Torrent Of Abuse

I may need to wash my mouth out afterwards but I'm with Alpine on this one - at least partly. One win does not make for vindication just as one defeat should not constitute a crisis. Those getting ready to prostrate themselves before the prodigal son of Southampton Football Club should really wait a little bit longer before bringing out the fatted calf and the big, sharp knife. Similarly those musing over the third word in the last paragraph of Jan Poortvliet's statements to the press should probably lighten up a little bit. The players have done fantastically well but they need to do it all season long. Hopefully they can keep it going all season and the board can keep the books balanced without feeling the need to sell anyone else. The signs are really good but we want a good season, not just one good game. Let's put the champagne (and the hemlock) on hold for a bit, shall we? If people on here invested half of the emotional intensity in their support that they do into whipping up an air of impending disaster or triumphant vindication, then the team would have the support it needs to push on. If everyone who took time to question the team selections actually went to the games they could when they could, we'd get full houses every game. Instead of starting new civil wars on here, why aren't you all re-investing this new-found positivity by queueing up down the ticket office?

I think mid-table is the most we can hope for - a limited ambition for a club but a great achievement for a young squad. This is the partially what we should have done when we got relegated: Bring in a band of hungry youth team players around a core of experienced pros. Unfortunately we had a manager who seemed to have one game plan (that being to buy your way out of the division) no motivation and no money. I don't think the board had much of a clue either. Of the squad, we lost the good players and kept only the same mediocre ones who had done most to get us relegated. Then we seemed to abandon any idea of playing the youngsters and brought in more journeymen. We were just piling new mistakes on top of the old - which is exactly what happened when we had 3 managers in a season and each had just enough time to bring in their own players and tactics, and stir the pot of mediocrity. It's not JP's approach I doubt, but more that it's taken so long to come around that we're taking the approach with half the talent we used to have. We've spent three years in the CCC fannying around getting nowhere. If these guys gel, then we have the nucleus of a good squad. It's then just a case of the current board keeping it ticking over hoping to get lucky with one of them or someone coming in to buy us out. Either way, no-one would be interested in us failing on the pitch and losing money like it's going out of fashion. Surely there's plenty of excitement left in the old dog yet?

Perhaps they can find where the Pompey shirt is buried and perform some sort of cleansing ceremony. Maybe spray some holy water over the centre circle and see if black/blue fumes start coming out of the ground?

Great argument, except... Lowe and Wilde won't sell. Not after 5 games, not after 10, not after Christmas, not after Easter. In your scenario, they will hang on while the club slips into a long, painful and divisive decline which benefits absolutely no-one - least of all the fans. We would bubble around near the bottom, flirting with survival just long enough for us to miss the chance to go into administration this year and avoid a points penalty next year. Then we'd slip into a fetid end of season full of rumours of a takeover which never comes. Then Lowe would simply buy us up on the cheap. You can't get us out of this by wishing just the right amount of misfortune on the club. Misfortune doesn't come in handy portions. It comes by the truckload. If you bring Lowe down, you'll probably bring us all down too, club and all. You might as well choose to cure a case of herpes by blowing your nuts off with a cannon. Technically speaking, you won't have the herpes any more, but that's not really the point.

There's no point selling your home for 50% more than you bought it if it just means you end up sleeping on the street. Similarly, there is little point selling your best players for a profit today if it means you get relegated tomorrow. That is slippery soap bar of knowledge which you were ham-fistedly scrambling around trying to grasp while you get repeatedly pummelled from behind in the prison shower block of ignorance.

And yet still the american audience would start to get bored because the score wasn't going up fast enough... Perhaps we can take some pointers from american sports? Divide every point-scoring thread up into quarters, or even eighths? Introduce cheer-leaders? Bring in one of the organs they use in ice-hockey? Maybe Alpine could play a little tune every time someone scores?

My God. There's such a whiff of conspiracy and paranoia, it's like dinner round David Icke's place. The next thing I'll hear is that our first team is being abducted by aliens, one by one, beamed up from the centre circle. Alpine, you are right in a sense that our club is getting cut back to the bone and that the "manager" is not being given the chance to manage - but that's what we have all come to expect. Lowe himself warned many years ago that clubs who go into the red are effectively managed by the banks. Forget the board, you might as well ask Barclays who will be playing next weekend. Welcome to F**kedville, Population: Us. The only way we'll get out of this hole is to find someone to buy us - and to be frank, as the economy is currently as f**ked as the Georgian army, there is little chance of us getting bought out by anyone other than LifeLongDreamer. So it's plan B - at least balance the books. You hate it. I hate it. We all hate it. But there is little alternative. If you want to go out with a bang, try having a candlelit dinner with dynamite. I'd rather we stay out of administration instead. And on another point, can we all stop the ridiculous over-analysing of things? First we had dissections of Crouch's statements to the fans, then an analysis of whether Nigel Pearson shouts too much from the touchline. Now Poortvliet shouts too little, or uses different words than he did a few months ago etc. etc. Can't we all just watch the sport? If I wanted my sport analysed to death, I'd have picked cricket.

I don't think it's that simple. We have had a succession of poor managers acting under the poor guidance of a poor boardroom. We couldn't earn promotion in our first year down because we were too busy selling the best players and trying to give away the rest. Betting it all on one season after being the poster boys for living frugally was like your grandmother living on 1p a day until she turned 75 and then betting her life savings and a couple of kidneys on a long-shot in the 3:30 from Cheltenham. The roots of our current plight lie a lot further back than Burley's failed promotion season - and they've been watered very well since 2003 too...

...and hope we stay up. Welcome to the last chance saloon. The last of the house-keeping money is going on red (and white). It's a dangerous tactic, but probably the only one available to us.

There is a lot of sense in this, Wes - but I wonder if we are too far down the path to administration to draw the line anywhere other than with the youth on one side and the high earners on the other. With a debt as high as ours, we might have missed our chance to make impassioned pleas to keep players. It might have worked had we done all this last year (or earlier) but that was not to be. Perhaps when he issues another statement (or posts on here) Michael Wilde can tell us why all this is happening now and not last year? It would make interesting reading. I don't share some of the posters' expectations for "total football". I think the best we can hope for is stability and mediocrity. It is a long way up from here and I am not certain that we are going in the right direction yet. Certainly nothing in the history of ever has been won by penny-pinching, cost-cutting or book-balancing, but it might just earn us a reprieve from the destruction of administration - the hell which even an old incorrigible old villain like Ken Bates doesn't seem to have been able to navigate his way out of with Leeds. I sympathise with Saintkiptanui's point that it might be too late for us to get precious about what players leave or stay - and I retain my right to the opinion I've had since Lowe came back that the real pain is still to come with more players set to go - but Alpine, for all your folded-arms posturing about this issue, if we really are as financially f***ed as we seem to be your constant whinging about why this is happening is about as useful as popping into Barclays and asking them why they're thinking of repossessing your home. Because they can. Because you're broke. Because they will.

Agreed. It is craziness. W0 D0 L1 is only relegation form if you like basing your figures on the shakiest of statistical ground. Alpine, just out of interest, what would be your plan B? Given that we've been losing money hand over fist and given that we're more likely to see the US cavalry riding over the brow of Lances Hill then we are to see an investor coming in to give us money, what do you suggest? None of us like NEEDING to rely on youth, but what do you think the alternative is? How many senior players do we need to keep to make you happy? (*serious question*) I think we can discount one alternative plan, though. Sacking the manager seems to be a bad idea. I think we can take it as read that if Poortvliet goes, we will replace him with the cheapest (and possibly most disastrous) option possible. I guess we don't have to go down that road again.

It would probably have helped if the reporter had actually followed the story through - covered why he was actually banned - or talked to the club - or both. As it is, there's so little information in the report, it's hard to see who is right and who is wrong. It's a little sad to see people here jumping to the conculsion he's in the wrong on the flimsiest basis possible, though. I know "Innocent until proven guilty" is an unpopular concept in the UK right now, but it's still the law. It's odd... The club cancels a few free bus tickets and posters on here are up in arms. Yet the club bans a fan from actually getting in the ground (on the basis of something that doesn't seem strong enough to actually make it through court) and people are happy enough to assume that it's alright because it's somebody else's problem. What a strange perspective...

I'm afraid I don't see how anyone knows enough after one game to think they know how the season is going to go. Why do we feel the need to prescribe radical fixes with just 2% of the season gone. To think we criticized Lowe for being reactionary... Can't we just accept what is being played out, give the team the support they need, watch to see who develops and come back again to pass judgement in the New Year? It seems we're all so eager to have our opinions vindicated that we're drafting our "I told you so"s the moment the final whistle goes. I don't know what I fear most of a Monday morning: A flood of "We lost - We're doomed" posts or a flood of "We won - Here comes our brave new dawn" posts. Doesn't anyone have enough patience to sit back and watch the season unfold?

Yes we do. Being Saints, we have to follow any decent result with a bad result as quickly as possible in order to dampen down any unwanted levels of excitement. If we beat Stoke, we'll probably have to quickly schedule another match against Real Madrid the next day just to save us all from a tidal wave of happiness which we're ill-equipped to deal with.