The9

Well, it is unless you take a sentence fragment and try to pass them off as the "real statement".

Guessing he means the cost of implementing health and safety requirements will go up. Though the government has shown every sign of deregulating anything it can, so I'm not sure that's going to be the case. Also, Portsmouth have previous for not maintaining their ground to the appropriate standard for years on end...

They sign players for all the wrong reasons, including "fashion" and to "get people excited". I don't think that's in question. What they should be doing is what Spurs and us are doing, matching players to need and playing the percentages to minimise wastefulness and maximise our competitiveness. It's only when everyone is doing that we need to worry.

It's amazing how people can hear/read "None of those players are for sale. I can't make it any plainer than that and that's the way we mean to go forward." and somehow think this is the same as the previous years. As for "our business model is to sell", we're £100m better off this summer than we were last - maybe the business model has changed as a result?

That's exactly the point. We don't. The likes of West Ham, etc. do it all the time.

Here all week, unfortunately.

"None of these players are for sale" is a VERY different message to the "we don't want to sell any of these players...but" message of previous summers. Though that does sound like he was responding to a list, so I'd like to know who was specifically mentioned. As ever, we'll see what it looks like in September. And FWIW, if we don't sell anyone significant, I'd have us down for a top 4 challenge. As I would have under Puel, FWIW, but no point talking about that any more.

Gardos started in the FA Cup against Arsenal. Tbf it was basically our 3rd team anyway. Not much to need to judge if two managers have deemed him not worth a start in that time. Mind you, Caceres looked just as bad on the ball in places in the one game I saw him play. When I have seen Gardos he looks decent at marking and heading, ok at tackling and intercepting, and dismally slow and ponderous with the ball at his feet whenever asked to do anything other that pass a ball under no pressure to an unmarked teammate.

Pretty sure we have a bunch of people we keep tabs on, just so we know who's available if we're suddenly in a position of needing to get someone in. I don't think that is in any way onerous though, and we probably have some kid in a cupboard checking a spreadsheet every month or two and reporting to a senior manager somewhere. No idea how you'd set metrics for management (other than the badges everyone has to have anyway), so I should think it's less "black box" and more "the kind of check list someone put on Saintsweb last week".

Ours has a plan. Theirs just involves throwing as much money as possible at anyone they think might have an idea. They have a "School of Science" anyway, as they proved when appointing Sam Allardyce.

Any purchaser with any sense isn't going to take over when there's no cashflow, are they? Kit sales must be due to start, so I could see a perceptive investor wanting some of that... though as he's taking over Portsmouth I'm thinking he's not that perceptive.

Jury's not out on Gardos, he was 5th choice behind Van Dijk, Yoshida, Stephens and Caceres at the end of last season. He was a borderline first team choice when he first arrived and hasn't come close to being considered after his injury. He was far too ponderous on the ball to last long even before his injury. Hell, we once substituted him off for a hugely out-of-form Yoshida when Arsenal took Giroud off in favour of a bunch of shortar5es up front, which shows where his strengths lay. Not quite so lucky in the FA Cup defeat to Arsenal this season, which was his only full first team appearance.

It shows we had multiple replacements in mind and needed to go through a set of processes to narrow that down, to me. To me the "Southampton Way" thing is about retaining things like the core of the Academy infrastructure, the principles of wanting to get young players into the first team, less palatably the ethos of buying, developing and selling at a profit, and generally retaining the overall direction and aims. The first team is the high profile part of that, but all the other stuff, all the direction-giving and decision-making retains the same direction irrespective of the first-team manager. If you think it changes on the whim of Les, what do you think has changed? First team tactics will change based on what everyone else is doing and are the one thing I would expect to vary over the last 5 years, also depending on who develops and who doesn't. Fundamentally we've been nuanced variants of a 4-5-1 for the whole time, whether 4-2-3-1, 4-3-3 or whatever. But the rest of it seems to be very consistent. Other clubs do things like make a new managerial appointment directly leading to a rash of short term "here and now" changes to bring in the players they have identified, which cost a fortune and deliver very small incremental gains if gains at all. Example - Palace signing a load of Allardyce players like Benteke, are they going to fit De Boer's ideas or will they splash out another couple of hundred million signing slightly different players for more or less the same result? Our method minimises the manager's role in this overall, so we never buy PURELY on a manager's recommendation - but at the same time the stuff like player character are the toughest to evaluate without meeting the player, so there are situations where we've signed players we're tracking based on the individuals knowing the player already. It did seem to happen a lot more with Koeman though, and was cited as a reason we weren't as bothered he left by the club when they spun that.

You've misdiagnosed the problem. Our finishing was awful, we created as many chances as Arsenal (though not of as good quality).

Can't see us signing Iheanacho if City's rumoured "buyback clause" is in effect - though I guess we could just set it for 2 years' time and 5 times what we paid for him and that would still meet the business model. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2017/06/23/kelechi-iheanacho-move-hits-stumbling-block-man-city-demand/

Actually, yeah that's a fair point as well, had assumed that based on signings but didn't know it was definitely the case.

I wouldn't be surprised to see West Ham sign him tbh.

He's young, already has Prem experience and qualifies as homegrown - though not being U21 and therefore having to be named in the squad of 25 to get a game suggests he's still more likely to go out on loan. As for Long, he's fantastic if you want someone to press and work hard, and apparently he had the highest top speed in the whole Prem last season, but his finishing was often dire last season. He's a decent player for away games because of his defensive ability, as long as he's not the lone striker.

You mean Oxford City's Matt Paterson, most recently of Gosport and Havant&Waterlooville? Has never played more than 40 matches for any club. Best season was 15 goals for Gosport in 14/15, when they came 6th in Conference South and his strike partner won the Golden Boot. Also has spells with Burton, Hamilton, Stockport, Southend, Forest Green and Aldershot on his resumee.

11 appearances, 731 minutes, 10 offsides. https://www.whoscored.com/Players/74921/Show/Manolo-Gabbiadini As a comparison with Gabbiadini's 0.9 offsides per game: Austin 0.5 Redmond 0.4 Rodriguez 0.4 Long 0.4 Tadic 0.3 Martina, Bertrand, Cedric, Stephens 0.1 This tells us that... defenders don't get forward much. Tbf we did play a lot more earlier balls through the middle when Gabbiadini first started, which gave the defence something else to think about rather than just defending low crosses at the near post, but soon reverted to type after his injury and when sides had some video of him to watch.

Good, coherent article, but the only thing it tells me that I didn't already know is that someone thinks we don't get a lot of injuries. Anyone who didn't already realise our core stability and refusal to knee-jerk decisions is one of the main reasons we've been outperforming the rest of the Premier League just hasn't been paying attention. The problem we're going to have is that our relative success comes from being competent in a sea of incompetence and wastefulness. When the others start to do the same things, where's our competitive advantage then? Doing things "The Southampton Way" is only going to work for so long if the process doesn't evolve - though with the rumoured takeover pending, anything could happen. I wouldn't be surprised if we're relatively quiet with our signings this summer, knowing that the cost of everything is through the roof. Or that we switch to exploit different markets where costs are much lower to get value, as we have done for a few years now.

Interesting to note that they don't have £800k (minus the sell-on they could have had off his value) to compete with mighty Millwall, of League One last season...

Guessing that as, like us, they haven't changed kit brand, they'll wear last season's blue away but with the new sponsor on it. Or quickly throw together a new third. Basically they'll have the same problem we had in 2012/13 with the red pinstriped aap3 Umbro kit and a white away. We ended up in yellow a lot.

Same time as everyone else, assuming they don't have any at the moment because they haven't been delivered, and they get it in stock in time.

Already covered that above. *My* rule, for myself - but I think a decent catch-all, is that there's no point doing anything until something comes out that applies to the 2018/19 kit - like a rule change, or a UA design for 2018/19. Might be earlier than last year if any of the World Cup qualifiers are wearing UA.