Tamesaint

S*d football odds. I want some decent tips for next week. It is the Cheltenham Festival after all.

You don't change do you?? Whether you call yourself Sundance Beast or Nineteen Canteen you just carry on repeating the same drivel. Your debating style is to just repeat the same points again and again and again. They have all been knocked back one by one on countless occasions but you still repeat them ignoring any criticism. We know what y6our points are: Lowe is great. Crouch is not. Lowe is great. Pearson is not. Lowe is great. See there I have summarised your last thousand or so posts in just a couple of lines. And people will not fall asleep reading these points as they do when they read your turgid ramblings.

Jason Euell has been immense over the last 2 games. I am thinking not so much of the way that he has led the line & helped Saga up front but more of the way he seems to be the leader on the field. Last week he seemed to be the one who gathered the team together & gave a pep talk once Preston had scored. This week he was every where in the last 15 minutes playing up front, in midfield and at one stage even in the back 4 . For so long we have lacked a leader on the park. In Euell we seem to have found one!!

;-) ,;-) Grow up please.

I wonder whether he knows what Justin Fashanu is doing these days??

Using your mobile telephone to troll this website at 11.50 pm on a saturday night!! You are very sad ... sonny.

Starting this thread at 4.58pm. Hmmmm Don't you bother to go to matches???

The most laughable thing on your post is you. Why bring Pearson into this thread??? This thread as nothing to do with him ... apart from the fact that if Rupert hadn't appointed an incompetent to replace him we would not now be in the relegation zone. Mind you, I agree that we are staying up.... as long as Rupert keeps out of the dressing room.

It would be nice if Rupes would ask the opinion of LM. If he had we might not have been saddled with the "Revolutionary Dutch coaching Concept". If he was to do so now, perhaps we would be able to escape relegation as we did last year.

The canteen nutter seems disappointed that he didn't see the march driving down the avenue at 2.00pm. Not surprising as it left 20 mins earlier from the other end of town!!!

The mods normally issue infraction points for cyber bullying like this. I trust that they still do.

I noticed that. Funnily enough the Fourth Bear has been posting on the echo site. That is where his normal bile and bigoted views are appearing. Clearly he is taking a different approach with us here. The Fourth Bear / Flash man at the Charge / Sundance Beast / Nineteen Canteen are all the same person if anyone didn't know.

Ok - lets look at it another way. I want Saints to do well. I want Saints to get back into the Premiership. We could try to do this by doing what Swansea have done which is to get a manager in ,encourage him to find up and coming talent and build a team. I quoted Swansea in my original post but I could just as easily have quoted Burnley as a team that has done this. Reading a few years ago were another such team. This can be done. It need not cost the earth. Instead we seem to have burdened ourselves with the reputation / expectation of having a team of youngsters built round the academy. We cannot afford to keep the top scorers from the last 2 seasons on our payroll. We cannot afford to plug the oh so apparent deficiencies at full back and up front . But we can afford to spend £1.2 million on Schneiderlin who when he isn't playing because he is injured , isn't playing because he is suspended (not playing tomorrow by the way due to suspension!!) . Schneiderlin fits our profile of having a team of youngsters. Stern John with his 20 goals a season does not. When we were in the Premiership we could afford the academy but can we still? Our pipeline of good players who paid for the infrastructure seems to be drying up. The football world has shown what it thinks of the ability of our academy by only making "derisory" offers for our players in the transfer window. Perhaps these youngsters upon whom so much is now being expected are not so good after all ? The much vaunted Arsenal setup which we want to copy produces youngsters who can beat full strength Premiership teams in the Coca Cola cup. Our youngsters have only been able to beat one team at home all season in the Championship!! If this is the best that our investment in youth can produce, why don't we re deploy our meagre resources? When we do produce decent youngsters what happens to them ?? A sniff of the Premiership was enough for Bale, Walcott, and Baird to leave. Even a Premiership reserve team proved too much of an attraction for Mills. Dyer looks like joining the ever growing list of players (Blackstock, Best and Crainie being just 3 ) who we have brought on but who have failed to reach their potential at Saints. I am a well meaning fellow and am pleased to see ex Saints do well for themselves. But aren't we better off by trying to assemble a TEAM that can get us promotion rather than impose a philosophy of youth upon the club which means that we send out 11 individuals onto the park each week ??

Let’s leave personalities aside for a moment and talk about what’s wrong with this club institutionally. At the heart of our problems is something far more damaging than the PLC status: the academy. It’s expensive, it yields fewer benefits than you might think, and it distorts the whole philosophy of the club. To see how bad it really is for us, keep one statistic in mind: Swansea City’s entire squad cost around £500,000. That’s not half a million per season – but in total. And all for a squad that certainly plays good football, and is in with a chance for a play-off place to the Prem. I don’t know what the annual running costs are for the academy. But I would bet they’re a lot more than £500,000- probably double or even treble that amount. In other words, we could build a Swansea City team every single year, and still make substantial savings over the present set-up. In the midst of a credit crunch, how on earth is such an expense still carried? It can’t be justified – not for a Championship club, even less for a League One club. And less still for a club on the financial brink. There seems to be a widely held belief that the academy ‘pays for itself’ – that player sales more than make up for its running costs. Is that still true? Who is the next Theo? Or Bale? (and we’re just talking about revenues here, not whether Gareth Bale’s ever going to make a decent Premiership player). In the present – and near future – economic climate, there are no big sales to make. No Premiership club is going to take a 5 mill punt on one of our youngsters possibly making the grade. Everything now is safety first – buy players who’ve proved they can do it at the highest level. If anyone doubted that, consider what happened in the last transfer window. Of course the club received offers – but they were, in their own words, derisory. The academy is absolutely not a cash cow. The worst of it, though, is that the academy, and the idea of buying low, selling high on young, largely unproven players, has badly damaged the first team. On the one hand, we buy Morgan Schneiderlin for ‘up to’ £1.2 million – presumably in the hope (since we clearly don’t have that kind of cash to splash) of selling him on quickly and for a decent profit. Now, not only is this not going to happen – we’ve spent more than twice the cost of the Swansea City first team on a single player (injury-plagued at that), while having to make do and mend with the gaping holes up front and at full back, to name a few. In other words, the whole philosophy of the club seems to be driven around the City-inspired speculation on unproven talent (rather like betting on start-up company shares in the hope that one of these companies will be the new Microsoft), rather than build financial success around a focused and skilful building of the first team, just as Swansea have done. Shut the academy. Find a manager with the talent to spot ready-made rising talent in the lower leagues (there is plenty out there, and always will be). And give that manager the room to construct a TEAM, not a motley collection of idividuals playing in the shop window with price tags around their necks.

... and what business is it of yours to ask such a question??? Anybody would think you were a customer or something????

I love the idea of rupert arriving by helicopter at SMS waving a see through briefcase. Am I the only one to see the similarity between Alan "look at me I am saving English cricket" Stanford and Rupert "look at me I am saving Southampton football Club" Lowe. They even share a facial similarity. :-) :-)

I wish we had Pearson and LM with us now to save us from relegation instead of these Dutch clogs.

Please do not call Stanley and others who disagree with you "unbalanced." We are perfectly entitled to our views without being called unbalanced. Tell me - how many milliseconds did your "long and careful consideration" take that Lowe and Wilde are the best option? In every post you make the same point indicating a lack of doubt. To be so one sided in your opinions would indicate to me that you did not give full consideration to all the arguments of the anti Lowe views.

Sorry mate. I just get worked up when I hear / read that name!!!

I remember queuing up to get the players's autographs after that match. A young lad came up to Bailey after that match and asked for his autograph and Bailey replied "you won't boo me will you ??" I bet he had.

I think that it is wonderful After all isn't it great news that we can beat Lewes reserves 2-0?? What more do the ungrsteful fans want???

A few goals from Saga.... I am sure that Saga could get them. But will he be allowed to play under the "Revolutionary Coaching setup"? Wotte seems to regard McGoldrick as being higher in the pecking order. He replaced Saga at Bristol 15 mins from the end. I agree that Saga could do it for us... but will Wotte even play him ???

I repeat JOHN BAILEY

Its always funny at this time of day to read threads like this when Jonah has been active on the forum. He always disappears about 5.00pm - its as though his mother has called him in for tea and told him to stop messing around on that forum!! I wonder why he didn't answer the question to name another AGM where the chairman started the meeting by reading out a congratulatory letter. Perhaps he will answer it tomorrow when he is next allowed out to play.