Lighthouse

I'm not actually making it up though, am I.

I have no doubt at all that there are plenty of people back at Staplewood analysing our recent performances as I type this and looking at what can be improved and where we can exploit our next two or three opponents. I have no doubt either that the players who will be travelling up to Doncaster have been properly briefed and we may well know the starting XI already. This is not a key part of the season, that's why we've given them a break now. We have two weeks between league games, with no international games and only a cup tie up at Donny in the middle. It's about as good a time as you can get for a break, right in the middle of the season. Every club spends millions every year on sports science and the vast majority of them, going by many players social media, accommodate a short break mid-season. I'm sure if telling players, "don't be fatigued, you went to Ayia Napa in June," was a viable alternative that yielded better results, everyone would be doing that instead.

You tell me

I'm not sure how some of you know how people actually work. They've just had an absolutely gruelling match schedule and moral is probably quite low after all the results. They need a break, both mentally and physically and a few days in the sun with their friends or families will do them some good. The attitudes of some people on here are just a witch hunt, whereby the solution to our recent struggles must be to cancel the break and make everyone do extra tough training sessions until it makes them winners. They're human beings. If you cancelling people's time away with their wives and kids (and they really don't get much mid-season) then players are going to properly down tools. As for following players wives on Instagram, then being upset when they post pictures of their lives; good lord get over yourself.

It's mid-season and they've just played four games in ten days? Why on Earth would you NOT let them have a break and why does that depend on results? Breaks aren't a reward for winning, they're a necessity.

Yeah, in like 2001. He was about half a million off being our record signing back then, probably about £20-25m in today’s fees.

We’ve spent way more on players who’ve been equally useless. £7m isn’t much of a transfer fee these days and we’ll probably get a reasonable chunk of it back eventually. Carrillo, Sully, Osvaldo and Delgado were all more expensive and did f**k all. Let’s not even get started on the cheaper players who were worse.

I'm afraid your wages are a bit high for the Championship, we're working on a loan deal to KUMB or possibly the UK squash forum. We're going for the hipster option, street food in Elephant and Castle.

You’re dangerously close to agreeing with each other.

He did a lot right and a lot wrong, however I will always love him for seeing the Sun take out a two page spread telling the nation how they’re now ignoring us.

He’s not funding the site. In fact he’s embezzling the earnings in a secret bank account in the BVIs.

Gao's rudderless, penniless tenure here was the segue from the Leibherr years to where we are now. His era was massively flattered by two people; Ralph and Ings. Without them we'd have gone down years earlier and there's no way we'd have come back up under his so-called leadership, i.e. a PR photo of him holding a Saints scarf in some office in Shanghai.

No. There are countless other owners we could have, like those of Blackburn, Huddersfield, Cardiff, Bolton, Wigan, Pompey or Blackpool. Saints blitzing their way back to the PL, with swashbuckling football from Lallana and Lambert is very much the exception to the norm.

You’d have to be off your tits to want that. For all their mistakes, they have spent a lot of money on the club and signed some quality players for this league. Would you want to be in League 1, with owners not spending a penny and a team built around McCarthy, Stephens, Manning, Smallbone and Archer? It’s a trait of football fans at every club to think that they have it as bad as it gets. I genuinely had friends who support Arsenal asking, "what have we done to deserve this, why does God need us to suffer?!" When they were finishing sixth at the end of Wenger’d reign.

Yes but I’m not sure how taking 1/8 inch off the wood furnishings is going to improve the situation.