Lighthouse

Sharing this again because it was just ridiculous.

This post reads like nothing but hard feelings to me. If you only accept players who derive their morals from 17th century naval warfare, you’re going to have a pretty small squad.

He’s clearly a far, far better player than Smallbone and would be a class above most midfielders in the Championship. You’d be nuts not to want him but he won’t be coming back whilst we’re a league below. I’d want someone more physical along side him but you don’t just need big cloggers to get out of the Championship.

He’ll have Prem suitors in summer, either on loan or permanent deals. If nothing else he’s exactly the kind of player one of the promoted sides should be looking at.

I thought we were the people’s front?

We just barely managed to paper over the cracks of Stephens and Bednarek through a combination of Hassenhutl being an excellent manager and having superior players like Bertrand, Romeu, Livramento and KWP around them. They were always a serious weakness and a whole team of Bednarek/Stephens standard players would have been relegated, even with Ralph in charge. Half the time they couldn’t even get into the team ahead of thoroughly average players, like Hoedt and Vestergaard. Two years ago we tried, and failed, to replace both of them with DCC and ABK. To put it bluntly, they’re both crap and I don’t think any Saints manager has ever really wanted either in their team, we’ve just failed consistently to recruit better centre halves.

Liverpool in 2017 was nowhere near the level they’re at now and in two of those games we played Yoshida and Virgil in defence. If I’m remembering rightly, the league game against Anfield would have been about 5-0 if FF hadn’t had the game of his life. In any case, the main point stands; Bednarek and Stephens have never been anything close to a competent defensive PL unit.

Bednarek never played for Puel, who really didn’t keep that many clean sheets after we lost Fonte and Virgil for the season. He also had prime Romeu sat in front of the defence and he was far better than anything we’ve got now and we played very defensive football. Most of his clean sheets were 0-0s at home to teams like West Brom, Hull and Bournemouth. None of our defenders have played better than they have this season, Stephen’s and Bednarek have always been a liability. The fact that Bree, Manning and Wood are getting games at all in the PL is just utterly laughable.

It doesn’t exist, it’s a media construct to get people to tune into a competition which is little more than an unwanted distraction for 90% of clubs involved. People like to romanticise about how great it used to be but honestly, did anyone care about Bradford vs Watford in the eighties?

I think Liverpool was always likely to be a bigger draw for Plymouth fans than Burnley was for Saints fans, regardless of pricing. Not, that I agree with what we charged, which was just silly, but we wouldn’t have sold out even at £15 for adults and kids for a quid.

No, I’m basing it on the assumption that if we’re not doing something so straight forward, obvious and fundamental then there must be a reason for it. We may be badly managed but we’re not slapstick cartoon mismanaged, as much as people would like to pretend we are.

Mental that Freed from Desire is now a global sporting anthem because some bloke from Wigan quite liked Will Grigg. Wouldn’t be surprised to hear it at the Superb Owl later.

Absolute conjecture based on nothing. I've no idea what's gone on between Juric and Downes but to suggest that he's thrown his toys out of the pram because he isn't fussed about losing, CBA training and just wants loads of days off is pure fantasy.

The club know this and yet they're not doing it, so it's clearly not that simple.

You said we needed to stop being lied to. We don't. I don't care about whatever juicy gossip is surrounding ABK, I just want him gone. He is quite obviously a more attractive prospect to potential buyers if he's playing regularly and putting in solid performances. The fact that Martin and Juric are both not playing him, instead picking the likes of Bree, Aribo and Manning to fill in at CB, should tell you that's clearly not an option, for whatever reason.

Not if the truth is something that could jeopardise our chances of selling him in the summer. Clearly there is some reason two different managers have done what we're doing. I can only hope the bloke f**ks off in summer and is never seen here again.

Five or six decent players in the region of £15-25m, plus a couple of decent loans, would have been far, far better than the absolute dross we ended up signing.

Clearly there is some reason why we put him on the bench but I can’t for the life of me figure it out. Maybe it’s a shop window thing trying to show that he is fit, who knows. Maybe he’s just one of those great lads to have in the changing room, that I keep hearing so much about.

That would be 19 players, plus two loans and the remaining four slots being filled by Edozie, Bazunu and a couple more like Fernandes in the £10-15m price range.

If you factor out the own goals, goalkeeping howlers and fluke deflections which have gone our way recently, I don’t think we particularly look like a goal scoring team. It’s no surprise that we drew a blank against a team which defends as well as Burnley. Shame really, a bit of a cup run would have given us some mild interest in the second half of this season.

How is it not part of the discussion, it's literally the thing it was brought in to try and prevent. People get so caught up in hating VAR that they forget some of the absolutely batsh*t nonsense that preceeded it.

Not that exact situation but I'm sure Vydra was always a bit like that. Constantly being signed and loaned between Watford, Burnley and West Brom as they were going up and down but only ever doing it in the Championship.

The bloke is off his tits. It’ll be interesting to see if he can make it through a full four years and in what state.

Summer ‘24 was the worst. Summer ‘22 and January ‘23 I can at least forgive SR for being bold and going with unknowns in the hope that they might work. Last summer though, we just signed a bunch of known Championship quality players and Lallana, who’s absolutely done as a professional footballer. There wasn’t even a sense that I wasn’t sure about our signings in summer, I knew they were no good because they’d already proven it for other clubs.

No recent experience with any fitters but if you’re looking for brands then I’d recommend Smeg, Neff, Poggenpohl and Bosch.