Verbal

No, bleating is good. We built a stadium to stand a cat in hell's chance, post Taylor Report and Sky largesse, of continuing to compete in the Premiership. Points deduction is too blunt an instrument. Was it really the Football League's intention, when the system was introduced, to drive clubs virtually to extinction, as they have with Luton? But the worst of it is that the problem actually originates in the Premiership. The ridiculous wages paid in that league trickle down into the lower leagues - ramping up the cost of being in the game for every lower league club. But do Premiership clubs face the threat of points deduction? No. The points deduction system is just as crude as Mawhinney's dim-witted, inept proposal for a salary cap - which was at least a vague recognition that the trickle-down effect was seriously damaging clubs in the lower leagues. Of course, the genius that Mawhinney certainly isn't, hadn't worked out what to do with the clubs that were relegated from the Prem. You can't just override legally binding player contracts in relegated clubs and impose capped salaries, so the salary cap would probably not be applied to them. Combine the salary advantage with the parachute payment system and, hey presto - Mawhinney has accidentally created a system where there is no real relegation from the Prem. The clubs at the bottom each season would, with proper management, simply bounce back the next. In other words, the clubs which Mawhinney is supposed to represent would have ever diminishing chances of breaking into the Prem. Brilliant. Give that man a peerage.

It depends what kind of owners they are. If they're stupidly rich, they can make as many mistakes as they like. If it's the kind of owner that can just about afford to buy themselves in, don't make the mistake of keeping the academy going. It costs close to or slightly more than a million a year to run. That money could buy us an entire first team. The trick at this level (assuming we're in League One, and maybe even if we're not) is not spotting the next 11-year-old would-be footballing genius. It's working out who in the lower leagues have reached the early twenties and have shown they're good enough to make the next step up. The Championship-leading teams are full of players like this. The new owner has to focus on the first team before anything else - and not repeat the absurd idea that you can rely on the academy throwing up the odd £5 million 'profit centre' player to justify the ludicrous expense of running the rest of the academy. Completely forgetting there's the small matter of creating and developing a team that can win divisions is not a mistake we can afford to repeat for a third time.

I was making a little joke - something I know you find conceptually obscure. Tell me, is there any subject, other than Lowe, on which you post? Just seems odd to me: someone with your track record wanting to be so strongly associated with a character so infused with failure and desperate hubris. Cut him loose and move on.

Anyone who let Lowe anywhere near the club.

Frost as a Southampton supporter is a bit of myth. First of all, he seems more interested cricket. (I've seen him a few times at the indoor school at Lords, working hard on his batting (!), and he's a regular in the Pavilion.) And second, it's a funny kind of Southampton supporter that does all his cheering from the Emirates stadium, and Highbury before that. Frost was even Chairman of David Seaman's testimonial committee.

My first match was Spurs v Saints at White Hart Lane, January 1970. We won 1-0 - Ron Davies (of course) scoring with a bullet header. So I thought I'd introduce my son to football the same way - Spurs v Saints in 2001. It ended 0-0. We played them off the park. You should have seen the teamsheet - Davies (Kevin), Beattie, Le Tiss, Pahars (who was on the bench I think), Richards, Kachloul, etc. Unfortunately, my son drew entirely the wrong conclusion. He went away and became an Arsenal supporter.

Exactly. either way, he's left the club with a poisoned pill. I'm sure he didn't plan it that way...

Putting the petty bickering aside for a minute, here’s an idea… In the absence of a generous (or stupid) benefactor, the consequences of administration will unravel for several seasons to come. The immediate problem, which will make our situation much worse, is the reasonably high likelihood of a ten-point penalty. Mawhinney at the Football League has pulled the classic politician’s stunt of booting the problem into the long grass, and we may not know the outcome for some weeks, no matter how ‘urgently’ the ‘forensic accounting’ is carried out. But then he’s a politician – what did we or anyone else expect? If we drop into League One and start the season on minus 10, we’d have to be as good as Leicester just to be reasonably sure of a play-off place. Anything less and we’re looking at two or more seasons struggling to ‘rebuild’ – which doesn’t describe half the pain… So the question is: Lowe’s technicality aside, how to avoid the ten points? We haven’t really got that much ammunition. In my view, the best argument is the future of the academy. Its running costs are about, or close to, £1m a year – clearly unsustainable for a club stuck for long in the League One quagmire of poor finances and mediocrity. The only realistic thing to do, if the ten points are imposed, is to shut the academy. Does Mawhinney really want this? Does he want to be forever associated with closing what has been seen as one of the country’s best football academies? (And certainly as good as they get outside the Prem). The whole penalty system is surely going to start looking utterly bankrupt (no pun…) if it destroys institutions designed – at great cost to the clubs that run them – to promote young, mostly British talent. A quiet word in Mawhinney’s ear might at least help. He is, as I say, a politician – and not an especially talented one (I talk with direct experience). Just a thought.

The actual sequence of events went something like this. Tommac worked as a UK sales director (not, as tommac would have it, as ‘managing director’ or ‘owner’) out of an industrial estate in Fulham (he preferred to call it ‘Mayfair’), flogging timeshares and hires on executive jets for a Florida-based company called Aerollloyd. In the course of his work, he had contact with two commercial lawyers from Paul Allen’s empire (it may well have been Vulcan.) Either he or they initiated a conversation about what they do – investigate investment opportunities in sports and entertainment. Always on the look out for a good deal, etc, etc. Either during this conversation or sometime afterwards, a light bulb flashed on in tommac’s head. This is a rare event so he could hardly have failed to notice. What about a football club? I imagine he spent the next several weeks trying to master google before entering ‘football club’ and ‘desperate’. Top of the list was you know who. His brief contact with the lawyers had led him somehow to think that if he could present a ‘deal’ to them, all neatly tied up with a pretty bow on top, he could make a decent ‘broker’ fee’ from it. (The source for all of the above is tommac himself– although there is a mathematical formula you have to apply to extract the bullsh!t) So off he trotted to St Mary’s, expecting all and sundry to welcome him with open arms, and give him a deal his lawyer friends couldn’t possibly pass up. But when he got there, he walked into the football equivalent of the Battle of the Somme. Dug deep into their trenches, the various factions jostled for advantage – forgetting, at least initially, to ask some pertinent questions about just what tommac’s connection to Paul Allen really was. During the course of his futile attempts to switch back and forth among the combatants, another lightbulb went on: why not force the warring factions together by appealing over their heads to the fans. Hence tommac’s grand entrance on the Saints Forum. For all the fun and games had with him over the next few months, everything of significance in this whole affair had already happened….and the damage done. The leak of Paul Allen’s name into the press and among the City gossips sent the club’s shares into orbit. The fact that there never was a bid from Paul Allen, or even an expression of interest outside of some desultory, cabin-pressured conversations with the short-sleeved wonder, seemed to have escaped everyone’s attention. The problem was that tommac appeared just as the club really was making a determined attempt to find a buyer and unite the major shareholders behind a sale. Sadly for all of us, the false rumour priced the club out of ANY deal. Sometime shortly before or after paying tommac a ‘finder’s fee’ (rumoured to be in five figures), the board and major shareholders did start to wonder anxiously about whether Paul Allen really was behind any move to buy the club. They investigated, and Mary Corbett even found herself jetting around the place trying to confirm it all (Source: Mary Corbett herself). But after several months, it became clear that there really was no bid, or even the prospect of one – and there was no connection between tommac (or ‘representatives’ as it was delicately put) and the Paul Allen. (Source: Jim Hone) This may seem like ancient history, but it really isn’t. The dominoes are still tumbling from the disastrous intervention of that little mastermind. There’s a parallel universe in which all short-sleeved nitwits are strangled at birth, and Southampton Football Club puts together a takeover in 2007 with the share price at around 25p. Lowe would never have returned, the Dutch ‘revolution never happened, and we’d be posting about how gutted we all are to have just missed out on the play-off places to the Prem. Dream on. And tommac: thanks.

Brading & Newport are good. 0 points for us I fear...

It's not what I believe that matters. A lot of people at the club believed that this noodlehead really did represent PA. The fact is he didn't. And I strongly suspect that the first time PA ever heard of the club was when some of the more gullible/wind-uppy (delete to taste) posters on here, like St David, started pleading for him to 'come and get us' on Seattle-based radio show phone-ins. All of which forced his actual representatives to say, in effect: 'PA is not interested and never has been.' (No doubt accompanied by sentiments summed up by: WTF??!!) If you have a shred of evidence that suggests otherwise, I'd love to see it.

I'm amazed the Paul Allen rumour is still so widely believed on here. Tommac was Paul Allen's 'representative' in talks with the club. And by 'representative' I mean freaky fantasist.

I'm not so sure that this was really down to Lowe's 'cleverness'. (Something vaguely oxymoronic about that). The PLC structure, and SLH, were surely intended to be part of Lowe's empire - a leisure behemoth with a nice football club attached. At the time of the reverse takeover, I seriously doubt that he thought: 'Oh, this'll be a clever wheeze when it all goes tits up.' By the time the bank pulled the plug - and long before - there was nothing left of that ambition except the club itself...or what was left of it. It must have been blindingly obvious to put SLH into administration. Hardly rocket science, is it? And the idea that it fooled someone as pedestrian a political hack as Mawhinney shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Hi, by the way!