Thank you Leon Best

As there seems to be looking back going on, and someone mentioned the Derby play off game I was just pondering ....

Had we beaten Derby and gone on to win the final would we have been as awful as they were? One of my lads works near Derby and tells me that fans believe the club is still recovering from that year in the Prem.

Now we know what followed bad, bleak and then good. If we get over the line on Saturday, we'll be in a better position to hang in there next year than we would have been back then.

So salute with me a local hero - Leon Best for a great own goal and that penalty miss!

 

I think you are right. Had we gone up it would simply have delayed the inevitable.

 

Ah, isn't hindsight a wonderful thing?

I was absolutely gutted that night but yes, we'd have struggled - particularly with Burley as manager. Our situation, in effect, is similars to Derby. It took us years to recover from that hangover and the ultimately too high wages in relation to our other debts that year.

Hopefully we never go the 'sh*t or bust* route ever again.

I still don't think Leon is that good, despite a few Premier League goals. Newcastle are a team that create an abundance of chances.

Anyway, enough of mentioning disapointments like that in the context of things.....we're going up remember....

 

Didn't we have to beat a team at home who were already relegated that season to guarantee a play-off place - Southend? I think we also went 1-0 down but came back to win 4-1.

 

In fairness to Derby they were the better team that Season and probably deserved to go up. I am sure that we would have done a better job in the Prem with the team we had that year but with what we had the year after, probably not. I'm not sure whether it was Leon's fault we didn't win that play-off, I'd probably start with Pele. But if Derby are still recovering from that season it's because of what they did when they got there.

 

Living near Derby I know quite a few Ram fans, and they all think they were lucky against us, and that Billy Davies had a definite plan to nobble our best players ie Bale, who wasn't able to play at the return game in Derby. Derby did go up but were ruthless and won alot of games with a score of 1-0. I think in the Premiership they were found out as you couldn't rely on scoring so few but conceeding less.

I think we were the better 'football' team so I like to think we would have done better

 

Saints Lambden takes the words right out of my keyboard, so to speak. Hindsight is fantastic.

I have frequently thought about what if...? It usually ends up with some sort of weird shiver running through me, at the thought of being a club on the edge of tipping over into insolvency and obscurity. I honestly don't think there would be such a media outcry about it either. For some reason, when Saints did fall off the financial edge, in reality, very few of the media seemed to actually give a hoot. It was reported, sure, but there were few articles of the agonising emotions that the supporters were going through. It seemed as if Saints would be all right, or that, if the club was to go under, the supporters would get on with something else in their lives, as if Southampton FC wasn't that important. I might be wrong, but that's how it struck me. We were fairly quietly going to go under and there were just a few platitudes being uttered about our demise. That hurt.

Well, perhaps the media were right all along. How could a well run club like SFC actually go out of business..? The fact is, Saints got close, but the assets sold themselves. All it took was some clear sighted ambition and a very fat wad of cash - which is exactly what Saints had been lacking in the first place.

I'm glad Leon Best messed up. I'm grateful to the lad. He's done well too. Out of that era of players who were either brought up, or at least brushed by the Academy, i.e. Blackstock, McGoldrick, Gillet, Baird, Bale, Walcott, Jones, Dyer, Mills, Cranie, etc.., [some later, some earlier] Best has done extremely well for himself, even though I thought both Blackstock and McGoldrick would be far ahead of him.

Anyway, next season, we'll have Him and Toon back down here to show him how well we get on without him in the side. It's all turned out for the Best..! [sorry]