Wurzel

To add to my post above, finishing positions of "comparable" clubs to us. i.e. acheived the "bare minimum" of staying in the Premier League for the last 3 seasons ignoring "big 6" Wolves 7th 7th 13th Everton 8th 12th 10th Leicester 9th 5th 5th West Ham 10th 16th 6th Palace 12th 14th 14th Newcastle 13th 13th 12th Burnley 15th 10th 17th Saints 16th 11th 15th Brighton 17th 15th 16th Leicester won a cup in that time. None of the others have even reached a final ( Watford & Villa were both losing finalists in one of the cups but not stayed/been in top flight for all 3 years).

There are pretty much just two options in football nowadays. Find an owner with more money than sense who will pump money into the club to acheive success. Unfortunately we are now talking oil state mega company/dubious government backed finance to acheive that, there just aren't many of them to go round. If that's what you want, there are clubs out there you can support. The second option is try to live within your means, and through a good transfer policy, a good youth policy and good tactics, hold your own within the company of like minded clubs and hope for the occasional cup glory. We are the second option. We're not brilliant at it. There is room for improvement, but for who we are, what we are, we are doing OK. In those 3 seasons quoted by @Lighthousewe haven't come close to going down. 3 teams that finished above us in at least one of them have gone down since. 3 more are below us at the moment. We've reached an FA Cup semi Final twice in the last 5 seasons, no other club outside of the big 6 has done that. We'd all like to dream, we'd all like to win things, but Leicester aside, I think we've compared ok with any other club outside of the big 6 over recent times.

At least there's no chance of RH picking his preferred line up of Redmond Redmond Redmond Redmond Redmond Redmond Redmond Redmond Redmond Redmond Redmond

Redmond has already been tried in all 4 attacking positions so far this season. Guessing he'll replace either JWP or Romeu for this one then, unless RH decides to be really whacky and start him as a centre back.

Has Redmond now been used in all 4 attacking positions this season? And been sh|ite in all of them? Whilst better players in all those positions have sat on the bench? When will that penny finally click

Stoke City, with the full agreement of their sponsor Bet365, have shirts available in their club shop with and without the sponsors logo. The plain one is by far the bigger seller.

First win incoming.

Think we possibly now hold the record for being the injured party to the most disagreed with VAR decision of all time .

That was the points the 18th team had each season, you needed to better that to stay up ( which I know you'll now point out you could still stay up on those points as long as your goal difference was better but that's cutting too fine for a safety target) Personally setting a points target can be a dangerous game, it depends on other team's results. I'd prefer it if we aimed for safe by game 35 for the sake of our blood pressure.. Weird to think with hindsight we were actually safe in early January last year, we just didn't know it.

We've also lost out on our hard core of Japanese tourists since Yoshida left

FotMob app on phone is amazing. Pretty much every pro league all around the world available . Pick your favourite teams and/or leagues and have them arranged in any order you want. Shlt hot speed for goal and other incident updates as well (always quicker than any stream).

He does seem a really down to earth guy, not the stereotypical footballer. A few years ago he was posting videos on instagram of his walks around Southampton, Winchester, New Forest etc describing the places and their history as he walked. Sort of bloke you feel you could bump into, have a pint and still be chatting hours later.

Just got to the end of the first section that Kindle allows you to read as a free sample. Went straight to the Buy It Now button to download the rest of the book. Looking forward to reading the rest.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Chapel was the intention, but club went for a "let nature take it's course" approach, and it soon became apparent once tickets started selling who was buying where.

The irony of all this is The Chapel end was the area the club envisaged as our "Kop End" when the stadium was being built, with enough room to accommodate all singing sections from The Dell and more all in one place. Of course our fans decided to split so they could "intimidate" 🤣 the away fans from both sides, diluting our support and consequently being outsung by almost every visiting team. Got to agree though, an all standing all singing Chapel End would be great.

Just a heads up. Although it has nothing with the club either, expect to see a Santa hat perched at a jaunty angle on the club crest around mid-December.

Good post. Till now he has had to fit square pegs in round holes and play with much of his squad taught to play and/or bought to play other manager's systems. This is now "his" team. He's managed to re-educate those willing (or able) to learn, got rid of most of the deadwood (still concerned over the 2 GKs) and bought in excellent young ( if you're good enough you're old enough) players to fit the system . I've always been an optimist, but after this window I genuinely see a new dawn for the club on the playing side. We're not going to storm the league overnight but I think a lot of the doubters are going to be pleasantly surprised

Yes. He's keen to get back into football but the only job he's been offered so far was turnstile repair man.

Disagree. They should stay wide and the full backs make runs inside of them . Has dual benefit of stretching the opposition defence wider and slightly reducing distance the full backs need to cover to keep goalside of opposition when they have to get back in a hurry. Trouble is Djneppo and Walcott aren't very effective themselves either as wingers or covering the full backs/narrowing the midfield when defending

He's more of a short corner specialist

Clutching at straws, but with in-match betting available, waiting for us to take the lead then betting on the opposition could make us all a small fortune.

As opposed to last year when the lines where thinner but the officials were thicker.

Am I the only one looking at the line up and seeing 10 round pegs in 10 round holes. ? (Would have gone FF over AM but neither justify the starting position)

Technically you are right from an accounting point of view , but for all intents and purposes the way @Dusic is describing profit makes more sense in this scenario. Ignoring underage players we have a fixed number squad of 25 players. They all have to be paid wages whether they've been here years or are new signings, so, inflation aside, we could regard wages as an approximate constant. But every time we sell a player they have to be replaced and, unless by somone coming through from the Academy, paid for. So (ignoring transfer inflation) we need to at least recover what we pay for each player to replace them with someone of similar quality just to stand still. Running down contracts until their value is nil or next to nothing leaves nothing to replace them with. So we fall further and further behind either financially or in quality of playing staff (or both). We got really lucky with VVD and sold him for a large profit , which could have covered several losses. Unfortunately the losses it covered seemed to come from everyone we purchased with his sale money and took us right back to square one again. Thankfully the last 12/18 months of trading show we seem to have started getting things right again.

A year ago I'd have said AM without a doubt, but he seems to have gone backwards . Definitely go for FF now, if for no other reason than he hasn't had a chance to let 9 in yet . (Is the 5 away to Spurs still his personal worst?)