Paul Chuckle

I have also renewed now moved seats and was easy to do so very happy

I haven't seen it but i was just proving a point how anyone could say waht i said as it proves nothing lol

I've seen The shirt too. I also had to sign a disclaimer and cannot say what the shirt was like but I can reveal you will either like it or not like it :/

it won't allow me to order online when i log in their is no option for anything at all Anyone esle having teh same problem? I will just go down the ground and pay for it on Friday, moving seat anyway so probably be easier doing that in the stadium

i do lol

was about to say the same thing LOL

Can you move seats if your an existing season ticket holder or will i have to wait until after the 30th June to do this?

Was a bit unfair as they showed Lamberts goal once and all the others twice plus a bit of celebration! Still have votes for Rickie. Lol at Milner being on 0%

Didn't Hirst bang in 2 on his home debut against Spurs at The Dell in a 3-2 win? Remember being year 10 of School when we signed him for 2Mil and was so excited, my mate was a Sheff Weds fan and was gutted when we signed him.

lol yeah i know, what was that horrendous purple shirt you'd ocassionly wear?

Your not one of those 40 year olds who still turn up in full kit including socks pulled up on match days are you

and England have done on afew occasions and i agree they are horrible

'**** em up get in to them' is another awful song from our fans

'Sing your hearts out for the lads' worst football chant ever

Lol

lest just hope he never gets put in charge of the first team lol But am happy with that appointment

All I keep seeing on the skates shirt is a womens legs spread open, that Kappa sign really is ****

Are there any BNP candidates down here out of interest? I looked to see if one was dunning in the Eastleigh area but couldn't find any info???

David Hughes such a waste Paul Tisdale ex youth doing ok manager wise

http://twitter.com/RobbieSavage8 well you can follow him here, hes actually quite funny, always answers back to people

Well only Celtic could afford him in the SPL abd as they have no manager that doesn't worry me at all. Rangers have spent no money on players in 18months

That should read 'Shame that half of the missing 20k'

Shame that the half of the 20000 missing today didn't make it to St Marys bet they will all be moaning if we get to play-off final and they can't get tickets

I was at the Villa game in 1994, last home game of season and we won 4-1. Was 10 at the time and stood in Upper Milton road with my dad. I remember Villa fans invading the pitch from the Northam End (away fans sat there then) and snapping the cross bar. Don't remember any of our fans getting involved or any real trouble though

Daily Echo reporter Simon Walter's three-page interview with Ted Bates statue sculptor Ian Brennan appeared in the weekend Pink. Here, we reproduce the feature in the wake of Saints fans' reaction to the £112,000 bronze portrait. From his trademark wave and smile to the Saints programme in his jacket pocket, the Ted Bates statue lacks nothing in detail. Since beginning full-time work on immortalising Mr Southampton in bronze 18 months ago, sculptor Ian Brennan has hardly stepped foot outside the workshop at his home in Warsash to ensure the statue would be ready for tonight's unveiling. As a Saints fan, dedicating so much time to the memory of the man who served the club for 66 years as player, manager, director and president has been a labour of love for Mr Brennan, who was commissioned the job by the Ted Bates Trust following the great man's death in November 2003, aged 85. "I've literally worked on it for seven days a week for the last 18 months," he said ahead of tonight's ceremony at St Mary's, where Ted's widow Mary was due to unveil the gargantuan sculpture in front of other family members, Saints fans and club officials. "Even when I wasn't working on it I was thinking about it - was Ted, Ted, Ted all the way through," continued the father- of-three. "Sometimes I'd wake up at 3am in the morning and go and do some more work. It's been mentally shattering but I want ed to do it so much." The project began at the end of 2005, when Mr Brennan was reliant on photographs of Ted Bates to get the best likeness. "Normally you need a mini mum of 15 measurements of the face but because that wasn't possible I was photo hungry when I first started." To put it in context, Sir Bobby Robson was still alive when his statue was unveiled outside Ipswich Town's Portman Road five years ago, and the sculptor responsible for the bronze statue of Margaret Thatcher, which was recently unveiled in the House of Commons, had the same luxury. "He had seven sittings with her which I envied, but I just had to get on with it and look for as many images as I could," continued Mr Brennan. "Sculpting from photographs is not the cleverest way of doing it - Madame Tussauds would never work from photos alone because its difficult to get the 3- D effect - and I had nothing to go by at all. "I saw him from a distance at the Dell but unfortunately I never met the man, which did n't help. His widow Mary told me about his mannerisms, like the way he held his thumb when he waved, but finding the right pictures was a real problem. There were lots of photos taken of Ted but mostly from an angle and not showing him from ear to ear. "Fortunately, the Echo library saved the day. I needed a straight face-on profile with him at the right age and with the right expression and they went right through the archives and came up with a straight profile of Ted with Mary and that was brilliant - but I still needed more. "I eventually found a little black-and-white one taken at more or less the same time. That helped but it was terrifying as I only had one hit. "I used a calculator to get the measurements and the lines exactly right because if, for example, the mouth was two millimetres lower than it should be it would have thrown everything else out." Eventually, Mr Brennan decided to also focus his work on two photographs taken on the day Ted received his MBE for services to football in 1998, and on a pose that will be instantly recognisable to every Saints fan over school age. "I've never seen a smile on a statue before but after a lot of research we decided to go with a pose of him waving and with a smile on his face. "Generally that's a no-no because most people remember your face as it is most of the time. A smile only lasts a few seconds but Ted was always smiling and if his statue had a straight face and he was still waving, there was a risk of him looking like Stalin or the Saddam Hussein statue that was pulled down. "Ted was always such a friendly bloke and when he waved to the fans he meant it, it wasn't a politician's wave. "He also had a natural, I'm pleased to see you' smile so we decided to more or less break new ground and try and get that smiley face. Hopefully I've captured that." Unlike most statues, the sheer size of the immortalised Ted Bates - he is 11ft high and weighs more than a tonne - meant he had to be sculpted piecemeal. "Usually you do it all in one piece but this was twice as big as anything I'd done so the hands, the feet, the head and the arms were all done in sections and welded on separate ly," said Mr Brennan, who worked with wax, plaster and clay before the various body parts were sent to London to be cast at the Bronze Age Foundry in London. "To complete it on time, the separate pieces were taken to the foundry for the moulding and casting process as soon as I'd carved them. "We were breaking new ground because the foundry had never done it quite like that before and I certainly had n't. At the back of mind was always the worry that the different parts wouldn't fit. "The jacket and trousers went to the foundry in October, but the head didn't go on his shoulders until late February. If any thing had gone wrong we would have been put six weeks behind, but fortunately it all fitted." At 16 feet tall on its plinth, Ted Bates is bigger than statues at other football grounds. "Usually they're made life size or around eight feet tall, which is what we were originally going to go for, but with it being on a slope against the backdrop of St Mary's stadium we decided to increase it," explained Mr Brennan. "He's huge. At 5ft 9in he was never the tallest footballer in the world but he's certainly one of the tallest footballing statues. "I couldn't believe how big he looked when I first saw him standing in the foundry last week - my head came up to the middle of his jacket, which in clay weighed over half a tonne and needed four men to get off the ground. "He stood tower ing three foot above the Margaret Thatcher statue, which was being cast at the same time." While Ted Bates was a giant of a man for Southampton FC, Mr Brennan was always conscious of the need to retain his subject's character in every aspect of the £112,000 statue. "We made him tall but at the same time we didn't want him looking down because it would be like he was looking down on people, and Ted didn't do that, so I decided to make his eyeline focus on Britannia Road, so he is waving to the people as they drive past." A former cabinet maker, Mr Brennan has sculpted statues professionally from his home in Warsash for over 23 years and has been commissioned more than 90 projects by the Royal Household, but has never worked on any sculpture the scale of the Ted Bates statue. He is used to sculpting wood but the use of clay meant his latest project was a constant work in progress. There is even a tale behind the slightly deflated football that is held in Ted's left hand. "As the 'hot-wax football' came out of the mould, it dipped slightly as it cooled so that the ball looked like it needed a little air,but that looked more realistic somehow, so we left it as it was." Incredibly, the whole project took just 18 months (the rela tively diminutive Margaret Thatcher statue took four years), but Mr Brennan would have had longer if he had his way. He admitted: "The foundry workers had to physically drag the head out of my hands just before the deadline. "It was like doing an important exam paper, it was just made of hollow wax at that stage and I was sat outside the foundry in my car at 7am, trying to tweak it and doing bits and bobs to his smile on my lap. "It probably wasn't necessary but it was almost an obsession by that stage. I'm no Michelangelo but I could have gone down that route. I could have given him the most beautiful shoes in the world but taken many years to do it! "The shoes are what people are closest to so I made sure I put lots of creases in them. People won't see the waving hand in as much detail because it's so high up but they've got lenses so I made sure I put the right lines on it. "It wasn't necessary, but any artist will tweak and tweak their work as much as they can - often until it's broken. Sometimes you can make it worse. I might have tweaked it to destruction if I had more time. My wife Sue sometimes has to tell me I've done enough, otherwise I wouldn't get any thing else done!" Now have your say on the Ted Bates statue ....