stockportsaint

Who did they have marking him? Essien, Obi Mikel? or noone in particular. If Man U get them in the final again, they could do worse than put Darren Fletcher on him, as Fletcher's only good for one thing - running around and kicking people. Paul Wotton - poor man's Darren Fletcher, or should that be the other way round? unfortunately I didn't get to see last week's game as I was staying with my non-football-loving sister. Guess that was why it was a big deal that Song was injured for the 2nd leg.

Whilst he was awesome last night, I've yet to see anyone do a man-marking job on him. I do think that if you put someone on him all game, he would be a lot less effective. Arsenal don't really have anyone who springs to mind as a man-marker. Perhaps we should lend them Paul Wotton next time they play Barca?

Would be quite happy with the current bottom three of Posh, Plymouth and Sheff Wed. Posh already down. Plymouth are not exactly strong at present, you could argue that they have overachieved by getting to the CCC and that they are a "natural" League 1/Div 3 team. Wednesday look pretty run down at the moment, after 2 yrs+ management by the genius that is Brian Laws (according to Deloittes). Would also prefer Wednesday for purely selfish, geographical reasons. Think Palace would be stronger than Wednesday, once out of Admin. Watford are one of those annoying teams that we always struggle against, for no logical reason. With the playoffs receding into the distance, we should also be taking a glance at League 2/Div 4: Currently we'd be playing the following next season: Rochdale, Notts County and Bournemouth for definite. Currently only Rochdale look nailed on to come up, although County and Bournemouth are 9/6 points clear at present. And then one of: Rotherham, Aldershot, Chesterfield or Bury. However the following are only at worst 5 points away from 7th: Northampton, Port Vale, Morecambe and Dagenham/Redbridge. On current form http://stats.football365.com/dom/ENG/D3/runin.html it's likely to be one of: Northampton, Aldershot, Morecambe, Rotherham. Personally I'd hope for Morecambe out of that lot - never been there, close to me, and Saints have *never* played them, although we haven't played most of the other playoff contenders in my lifetime, and i'm in my mid-forties. Think if the "Shots" come up, tickets would be very hard to come by, their ground only holds 1100 away fans.

good tip - followed your directions and they worked superbly - parked 3 minutes walk from the ground (well 6 minutes going back - a very steep hill) Just a shame about the game.

Not going to rate everyone, but: MOTM has to be Antonio - had a hand in three goals and scored the last. Carlisle couldn't handle him at all - he was very difficult to get the ball off when he was going forward. Thought he tracked back and covered Harding pretty well too. His goal was very well struck, and the celebration was pretty good too. Honourable mentions to: Harding - thought he mad a pretty good job of being a left-footed right back. Overcame the limitation of being wrong-footed with loads of pace and determination, think their right winger only really beat him once or twice. Fonte - always looks like he's got so much time on the ball, rarely forced to hoof it, great first touch. First half, a Carlisle player ran past about three Saints players, came to go past Fonte and Fonte tackled him in a manner that reminded me of Bobby Moore tackling Pele in the 1970 World Cup.

Woo Hoo - mine have finally arrived (at someone else's house, but that's another story). Got excited yesterday 'cos he'd received a special royal mail "come and collect something from us" type card, then realised it couldn't be the tickets 'cos none of the others were sent out recorded delivery. John's wife then went to the post office this morning, to discover that it was indeed the tickets, but the reason she had to collect them was because there was no postage on it - they had forgotten to frank the envelope! Yet another in the catalogue of co-ck-ups. Spoke to a very helpful young lady in the ticket office yesterday, when it looked like they weren't turning up. I asked if the rumour about the TNT van crashing last Friday was true, and she confirmed it. Apparently he managed to hit the flagpoles in front of the ground so hard that he wrote the van off. Claimed he couldn't see them because "they were the same colour as the sky". Then TNT couldn't get a replacement van to collect the load until 7 pm. You couldn't make it up. Just thought, good job he didn't crash into the Ted Bates statue, or he'd have been lynched.

Can't happen now that Wolves thrashed West Ham. However on a brighter note pretty sure it can happen by the time THEY tread the Wembley turf. Yeah, I keep trying to blot out the possibility that they could yet get to Wembley twice in one season, and god forbid if they should .... (can't actually finish that sentence). Know what you mean about Spuds, but don't forget that Pompey's most effective player against us and much of the rest of the season has been Jamie O'Hara. If Spuds get to the Semi he won't be allowed to play for Pompey, and they can't afford to play Dindane. Plus if Fulham get to the Semi, it will only be 4 days after their 2nd leg against Wolfsburg. Last Sunday against Citeh they were shattered after their Juventus excitement, wouldn't really want them playing Pompey in that state.

I did - on the OS photos thread: http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/page/Gallery/0,,10280~2003478,00.html very impressive too, particularly with the correct punctuation - umlauts - bonus points. Are you in that photo?

This game was moved to the Thursday back in June: http://www.saintsweb.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=14183 It is annoying that it was, but that's one of the fringe benefits of having a Class C category due to some tw ats that use Saints games as an excuse for a bit of a rumble with the opposition fans. to the original poster - By the way have you heard that Rupert Lowe's not our chairman any more?

very good LOL.

+ 1

Just put him on ignore. It's done wonders for my stress levels. And Glasgow too. And the best thing is, even if they slag me off for saying this, I don't have to read it. Ignore - aaah, like stopping banging your head against a brick wall.

very good - works on several levels

Just to clarify for you - the 1 ticket that they posted to me yesterday from the ticket office was a return. They had only sent me 13 when I'd ordered 14, so fortunately the very helpful young lady was able to find one in the same block as the rest of ours from the box of returned tickets - i.e. tickets that people have sent back 'cos they were sent too many in error, or to the wrong address, etc.

Update - the one ticket they forgot (whoops) arrived today. Which may shed light on the underlying problem here. This ticket was only posted yesterday after I spoke to them at around 4 pm. So Royal Mail managed to get it from St Mary's Ticket Office to Stockport by 1.30 today. Yet 5 tickets that were given to TNT at the latest last Friday are still to arrive. Perhaps any Royal Mail/Post Office employess might like to comment on our friends at TNT, or perhaps not, in case they get themselves into trouble? In the words of Ann Robinson, "TNT, you ARE the weakest link, goodbye"

For once, I tend to agree. Or at least a complete reorganisation. Perhaps some project management training.

You said it right - a farce. Doubt if Carlisle had the same grief: a) Lot less tickets to send out - approx 22k IIRC. b) They started sending them out much sooner - I heard some of them started receiving tickets early March. In a way, I hope we don't make the playoffs, as it would be utter carnage at the ticket office, and we'd get our tickets by July.

Not good for two reasons: 1) makes our almost non-existent play-off hopes even less likely - Millwall now top of the playoffs. 2) makes it more likely that Leeds will stay down. Don't get me wrong, I am no fan of Leeds. I have to work there too often for my liking, so love it when we beat them. However I want Leeds to go up this season, as it gets a big club out of this division - less competition next season. Would much rather we were battling with Millwall to be in the top 2 than Leeds. If you look on the statistically interesting http://stats.football365.com/dom/ENG/D2/runin.html and look at the recent form column, it ends up with a final table of: 1 Norwich City 97.0 2 Millwall 88.7 3 Swindon Town 82.3 4 Leeds United 80.9 5 Charlton 78.7 6 Colchester 76.0 7 Huddersfield 75.4 8 Bristol Rovers 73.0 9 Southampton 70.0 10 MK Dons 66.8 Think we might end up higher than that, possibly above Brizzle. *IF* we won all our remaining games, then we'd end up with 80 and 5th, playing Leeds in the playoff semis. However I think you'd get better odds on Pompey staying up than us making the playoffs.

who's *he* ?

You sound like a smug so-and-so who's already got his tickets, and doesn't understand the frustration of people who paid good money over 3 weeks ago and have yet to see the goods they paid for.

We ordered 5 tickets in phase 2 and 14 tickets in phase 3. Checked the credit card details on the relevant days and saw that the appropriate amounts had been taken from it, so knew we should be getting 19 tickets in total. Big Whoops all round, now just wait for the postman to turn up. Last Thursday, 13 tickets for Block 532 (up in the gods) arrive. Ring up to check what's happened to the other one and get told it's probably in the other envelope with the other 5. Finally get impatient today and ring up today to find out what's happened to the missing 6, and get the very helpful woman to check the details. Turns out they allocated us 5 tickets (in Block 132, 10 rows back from the pitch) on March 1st, then only 13 tickets in phase 3. So after a brief apology, she goes off to check the "Returns Bin", and comes back with a further ticket in Block 532, which she's putting in the post tonight (Monday). Oh, and they've sent the other 5 to a different address, so I'll have a (luckily short) journey across South Manchester to collect them *IF*/when they turn up. I ask what happens if they haven't turned up by Wednesday. She tells me they will have to arrange for reprints to be collected from Wembley ticket office on the day of the game. She made no mention of collection slips, so I don't think I'll have to make any trips to SMS this week, she merely said I'd have to turn up on Sunday with a proof of ID including photo - i.e. driving licence. Apparently the Wembley Ticket office will have a section open on Sunday from 9.30, staffed by Saints TO staff. As she was very helpful, I refrained from launching into a rant, but she did tell me that they processed all the orders first, then had a big pile of envelopes that had to be sorted for the post, but that it went out in no particular order, certainly not alphabetical. My guess is that Phase 3 tickets went out first as they were at the top of the pile. What I still cannot for the life of me understand is why they didn't process each order in full, once. I.E. 1) Check the ticket request, 2) process payment, 3) allocate tickets, 4) put them in an envelope, 5) stick a printed address label on it 6) then put that in the post bag. Get TNT to collect daily sacks of post from them, and they'd have got all the tickets in the post at least a week earlier. When you consider that my ticket is in a batch allocated to us on the 1st of March, it may not have turned up by Saturday, March 28th. I could have walked there and back and collected it in person in that time. Even a canal barge would have got here by now. I'd also like an explanation of what the £3 "booking fee" was for. Cos it certainly wasn't spent on the kind of things you'd expect it to be, like Recorded delivery, or Envelopes that don't advertise their contents to the whole world, or paying someone to post it two weeks earlier than they did. What I think the £3 was for was to line somebody's pocket for no benefit to me. When the dust has settled after this, I shall be making efforts to make Nicola Cortese aware that he needs to sort out the ticket office. If we can spend £1M on Staplewood, then we should be able to spend a quarter of that bringing the ticket office systems back up to scratch. Gaaah. Thats better.

It won't be that - he can walk 20 yards in a straight line!

for once, the echo had it first: http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/sport/saints/news/5074132.Thomas_out_of_Wembley_final not noticed this reported on the OS. with 'Semi" cup-tied who will play at RB - Was the Dan Harding experiment today with a view to playing him there at Wembley, or will it be Lloyd James? My preference would be Lloyd James, he may not be quick, but at least he's right-footed. Shame for Wayne, and for our defence, whilst not exactly pacey or creative, he is pretty solid defensively.

+ 1

Cheers - tried it last year, not very impressed with the quality or the commentary. Plus as I go to at least 40% of games it's hardly worth it. If I could pay by the game it would be worth considering.