The9

Dodgy gate revenue tax scams were all the rage in Division Three in the early 1980s as well, I can recall my dad telling me Newport County were underestimating the attendance by a few thousand every home game for VAT reasons when I asked him why the crowd looked much bigger than the number in the paper too. Not a great surprise that they went bankrupt...

Oi, you missed out me saying "I think he'll play in defensive midfield".

You are right to be suspicious... this is MLT's last START for Saints (he played another 9 times as a sub after this)... http://www.soccerbase.com/results3.sd?gameid=294014 ...and this is his last appearance in a competitive match, in a 2-0 win against West Ham on 30th January 2002 :http://www.soccerbase.com/results3.sd?gameid=353195 Both, you'll note, are home matches. In fact Le Tiss's last start in a Saints away match was in the League Cup win at Mansfield in 2000, a full 18 months before his last actual appearance. His last away appearance was for 2 minutes as sub on 19th Jan 2002 when we drew 1-1 at Liverpool, 11 days before the last home appearance.

I can see him playing defensive midfield for us, assuming we have a centre back lined up as well, of course. Nice that he's versatile enough to threaten half the team's places though.

He's fit enough to have been on the bench on Tuesday (and possibly last Saturday too, I can't remember). Not sure he's proven himself to the manager yet.

I have the '89 white one with the '89 yellow one's sponsor on it (and wore it to St Mary's on Tuesday for the first time)... not as illustrated. I've never seen the '87 white kit.

Lock the Task Bar.

The fact you think it might impress people is the interesting bit.

Outlook says it's..... ooooh.... Tuesdayyyyy. And it had better bloody well be, cos I'm playing football Wednesday night.

Pretty solid IT Support for you to get a response within a day, that's a hell of an SLA they're stuck with.

They apologised on the OS as well...

They don't have to. And especially not as they were apparently taking some cash on turnstiles by 7:55pm last night, so there won't even be a paper trail.

I haven't seen us hit a long ball all season. I saw a few hefty clearances, but that's fair enough. Attacking with balls from the wings, and especially yesterday a lot of link play and low crosses into the box. Once they figure out Lambert's 6'3" and hangs around at the back to outjump fullbacks we'll hit a few more in the air too... I thought Lallana and Harding worked well together, though it was mainly Harding's doing, as he was putting all the work in, without overlapping, just working hard to be available. Lallana just seems to want to jog with the ball until he can beat someone half the time, rather than do something effective with it.

I could happily see Man City (reserves) come to St Mary's for a thrashing...

Did he ? I'm assuming you were in the Kingsland, cos all I saw from the Itchen/Chapel corner was him get one cross into the danger area when unmarked - I'm one of his biggest fans but I can't seriously argue that he's done anything to warrant inclusion in the first team at the moment. He does have pace though, and now at least he's got a cross into the box at St Mary's. Same goes for Gobern for now.

Actually I thought he was very good last night, resisting the temptation to hit rubbish 45 yard passes into the crowd and instead concentrating on winning it and playing 5-10 yarders to people who can actually pass a ball. Shame for Gillett who improved a lot last season, but Wotton is fine for League One and he'll get another chance. Oh, but don't think I've forgotten Wotton's left footed slicer into the stand, he's still pants at football, but only when he has the ball. Perry for Lancashire, I'd leave Rasiak on the bench, Paterson offers us the kind of workrate we need away, Rasiak can come on and score with his first touch every match, that'll suit him.

From the pic, all of the expensive/exec etc. seats in the Itchen were empty, and that's about 1/3 of that stand, so say about 5000 in there, plus the Chapel/Itchen corner. That still leaves only 5000-ish being in the Kingsland, and that was far more full than the Itchen as there aren't any "Exec" seats, dugouts, comps for WAGs etc. Plus I was looking right at it... Admittedly there may have been the odd seat here and there which being red wasn't easy to see, but I've got a pic of the Kingsland on my mobile and it's basically full up to the Chapel corner. Still doesn't add up.

Well, I should think the chances of the VAT man talking to the Health and Safety exec is quite slim so we can tell the VAT lot how much money we took and the H&S lot how many people were in the ground. Simples, as people like to say on here.

Because it's a cup game.

We're at least 23 hours overdue of hearing OBS whining about it, anyway.

You wouldn't...

Thanks! I think you'll find there was a disclaimer with the fixtures (for a start at least one other game has been put on the wrong year due to a cut-n-paste error) -and for midweek cup games which might at the time have been played on either Tue/Weds and could be home OR away, I've gone with the Wednesday. I think they actually made the draw after I'd created the file but before the date was confirmed. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

Yep.

Who do you suggest was ? No-one else brought that much to the team. I thought Harding was very close though. It's nice to see us actually look like a coherent footballing side with a clue what's expected of them (running and a high tempo) after last year's laze-a-thon.

The interesting thing I noticed was that whenever we attacked down the right he pulled away behind the full back, expecting a cross to the far post (which he never got). Not sure if he did the same when we attacked down the left, he didn't seem to get any kind of ball in the box when we did that. He also came short for passes into feet when the ball was on half way, and didn't get many of those either. Give it a training session or two and either we'll be picked out those crosses he wants or Pardew will have him making the runs to fit our pattern - personally I hope we change our style to suit Lambert, rather than force him to adapt to our style, as only one of those things has been effective in the last couple of years. Most promising thing of the whole night for me was his ability to link play, passing the ball on the edge of the box, and then getting himself in front of goal to finish the move, something that dingus McGoldrick didn't do once last season, and Saga hasn't bothered with since about January.