The9

I must heartily LOL at the fact that one week later, and despite picking up a nasty calf injury on Wednesday when I got booted right in it, I reckon my Sunday match recovery time is down to one day and think I probably could have played a 6-a-side tonight without feeling utterly useless. That's pretty good going in terms of building up tolerance, though it doesn't mean I won't be properly injured within about 2 weeks if my usual schedule is anything to go by. Still, 2 games, no proper injuries, result... I might even get around to scoring soon - that'll be the game when our wide midfielders wonder where the service has gone... Also, note to Steve, a cross in the air might be worth a go next week...

I'm good for all of them, assuming you don't want me to play on the Sunday, and I'll be wanting a lift to Blackpool as well, unless people want to pay me petrol money at 110mph Bananamobile rates. I reckon my recovery time from 90 minutes is somewhere near 6 days at the moment. Before that I just creak and fall over when changing direction.

Having seen my performance in my work's 6-a-side game yesterday having played Sunday morning and still not recovered from it, I think I can rule out any possibility of me playing anything other than 11-a-side on Sunday for the forseeable future.

Funnily enough the one thing I DID manage to get in Derby the night of that penalty shoot out defeat was a really nice, good value curry. At about 2am after a fair bit of wandering. I think it was probably about 01:00 by the time the rain had eased off enough to try and walk to town in the first place though ! The gloating was all the more ridiculous as we'd totally outplayed them on the night as well and they were (again) lucky as hell...

What a waste of a precious post this is, but I think it's worth asking if Lallana's new contract was maybe some kind of reward for not kicking up about the Fulham offer, or just a prudent and sensible way of giving him more money immediately to keep him happy in the short term ? It's not like the contract is worth anything if a player wants to go anyway.

I think our league position is going to heavily influence our transfer policy. Should we be in with a decent shout of the playoffs in January, I suspect it would take a very persuasive offer indeed to entice Mr Lowe to sell any of the constituent parts, and I suspect the bank could be talked into agreeing to support NOT selling for the following reasons : If we didn't go up the teams interested in the kids in January would still be interested in May/June so we'd get the money anyway. If we went up the additional money from making it to the Prem could pay off all kinds of debts, and we'd still have a successful young squad on low wages that could feasibly compete in the top League with the addition of a few well chosen new players. (I can dream). Selling good players on cheap wages might even be a false economy in January - if they have to be replaced by less competent players damaging a promotion bid, or a more expensive player (admittedly unlikely). Our transfer policy so far has surprised me. We've still got Skacel and Davis and John, and we've signed and are paying wages to, of all people, Anthony Pulis. Not quite what I'd expected after initial proclamations of selling all OR the surprising acquisition of Schneiderlin (and to a lesser degree Wotton and Forecast). FWIW, I'd rather we had the problem of teams trying to buy our players for being too good to play in the CCC than not being able to offload players in the CCC for being too highly paid and not up to the job.

Nah, we'd have won the Prem if we'd gone up. FACT. I'm still not over your nob-tastic pitch invasion of maximum gloating and minimal actual celebration, and I'm not the only one. If it hadn't been for meeting a Derby fan on holiday a few weeks later I'd still want you to go bankrupt following a 14 goal defeat to us in your last ever game as your stadium fell to pieces. As it is I'll settle for 12. PS Is that the Lee Holmes that's been one of our best players in a better than last year team (until Saturday), is our outlet, and provides a constant flow of crosses to the front man ? He's my player of the season so far. PPS Is that the manager your Dutch friends "have never heard" of that played in the most recent World Cup Final that Holland played in ? Do any of your Dutch friends actually watch football, or know anything about it ? PPPS You didn't just lose to Doncaster, you lost to us as well. And apparently we're in for a "long hard season"... Ah hindsight...

Frankly, anyone booing a team of kids at this stage of the season is a grade A **** and shooting's too good for them. You'd think throwing 8 inexperienced kids in MIGHT POSSIBLY give these planks just the slightest of inklings that just maybe we should grant the team just a little bit of leeway, but apparently, no, some idiots haven't got the sense to realise that they're not going to be world class players overnight and don't realise that booing them isn't going to encourage their development one little bit. Personally I'd prefer it if the booing tossers stayed at home, especially if they've already paid. W@nkers, the lot of them.

Strange, cos I was there and am just re-watching the game and after looking under pressure for the first 10 minutes we've been stuffing them for the rest of the first half. The Sky stats after about 40 minutes showed our possession at 59%. Second half, yeah, we weren't really there enough. Admittedly we COULD have let 4 in, but we also could have scored that many, and I just don't understand the opinion that we lack a "cutting edge". Lallana's two shots cleared off the line were just unlucky, and I was surprised to see we should have had a penalty when McGoldrick was pushed into the goalkeeper. We also made loads of half chances - my one complaint would be that McGoldrick simply doesn't work hard enough when the ball's in the final third, he's been ambling up when there's a goal waiting if he's in the box and standing still in the middle instead of moving to pull the defence around and frankly it's starting to annoy me. Overall I didn't think we were that bad, a little bit too loose at the back (Perry in particular distributed badly and other than one block early on and a decent back header looked poor positionally and with the ball), and the team generally were lacking workrate in the second half. Couldn't argue with the pen, and there were more chances at their end than at ours. Davis 9 : Some great saves, and couldn't do much about the disallowed ones. Lay down for the pen though. James 5 : A bit too loose with his passes and tackles and Hammill got too much from him. Svensson 6 : Got completely done in the 6 yard box at one point, got pulled all over the place by straight-line strikers. Perry 4 : Lots of space around him and couldn't do a thing right for a lot of the time. One nice tackle, but he and Svensson let too much through. Surman 5 : Got stuck in a bit too much and didn't really link up with Holmes much. White 4 : Eek. Conceded penalty and really gave us nothing forward other than chopping the keeper outside the box after ball had gone. Gillett 6 : Lots of hard work first half, touch was a bit off today, meant he had to make more tackles than usual. Schneiderlin 6 : Some decent passes but didn't really leave his mark. Holmes 8 : Strong performance, hard work, good crosses, quieter late on. Lallana 8 : Very tricky, unlucky with 2 cleared off the line, again faded later. McGoldrick 6 : Annoying, great on the ball but doesn't get himself where he can get it often enough or unrgently enough. Needs to be more involved. Subs : Wotton 7 : Impressed me with tenacity, simple passing and one glorious 45 yard pass. Dyer 5 : Just doesn't do the right stuff at the right times, gave him a point for winning a header. John 7 : Held ball well, linked nicely, needed to do better with his header. Personally I'd drop Perry for Cork in the next game, and we need to stress hard work EVERY SECOND instead of just occasionally. Our good performances in the last two games came from workrate and that was lacking second half today.

I wish someone would tell the OS that Rotherham have moved to the Don Valley Stadium, I hope the team ISN'T planning on "making a long midweek trip to Millmoor"... http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/news/?page_id=10516

But the whole point is that we weren't actually struggling when Burley left, we were just trundling along in inoffensive lower midtable, being dull to watch but still winning just enough to be out of trouble. Despite our crappy start with no defenders, predictions of a relegation scrap in August were wildly incorrect to all appearances, and we solved the defensive problems MOST of the time in Oct/Nov/Dec. It was the entirely unforseen issue of Burley LEAVING that actually caused the problems, which is the opposite of what Alpine predicted and had the biggest impact on the season (along with the financial situation). It was Dodd and Gorman's spell that fed on the malaise that was bubbling under and turned us into an effort-free zone and the criminal FA Cup performance underlined it a hundred times, that CLEARLY proved that not "anyone" was better than Burley, and that he was wrong to insist it was. It was then Pearson who saved us from having that lack of effort cause relegation, which he did from an unenviable start position. Not "anyone" could have implemented that turnaround in that time-frame either. He "only won 3 games", as some people seem to harp on about, because he took over a diabolically performing team - and somehow managed to get us pointing upwards with limited resources just in time. It was one hell of a task he achieved from the starting point he was given. Since then we've hit the reset button, taken a massive, but cheap gamble on the Dutch guys, and things look promising. That's not least because Poortvliet and Wotte have had a preseason to make decisions and change things. But Pearson's role in keeping us up certainly shouldn't be underestimated, and this Alpinist revisionism isn't fooling anyone. I'll at least accept he was right about a lack of centre backs - until we signed Thomas after 2 weeks of the season. PS Don't expect a reply, I'm skint.

Well, here's my first post on SaintsWeb : I'm sorry, that's nonsense. I initially thought we'd be miles bottom of the League, I just thought it was unrealistic to expect us to lose 10 seasoned pros (I've been saying the likes of Davis (not Davies), Saga, Viafara, John and Rasiak would be leaving since May) and I thought it was highly unlikely that we'd be able to replace them with 8 or so kids and be in any way successful with a manager who had no experience of the league. By the end of the Celtic preseason game I'd seen enough to know we had a chance, but still before the Cardiff game I still didn't know if we'd be 10 points adrift or in with a chance of going up. After the first half I knew we'd at least COMPETE. My expectations were purely based on the likelihood of us being able to introduce and entire team of kids to the squad at the same time and hold up in the CCC. Even now we've only got one league win in three games, and we're only 17th, but I see us somewhere midtable rather than battling relegation. You'll note all that is about expectations of the TEAM, nothing about the Chairman, who has a crappy job at the moment even if he wasn't already disliked by a chunk of the fans. Yes there ARE people who want to lie and say they're boycotting Lowe when actually they just can't be arsed to watch, just as there are people who have class war attitudes, but your implication that everyone who thought we were going to go down is just blindly based on Lowe hatred is as preposterous as the opposing attitude, that everything Lowe does is automatically bad for Saints. I'm no Lowe fan, but at least he's addressing the problem, and by some miracle we seem to have integrated all of those new players very quickly. All credit to Wotte and Poortvliet for sticking to some very specific principles, so far, the shoots of recovery are promising - but so much is still up in the air when you look at our 3 league results. Having seen a month's worth of competitive games, there are now obvious benefits to the "kids" approach which weren't immediately evident - their fast recovery rate, enthusiasm, knowing each others' games and open-mindedness to the system and coaching, but still, none of those would be worth much if they were crap players. Thankfully they're not, and who knows what we could achieve if we can keep that core ? Yeah it's an epic, I've gone cold turkey for 3 weeks and haven't paid my fiver so I'm rationing!