The9

Again, any chance of a sticky, another load of threads with people questioning what dates things have to be done by... :mad: I've now added the 2 weeks-since-paid date for players, when they'll become free agents if they've given notice with immediate effect.

I don't have a problem with it, surprised we've still got Lallana as well, to be honest, despite his unproductive season.

No evidence at all, other than what you've said yourself... :confused:

McGoldrick deal was agreed before anyone made an offer, Davis is out of contract and the Surman deal isn't confirmed and even if it was isn't that surprising given that we're in League One and he's an occasional England U-21 with a couple of seasons of CCC experience...

LOLz, let it go ! :bear:

Well so far he has, he's had the opportunity to negotiate since Jan 1st. Obviously his contract doesn't expire until midnight, but this is as done a deal as it's going to get until then. Hardly surprised, he said all the right things but even with a speedy multi-billionaire's takeover there was still a pretty good chance he was going to leave, Prem offers silly money even for benchwarmers.

Eastleigh and Basingstoke are falling...

For all you knee-jerk panickers, here's a nice link to something I started last week with all the dates things are expected to happen, including Fry saying the start of this week was a deadline... http://www.saintsweb.co.uk/forum/showpost.php?p=345315&postcount=1

As someone who believed in something too much. Does nothing to change his status as a Saints legend at all. To be honest I don't even want him as Chairman anyway.

2 for me.

After reading another three threads with various people umming and arrr-ing about the dates when things have to happen by, bumpety bumpety bump, the answers are here... :mad:

I'm assuming you mean Surman rather than McGoldrick ?

Ooh, look, another thread about the same thing. Excitement.

I actually think the most likely thing that will happen is that we'll sign someone not long after a takeover (please), but I'm not sure we'll see any of last season's potential strikers playing for more than a few weeks if they even have contracts. On the Paterson front I think he's a long way from the finished article, but he has good awareness and puts in the effort, plus he's got good control and passing - technically I think he's a reasonably decent target man who still needs some strength work. More of an Ormerod than a Phillips though - you're right about flick ons and I think chances from closing people down, with the odd helping out on the goal front. You've seen more of him than I have by the sounds of it, but I've been quite impressed with his ability to find the net (after a bit of headlessness last pre-season). All I said was I'd rather have him than McGoldrick though, and I really don't rate his potential simply due to his attitude and reaction times.

We created loads of chances in the first few weeks when Holmes was playing, he sometimes managed to drag himself away from the half way line for long enough to get near the box for some of them, and after that seemed not to make the effort at all, in amongst the general confusion of who was where in the (not) 4-3-3... I just can't believe anyone can post "he wasn't lazy" in any seriousness on the subject of McGoldrick. I saw him make approximately 4 runs off the ball in the entire season (at home anyway), and I watch the strikers off the ball more than anyone else on the pitch. For the record, this isn't a disappointment to me. Seeing him chosen at all ahead of better players (well, one, in Pekhart) around October/November time was a disappointment.

He was blinded by the awesome "Kenwyne Jones - he's not from Canada" song we thought up at Swindon a few years back. Hell, I rated KEN~!!! pretty highly, but I wasn't going that far with it !

As an unfit striker myself I can at least say I know exactly what I am SUPPOSED to be doing, and in moving roughly the same amount as I do in a Sunday League match he doesn't even have the excuse of being a lazy, fat, old (in football terms) get either. Half of our problems last season were due to a lack of penetrating passes. Much of the fault for that lay with our midfield, but given that Lallana and Schneiderlin have shown flashes of creativity, some of that blame fell to the strikers for not making runs to create space, and McGoldrick is one of the laziest players off the ball I've ever seen. The season before last at St Mary's he didn't even bother running into 30 yards of space with the centre backs 20 yards apart in order to get clean through so Stern John could play him in from half way when he won the ball - that's just an unforgivable lack of vision and effort, and nothing he did last season made me think his "style" had changed any. Like I said, I think Billy Davies is the kind of manager he won't get away with that for, and if he undergoes a complete change of attitude he might have some success, as he's still young enough to be re-educated and he's got the physical attributes - but if he continues as he did last season he's got no chance and won't get a start for them after September.

Well I did say "young players IN WITH the two he bought"... I wasn't using Keane and Rio as examples of his youth-developing skills. However, it's testament to O'Leary's managerial ability that so many of the young players he blooded, even when there was plenty of money being thrown at the team, are still playing at a high level. Whilst accepting that some of those players are indeed very good and they'd have made it anyway, you can still ruin them with mistreatment, or refusal to give them a chance (what might Cranie, Dyer, Blackstock, Best, Matt Mills have achieved already handled differently?) Compare O'Leary's success in getting young players assimilated to, say, Redknapp at Saints and what he did with what we had... we all knew Walcott was something special (and I dare say Redknapp would love to take the credit), but Nathan Dyer never quite recovered from his trauma at the time (notably Reading and Mansfield), whilst "even" the maligned Burley took a gamble on Baird and Bale to great effect.

I don't remember Gary Lineker being "versatile" either, but he was bloody good at what he was supposed to do. At that kind of level attitude and application has a lot to do with it - James Beattie was a useless carthorse until Strachan got him fit, then he miraculously became a competent striker for a while, before reverting. I just don't think McGoldrick has an attitude that will bring him any success, whilst Paterson is a worker and has finishing ability, although he too has a long way to go. Different types of player, but I thought McGoldrick was little short of appalling as a central striker, rarely in the right place at the right time when the ball came into the box, and often on the half way line picking his nails. He probably wouldn't have got into any other team in that division half as often as he did ours last season, including Charlton.

Surely everyone thinks their opinion is correct, or it wouldn't be their opinion ? As it happens, yes, and not afraid to state it either. Now where's the archive of my glowing comments on Kenwyne in pre-season 2005/6 (twinned with a "top goalscorer" bet that proved to be a couple of seasons too early), and the time on Saints Forever where I said I thought Dyer might have more success than Walcott...?

And indeed on post #36 of this thread. And confirmed from the Forest site a couple of posts before that...

And not likely to with the "driving incident" hanging over him... I thought he was decidedly average but at least making the effort, unlike some. "Poor man's Jon Stead" as opposed to "poor man's Leon Best". Yes, I rate him that highly.

O'Halloran was worse, surely ? At least Molyneux looked like he might be able to attack.

Hmm, I thought Robertson was better than McGoldrick too. And Pekhart definitely was, until he got dropped for no good reason to preserve McGoldrick's bizarre untouchable run of games. Agree on the Surman and Saga front though, decent players. I think with Wotton his skills are best kept for motivating colleagues, can't fault his effort though.

I'd agree that two of those above are decent... maybe not quite La Liga standard though !