vince

My tip - leave the coffee on the side and tell your visitors to make it themselves and bring you one in when they do! Also, make lots of quick meals now and freeze them - you won't have time or inclination to make it in 3 weeks time, or drop hints for future visitors to bring food with them for all of you. Try not to end your work leave after the birth on a Sunday - i.e. try to have Monday to Wednesday off, then go back in Thurs/Friday, as it will be easier for you OH to do a couple of days rather than a full week initially as it is hard work. Your life will change, but for the better. It is a scary thing, but greatly rewarding - that Barclays advert with the jet powered kids flying off the stairs to greet their dad coming home from work? That's what I get every day now. The first 3 months will be a blur to you when you look back, so take time to enjoy it when you can. Oh, and that first family holiday you all take in a few months, that's not a holiday for you, btw!! All the best, fella.

Thanks for posting that, always nice to have some kind of knowledge of how the next generation of nippers are doing. It's sad that I had to think carefully about how I phrased that sentence based on previous replies - this is information of a 16yo playing international football 3 years above his age who is on our books, how can you take the p155, ffs?

Take lots of things to keep her interested, it's a long time for a 4YO to be sat still. Prepare her for the noise too - you're used to it, but it could be quite frightning for her.

That's pretty much as I saw it too, no close link between the back 4 and midfield, no real pace from back to front in going forward when it mattered and we need to close down a lot faster in games that matter. I have more concerns now than before the game, but perhaps we should see how Man City and Wigan goes, not just the former. Anyone else notice Di Natale after he'd been subbed go over to the disabled section and hand his shirt over to a wheel chair fan, then sign autographs? Nice gesture, and to be fair, he got a lot of applause as he went of from the crowd. I have the dubious pleasure of doing that double this week - at least Sutton only cost me a fiver....

I was the bloke who asked you if you'd asked about any new signings just after you walked back down the steps, fella. Anyway, we were poor, gave the ball away far too easily. Long punts up the park were coming straight back from the big bloke at the back out jumping Barney Rubble, and we never controlled the game. Fair play to Sutton, though, they did a job, looked tidy and took the goals well and had a couple of other chances to score. I don't think we bothered their first half keeper at all. We scored a good goal late on, good in the sense that it was a nice finish, but the lino was already flagging a foul in the box (which it was to be fair). I was with you on the right back, Matt Young, until the last goal, when he was way out of position, but up until then, he was in peoples faces and ears, talking his way through the game, which I like. But ultimately, not sure we'll see too many of that squad this season.

I'll be going tonight. The last time we played there, I nearly walked into the Saints changing rooms by mistake, as the door is next to the door for the gents.

Adult tickets are £15. Kids ones have £10 on them, but were free with the Adult tickets when I picked mine up, so £30 for two adults and 2 kids isn't bad value IMHO.

To be fair, I think the FA have realised we need to work on technique and small sided games. I did the level one coaching course in July (incidentally, the folder that comes with it has kids in Saints kit on the front and back covers) and the exercises in that are mainly in those areas. The coach that assessed us was a bloke who had worked with Arsenal for 10 years, and under Erikson with England, and was clearly passionate about bringing through better quality coaches at that level (all of us on the course coached kids). He said that at Arsenal, when they knew the FA were coming in to watch the training sessions, they were told to revert back to the "standard" FA coaching guides and basically hid their usual approach because of the fear of other clubs copying their techniques. I started coaching my nippers U6 team last year, and if the quality of players is to improve, it's this age group where the grass roots coaching needs to improve, and where the kids need to be given confidence to play and make the mistakes without fear. I think the FA could make it a little easier for volunteers like myself through pricing - it's £150 to do the level one (fair enough,, most clubs will pay that), but £495 for the level 2. I saw an article on the BBC web site that had figures of something like 250K level 1 qualified coaches and about 28K level 2, so only around one in ten make that progression. It would be interesting to see what the Spanish coaching course fees are for similar levels. I would say that coaching those kids has been one of the most rewarding things I've done and well worth doing if you have the chance. One of the lads already has exceptional ball control at 6, and while I appreciate the likelyhood of him being the next MLT is exceedingly small, who knows!?!

Hopefully the mods will indulge me a little as although this is not Saints related, it is Hampshire football related. My father, Ian Baldwin, passed away yesterday morning. If you played senior football in Southampton or along the Waterside from the 70's onwards (or against Fawley Falcons from around 79-84 when he ref'd a lot of my youth games as a nipper), you will almost certainly have been refereed by him at some point as he was a class 1 referee in the Hampshire league from the time he moved the family down from Surrey in the late 60's until the turn of the century, when he began assessing referees (he assessed Lee Probert on his rise to the premier league). He gave nearly 45 years to Hampshire football, and adding in his time with Surrey FA, over 50 years in total. He took me to my first game at the Dell in '79 against Leeds in the League Cup semi final (mainly because one of his school friends was running the line in that game) and I was hooked. He will be up there now, standing in the middle, telling the captains to have a good game and play fair.

I'm in for a fiver - that's a real fiver, not a "trust" fiver, btw.

It's got to blast out "Amarillo" with a "WTFILN?" banner. Happy days.

I'd settle for a "Dalek", but hope for a much better mid table position. My expectation? Somewhere in between.

Gillingham. HTH. (I believe the OP has previously said he will protect his sources)

I'll back this up - if you're inclined to read a football book, you'll be hard pressed to find a better one.

I'm in Dorking. There's a couple of other Saints fans in the town that I know of.

I remember a session on Soccer Sunday where Paul Merson took the **** out of him, laughing that Villa paid him 38K a week

I've just started coaching my nippers U6 side this season (no previous in coaching, but doing the Level 1 in the summer and hopefully the Level 2 later as the club will pay for that too). On every training ball we use, I've written "HEAD UP" in permanent pen. Before we do any execrises with the ball, I point that out to them and you can "remind" them during the exercise by asking them whats on the ball whenver you see them head down. Even after a season I can see the difference with them, so it's a trick well worth doing for those of you who also coach. I do a variation of "piggy in the middle" just throwing and catching a ball to introduce movement - get the one behind the "piggy" to point where he's going to move to, so the "passer" knows where to throw it too. Probably should be a different thread, but it would be interesting to know what anyone else does who coaches at that sort of age group.

Isn't that just the agent telling dan that he won't talk about his client on twitter, but was happy to discuss other things - that's how I read it, anyway.

Last team to be presented with the FA Cup by the Queen.

That'll give KD a bit of competition, this bloke saves everything, apparently.

I think this fella would fit the bill: http://www.soccerbase.com/players/player.sd?player_id=35776 Might fancy a move back to the prem by now.

NA: "I know what you mean, Robby mate, his son's an even bigger bell end, I can tell you....."

He has had the house in Cobham for a while.

That is correct.