Torrent Of Abuse

I imagine it's fallen down the back of the sofa. If you pull back the cushions you'll find it alongside the patience of the fans, a video of the best goals of the 2008-9 season and Agustin Delgado's medical records.

Maybe someone can provide him with some kind of primer.

Wait a couple of hours and then you can get another coat.

It must have been an accident. Surely if he'd meant it, he would have flapped and missed?

Redecorate the concources, particularly at the Northam and Chapel ends. No more bare breeze blocks. We should be able to find someone with talent who can paint lifesize images of players from the past on the walls - perhaps in that simplistic, posterised style. I remember one of the big football websites did T-shirts in that style. Just a three or four colour job ought to do... Imagine Matty's last goal at the Dell or Bobby Stokes wheeling away imortalised on the walls. Keegan, Channon, Ball, etc. etc. Also I reckon they should suspend stuff from the beams and ceiling space over the concourse. I'd say scarves and flags but that's a fire hazard so we'd have to make do with replicas made out of flame-retardant material. You can imagine the atmosphere down on the concourse for an evening match in winter, 1-0 up at half-time on a promotion push, beer flowing, fans singing "Oh When the Saints" slow and loud and soulful, with the reminders of 100+ years of saintliness all around... Sends a little shiver down my spine :-)

GM, you might do well to follow your own advice. I'll agree that those who pushed hardest for us entering administration should take a long look at themselves but I'm happy for them to do that by themselves with no coercing from you and me. There are plenty of better, happier things to discuss. It's strange that now, with a billionaire benefactor, we are still here considering what scores need to be settled. No-one has, to my knowledge, asked for your thanks in getting rid of Wilde and Lowe an yet you seem to want to start that fight with an imaginary adversary all by yourself. If anyone is having trouble embracing a new happier future, it would seem to be you. You raked over the embers of Fry's handling of the administration period rather than celebrate its end result. You raised the question of Leibherr's motives in buying our club (using the flimsiest and most confrontational of arguments, it has to be said. You might as well have said that he turned down the offer to buy Newcastle instead because he was once startled by a magpie as a child. That would have sounded about as plausible). It's odd having to write this, as I supported you when you posted about the Pinnacle debacle, defending your right to question the bid if you wanted to. Now, however, you remind me of one of those old soldiers who doesn't want to accept the war has actually finished as it was really rather fun, and who now just picks fights to keep things interesting. If I ever happen to sit in front of you at St.Marys and you tap me on the shoulder and remind me that you got it right back in the day about Michael "Chancer" Wilde and the tyre-kickers from Pinnacle, please understand that when I ask you to shove your season ticket up your a**e, it's nothing personal but I've just moved on.

How could we possibly hold that against her? Where she un-hitches the caravan is her own business. Speaking of people who arrive without invitation, cause tensions and aggravation whilst they're there and who leave a load of rubbish behind before moving on... don't you have any other forums to post on?

Surely if you wanted to hide the beer gut, you'd have been better to just buy a belt?

That would appear to be the most pertinent point, would it not? I must admit to hating GM's attitude on here sometimes but I have learnt to see past the grating nature of his posts to see where he might have a point, and it is starting to look like he had a point - much as he had a point when he showed Wilde up for the chancer he was. I must admit though Mole/Stanley, I've yet to find the upside to your posts. You seem to be grasping for things to use against GM when there are bigger and more important fish to fry. Why aren't you asking your DD questions of Tony Lynam instead. As I mentioned to Alpine In the previous GM-knocking thread, he's just as entitled to voice his doubts about Pinnacle as Alpine was to doubt Poortvliet/Wotte or you were entitled to voice your doubts about Lowe. Why he should be labelled a "troll" for doing what you guys do is anyone's guess. Oh but GM, can we have less of your attitude too please? You may talk sense sometimes but it's true, you are also a bit of a c**k sometimes :-)

Well you can start by reminding me of the moment when the two other potential bidders dropped out. I must have missed that in the flurry of F5 presses. What I do remember is us rushing into a union with Michael Wilde without asking questions of his credentials - and look where that got us. Much as I disliked Rupert Lowe then and now, it might have been better if we had cast more of a critical eye on Wilde and what he had to offer instead of jumping at the prospect of 'anything but Lowe' so we didn't end up making a bad situation even worse. This is, after all, supposed to be a new start as opposed to more of the same rubbish. It seems strange that you were (rightly or wrongly) very vocal about getting rid of a management team which you thought were not up to the job (regardless of whether that affected the club negatively in the short term) under the understanding that it was better to get the right person in for the long term, yet your opinion is completely different when it comes to getting the right financial backing in. Surely, if the stakes are much higher, then so are the penalties for getting it wrong and the rewards for getting it right? I do understand the need to get the deal done but don't think another Michael Wilde is the answer. So it's best we ask questions now really. As for GM, as he's not conducting the 'fit and proper person' vetting, but rather just asking questions on a fans' forum, I don't see the problem in him raising the point for us to discuss/agree/disagree/ignore. If anyone doesn't agree then I'm sure they are able to disagree without accusing him of being a 'troll' in much the same way that people were able to disagree with your stance on things without thinking the same of you.

If we got off it, I think we'd be hated by every club up and down the country for the next 20 years. We could win a cup final and still be known as the team that cheated their way out of a penalty. And that's the best we can hope for. At worst, we'll be punished further by the FL. Take the 10 points, Let the FL's unfair treatment of us act as a catalyst to bring us together with a common enemy, appoint a decent chairman and manager and let our football do the talking. And burn an effigy of Maahhhhwinnet outside the stadium after the final of the 2016 FA Cup Final when we show the f**kers in suits that we have long memories and little time for the Kings of f**kwittery at the FL.

To be fair to GM, he is only doing to the takeover talk what you did to discussions about our form last season. It's a bit rich for you to call him a trolling skate simply because he's asking questions of the takeover. Do you really have such a short memory for the sort of comments which came your way when you voiced your opinion? I'd like all this talk of multi-millionaires and transfer budgets to be true but I saw it all before with Mike "COYR" Wilde and, whilst I wish that this mystery bidder was all we hoped for, I'd also like to see some cards on the table as I'm a little jaded from the last 5 years. Say what you like about GM, but he had MW sussed out pretty well. I'd rather have him here vetting Pinnacle and potentially getting it wrong than have us all believe more spin and get let down again. "Fool me once" and that , you know...

Probably to avoid someone saying "Why isn't he sorting out the deal instead of starting threads on here?" You know what this forum is like sometimes...

Sorry. It's actually an offence to hang off the crossbar. You've just been banned from football for life. P.S. There is no right of appeal. Oh yeah. And you can f**k off, too.

Sure he'd be off in a helicopter when things got too tough but in the mean time he'd bring a f**king truckload of belief back to the club at all levels, and given the way we've watched trace of belief bleed out of the club these last years, I'd say he'd be the ideal man to inspire an unlikely surge back to the Championship. He might not stay around much longer than that but who do you want? Jesus?

That's interesting. Out here in Australia, Lowes is a name of a store specialising in extremely cheap and poor quality clothing for people who are only interested in how much (or how little) things cost, not whether they're actually any good. It's advertised by old fat sportsmen who seem intent on embarrassing themselves while trying to be entertaining/amusing. The irony works on many levels. http://www.lowes.com.au/

Sounds like his forte. If he decided to try his hand at pig farming or investment banking, though, I think we'd tap him on the shoulder and politely tell him he's out of his depth and that it would all end in tears

Nice idea, but there's something very disconcerting about that badge - maybe the use of a crest within a crest. I almost expect to look closely at the rose in the centre and see another old crest hidden in there... :-)

There's a lesson to be learnt here: You should draw up truly massive debts building a team good enough to finish 10 points clear of relegation. Then it doesn't matter when you get the punishment. If you slip quietly into administration, you're basically f***ed. True to form we've managed to get a nice big debt whilst still being rubbish. Kudos to the board(s) for managing this masterstroke!

Well in that case, I guess you'll definitely need to cast your nets a bit wider in search of new fans... Trawl around in our area, so to speak... Extend your catchment area...

I might be wrong but I think he was commenting on the fact that we are all discussing whether it is "morally" unacceptable to escape a punishment simply because you are not "legally" culpable. Derby were as morally guilty of flouting the rules for going into administration as any other club, and yet you would probably be hard-pressed to find any of their supporters apologising for it. If we are not found legally liable for a 10 point deduction, then that would put us in the same boat as Derby. It surely wouldn't matter when the "so-called tighter" rules came in: If the original rules failed to cover Derby's move into administration and these rules failed to cover ours, then the outcome should be the same - no penalty, no guilt, no shame. That said, I can see our incomparable talent for fncking things up leading to us getting relegated and then fighting all summer long to avoid a points deduction only to have it applied on the very eve of the new season. Then the very fact that we contested the deduction will see us detested at every club in L1 as if we actually had escaped punishment. So that would be nice...

Does it matter which end I tie to the Itchen Bridge?

True, but these are all clubs with other problems than just their budget. If you gave Newcastle an 8m budget instead of an 80m one, would it be in a worse position now or better? If P*mpey still had the wage bill they had pre-Redkn@pp, would they still be in the Premiership? I don't think anyone was saying that money equals automatic success (as we all remember the failed attempt at promotion when we spent 7m under Burley) but I think it's not too outlandish to think that if you give a good manager more money to spend, chances are you'll get better results. We can all pick out managers who have failed to spend well but it doesn't mean it happens all the time. As with the original post... Don't blame the building, blame the way the club was run. Don't blame the money, blame the way the money was spent.

Same place that many of the clubs still in the Premiership did - from investors. After all, that WAS the whole crux of Michael Wilde's original pitch for the club. You know, before he realised he'd actually lost the contact details for all his investors when he dropped his phone down the toilet. I believe some clubs still work under the idea of speculating with the aim of one day accumulating - or at the very least speculating a fairly large sum with the aim of not losing a very very large sum through relegation. Our club, however, has always worked under the principle that the only safe place for its money is in an old sock hidden under the bed.

True, but it depends on your perspective. If you're a club that spends 30m on players and they underachieve, chances are you miss out on a European place but you don't flirt with relegation. If you only spend 3m on players and they underachieve, chances are you're already relegated come Easter. Remember when we sold Kevin Davies for 7m and then took the cheap option of buying in 6 players - most of whom spectacularly failed to even make a spark (*wink*), let alone set the world on fire? If you keep trying to do the same thing, chances are you'll get it wrong so badly once that you'll get the club relegated. Unfortunately our relegation season saw bad sales, bad buys and an injury to Killer all coincide in a perfect (sh1t) storm. First problem was a patchwork squad of players who had been brought in by a number of different managers. Second problem was the large number of these who had been brought in as squad players - never likely to be good enough to get a game. Third problem was putting a heavy-spending manager like Harry Redknapp in but giving him the ever-tight Southampton budget. Recipe for disaster IMHO. Don't blame the bricks and mortar, blame the people who chose to run a circus there.