Without wishing to come across rude Romsey and wanting to keep the good debate going, your first couple of lines appear lifted from a PR spiel. No substance. What is "breaking the mould"? I can't recall many deals that were 'under the radar' from the championship season onwards. We certainly evolved a playing style, it's changed under each coach and will alter again i am sure. What is the way we went about running our club? forgive me Romsey, but that really reads like someone who swallowed the dream speech. Each one of ghose is a sound bite. I only hope Liverpool don't come in for you too
No - don't do PR spiel - too long in the tooth for that... I do sincerely believe we had a great thing going - I loved the way we always over-achieved (maybe our curse?) through the Championship. Its not a dream speech what I wrote earlier; I have a complicated job and I have learnt about what gets teams of people to work together, basically the hard way because I was total crap at managing people 10 years ago. I have, however, watched, with detached objectivity with what has gone on at Saints and in particular how the players reacted as we progressed on and off the pitch - what they were reported to have said. Not so much the words but have looked at the motivation that was behind the statements. However, and this is where you comment is to the point, we judge people by our own standards; and what motivates others maybe not the same as others. What I will write is that from a business prospective, not just the business plan but the apparent culture, instilled by NC (myself as a business person) was very interesting. It was not about buying players; it was firstly about the internal infrastructure of the club - not just training facilities, but about people brought into the business to function as not only coaches, but about education for those that stayed or might not make it, scouting/recruitment etc. The club had been run on good commercial lines focussing on the internals rather than buying success. Agreed, there are those, like Ricky, you brought in to add immediate quality, but it was also about generating internally the quality to carry that forward. If you look at the top clubs, their business model is about purchasing power only; its the cancer that corrupts our EPL - that is reflected when the England Team playing in tournaments. Did you know that in Germany- only one club in their top division did not show a profit last year (and reporting has to be in strict accordance with accountancy laws similar laws to the UK - nothing to do with Fair Play Euro laws)? Its not about swallowing do dream spoof - behind it all was a terribly sensible format that NC and ML brought to our club. My underlying concern is that we will follow now a business model that has been shown to fail. If we had a gate of 40K for each home match, with world wide merchandising, then we might have a future. Earlier, I mentioned leadership, at all levels within the club - do we still have this? This is where my reservations sit. I do not wish to appear rude, but its 2.00am in Dubai - so I will sign off now. At least tomorrow is the start of the weekend in the UAE - Ramadan Kareem to all Saints fans!!
How come West Brom can happily hang on to Mulumbu and Yacob, who are almost the equal of Morgan, with the general view being that their club is going down the pan this season? Why is no one jumping on their bones?
What we're suffering badly from is being the best placed team (league position-wise) that will sell players to all the teams above us, at prices they can afford. Everton, for example, won't sell Barkley to Liverpool; the top four only rarely (with the exception of Arsenal) sell players to each other. We're the most successful of the fodder.
But this was Cortese's failing. Yes he ran the internals well. He kept who he wanted and got rid of who he wanted to suit each level however like you say to reach the next level he had to get the commercial side working and it is quite evident that he wasn't doing that very well. He, directly and indirectly through his choices of manager, got us to the level we are now but just as Hammond, Fox, Hooiveld, Guly were good enough to get us promoted from the Championship but were cast adrift because they weren't good enough for the premiership (remember Guly was a first 11 player in the championship) you could look at us now. How many of our first 11 that ended the season would get into Arsenal's (the current 4th place) side ? Schneiderlin would maybe but he would have to fight it out with Arteta who has pretty similar stats to Schneiderlin for last season. Shaw maybe but he probably has worse stats than Gibbs for last season. Lambert, Lallana and Lovren would be squad players. So the 'framework' didn't fit a CL position within the timescale Cortese was selling to these players. They knew that surely and whilst churning out the company line they would either have to jump at the first chance of possibly making it there with someone else and hoping that they were picked to play in the CL or they would have to accept that they would probably be replaced here if we were to get to that sort of position ourselves. We WOULD NOT finish in the CL spots by just improving other areas of the squad. The whole squad barring a couple and virtually the whole first 11 would need improving on and that would not be achieved before the commercial side of things were vastly improved. We are complaining about how Cortese had ambition and led by example but then using an argument of keeping players that would only retain our position. Which is it? Do we want ambition? The Cortese manifesto/DVD or do we want to keep the players we have and maintain a middling position? We won't move up the league tinkering with the odd position. To move upward from 8th there are/were only a couple of players good enough to be first 11 anyway!!! Maybe Tadic is the start of the next improvement where we go from players capable of reaching 8th to players capable of doing even better. Koeman has only been in position a week or so. We have not got the players in we want yet. We are speculating about relegation?? What is going on with people's minds to be in meltdown over this. They wanted progress not stagnation, then all of a sudden they want the stagnation and for us to just keep the players we have.
Good post Imp. However, I disagree about the "how many Saints would have got into the Arse team" thing. I think you could make a decent case for Clyne, Shaw, Lovren, Cork, Schneiderlin. Lallana, Lambert and Rodriguez (although maybe not all at the same time). Arsenal really weren't that good last year. We could and should have got 4 points from them. We didn't thanks to some individual 'howlers' from players not mentioned above and the lack of a plan B. Of course we need to improve the players and Tadic seems like a good starting point. This is why I was so desperate for last years team (plus one or two) to give it one more year. Now we have to start almost form scratch and when you look at the ridiculous amounts of money being spent by the teams finishing above us last year, I'm not even sure I want to compete. As such I agree with this from Romsey Saint.
I think you, many others and I were/are over valuing our own players in terms of how good they are. Shaw is a prospect but so is Gibbs, however while we joke about his 0 goals and 1 assist Gibbs only just has better with 2 assists but from fewer games. It isn't a case of Shaw would immediately replace him. Arteta had pretty similar stats to Schneiderlin so again it isn't a simple case of Schneiderlin immediately replacing him. You can't really argue that Lambert would oust Giroud who had a fantastic season. Lallana vs Ramsey/Ozil/Chamberlain/Walcott/Cazorla ??? Lovren would be behind Koscielny and Mertersacker and probably vermaelen Cork would be behind Schneiderlin so wouldn't get in the Arsenal side. Rodriguez is battling Walcott and Chamberlain. Clyne I'll give you but I would guess Arsenal are going to upgrade their right back slot this year now Sagna looks likely to be gone (or is gone.) I agree they were poor against us last season and annoyed me that we didn't get at least 4 points out of them however the players they have are better than their alternatives at Saints were. Anyway not really worth arguing about. I was merely trying to point out that the same people who are talking about Cortese's ambition being dead are now lamenting that our better players want to leave. I think most of them knew they would not make CL here even if we qualified because they would have been replaced here.
Sorry to keep banging my drum, but I think we made our players look better than they are by playing well as a team. They will find it harder to play with less familiar team mates and playing a different style. The one exception is Luke...he is the real deal and will carry on progressing.
Good points Imps. The squad last season was good enough to finish 8th. Hell of a leap fo them to improve enough to finish top 4. Ron has a chance to build a stronger more flexible squad to continue our progession.
Lallana is also the "real deal". He has better close control than 90% of British players. He'll do fine at Liverpool, but how well will Liverpool do without Suarez? Contrary to what's been said elsewhere on this thread, a few rare players (Patrick Viera, Roy Keane, Luis Suarez) actually are irreplaceable. Lallana may not be in that category, but he is a rare talent.
This is actually one of the most important issues and, really it is the same point that Romsey Saint was making. That right now, I mean this season, we have to change our model to that of the other EPL teams and buy any success we might have. Hopefully, we can begin to 'evolve' again and do build a similar team spirit as before. Although we will never have the similar circumstances that gave the team its special bond, with a few youngsters coming through the system it will hopefully develop.
I think though that it is a blessing in disguise that we wipe the slate clean now though. 8th last season clean slate, hopefully improve the squad overall and retain 8th OR All the players stay for one more season, a couple of additions, do better than last season, then they all leave and we are then trying to get players to retain 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th? I think we will probably be able to retain 8th at the moment as long as we make the right purchases which so far seems to be the case. Will be much easier to move on than if we had got much closer to the 'end goal' then been demoralised as players left. And yes they would have left even if we had finished 4th, 5th, 6th. They left for Money and CL not just CL I am optimistic, but I am not trying to be. I just am optimistic as whilst I liked the way Pochettino played It riled me when we lost games to teams whose managers changed simple things and conquered his tactics. That Chelsea away game they were **** but just playing over the midfield (coupled with Ramires being exempt from red cards) lost us that game. I don't think that would happen with Koeman. Same with Lallana. My ex favourite player. Yes he has very close control however a better player in his position would have had 15-20 goals last season. How many times did he get into a position where someone like Ramsey or Cazorla or Sterling or Coutinho or Hazard (list goes on) would score? Loads of times. Hopefully Tadic proves to be like those where he gets into that position and scores more goals.
i think lff means buy accelerated progression. we were trying that but we kept getting worse players than we had. if we sell our best players it's much easier to buy better ones than we have left. #positivekreugerspin
We're still going to bring through the youth, and were still going to buy in too. Last year we bought 3 for over £30m, with a similar amount the year before. However we didn't have to buy more players than that because of our academy. We're likely to lose 5 first team players this summer, and we can't just replace them with academy players as we need some experience and more quality that they can deliver yet. Selling all 5 - which cost us around £10m in total will bring in around £100m. We 'made' that money. It's not needed to cover loans like at Pompey or to get high earners off the books like at, errr... Pompey. We earned that money. It's profit. To me that's not buying success, that's reaping the rewards - or from a pessimistic point of view - compensation. We can argue all day about if they should have stayed, but they aren't going to. It would be suicidal for the club to not spend a large proportion of that money. That will help us develop as a club and keep kids coming here and allowing us to give PL debuts to Sims, Hesketh et al.
Does anyone remember when Morgan first arrived and everyone thought he was ****? How times change ey!
