The9

I would imagine this comes down to the need to have a keeper on the bench for emergencies, but when the U23s have a game the same day, they can't use the same keeper for that. Which implies that the hierarchy goes 1st team keeper U23 keeper 1st team bench U23 bench rather than 1st team keeper and bench, U23 team keeper and bench. The U23 backup might also be behind the U18 starter too.

Players under contract get paid until the end of June irrespective due to the way football contracts work, clicking over on June 30. Caceres will be getting paid still, because he isn't a loan, he was a 6 month contract. Hassen was a loan, but is contracted to someone else, so depending on the agreement either us or them could be paying the wages. I'm guessing them, as we'd have no reason to pay for a loan player when we don't have any matches left in his loan term unless they insisted upon it as a condition of the loan.

Also, why do you think West Brom was the "only winnable game"? If ever there was hindsight it's that one.

What was two games in two weeks? It was Spurs 28th, West Brom 31st and Everton 2nd Jan. And then a 5 day break before 7th Norwich, 11th Liverpool, 14th Burnley, 18th Norwich, 22nd Leicester, 25th Liverpool, 28th Arsenal, 31st Swansea, 4th West Ham. And then we had a week without a midweek game. If you think we can pick a side for any of those games without considering the others you're being unrealistic. It is hilarious though that after the entire season, the only response against Puel's rotation so far to hold any water comes about the Xmas schedule which was widely panned for how inequal it was, particularly for being unfair it was to Saints. http://www.goal.com/en/news/1862/premier-league/2017/01/03/31102732/wenger-criticises-uneven-christmas-fixture-schedule http://www.independent.ie/sport/soccer/premier-league/revealed-was-the-christmas-premier-league-schedule-the-most-uneven-ever-35338503.html Oh and one of the reasons we scored more goals away was because we played Watford and Sunderland and stuck 4 on them both during the period where we had a week between matches.

Well you're wrong. And also it appears completely out of touch with the impact of recovery rates on performance.

Whhhhhhhhhhhhyyyyyyyyyyyyyy? It would have serious "controlling the ball 4 yards in front of you" potential, that's fo' sho'.

Aha! Thanks, this thread. 2017 Mouez Hassen (end of loan) Stuart Taylor Cuco Martina Martin Cáceres Jason McCarthy Jake Flannigan Lloyd Isgrove Ending scholarship Neal Osborn Connor Langan Rugare Musendo Archie Thomas Dan N'Lundulu Siph Mdlalose

I don't think it's a "strong possibility", I think it's possible if we got him cheaper. We'd have to negotiate him downwards to make it a viable deal though, and we can't do that without releasing him first. There's also the possibility we end up looking for an out of contract centre back on Sep 1st after some last minute mentalism from Man City too...

They'll have made the decisions on who was and wasn't being retained weeks ago. Most disappointed Martina's off, he's the best player called Rhu-endly Aurelio Jean-Carlo who's ever played for Saints.

Well, that's 4 of the players who are out of contract being released - who else's deal runs out this summer? Wouldn't be surprised to see us negotiating with Caceres at a lower rate some time around mid-July if no-one signs him, as backups go he's better than Gardos... whose contract runs out in 2018 btw.

Tbf I heard the same after Sunday's game, which is why I'm even entertaining the idea we might sack him despite not thinking he's done much wrong.

You mean the matches against 2nd placed Spurs when we had two more games within the next 5 days (And had a player sent off with over half an hour left) and West Brom when we'd just played 3 days before and had to play again 2 days later (and also had a player sent off)? Another argument ignoring the impact of the proximity of other matches on team selection...

We went three at the back to utilise Targett as an attacking midfielder where he seemed to thrive once he had Bertrand supporting him defensively so he was no longer torn about going forward, which he seemed reluctant to do playing from a conventional left back position. That only lasted about 3 games though as (I think) Targett got injured, and after that we had Bertrand at left wing-back and Yoshida in the back 3 which still worked but not as well - but still better than the times we played Yoshida at full back, where he made Martina look adventurous!

Doesn't make a lot of sense if the home shirt is predominantly white, does it?

Must remember to watermark these things. Or, y'know, put my name in the shading somewhere.

What I got from this was a load of corporate hospitality development that I don't really care about (which also just seems to be the reworking of existing space), followed by the suggestion of a corporate development in the West Stand (i.e. Kingsland), which I also won't care much about. It's quite a leap to assume that will definitely lead to more seats, though it is a possibility and they may as well if they're sticking some more boxes in there because there really isn't any obvious place to put hospitality in the Kingsland at the moment, it's just a concourse space under the seats as opposed to the well-developed Itchen side.

FWIW here's a plot of the "expected Goals" for the whole 2016/17 season: https://public.tableau.com/profile/freeman7264#!/vizhome/PremierLeague1617AttackingAnalytics/xGvChancesCreated As you can see, we're actually in the top 6 of number of chances created (11.267 per game, the same as Arsenal), which pushes up the number of goals you'd expect us to have scored. The deficit is when you draw the correlation line through the data points and see how far below "goals we should have scored" we are with "goals we actually scored". Also worth seeing that Arsenal's xG is much higher than ours from the same number of chances, which probably means they create better goal-scoring opportunities to begin with too. Man City's return from the number of chances they create is excellent, not that much of a surprise when you consider they've done a lot of stats work and data analysis so they probably have an idea of the most efficient chances to goals activities. The Aguerooooooooooo goal was one where the stats indicated he went from a 20% goal probability to 80% just by taking the extra touch nearer the goal-line, for instance.

I don't have his number. A facebook message might suffice.

I would imagine his "hip problem" is that his hips are that much further from the ground than most to begin with.

That's not true, we've not allowed that many more shots and we've conceded far more goals than we should have done from the positions the shots were taken.

Not really, there are stats based on historical goal data showing that we were awful at putting the ball in the net, nothing about chance creation or number of efforts on or off target, only "compared to historical shot data X many goals should have been scored" and Saints scoring far fewer than that even having created the chances.

I love the way they say "We Scored only deal in cold, hard data". Well, they do, but they ascribe subjective weightings to that data to get their scores which may skew the results away from what Saints value, for instance I'm pretty sure part of the reason we bought Long was his defensive work and pressurising, for which he won't get much credit here as it's a difficult metric to measure. Having said that, it does support the xG and xS stats I've seen elsewhere about how poorly we've done in finishing and goals conceded per shot.

It was only the use of the shoulder UA logo I'm afraid.

I haven't asked, but no reason to think they won't use black numbers, and a black short with white side stripe would work well with the original. Will be interesting to see if we go with the original white socks or the recent trend of mostly red or hooped socks. I probably should have asked.

As sleeve sponsors are now allowed it might be that UA take that space on the one arm rather than Saints having a secondary sponsor. I like 3 the best too, Obviously we couldn't have the UA logo where the Patrick one is on the original style because of the Premier League badge. The rumour was that we didn't have the broad stripe style before because of the replicas we were selling. Not sure that was ever a valid concern tbh.