Nordic Saint

Kat and her sales team sold him a vision of a business where players were bought cheaply and sold for huge profits, while the Premier League millions kept on rolling in, and he bought it. He hasn't got anything from it. Kat took him for everything he had and more.

Gunn is much younger than McCarthy and isn't it the club's policy to put as many young players as possible in the team/shop window? It's probably a policy Ralph had to agree to when he was first interviewed for the job.

I never want to see him in a Saints shirt again. Can we just put him on gardening leave until we can give him away to any club prepared to take him on a free transfer in January?

Money has been frittered away on players like Vestergaard and Carrillo who were clearly not good enough for the Premier League. About £100 million in transfer fees and wages has been poured straight down the drain on substandard players that no other Premier League club, with anyone with any common sense in their recruitment department, would want. That's where we need to start. It's no use giving our current recruitment department money to spend in January as they are more than likely to waste it.

We would have done in 1983/84 if he hadn't gone to Newcastle.

Anyway, it's a bit sad that after all these years, our fans still haven't managed to learn more than one verse. Oh, when the saints go marching in Oh, when the saints go marching in Oh Lord I want to be in that number When the saints go marching in Oh, when the drums begin to bang Oh, when the drums begin to bang Oh Lord I want to be in that number When the saints go marching in Oh, when the stars fall from the sky Oh, when the stars fall from the sky Oh Lord I want to be in that number When the saints go marching in Oh, when the moon turns red with blood Oh, when the moon turns red with blood Oh Lord I want to be in that number When the saints go marching in

He certainly must be glad to be back with his old goalkeeping coach, Stevie Woods.

Pompey fans didn't start calling Saints 'Scum' until the 1970s. I know as I was with Saints fans in the Fratton End when we beat them 5-2 in 1966, and the words scum and scummer were never uttered once by any of their fans. Millwall were the first fans to used the word scum as an insult for other fans in the 60s but most fans were using it in the 70s, including Saints. It had originally been used as slang in Borstals. Pompey fans were the first football fans, however, to add the -mer to scum. also in the 1970s. But, they didn't invent the word. If you consult the Oxford Dictionary, you'll find that the first written record of the word scummer was in 1585. It referred to one who scours the sea, a rover or a pirate. For many years it was a nickname for pirates or buccaneers.

Yes, I was in Fareham and my uncle who'd just heard the news on the radio, told me. Saints fans there were elated, almost like we'd just won the cup final, while Pompey fans were stunned. Everyone found the news incredible. We had a friendly coming up at Fratton Park and I remember the Pompey fans being worried that if Keegan made his debut in it, we'd take over Fratton Park. But, he didn't.

Incidentally, the Portsmyth about SCUM and the dock strike was started as a spoof article in a Pompey fanzine, called Frattonise, as recently as the 1990s. Now, it's become part of their mythical history. It sounds like the same thing is happening with OWTS and Spurs fans but it's even more recent as I don't think they were even singing it in the 1990s as their song, although fans of most clubs sang it occasionally by then. In the 2000s Spurs fans started their slow version and that then became their new song, replacing Glory, Glory Hallelujah.

Spurs fans were, in fact, the last fans to start singing any song. They considered singing ungentlemanly. I went to our first game there of the modern era, in 1966. Our fans completely filled the Park Lane End and 10,000 of us sang OWTS. From the Spurs fans there was absolutely no singing at all. I was also there when we played in 1967, which was the first year they had a singing section, and they sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic (Glory Glory Hallelujah), which was recognised as their song but never OWTS. The singing of OWTS by Spurs fans is quite a new thing. It sounds like this new Spursmyth about it being their song is a bit like the Portsmyth about the mythical dock strike.

It looks like 30k+ already.

Ex-Saints in the Champions League this week In starting lineups: Gazzaniga Lovren van Dijk Fonte Tadic Oxlade-Chamberlain Mané Unused sub: Lallana

The thing I've noticed about Vestergaard is that his forward passes are random. There is about a 50/50 chance that they will find one of our players. His sidewards and backwards passes, however, are clearly aimed at his team mates. This gives him an overall pass success rate of more than 50%. When I played football myself, at a much lower level, I was big and useless too but my random forward passes from the back would occasionally lead to a goal. People would say, well done or good pass, but I the truth was had no idea how I'd found one of my own men and, as far as I can see, neither does Vestergaard.

We certainly had a very strong squad then. We took 4 points from Liverpool that season and finished above them in the league.

That's how I saw it at the time too.

3 ex-Saints, Tadic, van Dijk & Mané, nominated for this year's Ballon d'Or.

Our black box used to have the resource available, and so did Spurs after that. His name was Paul Mitchell. Man United have been trying hard to get him but Red Bull have fended them off by promoting him to overall director of their football operations with a commensurate salary increase.

Without it, we'd have lost 3-1 yesterday. However, if it were used even more effectively to overturn penalty decisions, we might even have won 1-0. How much we benefit from it already shows the extent to which referees gave dubious decisions against less fashionable clubs like ours and how much results were affected by those unfair decisions. Manchester United, on the other hand, are going to suffer very badly from the fairness of it all. I wonder what might have been in our history in both league and cup if there had been VAR in the past, especially in our best seasons. We might well have picked up a couple of trophies in the 80s. There would certainly have been more trophies won by less fashionable clubs like ours.

This is very true. A stadium the size of St Mary's would have had a capacity of at least 50,000 in the 1970s. The old grounds had terracing at both ends as well as the lower tiers at the sides. There was seating for the middle class season ticket holders in the upper tiers at the sides only and the smaller of the ends was usually left uncovered for the away fans to feel the full impact of the weather in.

Somewhere there must still be photos of those late 70s plans. It would be interesting to see them. Am I right in thinking those plans were going through the planning permission stage in the early 80s?

This ties in with what I recall. I've found that Echo article online and they seem to have got their dates, capacities and locations mixed up. It doesn't appear to have been very carefully researched. Thank you (and thanks to everyone who's replied).

I didn't see the game. Was Danso at fault for any of the 5 goals?

Now that they are redeveloping the derelict Toys R US site, I wondered if anyone here had any photos or articles about Saints' proposed new stadium in that area in the 1980s? As I recall, it was going to have a 45,000 capacity and John Deacon, the Pompey chairman at the time, was on the Southampton City Council which turned down planning permission for it. This was one of the main reasons McMenemy left Saints for Sunderland as he was the driving force behind the new stadium and said he had taken the club as far as he could in a ground as small as the Dell.