The9

What's mental is hearing and seeing evidence, and ignoring it because it doesn't match your opinion. I'm resigned to agreeing we didn't score enough home league goals, I'm not even close to thinking we didn't create enough chances.

And if you think the schedule and fatigue didn't play a part in that, well I can't help you.

It's not supposed to be accurate enough to account for all the variables, it's supposed to indicate if the specific end chance itself is likely to result in a goal or not. That's as straightforward a metric as you're going to get from football. It also correlates well with the stats for chances, goals, successful teams and their final league positions, and reflects evident general trends (like Saints scoring far fewer goals from the same numbers of chances as Arsenal, for instance). That's good enough for the point I'm making about us not being poor at creating chances, just scoring. The other change next season will be the lack of effect of fatigue.... I may as well bust out that Saints ran the least distance of any team in any single Prem game this season as well, whilst Man U who are (probably) the only Premier League team to have played more games than Saints this season, ran the least of any team in the entire division. And with the overall impact of the Europa League... here's a research paper which covers the 10 years from 2001-2011 and says that "teams playing on Sunday following a Thursday night Europa League match were 0.41 points per game worse off." "The study also focused upon 71,251 goals and when they were scored during games. In parallel with winning less and losing more after just two recovery days, teams scored 0.52 fewer goals per game, scored 0.3 goals less in the final third and conceded 0.45 more goals than average in the final half hour". http://worldfootballacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/WFA_Study-on-recovery-days.pdf. So the combination of improved returns from our created chances and the likely reduction in the number of times Saints have to play tired next season makes me think we'll do better in terms of League points "even if" Puel stays in charge. Reason for optimism. FWIW if there's something we might improve on, it's taking shots from closer in - this season we've been shooting from further out overall than in most recent seasons. That and Arsenal's shot distances probably explains why they score more from the same number of chances as us, and why they're expected to. .

Feel free to point us all at the actual statistics for that.

We've challenged the top 6 in 3 of the past 4 seasons. Stats show our goals were significantly below the expected return for the chances we created. Ditto shots against us were disproportionately high in resulting in goals. Why is it unrealistic now?

Most of the time it's not drab to begin with. We created as many chances as Arsenal last season. Are you saying we're NOT going to be fatigued from playing nearly six solid months of back to back to back midweek and weekend games at both ends of the season? It was a huge factor. There's no "chronic lack of movement" - what there might be is a centre midfield which has no confidence it will score goals and chooses not to support the *three* front players, which possibly means all of our chances come against embedded and comfortable defences. We didn't score 17 home goals all season. That was only league games. 13 of which were played within 4 days of a previous match. Gabbiadini wasn't starved of chances, but a lot of his chances early on came from teams not knowing how to defend against him. A bit of video later, teams know what they should and shouldn't do. We did stop playing early balls over the top which created variety, though that might have been due to teams dropping off. Tadic provided 2 Key Passes per game, that's 13th in the entire league. 0.1 p/game behind Sanchez and Coutinho. Not his fault people weren't scoring from his passes that created chances. Though he did have as many assists as Eden Hazard in 6 fewer starts even so. FWIW I do agree with you about loading the box, but then we've had 2-3 years of relative success based on solid defence so it's maybe not a surprise the likes of Davis and Romeu hang back - Davis in particular has awful shot stats. Maybe it's as much about getting the other winger in the area instead of waiting for an overhit cross? But then that's often our full back anyway.

Setting aside the wider reporting for the moment, I try not to make points which can't be supported by stats: http://www.footballtransferleague.co.uk/sources/newspapers They're more accurate than the Star, Express, News of the World*, People and Metro though. Just worse than everyone else.

They cold called us the summer before, it's a standard thing they do to remind people who haven't renewed yet. We hadn't renewed because we were saving up to go to all the Europa aways.

I do hope the erstwhile manager of Rotherham (5 matches in charge, resigned in November) doesn't do a bunk after a month again... There are a lot of "big clubs" in L1 this season, aren't there?

It IS the final kit. Not sure if away is black or navy tbh.

Well that can't be right, it's dated 30th May, a full day before this thread was started. (There was also about half a day's worth of discussion on the long-standing kit thread before this thread was started (pics linked at 20:27 on 30th), and the Todosobrecamisetas link was put on their Facebook page at 19:48 on 30th too, but I'm not allowed to mention that this thread is completely pointless).

You've linked The Sun and therefore automatically lose the discussion.

I'm sure the club will have worked out the optimum time to do their business relating to wages and fees, they're into so much detail with everything else it would be entirely out of character for them not to. It's also very difficult to establish if transfer fees rise during the summer (given that you have to assume what price a player would sell for at a time they aren't sold), but it's not difficult to imagine them rising compared to last year given that all of the clubs involved have tens of millions of pounds more than this time a year ago.

No, I do honestly mean that. Puel's worst enemy this season has been the fixture schedule. He may have chosen a couple of energy-conserving games where we tried to nick a goal and play possession the rest of the time (obviously the Europa aways, but also a couple of home games in amongst the busy fixtures) but they were as a direct result of needing to prevent players getting fatigued and subsequently injured. The fact remains (and it is a fact, supported by chance created and goal stats) that had we taken anything resembling an average number of chances, or stopped anything resembling an average number of shots, we'd have significantly better off in terms of points. That is not the manager's fault, that is entirely down to the players not executing at key moments on the pitch. With fewer games likely next season (in fact guaranteed unless we get to both domestic cup finals) the players will be fresher and create even more chances than the ones we have done (same number as Arsenal, FWIW), and given that fatigue is known to affect the ability to perform key movements correctly, we'll most likely be better at taking them as well. All of which says that if we do the exact same things again as we did in 2016/17 but without the tiredness, we'll get more points than we did in 2016/17 too. So yeah, I'd be optimistic, because the stats say we couldn't be much worse than we were at scoring and stopping goals, and we're not likely to be that bad again.

Krueger didn't make any kind of statement referencing the manager other than telling Solent that Krueger isn't a football person and the club have an end of season review every season, that Krueger isn't part of. Anything beyond that is simply made up based on what people wanted to hear.

You're unlikely to see the players complaining about us playing drab football for two reasons. Firstly they probably have more evidence than anyone about their levels of fatigue and why we've very occasionally played to reserve energy. Secondly because the stats show we create plenty of chances, and it's their fault we don't take them.

I'm pretty sure Puel finding an alternative job and wanting to leave is the most likely method of him leaving at the moment, for the reasons above and our previous activity around managers.

If nothing's changing why would the club make a statement? Making a statement just makes people think there's something going on.

Strange assumption, given that the club has said nothing about Puel leaving, Puel has said nothing about leaving, and everyone knows the club is tracking new manager options at all times anyway. I think you're trying to build a justification that what you want to happen will be happening. Personally I see no reason for Puel to be sacked, though I can see why he might want to leave, and if it wasn't for all the rumours being constantly regurgitated there probably wouldn't even be this discussion - the club has a specific set of principles and Puel has met pretty much all of the targets (probably with the exception of making the Europa knockouts, and even that was a narrow miss).

Optimistic for a top 6 challenge. Though that depends at least as much on the transfer policy and any takeover news as it does the manager.

They're Premier League figures, they'll be Premier League games only.

That's probably why there hasn't been much transfer activity so far - clubs don't want to pay hugely inflated fees, nor do sellers want to let players go for sums that by August look low. Though having said that, a lot of deals were done last year by clubs who wanted to get players in before the prices go up. It's also why Saints tied a load of players up on bigger money new deals last year, the remaining contract is one of the biggest factors in the transfer fee.

"Freefall". Moving 2 places up the League from being 10 points behind 8th place on April 1st, to overhauling West Brom and Stoke. "Relegation scrap". We finished 13 points clear of the relegation zone, and already had enough points to have stayed up by April 1st with 11 matches left. April and May results: DWWLLDDLWDL. Bearing in mind also that we played Man City, Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal and Man United in that period.

Yes.

Timely of the Premier League: https://www.premierleague.com/news/405400 and BBC to publish this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/40125394 2016/17 season: Southampton (15 tv appearances) Prize money £25,240,917 Total Premier League money paid £122,450,841