

 

Selling both Pelle & Mane in the same window and not replacing their goals. I appreciate we couldn't hold on to them but to them try and tell us Redmond was the new Henry? Really?

 

Sacking Puel before you have a replacement sorted. Clearly none of the serious names fancied the set up and they've been proven correct.

 

Personally I don't care what division we are in. It's about the day out with my son and friends although no priced capped tickets is cr_ap. I'll have plenty of Northern and Midlands games to go to taking in a few new grounds for me and plenty for my son. We will still sing and shout ourselves hoarse and still be Saints fans.

Got to be good news for you that WBA and stoke are joining us in going down!

Letting Koeman leave

Not replacing Mane

Appointing Puel

Not replacing Pelle

Selling Fonte

Not replacing Fonte. Yoshida is ****.

Appointing Pellegrino

Not sacking him as soon as we lost to Burnley at home. Hell, you could even say Watford at home - it was clear we were going to be in a relegation dog fight then.

Backing Pellegrino in January. £19m on a striker who would struggle in the Championship.

Not using more of the VvD money to sure up the defence. None of our CBs are Premier League quality as proven by the goals we concede.

If you are talking about recent times. I can't disagree with much of this.

Yep, the famous Black Box (or those analysing it) has a lot to answer for. Believing they can keep pulling a rabbit out of the hat and amazing the football world with yet another clever decision than others couldn't see.

The same Black Box that will be found in the wreckage of our season.

Surely a replacement top class defender would cone from the same place we recruited VVD, Lovren, Fonte, Toby.

 

Why, when we had an excellent record in signing top class defenders, is it suddenly impossible or unreasonable to expect us to sign a top class defender or two?

 

We are allowed to buy a dud - Hoedt fair enough - but we should have replaced Fonte with soneone and lyin' Les also said that Hoedt was not VVD's replacement. It's the fact we didn't even try and get replacements.

We got Toby on loan when he had the chance for him to come here he chose Spurs I think you have to be realistic top close defenders do not want to come here.

Yes Lovren and VVD turned out well but they were not expensive and wanted to develop in the PL which I think is what Hoedt wanted to do when he signed as he was a Dutch international.

Fonte was bought in Div 1 and like Morgan and Lallana developed with us.

It is easy to say we should get in top CBs but which ones were available and have wanted to come here in the last 18 months.

Like me you have no idea who the club has targeted

I still think our main problem is the academy as we have not developed any top class regular PL players in the last five years just like what happened when we were relegated in 2005

We got Toby on loan when he had the chance for him to come here he chose Spurs I think you have to be realistic top close defenders do not want to come here.

 

Yes Lovren and VVD turned out well but they were not expensive and wanted to develop in the PL which I think is what Hoedt wanted to do when he signed as he was a Dutch international.

 

Fonte was bought in Div 1 and like Morgan and Lallana developed with us.

 

It is easy to say we should get in top CBs but which ones were available and have wanted to come here in the last 18 months.

 

Like me you have no idea who the club has targeted

 

I still think our main problem is the academy as we have not developed any top class regular PL players in the last five years just like what happened when we were relegated in 2005

We had a chance with Harry McGuire. He was being touted out to the league when hull went down. We backed jack Stephens

There is one and I don’t get paid millions of ££ to scout players full time.

Over the last few seasons:

 

In reverse order

3) Allowing Koeman to leave

 

2)Appointing and retaining Pellegrino as long as we did

 

1)Successive transfer windows and policy.

 

And the outright winner is Les Reed.

 

Historically the appointment of Branfoot was a monumental cock up, but it pales into insignificance compared to any of the above.

At least Branfoot kept us up!

Letting Koeman leave

Not replacing Mane

Appointing Puel

Not replacing Pelle

Selling Fonte

Not replacing Fonte. Yoshida is ****.

Appointing Pellegrino

Not sacking him as soon as we lost to Burnley at home. Hell, you could even say Watford at home - it was clear we were going to be in a relegation dog fight then.

Backing Pellegrino in January. £19m on a striker who would struggle in the Championship.

Not using more of the VvD money to sure up the defence. None of our CBs are Premier League quality as proven by the goals we concede.

The truth is that it took all of these mistakes to place us in this position. If any single one of them had not been made, we would probably avoid relegation this season. The fact is that Les Reed presided over all of these bad decisions and it is the combination of all of the mistakes that will relegate us. One or two bad decisions would have been ok and acceptable. Reed is unique in getting all of them wrong.

Everything you need to know about the black box here:

 

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2717975-inside-the-southampton-black-box-informing-their-manager-carousel

 

Some classic mastorbatory bull**** from the clowns in charge at Our club.

 

“Southampton have deliberately cultivated a system that mitigates a manager’s importance, ensuring continuity that can outlast any boss’ tenure. "One of the mistakes many clubs make is they don't commit to a strategy and move the goal posts all the time," Ross Wilson, Southampton's Director of Football Operations and one of the club’s most senior decision-makers, explained ”

“At Staplewood, Southampton's £40 million training centre nestled in the leafy Hampshire village of Marchwood, lies the club’s "black box." This room, which only Southampton’s inner circle have permanent access to, is the centrepiece of the club’s forward planning. "It enables us to present a lot of information in a way that keeps everything clear, on message, structured," Wilson said. The black box contains a live database of data and video highlights from European leagues that the club monitor. The rationale is simple: to allow Southampton to identify suitable players to sign.”

 

“The list is always evolving and always current," Wilson explained. Southampton invariably know who they want to sign in the next transfer window. Around 20 players are tracked in each position at any one time, and there is a shortlist of four or five primary targets for each position.”

 

“Reed has a dossier of potential coaches that is constantly updated, with intelligence on those considered the best fits for Southampton—especially handy when managers leave during their contracts, as happened in 2014 and 2016. There were only nine days between Puel's being sacked and Pellegrino's being confirmed as his replacement, showing how the dossier enables the club to act decisively in appointing new managers.”

 

“Pellegrino was identified as a manager in keeping with the "Southampton Way" for his track record of promoting young players and playing attacking, technically proficient football. From his time in Spain, Pellegrino is also well-versed operating as part of a wider executive structure like that at Southampton.

 

Any new manager "needs to be a fit to the philosophy of that organisation or that football club," Wilson explained. "When we appoint a manager here, we want that manager to be somebody that fits in with what we do here." This continuity of approach also ensures that existing intelligence gathered through the black-box will remain useful for the new boss.”

This is exactly my problem with this club. Up ourselves, blue sky thinking, trying to be clever and think we're better than everyone else.

Absolute cringe worthy load of ********. We just pat ourselves on the back all the time and belittle other clubs achievements. (Leicester copied us..!). ****ing hell. Lunatics running the asylum anyone.

I think you have to view some of the decisions over the past 24 months in good faith. For instance, we signed Boufal and Redmond after Mane left. They haven’t worked as we’d have hoped, and have offered nowhere near the quality Mane did, but you can see what the board were thinking. I was really excited about Boufal when we signed him.

Likewise with appointing Puel. A lot of people thought Koeman could’ve given more chances to youth players, and the football in the first half of his second season was pretty stodgy fare. Yes we could’ve appointed someone more high-profile at that point he left - Pellegrini - for example, but on paper, Puel had a good track-record of developing young players and of managing in European campaigns. So I can’t beat the board up too much about it.

That said, some of the decisions made have been so reckless they have bordered on self-sabotage. So in ascending order of ridiculousness, for me:

1) Selling Fonte and not replacing in January 2016/2017 window. We were facing our most realistic chance of winning a trophy in 40 years, and we sell our captain, leader, and last link to the League 1 days. Yes he was clearly unhappy post-Euro victory and his ego was supposedly through the roof, but he was also a consummate professional and would’ve got himself in the mind-frame to play that final. You can’t put a price on leadership qualities and we should’ve bent over to keep him at the club. This decision may have cost us a trophy.

2) Appointing Pellegrino and not sacking him when it became obvious to all he was out of his depth. The guy never seemed like our first choice. We dithered over sacking Puel for what seemed like an eternity, which was strange as the board had made his position almost untenable by repeatedly informing favoured journo’s that we were reviewing his position. Meanwhile Wilson was sunning himself in Portugal...

Supposedly we were holding out for Tuchel, but that always seemed unlikely. Silva and Schmidt had already moved on, with the former probably bored of waiting for us to make a move. And then suddenly Pellegrino was our always-had-been number one choice who had been tracked by the black box for years, etc. Les heralded it as a return to attacking football but his CV showed no signs of that.

Luckily for Pellegrino, he had the kindest opening fixture list I can ever remember for an incoming manager. So when he started to blow opportunity after opportunity for three points, the warning signs were going off like a Catherine wheel in a portaloo. The board had so many chances to react - post Leicester, post Liverpool, post Spurs, but somehow he crawled on into the January transfer window unscathed.

3) 2017/2018 transfer window - the grand farce. There were so many different ways this window could’ve gone, but Les & Wilson seemed to manufacture the most outrageously backfiring scenario that you wonder whether they were on commission to get us relegated.

First of all selling VvD. What a climb-down from the stance made in the summer. Why expend all that effort to keep him? He was back in the first team, and despite questions over how much he was applying himself, he was still clearly our best player and defender. He was also recovering from long-term injury.

We were struggling at this point and without a win since November. Any decision to sell was always going to damage us hugely at the back. Until the previous January we had always insisted we wouldn’t sell any players during this window. Based on how poorly the previous winter window had gone when we had sold a key player in January, with us having to rummage around the freebie bin and bring in Caceres, you think the board would’ve wretched at the thought of doing the same again.

But double-down on the same botched policy we did. Ok, a world record fee for a defender. Very nice, very nice. Well done Les and Ross. We had the predictable deluge of articles, humble-bragging about our history of ‘dazzling’ transfer successes and Liverpool dancing to Les’ tune. We also had less predictable articles where we were linked to a clutch of established Premier League players and promising youngsters - Mawson, Walcott, Sturridge, Dembele and Sessegnon. There was also a strange link to Tosun, despite him being on the verge of signing for Everton.

Given doubts over the manager, our precarious position, and the fact that we were flush with the VvD money, it was always obvious we would have to: 1) go above and beyond to convince players to come to us; 2) pay over the odds on transfer fees.

This seemed to catch Les and Wilson by surprise and after it became likely we would miss out on Walcott, who preferred the extra moolah and mid-table security on offer at Everton, we became locked in torturous talks to bring in Carrillo - a Monaco reserve and former Pellegrino player - and Quincy Promes, who seemed like he might just bring some qualities that we’d missed since shipping out Mane, but would always be difficult to prise mid-season from Spartan Moscow.

Bizarrely we were never strongly linked to any defender throughout the entire window, other than the tenuous link to Mawson. But when we were faced with limited options in the transfer market it really became a choice of either ditching Pellegrino and bringing in a manager to get the best out of the underperforming players we had at the club, or persisting with him and seriously backing him with several high-risk additions.

We didn’t really do either. £20m eventually shelled out on Carrillo after Pellegrino had belatedly realised a 4-2-3-1 works best with a target man, following Austin’s reintegration into the team and then subsequent injury.

Reed & Wilson seemed to drag this transfer out for about 2 weeks longer than it needed to, with him only ever being used sparingly by Monaco. Maybe they weren’t comfortable spending that money on a Pellegrino recommendation, but if so, why didn’t they just trust their better instincts and get rid of the man presiding over our demise?

Promes was made out to be touch-and-go but Spartak wanted time to sort a replacement and as we only agreed a fee typically late in the day, they were never in a position to do so. But hey ho, this transfer is all rubber-stamped for next summer, right?

So despite all the early window bluster and fanciful transfer links we ended up shorn of our best defender, and bringing in one grossly overpriced target man who had barely played over the past couple of seasons, and who we brought in so late that he missed several key games anyway and had no time to adapt to Pellegrino’s training ‘methods’.

We kept getting told by Jeremy Wilson that a ‘sense of urgency was developing’ about our predicament at boardroom level but it should’ve been screaming and slapping Reed and Wilson around the chops and compelled them to act. Or at least you thought our new owner would be sufficiently bothered to apply some pressure on them to sort things out.

Call it the result of inertia, overconfidence, or just plain indecision, the failures in that window have basically cost us our PL status. The frustration for us fans is that it was all so avoidable, and mainly self-inflicted.

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winning that Everton game 4-1.

I think you have to view some of the decisions over the past 24 months in good faith. For instance, we signed Boufal and Redmond after Mane left. They haven’t worked as we’d have hoped, and have offered nowhere near the quality Mane did, but you can see what the board were thinking. I was really excited about Boufal when we signed him.

 

Likewise with appointing Puel. A lot of people thought Koeman could’ve given more chances to youth players, and the football in the first half of his second season was pretty stodgy fare. Yes we could’ve appointed someone more high-profile at that point he left - Pellegrini - for example, but on paper, Puel had a good track-record of developing young players and of managing in European campaigns. So I can’t beat the board up too much about it.

 

That said, some of the decisions made have been so reckless they have bordered on self-sabotage. So in ascending order of ridiculousness, for me:

 

1) Selling Fonte and not replacing in January 2016/2017 window. We were facing our most realistic chance of winning a trophy in 40 years, and we sell our captain, leader, and last link to the League 1 days. Yes he was clearly unhappy post-Euro victory and his ego was supposedly through the roof, but he was also a consummate professional and would’ve got himself in the mind-frame to play that final. You can’t put a price on leadership qualities and we should’ve bent over to keep him at the club. This decision may have cost us a trophy.

 

2) Appointing Pellegrino and not sacking him when it became obvious to all he was out of his depth. The guy never seemed like our first choice. We dithered over sacking Puel for what seemed like an eternity, which was strange as the board had made his position almost untenable by repeatedly informing favoured journo’s that we were reviewing his position. Meanwhile Wilson was sunning himself in Portugal...

 

Supposedly we were holding out for Tuchel, but that always seemed unlikely. Silva and Schmidt had already moved on, with the former probably bored of waiting for us to make a move. And then suddenly Pellegrino was our always-had-been number one choice who had been tracked by the black box for years, etc. Les heralded it as a return to attacking football but his CV showed no signs of that.

 

Luckily for Pellegrino, he had the kindest opening fixture list I can ever remember for an incoming manager. So when he started to blow opportunity after opportunity for three points, the warning signs were going off like a Catherine wheel in a portaloo. The board had so many chances to react - post Leicester, post Liverpool, post Spurs, but somehow he crawled on into the January transfer window unscathed.

 

3) 2017/2018 transfer window - the grand farce. There were so many different ways this window could’ve gone, but Les & Wilson seemed to manufacture the most outrageously backfiring scenario that you wonder whether they were on commission to get us relegated.

 

First of all selling VvD. What a climb-down from the stance made in the summer. Why expend all that effort to keep him? He was back in the first team, and despite questions over how much he was applying himself, he was still clearly our best player and defender. He was also recovering from long-term injury.

 

We were struggling at this point and without a win since November. Any decision to sell was always going to damage us hugely at the back. Until the previous January we had always insisted we wouldn’t sell any players during this window. Based on how poorly the previous winter window had gone when we had sold a key player in January, with us having to rummage around the freebie bin and bring in Caceres, you think the board would’ve wretched at the thought of doing the same again.

 

But double-down on the same botched policy we did. Ok, a world record fee for a defender. Very nice, very nice. Well done Les and Ross. We had the predictable deluge of articles, humble-bragging about our history of ‘dazzling’ transfer successes and Liverpool dancing to Les’ tune. We also had less predictable articles where we were linked to a clutch of established Premier League players and promising youngsters - Mawson, Walcott, Sturridge, Dembele and Sessegnon. There was also a strange link to Tosun, despite him being on the verge of signing for Everton.

 

Given doubts over the manager, our precarious position, and the fact that we were flush with the VvD money, it was always obvious we would have to: 1) go above and beyond to convince players to come to us; 2) pay over the odds on transfer fees.

 

This seemed to catch Les and Wilson by surprise and after it became likely we would miss out on Walcott, who preferred the extra moolah and mid-table security on offer at Everton, we became locked in torturous talks to bring in Carrillo - a Monaco reserve and former Pellegrino player - and Quincy Promes, who seemed like he might just bring some qualities that we’d missed since shipping out Mane, but would always be difficult to prise mid-season from Spartan Moscow.

 

Bizarrely we were never strongly linked to any defender throughout the entire window, other than the tenuous link to Mawson. But when we were faced with limited options in the transfer market it really became a choice of either ditching Pellegrino and bringing in a manager to get the best out of the underperforming players we had at the club, or persisting with him and seriously backing him with several high-risk additions.

 

We didn’t really do either. £20m eventually shelled out on Carrillo after Pellegrino had belatedly realised a 4-2-3-1 works best with a target man, following Austin’s reintegration into the team and then subsequent injury.

 

Reed & Wilson seemed to drag this transfer out for about 2 weeks longer than it needed to, with him only ever being used sparingly by Monaco. Maybe they weren’t comfortable spending that money on a Pellegrino recommendation, but if so, why didn’t they just trust their better instincts and get rid of the man presiding over our demise?

 

Promes was made out to be touch-and-go but Spartak wanted time to sort a replacement and as we only agreed a fee typically late in the day, they were never in a position to do so. But hey ho, this transfer is all rubber-stamped for next summer, right?

 

So despite all the early window bluster and fanciful transfer links we ended up shorn of our best defender, and bringing in one grossly overpriced target man who had barely played over the past couple of seasons, and who we brought in so late that he missed several key games anyway and had no time to adapt to Pellegrino’s training ‘methods’.

 

We kept getting told by Jeremy Wilson that a ‘sense of urgency was developing’ about our predicament at boardroom level but it should’ve been screaming and slapping Reed and Wilson around the chops and compelled them to act. Or at least you thought our new owner would be sufficiently bothered to apply some pressure on them to sort things out.

 

Call it the result of inertia, overconfidence, or just plain indecision, the failures in that window have basically cost us our PL status. The frustration for us fans is that it was all so avoidable, and mainly self-inflicted.

 

 

 

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What a brilliant post. Can't argue with that. The dithering and indecision in the transfer market was not new as some of us had posted about in previous years. I can't understand why, unless it was because the people at the top wanted to keep cash reserves in the club coffers.

I know it’s the obvious one as it’s the most recent but keeping Pellegrino for anywhere near as long as we did has to be the worst thing we’ve done I can think of in my time as a saint. Just about everyone knew very early on he was useless and was never getting any better. Made worse by the player turnover scheme that wasn’t going to work out forever.

Letting Koeman leave

Not replacing Mane

Appointing Puel

Not replacing Pelle

Selling Fonte

Not replacing Fonte. Yoshida is ****.

Appointing Pellegrino

Not sacking him as soon as we lost to Burnley at home. Hell, you could even say Watford at home - it was clear we were going to be in a relegation dog fight then.

Backing Pellegrino in January. £19m on a striker who would struggle in the Championship.

Not using more of the VvD money to sure up the defence. None of our CBs are Premier League quality as proven by the goals we concede.

Well put. A 2 season long perpetual cluster**** born of the club's belief in it's own bull$hit that we are the blueprint for how a club of our size should be run.

Selling quality players and gambling on replacements who either have potential or didn't quite hit the mark at previous teams. Spunking 19 million in a striker who frankly looks toilet!

Having no ambition when we had Pelle and Mane we should of grew a set of balls tied them both down and actually signed ambitious players that would of made them want to continue on. That was the best opportunity to go for the top 6 / 4 consistently and we royally ducked it up.....

We could of got Promes , Ziyech or Dost and actually showed some ambition....

Selling quality players and gambling on replacements who either have potential or didn't quite hit the mark at previous teams. Spunking 19 million in a striker who frankly looks toilet!

 

Having no ambition when we had Pelle and Mane we should of grew a set of balls tied them both down and actually signed ambitious players that would of made them want to continue on. That was the best opportunity to go for the top 6 / 4 consistently and we royally ducked it up.....

 

We could of got Promes , Ziyech or Dost and actually showed some ambition....

Agree with the point you're making but you're re-writing history a bit regarding Pelle. Many were pleased to see him leave, and in truth selling him as we did at his age wasn't in itself the wrong decision by the club. As with may of our summers though it is the replacement - or lack of - that has been the criminal neglect by Les and pocket jock.

Mane - yes, but we come back to the player wouldn't look to extend his contract so we're faced with a dilemna.

Carillo - what a shambles, no defence of that move which just summarises the clusterf^ck of Reed's making.

A couple of decisions nobody has mentioned yet

1. Lino making a poor offside decision at Wembley. Win that game and we’d never had contemplated sacking Claude.

2. Believing Gabbi would score goals this season, understandable given his start pre injury but still a major screw up. Had somebody realised then maybe we’d have found a proper striker in the summer. The knock on effect was we were looking for one in Jan.

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A couple of decisions nobody has mentioned yet

 

1. Lino making a poor offside decision at Wembley. Win that game and we’d never had contemplated sacking Claude.

 

2. Believing Gabbi would score goals this season, understandable given his start pre injury but still a major screw up. Had somebody realised then maybe we’d have found a proper striker in the summer. The knock on effect was we were looking for one in Jan.

 

 

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... and signed Carillo instead

The decision to give Steve Wigley the managers job in 2005, and to not make a change sooner was by far one of the biggest mistakes this club ever made, although I believe that was down to Rupert Lowe and the board had to intervene to get Wigley out. Poor bloke was a decent coach who never really wanted the job and Sturrock should have been replaced with a proven name straight away.

Further to this whilst the decision to bring in Redknapp wasn’t a bad one, to not back him in the transfer market and rely on the likes of Davenport, jakobsson and Bernard to keep us up.

You could even argue to decision not to back Strachan after the 03 season by refusing to spend £10million on Steed Malbranque and Louis Saha as Rupes didn’t want to give that much money to a ‘rival’ led us on the whole downward path to relegation.

I think you have to view some of the decisions over the past 24 months in good faith. For instance, we signed Boufal and Redmond after Mane left. They haven’t worked as we’d have hoped, and have offered nowhere near the quality Mane did, but you can see what the board were thinking. I was really excited about Boufal when we signed him.

 

Likewise with appointing Puel. A lot of people thought Koeman could’ve given more chances to youth players, and the football in the first half of his second season was pretty stodgy fare. Yes we could’ve appointed someone more high-profile at that point he left - Pellegrini - for example, but on paper, Puel had a good track-record of developing young players and of managing in European campaigns. So I can’t beat the board up too much about it.

 

That said, some of the decisions made have been so reckless they have bordered on self-sabotage. So in ascending order of ridiculousness, for me:

 

1) Selling Fonte and not replacing in January 2016/2017 window. We were facing our most realistic chance of winning a trophy in 40 years, and we sell our captain, leader, and last link to the League 1 days. Yes he was clearly unhappy post-Euro victory and his ego was supposedly through the roof, but he was also a consummate professional and would’ve got himself in the mind-frame to play that final. You can’t put a price on leadership qualities and we should’ve bent over to keep him at the club. This decision may have cost us a trophy.

 

2) Appointing Pellegrino and not sacking him when it became obvious to all he was out of his depth. The guy never seemed like our first choice. We dithered over sacking Puel for what seemed like an eternity, which was strange as the board had made his position almost untenable by repeatedly informing favoured journo’s that we were reviewing his position. Meanwhile Wilson was sunning himself in Portugal...

 

Supposedly we were holding out for Tuchel, but that always seemed unlikely. Silva and Schmidt had already moved on, with the former probably bored of waiting for us to make a move. And then suddenly Pellegrino was our always-had-been number one choice who had been tracked by the black box for years, etc. Les heralded it as a return to attacking football but his CV showed no signs of that.

 

Luckily for Pellegrino, he had the kindest opening fixture list I can ever remember for an incoming manager. So when he started to blow opportunity after opportunity for three points, the warning signs were going off like a Catherine wheel in a portaloo. The board had so many chances to react - post Leicester, post Liverpool, post Spurs, but somehow he crawled on into the January transfer window unscathed.

 

3) 2017/2018 transfer window - the grand farce. There were so many different ways this window could’ve gone, but Les & Wilson seemed to manufacture the most outrageously backfiring scenario that you wonder whether they were on commission to get us relegated.

 

First of all selling VvD. What a climb-down from the stance made in the summer. Why expend all that effort to keep him? He was back in the first team, and despite questions over how much he was applying himself, he was still clearly our best player and defender. He was also recovering from long-term injury.

 

We were struggling at this point and without a win since November. Any decision to sell was always going to damage us hugely at the back. Until the previous January we had always insisted we wouldn’t sell any players during this window. Based on how poorly the previous winter window had gone when we had sold a key player in January, with us having to rummage around the freebie bin and bring in Caceres, you think the board would’ve wretched at the thought of doing the same again.

 

But double-down on the same botched policy we did. Ok, a world record fee for a defender. Very nice, very nice. Well done Les and Ross. We had the predictable deluge of articles, humble-bragging about our history of ‘dazzling’ transfer successes and Liverpool dancing to Les’ tune. We also had less predictable articles where we were linked to a clutch of established Premier League players and promising youngsters - Mawson, Walcott, Sturridge, Dembele and Sessegnon. There was also a strange link to Tosun, despite him being on the verge of signing for Everton.

 

Given doubts over the manager, our precarious position, and the fact that we were flush with the VvD money, it was always obvious we would have to: 1) go above and beyond to convince players to come to us; 2) pay over the odds on transfer fees.

 

This seemed to catch Les and Wilson by surprise and after it became likely we would miss out on Walcott, who preferred the extra moolah and mid-table security on offer at Everton, we became locked in torturous talks to bring in Carrillo - a Monaco reserve and former Pellegrino player - and Quincy Promes, who seemed like he might just bring some qualities that we’d missed since shipping out Mane, but would always be difficult to prise mid-season from Spartan Moscow.

 

Bizarrely we were never strongly linked to any defender throughout the entire window, other than the tenuous link to Mawson. But when we were faced with limited options in the transfer market it really became a choice of either ditching Pellegrino and bringing in a manager to get the best out of the underperforming players we had at the club, or persisting with him and seriously backing him with several high-risk additions.

 

We didn’t really do either. £20m eventually shelled out on Carrillo after Pellegrino had belatedly realised a 4-2-3-1 works best with a target man, following Austin’s reintegration into the team and then subsequent injury.

 

Reed & Wilson seemed to drag this transfer out for about 2 weeks longer than it needed to, with him only ever being used sparingly by Monaco. Maybe they weren’t comfortable spending that money on a Pellegrino recommendation, but if so, why didn’t they just trust their better instincts and get rid of the man presiding over our demise?

 

Promes was made out to be touch-and-go but Spartak wanted time to sort a replacement and as we only agreed a fee typically late in the day, they were never in a position to do so. But hey ho, this transfer is all rubber-stamped for next summer, right?

 

So despite all the early window bluster and fanciful transfer links we ended up shorn of our best defender, and bringing in one grossly overpriced target man who had barely played over the past couple of seasons, and who we brought in so late that he missed several key games anyway and had no time to adapt to Pellegrino’s training ‘methods’.

 

We kept getting told by Jeremy Wilson that a ‘sense of urgency was developing’ about our predicament at boardroom level but it should’ve been screaming and slapping Reed and Wilson around the chops and compelled them to act. Or at least you thought our new owner would be sufficiently bothered to apply some pressure on them to sort things out.

 

Call it the result of inertia, overconfidence, or just plain indecision, the failures in that window have basically cost us our PL status. The frustration for us fans is that it was all so avoidable, and mainly self-inflicted.

Top post.

I'm petrified that we are going to financially unravel now.

The decision to give Steve Wigley the managers job in 2005, and to not make a change sooner was by far one of the biggest mistakes this club ever made, although I believe that was down to Rupert Lowe and the board had to intervene to get Wigley out. Poor bloke was a decent coach who never really wanted the job and Sturrock should have been replaced with a proven name straight away.

 

Further to this whilst the decision to bring in Redknapp wasn’t a bad one, to not back him in the transfer market and rely on the likes of Davenport, jakobsson and Bernard to keep us up.

 

You could even argue to decision not to back Strachan after the 03 season by refusing to spend £10million on Steed Malbranque and Louis Saha as Rupes didn’t want to give that much money to a ‘rival’ led us on the whole downward path to relegation.

Ahem, Hoddle should have been appointed instead of Sturrock. I won't go into the details of the reasons behind that decision!!!

Those 'Take a walk on the Wilde side' t-shirts were a pretty spectacular bad decision.

Toon Saint

That really was a masterly summary of events.

I think you have to view some of the decisions over the past 24 months in good faith. For instance, we signed Boufal and Redmond after Mane left. They haven’t worked as we’d have hoped, and have offered nowhere near the quality Mane did, but you can see what the board were thinking. I was really excited about Boufal when we signed him.

 

Likewise with appointing Puel. A lot of people thought Koeman could’ve given more chances to youth players, and the football in the first half of his second season was pretty stodgy fare. Yes we could’ve appointed someone more high-profile at that point he left - Pellegrini - for example, but on paper, Puel had a good track-record of developing young players and of managing in European campaigns. So I can’t beat the board up too much about it.

 

That said, some of the decisions made have been so reckless they have bordered on self-sabotage. So in ascending order of ridiculousness, for me:

 

1) Selling Fonte and not replacing in January 2016/2017 window. We were facing our most realistic chance of winning a trophy in 40 years, and we sell our captain, leader, and last link to the League 1 days. Yes he was clearly unhappy post-Euro victory and his ego was supposedly through the roof, but he was also a consummate professional and would’ve got himself in the mind-frame to play that final. You can’t put a price on leadership qualities and we should’ve bent over to keep him at the club. This decision may have cost us a trophy.

 

2) Appointing Pellegrino and not sacking him when it became obvious to all he was out of his depth. The guy never seemed like our first choice. We dithered over sacking Puel for what seemed like an eternity, which was strange as the board had made his position almost untenable by repeatedly informing favoured journo’s that we were reviewing his position. Meanwhile Wilson was sunning himself in Portugal...

 

Supposedly we were holding out for Tuchel, but that always seemed unlikely. Silva and Schmidt had already moved on, with the former probably bored of waiting for us to make a move. And then suddenly Pellegrino was our always-had-been number one choice who had been tracked by the black box for years, etc. Les heralded it as a return to attacking football but his CV showed no signs of that.

 

Luckily for Pellegrino, he had the kindest opening fixture list I can ever remember for an incoming manager. So when he started to blow opportunity after opportunity for three points, the warning signs were going off like a Catherine wheel in a portaloo. The board had so many chances to react - post Leicester, post Liverpool, post Spurs, but somehow he crawled on into the January transfer window unscathed.

 

3) 2017/2018 transfer window - the grand farce. There were so many different ways this window could’ve gone, but Les & Wilson seemed to manufacture the most outrageously backfiring scenario that you wonder whether they were on commission to get us relegated.

 

First of all selling VvD. What a climb-down from the stance made in the summer. Why expend all that effort to keep him? He was back in the first team, and despite questions over how much he was applying himself, he was still clearly our best player and defender. He was also recovering from long-term injury.

 

We were struggling at this point and without a win since November. Any decision to sell was always going to damage us hugely at the back. Until the previous January we had always insisted we wouldn’t sell any players during this window. Based on how poorly the previous winter window had gone when we had sold a key player in January, with us having to rummage around the freebie bin and bring in Caceres, you think the board would’ve wretched at the thought of doing the same again.

 

But double-down on the same botched policy we did. Ok, a world record fee for a defender. Very nice, very nice. Well done Les and Ross. We had the predictable deluge of articles, humble-bragging about our history of ‘dazzling’ transfer successes and Liverpool dancing to Les’ tune. We also had less predictable articles where we were linked to a clutch of established Premier League players and promising youngsters - Mawson, Walcott, Sturridge, Dembele and Sessegnon. There was also a strange link to Tosun, despite him being on the verge of signing for Everton.

 

Given doubts over the manager, our precarious position, and the fact that we were flush with the VvD money, it was always obvious we would have to: 1) go above and beyond to convince players to come to us; 2) pay over the odds on transfer fees.

 

This seemed to catch Les and Wilson by surprise and after it became likely we would miss out on Walcott, who preferred the extra moolah and mid-table security on offer at Everton, we became locked in torturous talks to bring in Carrillo - a Monaco reserve and former Pellegrino player - and Quincy Promes, who seemed like he might just bring some qualities that we’d missed since shipping out Mane, but would always be difficult to prise mid-season from Spartan Moscow.

 

Bizarrely we were never strongly linked to any defender throughout the entire window, other than the tenuous link to Mawson. But when we were faced with limited options in the transfer market it really became a choice of either ditching Pellegrino and bringing in a manager to get the best out of the underperforming players we had at the club, or persisting with him and seriously backing him with several high-risk additions.

 

We didn’t really do either. £20m eventually shelled out on Carrillo after Pellegrino had belatedly realised a 4-2-3-1 works best with a target man, following Austin’s reintegration into the team and then subsequent injury.

 

Reed & Wilson seemed to drag this transfer out for about 2 weeks longer than it needed to, with him only ever being used sparingly by Monaco. Maybe they weren’t comfortable spending that money on a Pellegrino recommendation, but if so, why didn’t they just trust their better instincts and get rid of the man presiding over our demise?

 

Promes was made out to be touch-and-go but Spartak wanted time to sort a replacement and as we only agreed a fee typically late in the day, they were never in a position to do so. But hey ho, this transfer is all rubber-stamped for next summer, right?

 

So despite all the early window bluster and fanciful transfer links we ended up shorn of our best defender, and bringing in one grossly overpriced target man who had barely played over the past couple of seasons, and who we brought in so late that he missed several key games anyway and had no time to adapt to Pellegrino’s training ‘methods’.

 

We kept getting told by Jeremy Wilson that a ‘sense of urgency was developing’ about our predicament at boardroom level but it should’ve been screaming and slapping Reed and Wilson around the chops and compelled them to act. Or at least you thought our new owner would be sufficiently bothered to apply some pressure on them to sort things out.

 

Call it the result of inertia, overconfidence, or just plain indecision, the failures in that window have basically cost us our PL status. The frustration for us fans is that it was all so avoidable, and mainly self-inflicted.

 

 

 

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I think you speak for the many, Toon.

Ahem, Hoddle should have been appointed instead of Sturrock. I won't go into the details of the reasons behind that decision!!!

Few years since you got to mention Glen

I won't quote it again, but top post Toon Saint.

Another angle to look at is how benifical is the Europa League for clubs of our size? Is it just a poisioned challace? Recent memory of the likes of Boro, Fulham, Bolton, Brum, Swansea, Skates all having a good time in the EL but then falling away in the league. It just seems to me that clubs of our size focus too much on bulking the squad out with average additions and they lose sight of actually improving the first team.

This is exactly my problem with this club. Up ourselves, blue sky thinking, trying to be clever and think we're better than everyone else.

 

Absolute cringe worthy load of ********. We just pat ourselves on the back all the time and belittle other clubs achievements. (Leicester copied us..!). ****ing hell. Lunatics running the asylum anyone.

Yep. The problem is, it's cringeworthy when whatever they are doing appears to be working. But more recently a lot of that tripe just clearly isn't true. I think the best line is the "decisiveness" with which we apparently sacked Puel. Incredible.

Oh and Toon Saint, brilliant post.

Think Toon Saints post sums up our current position perfectly. As for the 3 worst decisions ever, I would go with:

1. Persisting with Pelligrino for so long whilst our Premier League status disappeared before our eyes. It was madness to let him carry on through December but to give him the transfer window, let him blow £20mill on one of his pals, then sack him after the window shuts giving the new guy little chance to change anything makes no sense at all.

2. Appointing Wigley. A crazier appointment than Pelligrino, complete lunacy that this guy was Putin charge of a Premier League football club, ike this season he ****ed up all the winnable home games causing our relegation. At least Lowe acted a bit quicker in sacking him though.

3. Appointing a rugby coach as director of football. I have no issue utilising expertise from other sports but the way Lowe implemented this was nuts.

I won't quote it again, but top post Toon Saint.

 

Another angle to look at is how benifical is the Europa League for clubs of our size? Is it just a poisioned challace? Recent memory of the likes of Boro, Fulham, Bolton, Brum, Swansea, Skates all having a good time in the EL but then falling away in the league. It just seems to me that clubs of our size focus too much on bulking the squad out with average additions and they lose sight of actually improving the first team.

I said that at the time but was lambasted for doing so.

I said that at the time but was lambasted for doing so.

Worst decision on here is not banning you for trolling for 10 years....Toon Saint says it all.

Worst decision on here is not banning you for trolling for 10 years....Toon Saint says it all.

Sour grapes on your part.

Sour grapes on your part.

Stopped clock right twice a day...still you can use your Norwich ST to watch us next season.

Stopped clock right twice a day...still you can use your Norwich ST to watch us next season.

Yawn...you really don't have an answer.

Having a system in place, and then ignoring the vital functions of that system, and bending/breaking every rule which made it successful.

 

When faced with the reality that Pellegrino was a disaster, we tried to imagineer a mindscape that PR equals points. Turns out, blue sky thinking can't alter the league table.

 

Disastrous on all fronts really.

As someone involved in audits and QMS, the systems are as only as good as the people owning them. I’d be interested to know if Gao has changed things so that the directors can no longer control what they used to be able to do, or got lucky first time.

As someone involved in audits and QMS, the systems are as only as good as the people owning them. I’d be interested to know if Gao has changed things so that the directors can no longer control what they used to be able to do, or got lucky first time.

Many of the decisions under scrutiny predate gao. For example, with the exception of the VVD signing (which many on here had been calling for), we've had poor transfer windows since the summer of 2015.

Many of the decisions under scrutiny predate gao. For example, with the exception of the VVD signing (which many on here had been calling for), we've had poor transfer windows since the summer of 2015.

Yawn...you really don't have an answer.

Troll on....Hoddle the broken record unemployed since 2004....Farke rules

“Pellegrino was identified as a manager in keeping with the "Southampton Way" for his track record of promoting young players and playing attacking, technically proficient football. From his time in Spain, Pellegrino is also well-versed operating as part of a wider executive structure like that at Southampton."

I laughed out loud....

Troll on....Hoddle the broken record unemployed since 2004....Farke rules

...

“Pellegrino was identified as a manager in keeping with the "Southampton Way" for his track record of promoting young players and playing attacking, technically proficient football. From his time in Spain, Pellegrino is also well-versed operating as part of a wider executive structure like that at Southampton."

 

I laughed out loud....

Where on earth was that lifted from ?

Or perhaps it was on Planet Les.

Where on earth was that lifted from ?

 

Or perhaps it was on Planet Les.

I expect the second sentence was deemed as more important than the first.