The9

Apology accepted. Blame squarely on the fixture list and our shatty finishing/goalkeeping.

Of that lot I agree with all of it other than "it worked away not at home" (based on basically two aways where we were rested and scored 4, no reason to think that won't be a regular feature next season) and "doesn't seem capable of changing things", as well as the implication that the manager would have made a difference to the club's policy - though yes, Koeman probably would have signed a dutch player he knew on a 6 month contract rather than Caceres. Pochettino was in no position to complain, we had the best XI players in Europe and the rest of them didn't matter, if you believed Cortese. The rest of it makes sense, though I don't think we need to worry about Tadic any more, and Davis is running towards the end of his career now.

You seem to ignore the "don't think he's done anything worth getting sacked for and has actually been pretty successful considering" group.

New West Brom shirt, solid back, nice look at the new Prem name/number on shirt too.

I would think he's salaried and no-one gets a cut of the sale of players. Cortese was very anti-agent and whilst he wasn't averse to chucking himself bonuses, I should think the model we have is still to pay as little to third parties (including club employees) as possible on transfers.

Austin made a load of near post runs on Sunday. Unfortunately the ones where he actually got the ball were all wide of the near post from where a lone striker really can't do much other than play it back out wide, and of course plenty of the runs didn't end up in the cross coming at all. When you've only got one runner in the box against a set defence it's pretty easy to defend as you've said. The main fault for me is the lack of penetration into the box by the midfielders when the ball is out wide - no overloading for the defence to cope with and not much finishing ability even if they get there and have a shot. Boufal and Redmond are probably the most technically proficient finishers in the midfield and the former often doesn't give himself enough time to finish. As mentioned elsewhere, Davis and JWP are not good finishers and their strengths lie elsewhere.

TBF given his lack of height (even in comparison to most other full backs) it's quite pleasing to see that he's only been absolutely done all ends up by a ball to the back stick once in two seasons. When Evra started at Man U he got found out about 5 times on his debut alone.

Bottom half Championship with occasional forays down to League One until they find someone to build them a new ground which doesn't cost them a fortune.

I'm always at a loss to see why people haven't worked out that we have a very specific type of recruit. Zola is about as far from a Saints managerial appointment as you can get. Our general competence at this kind of stuff is how we've gone past the likes of Villa, Newcastle etc.

I'm assuming it was the OP TBH. Though the "homegrown" flags show why we might keep Long and Rodriguez compared to more expensive non-HG replacements. It also explains part of the decision around Stephens...

It's £10 a year for NCAFCST but it's only £5 to join PST. Newport's fans acted to save their club BEFORE all the ripping off charities etc once it was realised that the money man wasn't going to put anything in. I'm not expecting any of my £250 back but it is in the T&Cs that the shares can be sold, they're still shares in the Trust not the club though.

I think they've just filled some blanks by moving players up. Have to say I hadn't spotted it originally.

Fair point, but released lists are hardly a secret, it's also in Premier League rules that they have to be published. Plus as Caceres didn't have a club in February when we signed him, Saints may be gambling that no-one else comes in to enable the club to make a lower offer.

Yup. Which is why we'll offer them deals - they also have to be at least as good as their previous terms.

Shouldn't the first question be "how much are people expecting next season if we don't...". Because without Europe, keeping all but Cedric, Tadic and the out of contract players (the ones I expect to go irrespective of anything else), and assuming we don't get past the QF stages of more than one cup, I'd expect Saints to be competing for 6th as a minimum. With Puel. If we sell Van Dijk, Bertrand, Cedric, Tadic, and have to rebuild again, we'll be in the B-league somewhere between 7th-15th. If we sell Romeu without a replacement or start the season with Yoshida/Stephens at CB we'll probably be in the bottom half.

I don't know why people are finding this so difficult... We had no more rest than Spurs - both sides had 10 days' rest. After 5 days it's basically irrelevant because players of any age are fully recovered, which they're not for anything under that. We basically picked the first team for that one (with Rodriguez up front, who'd just scored a hat-trick in the previous game). Unfortunately we had a player sent off against Spurs which hugely reduced our chance of getting a result in that game. Recovery times were huge beforehand and therefore irrelevant. Every player should have been playing at full strength and they were the better side than our best team. The next match was against West Brom. Saints had 3 days' rest before, West Brom 5 days rest. Hugely significant difference in recovery, Saints playing at a significant disadvantage as a result. The final game of that spell was Everton. Saints had 2 days' rest before and Everton 3 days' rest. Again, Saints disadvantaged. On top of that, Everton's first game was 5 days before their second, so they ALSO had more recovery time between games 1 and 2, and the cumulative effects they'd have suffered would be less than those Saints faced. So, to reiterate - Saints got utterly screwed over by the fixture list, people who don't consider other games as part of the bigger picture are being naive and ignorant of the impact that recovery has on performance, and also, where both teams have a decent recovery period, it's not relevant. However, over and over this season Saints did not have the opportunity to recover, and frequently played against teams who had.

Gazzaniga, Gallagher and Stuart Taylor get us down to 25 without any impact on the first team, plus we have Gardos in hand too...

He means Danish.

1) We usually do (Lambert and Fonte for a start, Bertrand and Van Dijk have 4/5 years left too so would be obscenely expensive to buy from us) 2) The whole methodology is finding value and improving the player, it gives us better players than we've paid for and we make a profit.

One of the reasons replica sales are down is because people have accepted that a one-year cycle is bloody ridiculous and as you'd expect, people just skip designs they don't like. I don't, I just wait for the crap ones to get reduced in price, but the "rational consumer" is probably peed off with the cost and the tiny amount of effort the kit companies are bothering to put into the design process nowadays (as evidenced by the gazillion teams with the same Nike template).

The earliest Saints have announced a kit in the past 5 years is next week if my Timehop is anything to go by. We'd all but nailed the crappo all red adidas thing by now (except I still had the gold bits as being white) but it was still speculation at this point. Most get released in the first week of July but announced in the week or two beforehand. They'll have specific dates when the Megastore and ground will get the refit too - last year the new banners were just going up. Not sure if we'll be getting a concourse sale this year given that neither shirt sponsor nor kit brand are changing - there's some half price training kit on sale that's still over £45 and going to be out of date in a matter of weeks.

Defoe is on £60k a week. And that's only because his relegation release means he doesn't have a transfer fee.

I genuinely don't see any reason to fire him, but I did hear a few rumours over the weekend that made me think we might be. They certainly suited the "Puel Out" group though, all about which players he'd fallen out with and how they'd leave if he didn't. Taken with a pinch of salt, the overarching takeover is likely to be more of a determinant of Puel's future (though if there's a borderline decision, his ability to get another job to be spun as progression for him would probably be a factor).

Because the same knee-jerk mentality that says he's crap and must be leaving without any consideration of the external factors is the same knee-jerk mentality that says if Saints haven't announced he's leaving by the end of the week following the season that he must therefore be staying, without any consideration of the external factors.

Alderweireld was and is the best centre back in the division, when alongside Fonte and behind Schneiderlin the defence was formidable. But that was 2014. Fonte was garbage this season at times, and plenty of people said he was well off the pace even in August. Stephens may or may not turn into a player as good as Fonte was at his peak, but there was little difference between Stephens at his best and Fonte this season. Lovren was decent but made to look better by Fonte and it took 2 years for him to find someone to do the same at Liverpool. Again, 4 years ago, Fonte had declined a lot, and pretty rapidly, by the time we sold him. Bertrand has pretty much already said he hasn't considered leaving, not sure why the discussion's happening tbf. Our signing of "big club rejects" with him and Romeu seems like a viable way forward, and smart way to find players who might stick around.