saint1977

Ah yes, had Gouden Carolus at the JDW Festival last month - excellent ale that belies it's 8.5% or so strength. Haven't tried Surrey Hills so will look out for that, best beer from Surrey I've had is Hogsback's Burma Star Ale - wonderful bottle conditioned beer and a donation goes to the Burma Veterans Association. Guide Dog used to be my regular pre-match pub until moving to Hayling meant that driving (and parking in Woolston) became my means of getting to games! PM me if you are going to a game over the Festive period or early in the New Year and I'll buy you a jar. What is the Guide Dog selling these days now that Hampshire Brewery is formally kaput?

It's the price that experience comes at that is the issue though. If he is on the reported £10-15k a week, Rupert might be tempted to save money by paying him 50% up front to go and I can't see the bank saying no. If that means we can renew our contribution to Cork's loan I'd have to say yes, much as I think Euell can still do a decent job for us IMO. Wasn't there an OS article earlier in the season on his positive impact on the youmg players?

Delap was a Gray signing and I think Gray was going to build around him and probably Anders. WGS played Delap and Anders but they weren't players WGS neccesarily built around as WGS likes the press the opposition more and prefers width and getting crosses in for strikers which Beattie certainly enjoyed feeding off!

Good news - unless he has a release clause at say £1.5m we should be asking for more. Bear in mind we need to pay Bournemouth 25% as well. If anything, Bournemouth have even more reason to want him to move than agent does!

It's a reflection of the fact JP has a hugely challenging job on his hands. We're not getting pulped 5-0 every week but we need more than isolated, if convincing wins to stay up, some foul 1-0 wins where we have to be a bit unpleasant to play against are sadly a CCC neccesity. I have no urge to see JP sacked but voted no simply because I don't think the gamble was right for the urgent circumstances - there isn't a Hoddle or WGS or any Sky money to bail us out of this experiment. By the same token, JP isn't doing disasterously badly either but I'd like to see him maximise what he has and 433 isn't the only game in town. JP seems like a decent guy and I would get a lot of pleasure from seeing him keep us up, the club gets taken over, JP brings in some bargains from the Dutch market and finish in the CCC top 6 (that's my dream version).

The wages are a good point. A friend of mine is a Leeds exile and gets the club newsletter with his away membership. In it when Leeds went down to L1 Bates said that wages had been a real issue in signing players including an out of contract young striker "from the South of England" that wasn't a first team regular for their non-Premiership club had wanted in excess of £7k p/week. Had a feeling that he may have been talking about Leon Best at the time.

Yes and the CCC deal was re-negotiated recently and CCC clubs I seem to recall get the lion's share. If anyone has figures this would be great. The main issues would be reduced sponsorship, less likely to attract the better young players to the academy but the overheads for running it would be the same, gates would certainly drop again particularly ST sales and there are few clubs at that level - Leeds and Leicester apart - that bring many away fans and obviously the reduced media exposure. Hospitality prices would have to reflect the drop in standard. Also, other clubs would pay much less for our players and players we wanted to recruit have a mental block about moving from CCC to League 1 - Leeds are having awful trouble recruiting despite their profile and being 2nd biggest payers at that level. As Forest found, not an easy league to exit either. It's not the same drop as PL to CCC but it would reduce our hopes sustainability to zero. SFC is not set up to be a League 1 club, we would have to scrap the Academy on our reduced income and that's goodbye to the "strategy". Centres of Excellence don't attract the players.

Thing is though I'm not sure he'll politically get away with it at Spurs. At Skates or us he can play the pessimist but he's more likely to be challenged at WHL. His start there buys him extra capital but it won't have done him any favours in the long-term. I think Spurs will have some money to spend but look at their new stadium plan, even with regeneration money that is not going to be cheap to build. It might only be a net £5m spend in the summer but the signing on fees for players costing £14-15m will be huge and the net income came on one player - Berbatov - so the overall wage bill won't have reduced much.

Thanks Nick, interesting comments from JP. Perhaps he feels that they aren't taking on the mentoring role he had hoped or it could be that he's priming us for all the big earners being off-loaded in the window. I agree though, not ideal man-management with the XMAS fixtures before the window opens. I'm concerned that Chez was right yesterday and teams will wait on taking the big earners until the last day - as Hertha & Bolton did - and squeeze the price on Surman and Lallana.

Mind you, he also missed an open goal in 2004/5 when WBA were leading 2-1. One his goals that day should have gone down as a Blayney o.g, so lazy was Blayney's effort, he just pushed a snails pace header into the back of the net. Blayney was really a one save wonder, I'm not even sure if he's in the game anymore, he was Sullivan's back up at Donny last I heard.

Yes and they scored from a Delap long-throw I seem to recall but I've a feeling sadly that the Fishy Few may have won.

Thanks LBS, I was in Bitter Virtue on Sunday by coincidence stocking up for XMAS before having Sunday lunch with the folks who live on the outskirts of Soton. There is supposed to be an excellent beer festival between Antwerp and the Dutch border every March but sadly I can't make it this year. I'll have to settle for Gosport Winterex instead! Thanks for the tip on McChouffe, will see if Chris and Anne have it in stock next time I go to BV. I'm getting the CAMRA 100 Belgian ales book to try by Tim Webb for XMAS so should get some more hints from in there. Chris told me the new Ascot ales they have in are v.good, will post once I've sampled them!

It's less a link but more of an observation that Hedge Funds - of which SISU are one - are being dropped like hot potatoes in the markets. Some are not making the huge profits that they were and many are not getting the investment at all. It doesn't just hit the super rich either - it reduces inter-organisational and bank lending further and hits pensions. Hedge Funds have been a key growth engine in the last 10 years but confidence in them has been shattered and the bubble may be about to burst badly.

I reckon Rupert would want more than £3m, chances are this story has been planted by the player's agent/s. Pulis has his price and the agents are trying to push it. We did the same to clubs when we were a steady PL club in the early part of this decade though so can't complain.

Red and white stripes too. I like the way Hodgson said on Saturday that it was many years since he'd seen referees' decisions that hotly contested at an away ground. Good on the Stokies! I can remember at the Dell that refs used to really get it in the neck if we didn't like them. With reference to a post further down, does anyone know if we owe HMRC money? Chances are that we may and we'd be paying interest too on late or incomplete tax returns. HMRC have been trying to get the rules changed - with little success so far - that football creditors get priority over other creditors. It may seem unfair to those outside football but imagine the domino effect if one major CCC club went in and couldn't pay a number of others - for instance, had SISU not come in for Coventry we could have lost most of the 600k for Leon Best.

Top post from the man from Dubai. I agree with 99% of this and having a strategy is fine I agree, however without any finance the academy infrastructure is suffering as well so probably best to see it as a short-term phase. If the board's alleged comments to Martin Tyler are anything to go by, it's a concern if the wages are now sustainable but the stadium debt is not. Selling more older big earners if we can to service the latter is OK but not Surman and Lallana to service SMS. You then end up with a reduced overdraft as the bank want but absolutely no way of servicing what is left of it with slumping ST sales after CCC relegation - unless our natural level is mid-lower mid table in League 1. Leicester are sustainable at that level only because of Mandaric - much as I detest the man - we are not. In the same way as we had to survive in the PL to acheive the move to SMS in the late 90s so we need to survive in the CCC this season to ward off administration. Selling the only offensive options we have for £3m a pair isn't going to achieve that objective.

Would tend to agree on the price for both, it would be a bit low. However, has Lallana signed a new contract this season?

Hadn't heard about that Nick, must have not been listening at that point, could you share with us?

I agree with you MProbert, I'm sick of talking about Rupert Lowe. Sadly, there are a number of posters on either side who just cannot help themselves by typing something provocative and often totally ignorant or untrue. One or two of them that have joined in the last few days sound suspiciously like the PR plants that invaded S4E in 2006 - surely the club wouldn't be that stupid again. The mods need to be really hot on this. I know the mods are snowed under and do a very good job but the only way is to curtail the most provocative posts and posters and to pull the posts that are blatantly re-writing history and attempting to stir trouble. We know who those posters are. I may not agree with posters all of the time but I do genuinely respect them, their opinions and they are Saints fans at heart and "on our side". If I do agree with a poster, irrespective of their position on Rupert Lowe, I'll say so and if I don't I don't.

Judging by the standard of some of the plants Rupert used in 2006, his taste in media companies hasn't improved! I'm not a shareholder but I'd love to see someone ask Rupert directly at the AGM coming up whether he's using club funds on this sort of nonsense again.

Andrew Cowen would be a more palatable option in the short-term if we can't shift the major shareholders. He knows the club, can ably represent the Askham/Lowe proxy but won't interfere to the same extent as Rupert and Rupert can then focus on sorting out WH Ireland. Rupert is just too divisive and the fanbase will only divide further. I mean look at some of the posts on here, I even posted above to say "let's not call everything we see as pro or anti-Lowe, we can praise or criticise something on the same thread without being a hyprocrite" and someone/PR plant even has a pop at that! Doesn't give the impression of a healthy club. Debate is healthy but the sheer unpleasantness and divisiveness and constant unitary statements reek of a dying organisation.

Andrew Cowen as Chairman? Doesn't involve a takeover but does remove a divisive figure. Cowen is a good option IMO.

Your username is ironic - you could have photocopied that response from Solent Stars and one or two other posters. We have only won sporadic games this season you ejit, look at the league table and we're going to be selling players of any value in January, use Google to see that. Head.out.of.sand. Then again, you could well be another PR plant.

Says Mr 3 posts PR plant. Look at one of threads above, Wolves have an average age of 23, not much above ours but they have VERY GOOD young players. We have one or two that are good for this level - Surman and I think Lallana will be the pick of the bunch - and a few that will be much longer term bets - Mills, Gobern, Racine. The rest like Lancashire are very average and look at McGoldrick - 21 and couldn't score in almost 20 loan appearances in League 1 next season! Average young players will only ever make average experienced players with limited re-sell value, can people not understand that? We'd be better off if we can't afford decent loan signings trying to find a bargain in the Dutch markets and use JP and Wotte's knowledge to see if a Ferry Bodde turns up. After all, Dutch players tend to fit quite well historically into English football.

I'm going to put a devil's advocate post on this thread before one of Rupert's PR plants does it in a much less subtle way. I believe that people ARE staying away because of Lowe but I'm not sure it's as many as 5-7k. I think the figure is probably 2-4k, maybe slightly less. Don't believe any of the PR spin planted on here that it has has no impact at all because I've got a number friends that were long-term STs even last season that really couldn't stomach the thought of Rupert being Chairman again and are staying away. My point is that after Wilde took over in 2006/7, the gates went up a bit but not by as much as people predicted. Some of the people who stated that they would SMS regulars again if Lowe was ousted didn't follow through with their pledges and it did undermine the movement to get shot of Askham's proxy group a bit sadly. I just wanted to put a bit of balance into the debate.