gecko

Quite impressed with how flame-retardant footy shirts are these days

NY Mets are Baseball... Anyway, whether he's been given a proper chance or not, he's clearly not in the managers plans. So get him out the door asap, in the most profitable way for the club possible.

What an excellent announcement to start the day. Just need to get that striker in first, then we can just shut all our windows, right?

I don't recall anyone being particularly excited by Paintsil. Probably still reeling from the last mistake we'd bought from them... tbf though, Championship could be Onuachu's level in the English pyramid. We've not seen him yet so hard to say. I suppose we can infer from RM's decision to not play him, that he's probably still not be good enough. On the striker front, I reckon we'll see a better contribution from the attacking midfield this season anyway. Both Armstrong's, Alcaraz and Tella (and to a lesser extent Edozie) haven't exactly been shot-shy from outside the box or just inside. And we currently seem very capable of working ourselves up to that part of the pitch in the current system. Often requires a bit of good fortune for them to go in, but it feels to me like there'll be a few games this season where we'll get two/three from outside the box and others where we'll get none.

I still reckon there's a chance the Mara could come good in the future The rest of that lot can do one though, along with Lyanco of coure. 10/10 Insane window if that all happened though

I'm just glad we finally have a manager that is enacting some holistic, bluesky thinking it's actually something i quite liked about Stephens - he was one of the only CBs we have that would actually dare carry the ball up to/past the half way line dragging opposing strikers with him at times. Agreed that beating the man opens up a lot more attacking opportunities. It's usually fine as a fullback or AM given their position on the pitch, but as a CB I still think Wood's highlights suggest that he'll be prone to being caught out of position. If the rest of the "system" can compensate for that, then I'm all for it. Otherwise I suspect we'd see a lot of silly/unnecessary concessions

My thoughts on this "highlights" video though... he seems to love taking players on, running out from the back, and there were more than a few occasions where he seemed to collect the ball miles out of the position I'd expect a CB to be. All of which are pretty risky, which probably explains why the Swans shipped an enormous amount of goals last season. I suppose time will tell if he's the right one for us. Obvious perks of being known by the manager, and quick onboarding to the playing style. I can't say I know anything about him though.

oh i don't disagree; i remember him doing very little for us in his short time here so far. But somewhere along the line, prima-donna footballers got it into their heads that the contracts they've signed aren't worth the paper they're written on. Assuming he actually has downed tools, the alternative is that we keep hold of him and he may become a Gnonto @ Leeds. Is it worth sticking a 25m player in the reserves to rot on principle.... probably not imo, even if we had the financial luxury

Agreed. if those pointless arguments can find their way onto another thread somewhere, I'm sure it'll be most appreciated Anyway, on Sulemana, if he's downed tools and the 25m is legitimate. I'd say let him go. We near enough break even, and can bring in someone who actually wants to be here. Shame, as many people probably agree, he could have been awesome... maybe sneak a sell-on clause in to satisfy some on here ;-)

Sky's Transfer centre saying it's 32 upfront, but add-ons meeting the 40m valuation. I guess we'll never know the actual net value we get, especially given the Chelsea profit contract part Still, as others have said, seems pretty good business for a player who we're not certain will return to his pre-injury form especially as it's one of the few areas we're ok in, now that Manning has come in.

Pretty difficult to say that with confidence. We've not actually played any pre-season games against this year's level. Benfica were domestic champs and Champions League QF AZ Alkmaar were Europa League SF Bournemouth are PL Reading are in an absolute mess; they may have technically been Championship last year but their team this year with all the embargoes will struggle in L1 And if they're all doing preseason correctly, like we are, then the teams rotate a lot. I can't have been the only one who thought "WTF" to the starting lineup vs Bournemouth; no way does that lineup start in a competitive match. We're also a club that's had a month to adapt to a complete overhaul of system. On the whole I think we already look better than the dross we saw last year.

I think Stephens has always felt like he's got a serious mistake in him whenever he plays. I don't really like this as an argument against him... all of our CBs had the same issue. He also felt like he had a regular purple-patch in him too; he seemed to be well liked on his stint at bournemouth. What I liked about Stephens is he is the only one of our CBs that I've ever seen carry the ball to/past the half way line, and looking pretty comfortable on the ball, allowing a different distribution further forward.

I do love coming to this thread. seeing there's been 20+ updates since the last time, and thinking "excellent something interesting must've happened" ... then scrolling through 20 posts about circles.

Start as you mean to go on ;-)

Surely only one; in the superposition ;-)

I'd bite anyone's hand off for a dodgy 1-0 win from a VAR cock-up and a 0-0 from tonight and Spurs

An very unexpected and welcome point. It will all be for nothing if we can't back it up against Brentford - that needs to be 3 points and another good performance to put everyone else under much more pressure. One win moves anyone in the bottom 9 a lot of places, so it's going to be a hell of an end to the season.

I can see either side of all of those incidents - all of them could have gone either way, in my opinion, for the reasons you've outlined and the counter argument from others. I think we can agree that we're pretty unlucky that they ALL went against us, and that both our CBs had complete brain-fart moments in one game I'd say Walcott was rightly called offside. Although it looked to me like the Grimsby line was very generous to them, possibly because he was obscured by Walcott - which if the VAR guy only gets one angle to draw lines from, then the system is completely pointless in cases like this.

Difficult to dispute this as the likely outcome. However they were garbage last night against Blackburn, and rightly got beat.

Yeah it was a cup game, so probably picked a different team to PL

Selles not done himself any favours there. Got to keep in mind though, loads of teams bring in fringe players for the cup matches, so I'll reserve judgement until the team sheet is out for the Chelsea game. If several of those names are starters, I won't be defending him ;-)

Sky news article has it mentioned; obviously doesn't mean it's legit though - https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11095/12810313/jesse-marsch-on-verge-of-becoming-southampton-manager-a-week-after-being-sacked-by-leeds Sky Sports News understands Marsch would be happy to sign a short-term deal, which also suits Southampton"

I've read a few posts saying how Marsch will be a good fit for our current players, with the additional note that his style is very similar to Ralphs (likes to high press, often plays a 4-2-2-2 etc). I'm not necessarily disagreeing; personally I'm in favour of a return to that style of play; it's way more interesting to watch when it works than say the Puel era sideways passing and recycling. One thing I've not really seen mentioned though, is that we've bought a lot of players recently, many of whom haven't actually trained under Ralph (Orsic, Alcaraz, Sulemana, Tall Paul, Bree) and those that did cross over with him (ABK, Lavia, Edozie, Larios, Aribo, DCC, Mara) trained under the other Ralph "totally-out-of-ideas-5-at-the-back" Hasenhuttl - many of those new names will be the first on the team sheet for a lot of people on this forum You'd hope that with all those players being utter professionals, hopefully they should pick up the routines pretty quick. I'm just not sure it's as simple as saying "Marsch plays like Ralph; ergo we'll be straight up to speed" Some of those names look like they'd work great in a high press team. e.g. Sulemana, Orsic are nice and pacy etc for the press. Some not so much. Some of the Man City recruits will probably be okay too, having coached under the City/Pep infrastructure too. as an aside, I don't mind the 6 month contract too much. If he fails miserably, we can ditch. If he succeeds then we can obviously renegotiate. In the mean time, we get someone who is head and shoulders above Jones, and the board get 6 months to sort out a contingency or two for every possible permutation of surviving/relegation/marsch leaving/not leaving etc.

I think the concern around Marsch is fairly well founded. - He's a lot like Ralph in his formations/style, which clearly stopped working for us for whatever reason - He's just been sacked by a relegation rival - He's was less successful than Ralph in the RedBull echelons That said, his first big win for me, is that he's not Jones. Secondly, he had his Leeds team at least scoring goals. If we're going to go down, and in all likelihood we will, then it would be nice to see a few more goals to make it seem like we're trying to stay up. Not saying he's my number 1, I'm not really sure who I think is the best man for the job right now, but we could certainly do worse.

Guess there wasn't a stat to show how much of a jackass the guy was, nor how much the fanbase would detest him in a matter of weeks.