If players want to leave, they leave. Doesn't matter if you are Saints or Man Utd or Arsenal. Van Persie wanted to leave, he left. Ronaldo wanted to leave, he left. Saints have got some very good players at the moment, which is funnily enough, why other clubs want to buy them. That's football, always been that way, always will. Saints are financially ok, but still the above applies because our players want to join clubs that are higher up the pecking order. Saints have to what's right for the club, get the most money. However the current board are learning the hard way that they will be judged on their actions or inactions and how and what they say. You can't preach about wanting European football one minute and then sell players who can possibly get it for you. But on the flip side, if Ralph had come out and been 100% honest and said: "We simply can't stop players wanting to join clubs in the top 6, they pay more, they win more & no matter how much we say about ambition, Saints will be 7th to 10th place team at best"..... HE WOULD HAVE BEEN CRUCIFIED BY FANS.
Previous to his latest rant, I think the end of the season, to give him some credit, he did mention (whilst talking about potential transfers) that we are competing with clubs with more spending power etc.
Thank you Fran, you made me chuckle. If there is an issue/problem with Les Reed then I don't understand why. He's an administrator. A football expert, as you say. He shuffles the papers on the footballing recruitment and academy side. It's not his job to gee players up. What he does, he usually does pretty well.
He perhaps doesn't have the aura that Cortese did when he shredded offers in front of players. I don't know how fair it is to blame him for that really but here we are.
Thing is, we don't have a Cortese. Comfortably the biggest asset this club has had in donkey's years, he left the building, never to return, in January. That is where all the unravelling has been gradually taking place. I'm bound to say that if he was still at the club, zero would have happened. We'd be looking at 3 players representing Saints at the World Cup and re-starting in August. There would be no question of selling players. I simply don't trust this present bunch enough to do the right thing. Les Reed is not one of those. I trust him to do his job. That's it.
That is complete nonsense. Sorry man. Understand you don't want to talk about it, so I'm not going to argue with you. But every time you say it, I'm going to point out it's bullshit.
Fine. You can have your opinion. I remind you that on this forum you could be less offensive about it. I would also ask how you think I might be wrong. This isn't about my favourite player leaving, so I am quite prepared to hear how a club, which was charging along, getting better, season after season, under one man's vision of what might be obtainable, is still doing the right thing now that he has gone. You tell me how things are going to progress.
None of us can really know if the players would be kept if Cortese stayed...there were some financial problems. The players may not have tried to leave if Nicola stayed, but he may have had to sell them. Easy for him to say that they wouldn't have had to go. We can't even be sure that MP would have stayed. It is likely, but again no one actually knows.
We do lack a leader...Nicola or similar. As I said, Kreuger may be a nice chap and may be very clever...hell, he could be a great Chairman, but leader he isn't. Les Reed is required to be knowledgeable...but again not a leader.
I think that is the key bit. Who is the club's leader? Each person has a role but none seem to be the leader. That is the one thing NC was. He did not talk much but when he did it came out as a leader. I really think the board needs to find that person and soon.
Cortese would have gambled on taking us to the next level. But he might have gambled and lost, and if he had who would have picked up the bill?
Understand that...we don't know what was going on. I have a suspicion there was something going wrong...something would have had to be sorted out somewhere. But if not Cortese...why couldn't we have a Cortese-lite Chairman?
Is Ewan Thomas a Saint then? didn't know that. Chris Akabusi may be a West Ham fan, but didn't he used to train with Southampton and Eastleigh AC? He was the after dinner speaker at a do I went to a few years back, and he was bloody good, very entertaining. A relentlessly upbeat guy, and couldn't we just do with someone like that around St Marys.
For one thing, it seems as though Cortese might have sold Lambert to WHU in January but was blocked by the board. So that's one player that would have been gone under Cortese. For another, at some point Cortese was actually going to have to deliver on his vision, and the funds probably weren't there for him to do that. There is a difference between "we don't need to sell players" and "we don't have money to buy a bunch of other high price players." For us to get into the top 4, we probably needed to hold on to all of our players and spend another 50m. That probably wasn't possible. And once that wasn't possible then MP and players were going to leave feeling that we'd gone as far as possible. Cortese was actually the first one to bail, which was convenient for him because now he isn't the bad guy anymore. Cortese couldn't hang on to AOC. It seems he wouldn't have chosen to hang on to Lambert. There is the rumor that Cortese even tried to fire Pochettino, so I wonder how loyal Pochettino really was. It's become increasingly apparent he never had any intent of staying here. You'd think if anything he'd feel a little more likely to stay and pay back the board that saved his job. So not sure at all anything would have been different. The other huge thing to keep in mind is that all of this drama with players being unhappy and wanting to go, and managers unhappy at board and vice versa, players being sold... that's what happens at the big clubs each and every single season. They all sell players as good or much better than Lallana, Lambert, and Shaw every year. Liverpool for example is selling Suso for 15 or 20m or whatever. Suarez is starting to hint he might go. Man U fired their manager. Chelsea fired a manager last year, and Mourinho turned over the entire team almost and now they're having a fire sale. If NC were here and he were as ambitious and clever and ballsy as you say, he would be ruthlessly culling people from the team and leveraging the funds into more productive players. This is the guy who fired Nigel Adkins after two straight promotions. It's the only way to break into the circle. We don't have the spending power, so we have to spend more efficiently. A player like Lambert would be a prime player to sell. But if NC's only plan was to not sell players and just spend 40 or 50m every year, then he's obviously going to run into a brick wall because that is a stupid strategy. And if his only plan to not sell players was to shred contracts in front of players and talk ****e, that is also a stupid strategy. Which might be why he isn't around anymore.
The unravelling didn't start when cortese left, ultimately it started when Markus died. From that point cortese had neither the money or the authority to push his vision through. If cortese was still here it would mean that he was toeing KL's line, thus things would be happening just as they are now.
