Being Premiership matters because we will have the opportunity to see our young players come up through the system, compete at the highest level, and even pull on an England shirt...all while with the club. It means having the financial wherewithal to build and maintain the facilities necessary to ensure that none of their potential is wasted. Being in the Prem isn't that important for me, but the byproducts are.
Morning, Lamballana. This has proven to be a provocative thread, hasn't it? It achieved what I hoped in that it's helped fill the news gap while we yet again wait for another football match to break out! I can go with what Schad says, and if I thought that once we get going in the Prem we would be able to hold on to the likes of James Ward-Prowse and see the next generation of Alex Chamberlains making it into the England set up without needing to transfer to Arsenal then I would be delighted. I admire Schad's optimism, and am determined to share it. Believe it or not, I am actually a very optimistic Saints fan - you have to be, don't you? I think all I was trying to say is that when we were playing in the lower leagues I got as much of a buzz from a 2-0 home win against Barnsley as I did in the "old days" when we beat, say, Liverpool (which thankfully we did very often). Some other posters have acknowledged another difference. The train journey back from SMS was always better as the away fans from a team like the aforesaid Barnsley were a knowledgeable bunch and the craic was always good. While the majority of Villa fans I met the other week were great, there were sufficient numbers of dickheads to make the journey seem endless. Welcome back to the Prem. Ultimately I simply love watching Saints. Who they play is a secondary consideration. I don't think I was saying more than this.
Greetings Channon and yes you are right. I also get a huge buzz whenever Saints win and whoever the opposition is. That said I like the additional kudos gained from the press and other supporters if we topple a so called big club. To be able to do that regularly you need to be in the PL. I'm also hoping that NC is true to his plan and this club really is destined for the very top. Let's face it we all deserve it! Whatever happens it will be a roller-coaster and exciting ride.
To be honest guys....if you compare teams of yesterday with some of the more influential teams of today. The difference is just that, money. Going back into the 70/80's most top flight teams seem to have at best 3/4 highly priced players with wannabes coming through and a couple of done that, been there older hands. Playing honest to good British style football as it was meant to be played. In the late 60's early seventies when Wilson and co got in, it was the start of withdrawing schools from playing competitive sports. The old house system with in schools for maintaining standards of competitiveness and of fair play as well as being able to help your house with academic points added to that spirit. It didn't seem to matter how good you were at anything somehow you managed to contribute male or female. No one was left out. If you didn't want to take part in the sport you could sell the squash. Or just watch and cheer your house on that though was the only compulsory thing you had to be there.(Well it was in school time) Cricket was the first noticeable victim. Counties all over England had their best sources of future Talent withdrawn over night. Leaving their main source to the private schools......Cricketers like Fred Truman, Typhoon Tyson, Alec Bedser, Laker, Lock, more local to home Peter Sainsbury, Roy Marshall. All these players were discovered playing for schools. They were helped and coached prior to college or university that is just a few this old memory came to mind. It took a bit longer for football to suffer the same fate thanks to leagues like the tyro etc. The coaching side for me suffered the most though. Those little things you picked up playing interhouse or interschool where the games were not so competitive were vital. More recently money has raised it's uglyhead with Teams like Chelski, City and the likes pretty well trying to buy success rather than earn it. Somehow doing this for me atleast has taken something from the game. A teams success shouldn't be dependent on how rich the club is but on how good the team is. Going back to a a more level playing field for all, will make the game more exciting and a bit less predictive......Thats the way it should be and yes I would still want my Saints to be up there competing with the best about!.............
I like this thread. On the Sky thing, I get the pre-megacash nostalgia, cheaper tickets, 3pm Saturdays, a foul was a foul, offside was offside, shorts were short etc. But football is different now (it would have been anyway), and there's not much chance of the genie getting back in the bottle. The gap between the Premier League and everything below has widened, and this is also true for Championship-League 1, League 2-Conference and so on. I don't have a problem, and you may disagree, with the Sky money. It is good and important. My big complaint is that the vast majority of it flows back out in wages, never to be seen again by the footballing world. That's not quite right. There's not really any excuse for all 20 Premier League clubs to not have an excellent academy set up, for example, but only about half do. Not quite sure what the solution is, but the TV money is going up again and someone has to work out a (non wage cap) way of making sure it doesn't all go on new cars and houses in the Manchester area.
Not too much about the Nostalgia but the football supporter has changed over the past 20-30 years. Yes there were Man U fans from miles away thet had never been to OT and had no viable link or reason to support them other than they were the most famous team however back in those days it was purely that. People supported Liverpool or Man Utd or Leeds. The past 2-3 decades has seen people supporting anyone who gets near the top. I remember when Chelsea had no fans, when they were struggling to get people into their gates in the old 2nd division and even when they got into the Prem in the early days. Then Hoddle came, Gullit etc and they started to get some sell outs, then the Ranieri period and relative success with Abramovich towards the end and all of a sudden young boys in Lincoln were wearing Chelsea shirts. WTF? Never happened even 10 years earlier with a 'previously unfashionable' side. No kids wore Blackburn shirts when they won the league, no kids started wearing started supporting Leeds when they won the last of the old D1 neither Everton shirts in the eighties, however there are huge swathes of Man City and Chelsea shirts all over the place now. If next year Roberto Martinez managed to win the league with Wigan I dare say the fickle young kids of today would be wearing blue and white. So my ramble (yes I know I go on one) is that for those of us of the previous generation and older we would support Saints wherever they were in the pyramid. I fear many youngsters would completely lose interest just as they did over the past 6-7 years when they weren't posting on the forums and weren't going to games. To them it's more of a prestige thing to say to someone 'I support Saints and I am proud of it' when they may as well just say ' I support a team in the Premiership'. For me when I say that statement it comes with no conditions of where they are in the leagues. sweeping generalisation but I hear all the kids to me 'Why do you support Saints, they're crap' and I reply 'Why are you wearing a Chelsea shirt in Lincoln with your Northern accent?' (BTW I can wear my Southampton shirt in Lincoln because I have a Hants accent, been practising it for years....I jest)
Some good points here and right diagnosis, but the finger is pointed wrongly. I happen to know the Chester based Saint that Channon would have been drinking with (strangely there aren't many of us). This guy was a teacher who took his school teams through to win national awards. One of his issues was that the Private Schools had properly invested, so they had an ex-Man Utd player at one, a former WBA player at another etc. Ditto in cricket. The problem, according to my fellow Saint , is not the old mantra about non-competitiveness - many of his old pupils play pro or semi-pro football - but rather lack of resources. No State school can afford to have an ex-County level cricketer coaching their team, or an ex-pro footballer with their football team. The Independent Schools have them in spades. The problem is that successive governments have not seen school sport as important, and so it has never been properly funded. So only one question left. Channon, why the hell was I not invited for that drink??!
Fair points, Lambo (except about the drinks invite. If you haven't found the non-Man Utd/Liverpool pub in your area yet then you haven't been trying) . But unusually, I don't think you've said anything about the original point. But it's all Beddy's fault for introducing politics. I think he should be referred to the mods.
I don't expect that we're near the point where we'll have top tier players spending their full prime here. But I do think that we're a couple years of success from being able to fend off the wolves long enough that we'll get to see youngsters grow to be top-class players in their time here.
Beddy, consider yourself castigated (that'll bring tears to your eyes!). You are sentenced to hear Ed Milliband's speech 24/7 for life! As for you, Channon. You are quite right I didn't address the original point. Being in the Premiership is still a buzz, but could wear off. Like Schad, I don't think we'll ever be a non-selling club, but then which club isn't forced to sell on occasions. We have to speculate to accumulate and all that. I too enjoyed the last three years as much as I've enjoyed any spell watching Saints, including the Lawrie days and the Ted Bates years when we first made it out of the Second Division Maybe we made it here too quickly but we're here and I'm going to enjoy it even if we don't manage to cling on this year. Good post though during another bloody lull in the season. After the buzz of Jose's late equaliser it would have been great to have had another game. This stop-start stuff does my head in!
Hey, how about if Saints join the Scottish Premier League..? Good chance of winning that. And we get to play each other 4 times a season, or some such combination. Sorry Rangers, but we wouldn't be playing you. Still, you wouldn't want to play us anymore than we would want to play you. To be truthful, I don't exactly know what bloody fixture system they're using these days.
For a ****ty little tin pot outfit like saints and canaries, we just have to ride the fortunes and curse the sorrows.
