Nordic Saint

Fraser Forster was standing with the fans watching the game last night.

I said last year that if McCarthy played in goal for the rest of the season, we'd be relegated and we would have been. I dread the prospect of him playing for us again next season. The Fiorentina reserve goalkeeper we are supposedly signing is very injury-prone and can be out for months at a time. He also gets suspended a lot. He got 2 red cards in his 9 first team appearances this season, which means we will almost certainly see more of McCarthy limbo dancing at his near post, trying to avoid getting hit by the ball.

The rumours are getting stronger that we're signing Fiorentina reserve goalkeeper, Dragowski. This doesn't exactly fill me with confidence as I've watched most of Fiorentina's games this season on BT Sport and even their first choice goalkeeper is not very good and Dragowski has picked up 2 red cards in the 9 first team games he has appeared in this season. He's also very injury-prone and has long-term knee problems.

Good game at the Silverlake today: Eastleigh 4-4 Grimsby. Attendance: 3,499 incl. >500 Grimsby fans. Grimsby were leading 2-0 at half-time and Eastleigh scored the final goal in the 90th minute. Ex-Saint Jake Hesketh scored a good goal.

The number of songs that have become football anthems is fairly limited and most of them are old. Yellow Submarine is still being sung in Italy. But, there is one I think would be brilliant, which, as far as I know, has never been used and that's Neil Young's Southern Man. Of course, the lyrics would need to be changed but the melody is about as perfect as you could get for a football anthem, especially for Southampton.

Anyone can write whatever they like on Wikipedia but I think what you've been doing is including the years they were in the new Divison 1 (old name for Championship) in the 90s and early 00s, which was the second tier in the Premier League era. The number of seasons Pompey were in the top flight is 33 and that is a FACT which is unlikely to change in the near future. England historical attendance and performance (european-football-statistics.co.uk)

You should have learned by now never to trust any numbers provided by Pompey fans. These are the real totals: Seasons in top flight, not including next season: Saints 45 Pompey 33 This site is fairly reliable as they can't tamper with it: England historical attendance and performance (european-football-statistics.co.uk)

Here's something else to cheer you up. We are now going into our 46th season in the top flight.

Does he have anyone on his coaching staff who's worth listening to? Kelvin Davis? Dave Watson?

We don't have anyone who's any good at heading the ball, either in defence or attack, and opposition managers have begun to capitalize on it. Meanwhile our manager and coaches still don't seem to have realized and we keep lobbng high crosses, throw-ins and corners into the opposition penalty area. Because we don't win anything in the air, the pathetic excuse has even be offered that we deliberately direct long throws to opposition players' heads so that they will head the ball to one of our players, which of course they don't. They head it to one of their own players instead and start an attack against us. I believe there are stats which show we are the worst team for conceding goals from corners and crosses and for failing to score from them at the other end. Until we buy a defender and striker or two who are good at heading, we are going to continue struggling.

I don't suppose there's any chance of getting Giovanni van Bronckhorst? He might fancy managing in the Premier League, although he'd probably choose a bigger club than Saints.

Nowhere near as good as Romeu.

Please not another 9-0.

The combination of Kent and Tavernier has been devastating in Europe this year. What a final it's set to be. Eintracht took 30,000 fans to Madrid. They'll have more than that turning up in Seville and so will Rangers. Pity the stadium doesn't have a bigger capacity.

To be fair about the only time, the Chapel, our supposed home end, made any noise was for the Europa League game v Inter Milan. I'm resigned to the fact that we're never going to have a proper home end at St Mary's though. The will simply isn't there.

Frankfurt - proper home end. No hiding in little groups in the corners of the away end there.

Arsenal away looks tough but Chelsea and Brighton at home and Brentford away are all winnable. I can see them surviving with a win on the final day of the season. As for being in freefall, Leeds have won three and drawn two of their last 6 games. The only one they lost was v Man City.

If Everton start winning, it could take more than that to stay up this season.

I've been watching Saints since the 1960s and Jose Fonte is the best captain I've seen. He's also proved to be Lille's best ever captain.

It is permissible to eat and drink between dawn and dusk when you are travelling but you are supposed to do make up days later to compensate. Certainly, for away games at least, players don't have to observe the fast but, of course they realize they are being watched by millions of people on TV. The vast majority of muslims - I'd say >90% - try to observe the fast throughout the month of Ramadan, to varying degrees. In some places you can be arrested by the religious police if you are seen eating or drinking in public. Ironically, some muslims gain weight during Ramadan because of all the extra food, especially unhealthy sweets, eaten during the hours of darkness.

That and the fact we don't score from corners, crosses and long throws is because we don't have anybody who can head the ball, either in defence or in attack, which is a serious deficiency at any level of football, let alone the Premier League, especially as our main mode of attack is high crosses and corners from our wing-backs. Let's hope we can buck the trend today and scrape a draw with a ball accidentally bouncing off the back of one of our strikers heads into the Brighton net.

The tension leading up to the Brighton game is palpable.

Juanmi has now scored 18 goals and has capped a fine season by winning the Copa del Rey with Real Betis: only the 4th trophy in the club's history.

Sideways passes in front of your own goal. It doesn't matter how good your goalkeeper is, it doesn't work. Even a good midfielder stopping and playing short passes is going to give the ball away at least once every game but it's not in a danger area. But a goalkeeper doing it a few yards in front of his own goal is stupid, and the manager is even more stupid for telling him to do it. So many goals are being given away that way.

Even at just 5' 10", Danny Ings was a better header both in attack and defence than any of our current players. We've had many central defenders who were good headers: van Dijk and Fonte, for example. Of course, to be a good header you need bravery and perhaps that's a quality some of our current players lack.