^^^This. If those 9 games were still under Ralph, we would have got more than 3 points. We could have stilled binned him then and be better off. If Selles had come in then, we'd also be 3-6 points minimum better (And incidentally not in the bottom 3). All guess work I know, but remove the NJ experiment and we wouldn't be in such dire straights. It is on SR as NJ wouldn't say no to the job, but if he behaved a bit different we wouldn't have blamed him so much. He really was/is one of the biggest arseholes I have ever seen managing a football team. In any division.
If (when) we’re relegated, it would be better if teams who aren’t in the strongest financial position come down with us. Do Leicester fall into that category? I could see teams like West Ham and Forest spending a lot to get back up. Bournemouth spent a bit in January too. The Championship is always tough, and we’ll most likely have the yo-yo teams of Norwich, West Brom and Watford as competition too.
Leicester, Everton and Forest would all be in big trouble I think if they went down. Leicester's owners got hit harder than most during COVID and have a huge wage bill. Everton have dodgy money and an expensive stadium unlikely to open on time. Forest will have 3 squads of pretty **** journeymen unlikely to want to be at the club outside the EPL.
Leicester-Bmouth today is arguably the biggest relegation six-pointer so far. Personally I think it's difficult to see them both going down, but there's a very decent chance that one of them will. Hence that match is massive.
Exactly. Then rather than gaining 3 points over one and nothing over the other, we gain 2 points on both later today.
The damage was caused by Nathan Jones. The timing was great - a world cup, six weeks to inculcate the players (most of which weren't off to the World Cup) into a new regime. But you can't help thinking had we gone for Dyche we'd have about 5 more points and would have dragged some of our rivals down in the process. Like everyone else I want Saints to stay up, but that seems unlikely. At this stage, even going into the last game of the season with an attitude of "we must win and hope everything goes our way" would be a major achievement from Selles and co. If this is our last season in the Premiership for a while (which should be seen as a benevolent venture: a chance to proselytise to non-Premiership teams about the dangers of Portsmouth and the glory of Southampton), it'd be nice for JWP beat Beckham's free-kick record whilst he's still at St Marys. If he goes to, say, Man U he might not get enough games to do so. My fear is that our scouting program has been a bit rubbish for the last few years. If we can start a bidding war, we'll get £50M from Ward-Prowse and about £20-30M total from some of our better players, but can we trust our scouts to actually pick emerging players that'll do and job for us in the Championship and mature into Premiership quality players? The augurs aren't great. A year in the Championship may be a good chance for some of our academy prospects to break through. Our successful sojourn in the Premiership came in part from Academy kids who had three years of laying everything to waste around them. They got a stress free year in League One where no-one expected us to get promotion because of the points penalty. By the end of the second year, they were good Championship players playing in League One and 2/3 of the way through the Championship, they were Premiership quality players, slumming it in the lower leagues. It'd be nice to get Tella back so he can do for us what he did for Burnley, but I suspect we'll lose him.
It was always going to be extremely tough, and we have certainly made it even tougher. Our floor at this point is to close with 4 wins and a draw in eight matches, which...yeah. We don't even have four wins in the last five months. And that's the bare minimum.
Even if we win the winnable games we are likely to go down. That being said, I'd be amazed if we get more than 30 points.
Any estimates on when we could officially be relegated? Fail to beat Palace and could it be either Bournemouth or Newcastle? They'd both be fun for differing reasons! Either way I really hope it's all done and dusted by the time we go down to Brighton as that'll be a great day out if we're already relegated.
It won't happen this month. Even if we were to lose all four games, it's very difficult to see us walking off against Newcastle with the side in 17th place being on 36 points. For one thing, Everton v Leicester isn't until 24 hours after that, on 1 May. But mainly there are too many matches this month between West Ham, Palace, Bmouth, Leeds and Everton. So whilst it's likely that some of them will reach 36 points by that time, I highly doubt they all will. Neither Leicester nor Forest will reach 36 points by the time we finish against Newcastle, so it'll only take one of the other teams to also not reach it for our season to mathematically continue into May. There's a decent chance though that you'll get your wish with regards to the Brighton game.
Our opening game in May, against Forest, does look like a decent shout for determining who will finish bottom and, potentially, who will go down first.
Cheers Brendy, knew that one of you/Schad would know! That would work out well for me if is at Forest seeing as I'm giving it a miss due it being moved the Monday night. Expect we'll pick up at least one win this month though.
