just beat me to it, young side that. Especially the bench. Hansen is only 16 and looks a talent from the highlights.
Saints Academy Thread
- Thread starter - Doing The Lambert Walk
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**** tournament, you shouldn't even be in it. Why is it Cambridge's responsibility to provide training opposition for your players?!
If you get through the group stage, I hope you'll feel proud of denying a league one or league two club a day out at Wembley.
It would be a valid argument if it wasn't coming from a fan of a team that bought an F.A cup. Denied other teams a chance at the Millennium Stadium that year.
If you notice, we are playing kids against men, in the spirit of the competition, the chance of us qualifying are fairly remote, but the kids are benefiting from playing against experienced opponents. If a League One or League Two team cannot beat a team of youngsters then they won't go far against better opposition.
Oh here we go again. We didn't buy the FA Cup because if you class what we did as buying a the FA Cup, then pretty much every team ever has bought the FA Cup.
Let's go through some transfer fees of our starting line-up shall we:
David James: 1.2 million
Glen Johnson: 4 million
Sol Campbell: Free transfer
Slyvian Distin: Free transfer
Herman Hreiddersson: Free transfer
Lasanna Diarra: 5.5 million
John Utaka: 7 milllion
Pedro Mendes: 7.5 million in a deal which included two other players
Niko Kranjcar: 3.5 million
Sulley Muntari: 7 million
Kanu: Free transfer
Total spending: about 25 million.
So how is that buying the cup? Yes, we paid over the odds in wages, but frankly we were probably paying around the same level as the top 4/6 at the time, just without the infrastructure to back it up (and the economic recession, Standard Charted recalling all of their loans at the same time, etc etc). The difference compared to us and the Man City's of the world is that their spending has led to transfer and wage inflation, our spending did not as it was about on par for an admittedly larger club than we were for that time. Anyway, if you class that as buying the cup, then every team buys the cup (and every other trophy) without fail. Heck, Southampton bought their way into the League Cup final last season. Or did your players all play for free?