ant

I thought the pre-season coverage was pretty good and worth a few quid. Kept me going through the summer drought of football at least.

Fair enough, I must admit I only had the highlights to go on in that Bournemouth game. As you say though, if you're going to take a lower-key role in the team, you have to make your contributions count and often he does. In a round about way that's what I was trying to get at - glossing over his misgivings, he brings an awful lot to our attack even if it's not constantly evident. It's incredibly early in the season of course, but the fact that he's sitting deeper has so far meant that we appear to be lumping it up to him less often, forcing us to play the fast, efficient ground passes that I think are one of this squad's biggest strengths.. His fits and bursts of activity certainly don't hurt either! Quite, it could be similar. His fitness and physique have taken a turn for the better in the past 12 months though which makes me think it might be coaching or self-discipline that have brought about the changes in playing style rather than age or decreasing ability. It could be argued that he's a better footballer now than when we signed him.

Completely agree, The9. Rickie's not only taking on a different role but flourishing there, in my opinion - his pass for Lallana's goal against Leeds got me all sorts of excited. Intelligent footballing brain, great confidence when holding and distributing the ball, quality set pieces... granted this is an extremely hyperbolic statement, but are his attributes starting to remind anybody else of a certain club legend? Obviously not on anything like the same level, but... It frustrates me immensely when people berate Rickie's perceived lack of effort (normally hear this bullsh*t from the stands). How many goals did he create by tracking and closing down last season? A fair few - our first against Bournemouth away comes to mind. I'd say that he and Connolly have a potentially great partnership in the making.

Check out the Hants Police Twitter feed if you want facts - http://twitter.com/#!/HantsPolice They've been updating regularly and have confirmed no trouble as yet.

Exactly. Looking at the videos posted on Youtube, half of the time it's groups of kids milling around while a few smash the hell out of windows and grab what they can. It doesn't take many people to make a huge mess. I don't think I'm going to be able to stand by and enable actions like that. It wouldn't take many people feeling the same way to make a difference. IF it happens of course.

Lots of rumours and nonsense doing the rounds, hopefully most of it will blow over without incident. I'm buggered if I'm letting mindless degenerates attack our city though - if a big enough group of anti-rioters got together it'd be a piece of **** to rush them out. A large group of Turkish shopkeepers managed to clear their road of rioters in London simply by chasing them...

Goodbye Alex, goodbye affection, goodbye media circus. Hello Schteeve, hello loadsamoney. On balance I'm happy with the way things are unfolding. Time will tell, but right now I think Arsenal have managed to mug themselves.

Didn't quite a few people on here suggest that we were a 'second half' team last season?

Fair play - there's a couple that could do with being added mind. Also worth pointing out that @officialsaints generally follow our verified first team players as there were fake accounts for Rickie Lambert and Adam Lallana towards the end of last season.

Well from a Southampton player point of view there's: @RadhijaidiOff @Ryandickson23 @jackcork1 @stief87 Staff includes: @jordansibley (club spokesman) @MrSimonWilliams (communications officer) @Cornsy69 (performance analyst) @TomCoull (cameraman) I don't really follow many non-Saints affiliated football personalities but I'm sure there's some gems.

Was that not partly because people were trying to dive out to the north car park before the game finished and access was temporarily closed off? But yes, I completely agree - apart from anything else when you've paid that much money to see Saints play, why risk missing any of the action? Bloody hell, that "we all love Leeds" got boring quickly! Fair play to them for keeping it going though, our fans seemed pretty disinterested in trying to match it or drown them out which was a shame. However as you rightly say our support was fantastic other than that. My take on it is that we're finally back in the same league as Pompey, so of course there's going to be an initial excitement about it - the chants mentioned were contributed to particularly vociferously. I doubt the fact that the game was televised dampened that spirit. Personally I'd rather 90 minutes of raucous atmosphere exclusively consisting of anti-skate songs than a deathly silent St. Mary's. It really was only about a quarter of that amount of time anyway! Not to mention the fact that ours is a 'real' rivalry so isn't it OK to mention it? Most of the derby teams in this country sing about each other. To me it doesn't have the same tinpot feel as Bournemouth trying to get in on the act last season.

Not only fitter but sharper, I thought. There was a good pace to our buildup which left Leeds looking flat-footed. Whichever methods the coaches were using in pre-season it seems to be paying off. Would appear that this sports science approach really works to each player's attributes- got to be better than just sending them all off to do thousands of laps of the pitch.

Any suggestions? Yes - Google On a more serious note, First Row Sports normally has multiple links to streams of all televised games.

Great post on the whole, but thought I'd pick out this line as I read it with a wry smile on my face. Undoubtedly true in my experience - I lived in Southsea for just over a year (girlfriend's fault - she was at the sh*thole's uni) and used to get some pretty hefty abuse in Fratton when getting off the train after a Saints game. Pompey fans walking around Southampton might get a double take but little more. I do think it stems from them being in our shadow for many of the pre-'05 years. Time to nab superiority of league position back

If it's pure spite we're extolling here, I hope you don't manage to make it to the match then. Bloody hell!

It'll be a massive shame if this proves to be true. Hopefully purely down to the Sky and 'end of holiday' reasoning, but we'll see in the coming weeks. Would be shocked if we end up averaging lower than a 25k gate at home as that was achieved most weeks in League One wasn't it? Still, there's sometimes a better, louder atmosphere with fewer people in the ground (the 'hardcore' influence?) so you can chalk up another mark against optimism. I hope!

Haha, no! Last one was on the pitch, this one's in the Kingsland.

I can't tell whether you're being serious, so I'll roll with the assumption that you are. What are you saying though, that sheer numerosity of signings is the ultimate goal? That the potential quality of our signings will be inversely proportional to the number of days of pre-season left? It doesn't matter a jot when players come or how many they are; rather how they gel with the squad and what they bring to the overall package. Didn't Adkins say that another signing is all but in the bag? He doesn't seem to speak in definitives without delivering - if I'm remembering his statement correctly then I believe it will happen. Not to mention the possible other he talked about in passing...

The instructions are pretty simple if you pay by Paypal - you just log into your account, find the recurring payment and cancel it.

I don't think anybody's truly taking it as gospel. It's a thread of speculation, as many posts are on here (possibly containing a few too many definitive statements, but that generally appears unintentional). Indeed, but if we're in for Jemal I'd imagine it's a calculated risk. You'd suspect this lad has been scouted to some degree rather than the club going in blind. By the same token the reward against risk could be favourable in the long-run. But hey, it's all mindless speculation so there's little else worth adding.

Oof, makes our season ticket prices seem pretty reasonable IMO.

It's more about potential isn't it? There's no evidence to suggest that Jemal wouldn't be able to adapt to the English football or the Championship and if he does, there's a far longer career ahead of him than Gorkss has left. Anyway let's not get ahead of ourselves - I'd quite happily accept either into the squad!

To a point that's probably true but considering the hard times of the recent few years, every single goal and point mattered immensely, no? It was a mix between the functional, logical approach (another win, another tick in the box and closer to promotion) and the emotional (a sound win on the Saturday sending me off in a good mood for the rest of the weekend). The difference to the 'glory' teams for me was that we had the hardship before the success. OK it was relative i.e. it took a drop to League One for us to get so many wins at home, but you can only beat the teams in front of you (and other assorted clichés).

Most of my top moments have already been listed, so for me it was more of a general part of the season: after our dodgy start was put to bed, turning up to a home game and expecting Saints to win. That's not something that I can claim to have ever felt before! It wasn't borne of arrogance, more that we had the squad, the momentum and damn-near turned St. Mary's into a fortress. I'll miss that feeling f'sure.

Well it's certainly true that if you buy a Saints Player subscription you can log in to other clubs' versions so I don't see why it wouldn't work the other way around.