Gao Speaks....

Poch had decided to go...there is no way he would have turned down Spurs. Koeman would probably have stayed for his last season, but we wanted a further commitment.....also rumours of bust up between him and Reed (who knows). I don't believe extra money for players would have changed the minds of either. It's the same for Ralph...if he does well, he will get a better offer and be gone in a couple of seasons (perhaps even one). Fans have to accept that we aren't a big enough side to keep really good managers...it then becomes a choice....do you want good managers who tend to move on or do you want okay managers for whom we are a massive club. I know which I prefer.

 

I like to think that Ron's mind made up by a conversation that went something like:

'So Ron, we're delighted that you're staying for your final year, but you obviously know that we'll be letting Sadio and Graziano go right?'

'Yeah I expected as much, how much a of a budget have I got for a striker?'

'Well you got Charlie in January'

'Oh.'

 

Poch almost certainly would have left. Koeman, it's hard to say; he explicitly cited the lack of backing as a problem, and stated that our way of doing business wasn't sustainable. It's hard not to draw a connection between that and his willingness to fly the coop.

 

Wasn’t there rumours he wanted Siggy?

 

No idea; he was pretty openly unhappy that we didn't back him in that January window, though. If there were prominent names mooted, they have escaped my memory.

 

Yes.

I would add (this isn't aimed at you Libby)

A lot of what you guys want from a club our size is unrealistic. We will always just be a stepping stone club for the better players. They will never stay here

Sooner you realise we are a small/medium size club in a very big pond you will enjoy football more. We haven't got the fan base etc to be able to be a top 8 club

 

Gao is still not as bad as the duckhunting, hockey playing, red faced, brexit loving toff......yet.

 

Just hope for the odd season where we have a blinder. Can happen. I like the challenge that Ralph has with our squad. Bring it on!

 

I can't now because I stopped listening to pundits comments because I was so sick of them saying, ' good club, well run club...' ages ago. Remember... I'm generally not a football supporter, so I don't go looking. But anyone like Shearer, Wright and others have said it over the years.
There's an excellent possibility that since I last heard a pundit say it, Saints are no longer a well run club.
Anyway, the point is that they don't say anything else about Saints. Oh, yes... Great Academy. There's that. Probably heard that enough times too.
What I miss them saying is: 'Really good side'. 'Dangerous side'. 'Can beat anybody on their day', 'Best side outside of the top 6'. 'Most likely to break in amongst the top clubs'. All of which pundits were saying as little as 4-5 seasons ago.
I've even still got a recording on this computer where John Hartson and Steve Claridge were talking about Saints chances of making Champions League the next season on the BBC programme 'Final Score' Both said that if Saints could maintain the general form they were showing, and given the quality of the squad they saw no reason not to, they could do it. Of course Leicester went and did it for real with a squad that was arguably no better than Saints a year or two earlier.

 

The difference is that the big boys saw us coming and picked us apart like vultures, with Leicester it was so unexpected and out of the blue (they were bottom 6 the previous season) that it caught them all out.
That particular season won't be repeated for a very long time as the cartel won't allow it to.

 

Read my post from way back when [a couple of seasons back at least], when I said top clubs deliberately dissected Saints, yet still the club managed to spring back. But they couldn't keep doing it because they weren't prepared to fund it.

 

Stardust?

 

It's tough to stop players moving when a top club shows interest in these days of greedy agents agitating for a pay day and players with too much power.

 

Alternatively, we were willing participants in those sales, something that we have declared to be a part of our model on numerous occasions. There is no organized conspiracy against Southampton Football Club: we had good players that other clubs wanted, and moving them on suited our interests.

 

Well it's a different point of view certainly.

 

I think there is a lot of truth in this, but the main requirements for the model to be successful are (a) good recruitment, and (b) a good Academy. Since Koeman left we haven’t recruited well, and the Academy declined under his tenure, with Martin Hunter then making it worse. The Academy is now getting back to it’s best, possibly the best ever, but it remains to be seen how our recruitment is.

 

I’m sorry you don’t hear that TSS... we need to get lucky again by doing the right thinhs we did back then. I think we all want that. We had a taste and maybe we can have it again.

Sadly, life isn’t always a fairytale. Leicester creates one. We nearly did.

 

And frankly, the rough outline of that model is something I've always been very happy to see continued. We were never going to keep the Van Dijks and the Manes for their full careers, though in Mane's case we probably erred by not locking him down a bit longer (which would have at least maximized what we received). But the trick is that, when you sell those players on, you need to use that windfall to get more players with the potential to be top quality. We bought badly, but we also didn't exactly reinvest aggressively, either.

Ajax is the peak example. They're built on that model, but in addition to their Academy, they have used the fruits of their outbound transfers to poach hyper-talented youngsters for years, many of whom featured this past season. They knew that they would ultimately have to sell on this generation of players as well, but they held on to some of them for an extra year, made an unprecedented (well, at least going back to their glory days) push in the transfer market using the funds from previous years' sales to fill out the team, and ended up making the CL semis. Not only was that a massive success on the pitch, it'll end up allowing them to finance further pushes in the future, because they now have the resources to nab every talented teenager on the continent.

 

A figure people love to hate, but in actual fact, is key to where we are today.
Without his badly implemented stadium finance system, we may well have avoided administration in 2009, but we would be undoubtedly struggling in L2 right now. And despite his red cheeks and love for hockey, he oversaw some good times. Posh boy did okay.

 

Swing him from the Itchen Bridge....