SW11_Saint

The arrogance of underestimating your opposition… and picking a ludicrous line-up.

Jack Stephens if he stays…

Tommy Dobson-Ventura has headlines written for him already. He sounds ace.

Possibly right. Though, like our board interviewing Nathan Jones, sometimes your instincts - when you sit across a desk from someone - should tell you all you need to know…

Still beggars belief that that guy from Begbie Traynor saw the Mickey ‘Fiasco’ consortium not only as genuine, but the best offer😳. It was literally his job to assess the authenticity of each bitter. Incredible that we might have lost the Liebherr bid due to his incompetence.

Turned out to be a rather prescient post!!

Had this conversation in the pub on Friday… who is actually keeping the good ship SFC on course at the moment? Whatever we thought of Semmens - he knew how to run a club operationally. I believe Henrik Kraft is nominally CEO at the moment but don’t believe he has any experience of running a football club (isn’t he more of an investor type?) - which is a specialist skill these days. The level of turnover we’ve had - my to mention SR being focussed on buying Valenciennes - hasn’t helped either. With so many in new positions (and with many yet to be filled) continuity is going to be challenging to say the least. I’m not sure Wilcox is even in situ yet(?) - who is overseeing player sales / purchases? Let’s also not forget that JW is stepping up into a broader, more senior DoF role too, albeit at a smaller club. Reflecting, pretty much every major decision SR have made this far has been flawed at best, catastrophic at worst (ref. the last two managerial appointments). Not sure how much faith I have that they have the capability to keep things running smoothly with so much change going on. How about that for an upbeat pre-season post?! 😂😫

Yeah but not for bloody discount prices too!

Steve Moran 😍

Carabao cup: Gillingham (A)

Forest Green Rovers - new ground and a vegan pie 🥧👍

Lovely to start the season with a spirit of optimism 😂

Me this would be a good away kit… simple/classic.

Me too. He’s only 19, it’s about his future worth… He’s phenomenal already, and he’s going to get much much better. I think we should be asking £60m min.

Yeah, I get that - though when those same attributes were true of us it didn’t stop us being raided. Caicedo will still go, regardless. My point really is that it’s the quality of the player which determines their value, not the state of the club (when involving the top two divisions at least). If we’ve put a value on him, we should stick to it. If they or someone else doesn’t want to buy him due to feeling he’s overpriced then fine. We’re not skint, he’s under contract, we don’t need to sell him. He and his agent will be mightily pissed off of course, but we need to hard ball this, not roll over and let our tummy be tickled (we will of course). With any luck there will be a bidding war.

Well we keep him then, or someone else buys him. They shouldn’t dictate the price to us. Brighton are holding out for £80m for Caicedo.

And I meant to type divergence - not sure how it ended up as dissection! 😂

Yes, exactly I would rather have alternate years - traditional vs experimental. As you point out though this isn’t the first time we’ve had back-to-back alternative kits. I am not actually against a bit of innovation as long as (a) the design is great and (b) they stick to the red/white/black colour palette. In fact the ‘Keegan kit’ and the L1 sash kit are two of my all-time favourites, but I definitely would like a more traditional r&w stripes design as the predominant approach. TBH I was actually more aggrieved at the Cortese era dissection - the whole ‘all red’ kit thing as it had no connection with Saints’ tradition. At least the last two have stuck to our recognised colour palette. The other thing with Hummel that I don’t like - as pointed out by someone else on here - is the the fit is terrible (on players I mean). They just look baggy and amateurish. One day maybe I’ll get my dream of someone delivering a smart, classic yet contemporary take on our kits of the 60s/70s - I think Atletico Madrid have done this before and it looks great. For me, that would be true innovation!

Of the ‘mega clubs’ they’re the exception that proves the rule. That said, they do it incredibly well - quick tot up from your graphic they have stripes 60+% of the time and tend to alternate between traditional and experimental, which is all that I and others would prefer. Their ‘experimental’ ones always tend to be high quality designs though. Only one I really didn’t like was the ‘hoop’ design.

Overly fussy shorts, but a great kit 👍

I think what happens on the pitch is a better barometer of that!

Though in those days we kept kits for about 3-4 season stretches so probably only had about 4 kits in the whole of the 80s…

Exactly the point I have been trying to make. Seems a lot of the (presumably) younger crew don’t really give a shit about upholding tradition - they just want ‘new shiny things’ every year, regardless of whether well designed or not.

He might be on the other side!

I’m calm, don’t worry…😉 I was just making a point that I’d prefer going back to stripes instead of another gimmicky kit. A lot of fans would I suspect.