As you've both posted here @devonFRATTONiser and @pompeymeowth . Out of interest would you swap your cup for a PL place? Or would you not change that day for the world?
Relegation will cost the club in the order of £130m. Winning the cup earns us £1.8m. I personally fear for the club in the event of relegation as our new owner couldn't even afford to buy us in full. I love the club more than any potential memories of lifting a much diminished piece of silverware.
Probably in the same way it saddens me that people value the glory of winning a trophy over the higher level of football. I was actually raised as a United fan by my family who are from up north but brought up in Southampton and i just found Southampton a much more interesting club to talk to friends about and support as a kid despite united winning everything and by the time i was in secondary school i was 100% Saints. Yes i definitely want to win a trophy but i'm happy to wait and i have faith we will do it without having to get relegated in the process. If we were finishing 17th every season my opinion might be different but we're not. so i'd rather we kept playing at a higher level and kept competing for trophies - which we are doing.
PL seasons come and go. You can't forget something as big as winning the cup, that moment when it's held up will stay with me forever. I'm sure older Southampton fans still remember that moment when Peter Rodrigues did just that.
I sympathise with this and you’re right about that glorious moment, but here’s another memory. We lost an FA Cup semifinal in 1984 and ended up finishing 2nd in the First Division. To this day, most Saints fans won’t even mention the name of Everton’s scorer, but if we had won the league, nobody would care about him, or care that we lost 1-0 at Highbury in that semi. If, on the other hand, we had won that game and won at Wembley, but not won the league, there would still, 34 years later, be a lot of frustration that we hadn’t done the double.
You can't say we compete for trophies and quote our most recent PL years conveniently ignoring the 7 years we spent in the lower leagues
Yeah I get that... but you can't provide 2 finals in our last 8 years in the top division as evidence of competing completely ignoring the fact we spent 7 years out of it.
Yes i can... from my stand point its impossible to include them because i'm arguing to stay in the PL so only time we spent in the PL would count. So not the paint or the league promotions. I'm arguing how we are competitive IN the PL.
But that's making the assumption that we will always be in the PL, as well as always be competitive in it, which is quite clearly flawed.
" If we were finishing 17th every season my opinion might be different but we're not." Thats what i said in the post you're arguing, so i'm clearly not making that assumption. But this season we have a very good shout of getting into a semi final. I'd rather stay in the league and keep competing then take a trophy and go down, simple as that. Honestly, past this i think we're just going to be arguing the limits of the hypothetical question.
